Naturalizing Tomasello’s history of morality

ABSTRACT

Building on different sources of theory, from paleontology to psychology, Michael Tomasello offers a plausible, even compelling, story about how our ancestors developed distinctive forms of collaboration, evolving mechanisms to support them, in the period from roughly 400,000 to 150,000 years ago. But he claims that this narrative explains why they would have begun to think in characteristically moral ways, developing notions like those of respect, desert, and commitment. Do the arguments rehearsed support that extra claim? It is not absolutely clear that they do.

KEYWORDS:

• Commitment
• desert
• morality
• natural history
• respect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On the distinction between moral terms and other practical terms, see chapter 5 of Pettit (2017).

2. I shall take Tomasello to use “strategic” in this common sense, where the psychological motivation is clearly self-interested, or at least partly self-interested (see p. 149). In this sense, acting out of sympathy is not strategic. But neither is acting out of sympathy equivalent to acting morally. This appears, for example, in his remark that evolved human beings care for many others “not only because they sympathize with them but also because they feel they ought to” (p. 38). This leaves us with the three pure possibilities – there are also mixed ones (p. 161) – of acting out of strategy, out of sympathy, and out of a moral sense of ought.

3. Tomasello suggests that this is so because the steps described “were based only on strategic trust” (p. 64). This must be a slip, since proximate psychological mechanisms are also supposed to have played a role: for example, in people’s having “evolved the tendency to deter, and so to try to control, free riders” (p. 61); see 16 above.

4. Tomasello takes the notion of joint commitments from Margaret Gilbert. As he sees it (p. 64), prior to stage 20, early humans would have performed jointly intentional actions on the nonnormative basis described by Michael Bratman. For recent statements of these contrasted views, see Bratman (2014) and Gilbert (2015).

5. In preparing the final version of this article, I was greatly assisted by comments received after the presentation at a conference in Schloss Marbach in May 2016. I am particularly grateful for his comments to Michael Tomasello. I was also helped to improve the article by comments from an anonymous referee.

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Notes on contributors

Philip Pettit

Philip Pettit's books include The Common Mind (1993), The Economy of Esteem (2004) with G. Brennan; Group Agency (2011) with C. List; The Birth of Ethics (2018). Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit, ed H.G. Brennan et al, appeared in 2007.