Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera

Drawing upon the developmental and comparative psychology literature, this article discusses the biological and cultural factors influencing the psychology of peer competition and peer cooperation in humans. Data from comparative psychology are useful to address questions about cognition from a broad evolutionary perspective. Developmental evidence, in turn, provides crucial information about how cognitive capacities emerge during the organism’s life span, which will help to better illuminate how developmental trajectories are shaped by evolutionary processes. A special emphasis will be given to cooperative behavior, which, arguably, encompasses the most distinctive cognitive traits of the human species. The article ends by examining one of the most promising avenues of research on the psychology of peer cooperation: the shared intentionality hypothesis.

We present evidence that mainstream Anglophone philosophy is insular in the sense that participants in this academic tradition tend mostly to cite or interact with other participants in this academic tradition, while having little academic interaction with philosophers writing in other languages. Among our evidence: In a sample of articles from elite Anglophone philosophy journals, 97% of citations are citations of work originally written in English; 96% of members of editorial boards of elite Anglophone philosophy journals are housed in majority-Anglophone countries; and only one of the 100 most-cited recent authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy spent most of his career in non-Anglophone countries writing primarily in a language other than English. In contrast, philosophy articles published in elite Chinese-language and Spanish-language journals cite from a range of linguistic traditions, as do non-English-language articles in a convenience sample of established European-language journals. We also find evidence that work in English has more influence on work in other languages than vice versa and that when non-Anglophone philosophers cite recent work outside of their own linguistic tradition it tends to be work in English.

Human adults incline toward moral objectivism but may approach things more relativistically if different cultures are involved. In this study, 4-, 6-, and 9-year-old children (N = 136) witnessed two parties who disagreed about moral matters: a normative judge (e.g., judging that it is wrong to do X) and an antinormative judge (e.g., judging that it is okay to do X). We assessed children's metaethical judgment, that is, whether they judged that only one party (objectivism) or both parties (relativism) could be right. We found that 9-year-olds, but not younger children, were more likely to judge that both parties could be right when a normative ingroup judge disagreed with an antinormative extraterrestrial judge (with different preferences and background) than when the antinormative judge was another ingroup individual. This effect was not found in a comparison case where parties disagreed about the possibility of different physical laws. These findings suggest that although young children often exhibit moral objectivism, by early school age they begin to temper their objectivism with culturally relative metaethical judgments.

To explain the evolutionary emergence of uniquely human skills and motivations for cooperation Tomasello et al. (2012) proposed the interdependence hypothesis. The key adaptive context in this account was the obligate collaborative foraging of early human adults. Hawkes (2014), following Hrdy (2009), provided an alternative account for the emergence of uniquely human cooperative skills in which the key was early human infants’ attempts to solicit care and attention from adults in a cooperative breeding context. Here we attempt to reconcile these two accounts. Our composite account accepts Hawkes’ contention that the extremely early emergence of human infants’ cooperative skills suggests an important role for cooperative breeding as adaptive context, perhaps in early Homo. But our account also insists that human cooperation goes well beyond these nascent skills to include such things as the communicative and cultural conventions, norms, and institutions created by later Homo and early modern humans to deal with adult problems of social coordination. As part of this account we hypothesize how each of the main stages of human ontogeny (infancy, childhood, adolescence) was transformed during evolution both by infants’ cooperative skills “migrating up” in age and by adults’ cooperative skills “migrating down” in age.

Discussions about the evolution of human social cognition usually portray the social environment of early hominins as highly hierarchical and dominant. In this evolutionary narrative, our propensity for violence was overcome in our lineage by a key increase of our intellectual capacities. However, I will argue in this paper that we are at least equally justified in believing that our early hominin ancestors were less aggressive and hierarchical than what is claimed by those models. This view is consistent with the available comparative and paleoanthropological evidence. I will show that this alternative model not only does not support long-held views of human origins but also has important consequences for debates about the evolution of our capacity for normative guidance.

Dos teorías biológicas han intentado explicar la evolución del altruismo biológico: la teoría de la selección de parentesco y la teoría del altruismo recíproco. No obstante, algunos biólogos han defendido recientemente una explicación del altruismo biológico por selección de grupos, mediante una teoría de selección en múltiples niveles (Sober y Wilson, 1998). Este ensayo articula las distintas respuestas al problema de la evolución del altruismo biológico, dando especial importancia a la explicación en múltiples niveles. El ensayo se divide en dos partes. La primera, analiza el problema evolutivo del altruismo biológico, exponiendo las distintas teorías disponibles. La segunda, defiende una interpretación de la teoría en múltiples niveles, que distingue el componente de selección de grupo de su respuesta específica al problema del altruismo biológico, esbozando cómo una teoría de este tipo podría sintetizar las distintas respuestas en una única explicación de selección de grupo.

