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ABSTRACT
According to Tomasello’s natural history of human morality, morality's key structures come into being in the dyadic joint action of early human hunters. Such joint action, Tomasello claims, involves the generation of a new entity, a “joint agent,” and brings with it insight into the agent-independence of agential roles. These two features are, Tomasello argues, decisive for the inception of early humans’ “respect”-based proto-morality. The key structures at work are then, he claims, “scaled up” in the “group morality” of modern humans. I raise three worries about the narrative at the level of early humans’ proto-morality. These concern the content of proto-moral “respect,” the role of language or proto-language, and the limits of focusing on dyads. In a final step, I express the concern that Tomasello’s construal of the “scaling up” process appears to lose the key structural features of respect, as it seems unable to distinguish social and moral norms.
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Notes
1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2016. Unless otherwise indicated, all bracketed page numbers in the main body of the text refer to this monograph.
2. See Gilbert (Citation1996, pp. 186–187). According to Gilbert, “plural subject formation creates a new motivational force” (Gilbert, Citation1997, p. 27).
3. More on this in section 3.
4. This may, moreover, be one reason why the account locates the genesis of the key deontic features of morality in the interaction of dyads, rather than in other small-scale interactions. For worries about dyads, see section 5.
5. The rest of the paragraph following this quotation is somewhat confusing in its precise explanatory claims. In particular, it seems to contain what might be a competing explanatory model to the one I go on to discuss in the main body of the text, namely that the strategic “Respekt” of the partner’s bargaining power together with the recognition of self-other equivalence might generate “mutual respect.” In the model adumbrated here, self-other equivalence appears to be doing more work than is explicitly acknowledged.
6. On composite actions, see Roughley (Citation2015, Chapter 9.5.3).
7. As Philip Pettit pointed out in discussion, humans can intend together to carry out shared basic actions such as dancing a tango without having recourse to language in individual cases. My point above concerns shared intentions to perform joint composite actions, the kind of intentions required for hunting together. Warneken and Tomasello (Citation2006; Citation2007; here p. 66) report cases of adults engaging in simple collaborative activities with pre-linguistic 14- and 18-month olds. Note, however, that one of the two agents involved is fully linguistically competent. On the basis of my own — informal — observation of infant behavior, I suspect it is fairly clear that prelinguistic children don’t engage in behavior dependent on their sharing goals with each other.
8. Although this isn’t the standard reading of the structure of Strawson’s article, I think that careful reading shows it to be the correct one.
9. One might interpret Strawson’s central claim that the reactive attitudes are the expression of a “participant” stance in this way. For such an interpretation, see Steinfath (Citationin press, section 4).
10. For a detailed working through of this Smithian account, see Roughley (Citation2018, Citationin press).
11. It is worth noting that Gilbert also thinks in terms of an — analytical, rather than genealogical — scaling up of the structures at work at the level of simple dyadic joint action to those of large-scale social entities, in particular to the level of societies (Gilbert, Citation1989, pp. 204–205; Citation1996, pp. 189–190). However, her conception is not subject to the kinds of worries I articulate in what follows because she thinks that the deontic features that are in play at both levels are not moral, but of a sui-generis kind internal to “plural subjects” (Gilbert, Citation2014, pp. 5–6). Political obligations are, in her view, the most prominent example of such large-scale, society-wide non-moral obligations (Gilbert, Citation2006).
12. See Nicholas Southwood’s helpful proposal to draw the moral/conventional distinction along these lines (Citation2011, pp. 773–774).
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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).