A Natural History of Human Morality by Michael Tomasello

Author:Michael Tomasello [Tomasello, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780674088641
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-01-04T07:00:00+00:00

Conventionally Right and Wrong Ways to Do Things

Where early humans had role-specific ideals in personal common ground for how each partner in the dyad should play her role for joint success, modern humans had in cultural common ground the correct and incorrect ways for performing the roles in conventional cultural practices. In a sense, this is just a quantitative difference: instead of role reversal and interchangeability between two partners, we have full agent independence within the practices of the cultural group. But it is also more than that. Conventional cultural practices as the correct way (not incorrect way) to do things go beyond early humans’ ad hoc ideals that two partners created for themselves and that they could just as easily dissolve. The correct and incorrect ways to do things emanate from something much more objective and authoritative than us, and so individuals cannot really change them. The collective intentionality point of view thus transformed early humans’ highly local sense of role-specific ideals into modern humans’ “objective” standards of the right (correct) and wrong (incorrect) way to perform conventional roles. Such an agent-independent or “objective” point of view is not sufficient for judgments of fairness or justice, but it is necessary, as has been explicitly recognized in one way or another by moral philosophers from Hume with his “general point of view,” to Adam Smith with his “impartial spectator,” to Mead with his “generalized other,” to Rawls with his “veil of ignorance,” and to Nagel with his “view from nowhere.”

The objectification process comes out especially clearly in intentional pedagogy (Csibra and Gergely, 2009). Intentional pedagogy is unique to humans (Thornton and Raihani, 2008), and it very likely emerged with the advent of modern humans, since this is when clear cultural differences between neighboring groups first appeared (Klein, 2009). The prototypical structure of intentional pedagogy is an adult insisting that a child learn important cultural information (Kruger and Tomasello, 1996). Intentional pedagogy is thus explicitly normative: the child is expected to listen and learn. But just as important, it is also generic in the sense that its normative ideals are kind relevant. It is not just that we found this nut under this tree but that nuts like these are found under trees like these. It is not just that to throw this spear I or you must hold it with three fingers and a thumb but that to throw a spear like this anyone must hold it like this. The voice of intentional pedagogy is consequently both generic and authoritative: it is stating as an objective fact how things are or how one must do things, and its source is not the personal opinion of the teacher but, rather, some objective world of how things are. The teacher is representing the culture’s take on the objective world: “it is so” or “one must do it so.” Indeed, Köymen et al. (2014, in press) found not only that preschoolers use such generic normative language when they teach things to peers but

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