El estatuto científico del adaptacionismo ha sido criticado muchas veces. Mi respuesta a estas críticas se funda en una formulación del adaptacionismo acorde con la concepción semántica de las teorías científicas, que no sólo permite reducir las objeciones a pseudoproblemas, sino que también inscribe la disputa en un nuevo terreno. Sugiero que este terreno es el legitimo espacio de disputa, sin afectar el estatuto científico del adaptacionismo.

The goal of this thesis was to explain and defend a naturalistic theory of normative cognition—in particular, human social norm psychology. More specifically, I aimed to provide a lineage explanation of this form of normative thinking, i.e., an explanation that specifies a sequence of changes that takes us from agents with an ape-like baseline capacity for social cognition to agents with human-like social norm psychology. The explanation I offer in this thesis relied on a model of great ape and human cooperation that has been built over the last two decades of psychological research within the theoretical framework of shared intentionality. I argued that human social norm psychology is closely linked to our shared intentional psychology and that this capacity is in turn connected to prototypical moral judgments such as judgments with Turiel’s signature moral pattern and judgments about inescapable and authority independent moral demands.

Building upon usage-based models of language acquisition (Bybee, 1985; Givón, 1979; Langacker, 1987), I argue that the process of norm acquisition is the result of domain-general mechanisms of pattern-recognition, intention-reading, and affective processing. These mechanisms allow children to produce normative judgments that are generalizable, intrinsically motivational, and which trigger punitive attitudes against norm violators. Moreover, some of these normative judgments are moralized in a prototypical way often engendering moralized emotions like guilt and shame (but also less studied positive emotions) which contribute to these judgments being perceived as inescapable and authority independent (Mameli, 2013). As we will see in this chapter, this model leads to important philosophical consequences for one of the more heated debate in contemporary moral psychology, namely the debate on moral nativism (Dwyer, 2007; Hauser, 2006b; Hauser, Young, & Cushman, 2008a, 2008b; Joyce, 2006; Katz, 2000; Mikhail, 2007; Nichols, 2005; Prinz, 2009; Sterelny, 2010).

In this chapter, I argue that normative guidance evolved as a consequence of the selective pressures of collaborative hunting. This is a hypothesis I have not ruled out in the previous chapter since the model I have proposed in that chapter is still compatible with the idea that early hominins used tools and hunt in groups—a model in line with views that decouple hominin hunting from aggression (see Pickering, 2013). The tamer picture of our early ancestors I offered in the previous chapter will play a crucial role here in two different ways. One is to provide a cognitive baseline for my lineage explanation of normative guidance. Another is facilitating the gradual expansion of early hominin cooperative capacities since collaborative foraging would be implausible in a very aggressive and dominant lineage. Wolves, hyenas, and lions are carnivores with dominance hierarchies, but their hunting strategies were not readably accessible to the hominin lineage since we lack the speed, the canines, the claws, and the physical advantage of these predatory mammals. They hunt in groups as some great apes do but their hunting behavior is not collaborative. Collaborative hunting as the one we see among hunter-gatherers requires shared intentionality, for it relies on joint goals and plans, task and role division, and shared commitment, which are psychological features much more readily accessible to the tamer model of early hominins I have put forward in chapter 3. Thus, my aim in this chapter is to propose a lineage explanation whose starting point is an early hominin with high levels of social tolerance and basic mindreading skills, and as an endpoint, agents with human-like capacities for shared intentionality, including its subsidiary normative dimension, i.e., the distinctive punitive attitudes they engender and their consequences for partner choice.

This thesis aims to provide a lineage explanation of a central form of normative thinking, i.e., an explanation that specifies a sequence of changes that takes us from agents with a certain baseline capacity for social cognition to agents with normative thinking (see Calcott, 2009). I frame this explanation within the hominin lineage. This means that I take the baseline of social-cognitive capacities to be the one of the common ancestor of chimpanzees (P. troglodytes), bonobos (P. paniscus), and humans (H. sapiens) and I focus on the key differences between that baseline and human normative thought. In this context, the aim of this chapter is twofold. I not only want to provide such a baseline but also to locate the emergence of the high-level cognitive process that distinguishes human normative thinking within the evolutionary trajectory that led to human social organization. More specifically, since I have identified in chapter 2 a unified form of human norm psychology with our distinctive capacity for shared intentionality, I will propose at the end of this chapter that the lineage leading to the emergence of our capacity for normative guidance is the same as the one that leads to shared intentionality. The central goal of chapter 4 will be to flesh out this lineage explanation from the hominin baseline of social cognition that I defend in this chapter.

