Evolution of Normativity Workshop Series launches January 2021
The evolution of morality is a topic of much recent interest in cognitive science. But morality is a a fraught concept, and progress on the nature of moral psychology has suffered from that. Simon Fitzpatrick and I want to move away from the focus on moral cognition to look at the evolution of normative cognition, which is the focus of the Evolution of Normativity Workshop Series. This topic offers great opportunities for interdisciplinary research, and the workshop series bring together philosophers and scientists--primarily primatologists--to examine how social norms and underlying psychological capacities for normative reasoning, judgment, and motivation (including motivations to punish or otherwise sanction norm violators) evolved in modern humans by examining their possible presence in nonhuman animals.
This workshop is aimed at developing routes for investigating normative cognition in other species, with a focus at this point on great apes. There is already a robust primatology literature on related topics, including culture and group traditions, cooperative behavior (such as group hunting and defence of territory), policing behavior, social cognition, play, and deception, but little work that addresses normative capacities directly. It is our view that basic normative capacities, such as the ability to learn, follow, and enforce normative standards of behavior (social norms), may well be present in a great many species with rich social ecologies and abilities for social learning, and that such capacities needn’t require language or other allegedly uniquely human cognitive abilities. At the very least, this is a possibility worthy of further empirical investigation, with enormous potential implications for our understanding of human evolution and other animals.
The workshop series stems from a planned two-day workshop at John Carroll University in 2020 that was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In its expanded format, the workshop series consists of a series of virtual talks and discussions of how to more forward empirically and theoretically on questions related to the evolution of normative thought. Each meeting will feature one or two short talks, followed by discussion. The goal of the workshop series is to get to know one another’s research and consider whether we’d be interested in pursuing interdisciplinary grants and research projects. While the workshop series is a closed event, we hope to create something worth sharing later!
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