Socioecological pressures, proximal psychological mechanisms and moral normativity. Situating Tomasello’s Natural History of Human Morality

ABSTRACT

The article divides into two parts. The first situates Tomasello’s A Natural History of Human Morality in the context of other attempts to explain morality’s evolutionary origins. It focuses in particular on two specific features whose genesis Tomasello aims to reconstruct: first, the proximate psychological mechanisms he takes to be requisite to moral thought and behavior, and second, the normative concepts he believes are deployed by agents with the relevant cognitive and motivational structure. The second part of the article introduces the eight commentaries by biologists, a psychologist, and philosophers on Tomasello’s monograph that are collected in this special issue of Philosophical Psychology.

KEYWORDS:

• Between-group selection
• collective intentionality
• early humans
• joint commitment
• modern humans
• moral normativity
• respect
• second-personal morality
• shared intentionality
• social evolution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Most of the contributions to this special issue were presented at a symposium that took place at Castle Marbach, Lake Constance, in May 2016. I wish to thank the Jacobs Foundation, Zurich, for their generous funding and all-round support of the event.

2. The argument from the so-called “Darwinian dilemma” for robust moral realists claims that, if the human capacity for moral judgment is a product of natural selection and if the moral truths that such judgments purport to represent exist independently of the moral practices of humans, it would be a mystery how the judgments could result in knowledge. The argument assumes that knowledge of such independent moral truths would, unlike the knowledge of independent physical truths, confer no fitness advantage and could thus be given no evolutionary explanation (Street, 2006; Joyce, 2007; chapter 6). If moral skepticism is to be avoided, the natural reaction here appears to be to understand moral truths as in some sense internal to the human life form. As we shall see, this appears to be both Darwin’s and Tomasello’s reaction.

3. Darwin first makes this point in epistemic terms, saying that the agents would think they had such “duties,” but he follows this up with what looks like a metaphysical formulation, “The one course ought to have been followed: one would have been right and the other wrong.” (Darwin 1981, pp. 73-74)

4. The classical texts here are Trivers (1971) and Alexander (1987).

5. Tomasello and Rakoczy (2003) is a transitional article that brings in the capacities for shared intentionality, but attempts to squeeze them into the earlier framework.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neil Roughley

Neil Roughley is Professor for Philosophical Anthropology and Ethics at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He has recently authored the monograph Wanting and Intending. Elements of a Philosophy of Practical Mind (Springer, 2016) and co-edited the volumes Forms of Fellow Feeling. Empathy, Sympathy, Concern and Moral Agency (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and The Normative Animal? On the Anthropological Significance of Social, Moral and Linguistic Norms (Oxford University Press, in press).