The goal of this chapter is to explain the relationship between the type of normative thinking I defend in this thesis and moral judgments. On the view I propose, the distinctive shared intentional capacities of the hominin lineage help us to define an important form of normative thinking, namely shared intentional normative thoughts. I am not interested in private rules that govern cognitive systems. Hereafter, I will understand norms as social level facts. These facts are identified or misidentified by the agent, who represents them in the form of shared intentional states, or so I will argue. When a norm is executed in cognition it generates shared intentional normative judgments. Since joint intentional states are hybrid mental states, I will try to show in this chapter that shared intentional normative judgments are also hybrid mental states, i.e., states which are functionally defined by both its cognitive component and its motivational component.

The goal of this thesis is to explain and defend a naturalistic theory of normative cognition—particularly, human norm psychology. Naturalism is understood here as a methodological approach—one that takes the philosophical practice to be continuous with the natural sciences. On this view, philosophical theories are empirically testable conjectures. I think they should be treated as such. Certainly, philosophy is often understood as a matter of pure conceptual analysis aimed to find necessary truths. But I am skeptical of the prospects of understanding the mind by this method alone. Granted, conceptual clarification is a major feature of the philosophical enterprise, but it is hardly a methodological tool under the exclusive control of philosophers. Conceptual analysis is, and has been always, an important component of the scientific practice. Of course, there will be parts of this project that will require more conceptual clarification than empirical input. This will be clear at times in certain parts of this work. But the whole theoretical enterprise that this thesis attempts will be carried out by a mixture of traditional conceptual analysis and empirical data.

Explicar el altruismo biológico es uno de los más grandes problemas teóricos enfrentados tanto por biólogos evolutivos como por filósofos de la biología. Las explicaciones más aceptadas han apelado a parentesco y reciprocidad. Pero otra explicación que ha recibido recientemente mucha atención es la vigilancia y el castigo, que reprimen la competición dentro de los grupos. Cuando las oportunidades de competición son limitadas al interior del grupo, los individuos pueden incrementar su propio éxito únicamente mediante el incremento de la eficiencia y productividad de su grupo. Pese a lo anterior, se ha llegado a sostener que las distintas respuestas al problema de la evolución del altruismo biológico pueden sintetizarse en una teoría de selección multinivel (Sober 1993; Sober y Wilson 1998), mediante modelos matemáticos que añaden procesos de selección de grupo (Wilson 1975; Lande y Arnold 1983; Price 1984; Price et al. 1984; Sober 1993; Heisler y Damuth 1987; Goodnight et al. 1992; Sober y Wilson 1998). La hipótesis de trabajo que se examinará en estas líneas es que vigilancia y castigo son realmente explicaciones de selección de grupos, que en algunos casos implican sinergia entre procesos de selección individuales y grupales (Rosas 2008; Rosas―Levels of selection in synergy, en revisión) o conflicto entre ambas (Wilson 1975; Sober 1993; Sober y Wilson 1998), siguiendo la sugerencia de Charles Darwin quien parece recurrir a la selección de grupo para explicar fenómenos como las castas estériles en insectos sociales y la moral humana (1859: 202, 236; 1871: 166).

Matthew Liao's edited collection Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality covers a wide range of issues in moral psychology. The collection should be of interest to philosophers, psychologist, and neuroscientists alike, particularly those interested in the relation between these disciplines. I give an overview of the content and major themes of the volume and draw some important lessons about the connection between moral neuroscience and normative ethics. In particular, I argue that moving beyond some of the dichotomies implicit in some of the debates advanced in the book makes the neuroscience of moral judgments much more useful in advancing normative ethics. Recent theoretical and empirical research in the psychological sciences has significantly advanced our understanding of moral thinking. In this changing landscape, Moral Brains: the neuroscience of morality does a great job at featuring leading researchers in moral cognition from a wide range of disciplines and summarizing the last two decades or so of scientific and philosophical discussion in moral cognition. This is an especially appealing book for researchers working on moral judgments, emotions and reasoning, moral decision-making and epistemology, personality disorders associated with impaired moral judgment, and the neuromodulation of moral thinking. Researchers with a broad interest in moral psychology, philosophy of 2 psychology, normative ethics, and metaethics will also find the book valuable. The volume supplies a collection of readings in moral psychology and neuroscience that works well as an introduction for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, as well as a stimulating reading