Naive Normativity
I'm super happy to share good news from The Journal of the American Philosophical Association --my paper "Naive normativity: The social foundation of moral cognition" has finally found a home. This paper started its journey during my sabbatical in 2015 where I spent a few days watching the temple monkeys of Mandala Suci Wenara Wana in Ubud, Bali. These monkeys are notorious thieves. A few years earlier one monkey snatched some cookies out of my pocket. I shouldn't have had them, but, well, nobody's perfect. On this visit, an infant macaque tried to get into my belt bag (but not very successfully). While the tourists are prone to having water bottles, sunglasses, cameras, or food disappear before their eyes, the locals who came to pray carrying offerings of rice, fruit, meat, candy and cookies were left alone. There was a clear practice in play at the Sacred Monkey Forest Temple, and it made me wonder about how the young learned this cultural practice. (I later heard some great talks by primatologists about this sort of practice in Bali and in northern India. The monkeys first steal the item, then take it to a local guardian to barter it for a reward. If the reward isn't good enough, the monkey thief will throw away the food and wait for something better. When they get the right value reward, they will drop the stolen object and run away with the treat.)
So many people helped me develop my thoughts during the writing (and sitting on it) process. I gave very early versions of the talk to audiences at Wollongong and Australia National University. As the ideas developed I continued to get help from audiences at Indiana, Toronto, Duke, Penn, Columbia, Lichtenberg-Killeg Institute, Pittsburgh, Bilkent, Berlin Mind and Brain, Pitzer, Waterloo, and Boston University. I have to extend a special thanks to Laura Schlingloff and Richard Moore whose paper "Do animals conform to social norms?" in The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Animal Minds forced me to develop an account of social norms. Read that paper!
Here's the abstract:
To answer tantalizing questions such as “Are animals moral?” or “How did morality evolve?” I propose starting with a somewhat less fraught question: “Do animal shave normative cognition?” Recent psychological research suggests that normative thinking, or ought-thought, may begin early in human development. Recent philosophical research suggests that folk psychology may be grounded in normative thought. Drawing on these two literatures, I argue that the human variety of social cognition and moral cognition encompass the same cognitive capacities, and that it is a mistake to treat them as two different sets of processes.
I develop an account of animal social norms that shares key properties with Cristina Bicchieri’s account of social norms, but which lowers the cognitive requirements for having a social norm. Next, I propose a set of four early-developing cognitive capacities implicated in social cognition that I call naïve normativity (identification of agents, sensitivity to in-group/out-group differences, social learning of group traditions, and the conscious awareness of appropriateness). I review the ape cognition literature, showing that chimpanzees largely share a human style of social cognition, and I present preliminary empirical evidence supporting the existence of social norms and naïve normativity in great apes. While there is more empirical work to be done, I hope to have offered a framework for studying normativity in other species, and I conclude that we should be open to the possibility that normative cognition is yet another ancient cognitive endowment that is not human-unique.
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