Sharing our normative worlds: A theory of normative thinking
Abstract
This thesis focuses on the evolution of human social
norm psychology. More precisely, I want to show how the emergence
of our distinctive capacity to follow social norms and make
social normative judgments is connected to the lineage
explanation of our capacity to form shared intentions, and how
such capacity is related to a diverse cluster of prototypical
moral judgments. I argue that in explaining the evolution of this
form of normative cognition we also require an understanding of
the developmental trajectory of this capacity. For this purpose,
the thesis is organized as follow. In the first chapter, I make
some methodological remarks and provide the general overview and
plan for the dissertation. In the second chapter, I explain what
my explanatory target is and why it matters. On the view I am
defending, shared intentional psychology gives rise to a special
form of psychology that enables us to engage in social normative
thinking. These norms are represented as shared intentional
states. Moral psychology, in contrast, is more diverse. For moral
judgments define a quite heterogeneous class of mental
states—although some moral judgments may involve the
representation and execution of norms, certainly not all of them
do. I show that although much of our distinctive social norm
psychology can be explained within the framework of shared
intentionality, moral judgments cannot be unified in the same
way. In the third chapter, I provide the baseline of
social-cognitive capacities that serve as starting point for my
lineage explanation. I argue that hominin social cognition was
for a very long period of our evolutionary history essentially a
matter of low-level cognitive and motivational processes. On this
picture, bottom-up affective processes regulated the social lives
of early hominins without requiring any special top-down
mechanism of normative thinking such as a capacity for
understanding and representing social norms. In the fourth
chapter, I argue that human-like social norm psychology evolved
as a result of the selective pressures that gave rise to shared
intentionality, especially the demands that came from collective
hunting. Yet collective hunting was not the whole story of the
evolution of shared intentionality, for our capacity to form
shared intentional mental states emerged from the interplay
between the selective pressures that led to cooperative breeding
in humans as well as organized, goal-oriented, collective
hunting. Thus, I propose an evo-devo account of shared
intentionality and its normative dimension since I argue that
explaining the evolution of this particular form of normative
thinking crucially depends on information about the developmental
trajectory of this capacity. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I
focus on how social norms are acquired and how the way we learn
them gives rise to some prototypical cluster of moral judgments.
Thus, this chapter returns to some of themes and arguments of the
first chapter by explaining how the distinction between moral
judgments and nonmoral judgments can be culturally transmitted.