A Natural History of Human Morality

Michael Tomasello

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780674915879
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology, American Psychological Association
Winner of a PROSE Award, Association of American Publishers
Shortlist, Cognitive Development Society Book Award
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year A Natural History of Human Morality offers the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral psychology. Based on extensive experimental data comparing great apes and human children, Michael Tomasello reconstructs how early humans gradually became an ultra-cooperative and, eventually, a moral species."Tomasello is convincing, above all, because he has run many of the relevant studies (on chimps, bonobos and children) himself. He concludes by emphasizing the powerful influence of broad cultural groups on modern humans… Tomasello also makes an endearing guide, appearing happily amazed that morality exists at all."
—Michael Bond, New Scientist "Most evolutionary theories picture humans as amoral 'monads' motivated by self-interest. Tomasello presents an innovative and well-researched, hypothesized natural history of two key evolutionary steps leading to full-blown morality."
—S. A. Mason, Choice

 

1

The Interdependence Hypothesis

The commitments that bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual; and their nature is such that in fulfilling them one cannot work for others without at the same time working for oneself.

—JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU, THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

Cooperation appears in nature in two basic forms: altruistic helping, in which one individual sacrifices for the benefit of another, and mutualistic collaboration, in which all interacting parties benefit in some way. The uniquely human version of cooperation known as morality appears in nature in two analogous forms. On the one hand, one individual may sacrifice to help another based on such self-immolating motives as compassion, concern, and benevolence. On the other hand, interacting individuals may seek a way for all to benefit in a more balanced manner based on such impartial motives as fairness, equity, and justice. Many classical accounts in moral philosophy capture this difference by contrasting a motive for beneficence (the good) with a motive for justice (the right), and many modern accounts capture the difference by contrasting a morality of sympathy with a morality of fairness.

The morality of sympathy is most basic, as concern for the well-being of others is the sine qua non of all things moral. The evolutionary source of sympathetic concern is almost certainly parental care of offspring based in kin selection. In mammals this means everything from providing sustenance to one’s offspring through nursing—regulated by the mammalian “love hormone” oxytocin—to protecting one’s offspring from predators and other dangers. In this sense basically all mammals show sympathetic concern, at the very least for offspring, but in some species for selected nonkin as well. In general, the expression of sympathy is relatively straightforward. There may be some cognitive complexity in determining what is good for one’s offspring or others, but once that is determined, helping is helping, with the only serious conflict being whether the sympathy that motivates the helping act is strong enough to overcome any self-serving motives involved. Acts of helping motivated by sympathetic concern are altruistic acts freely performed and are not accompanied, in their purest form, by a sense of obligation.

In contrast, the morality of fairness is neither so basic nor so straightforward—and it may very well be confined to the human species. The fundamental problem is that in situations requiring fairness there is typically a complex interaction of the cooperative and competitive motives of multiple individuals. Attempting to be fair means trying to achieve some kind of balance among all of these, and there are typically many possible ways of doing this based on many different criteria. Humans thus enter into such complex situations prepared to invoke moral judgments about the “deservingness” of the individuals involved, including the self, but they are at the same time armed with more punitive moral attitudes such as resentment or indignation against unfair others. In addition, they have still other moral attitudes that are not exactly punitive but nevertheless stern, in which they seek to hold interactive partners accountable for their actions by invoking interpersonal judgments of responsibility, obligation, commitment, trust, respect, duty, blame, and guilt. The morality of fairness is thus much more complicated than the morality of sympathy. Moreover, and perhaps not unrelated, its judgments typically carry with them some sense of responsibility or obligation: it is not just that I want to be fair to all concerned, but that one ought to be fair to all concerned. In general, we may say that whereas sympathy is pure cooperation, fairness is a kind of cooperativization of competition in which individuals seek balanced solutions to the many and conflicting demands of multiple participants’ various motives.

Our goal in this book is to provide an evolutionary account of the emergence of human morality, in terms of both sympathy and fairness. We proceed from the assumption that human morality is a form of cooperation, specifically, the form that has emerged as humans have adapted to new and species-unique forms of social interaction and organization. Because Homo sapiens is an ultracooperative primate, and presumably the only moral one, we further assume that human morality comprises the key set of species-unique proximate mechanisms—psychological processes of cognition, social interaction, and self-regulation—that enable human individuals to survive and thrive in their especially cooperative social arrangements. Given these assumptions, our attempt in this book is (1) to specify in as much detail as possible, based mainly on experimental research, how the cooperation of humans differs from that of their nearest primate relatives; and (2) to construct a plausible evolutionary scenario for how such uniquely human cooperation gave rise to human morality.

The starting point is nonhuman primates, especially humans’ nearest living relatives, the great apes. As in all social species, great ape individuals living in the same social group depend on one another for survival—they are interdependent (Roberts, 2005)—and so it makes sense for them to help and care for one another. Moreover, as in many primate species, great ape individuals form long-term prosocial relationships with specific other individuals in their group. In some cases these relationships are with kin, but in other cases they are with unrelated groupmates, or “friends” (Seyfarth and Cheney, 2012). Individuals depend on these special relationships to enhance their fitness, and so they invest in them, for example, by preferentially grooming their friends or supporting them in fights. The evolutionary starting point for our natural history of human morality, therefore, is the prosocial behavior that great apes in general show for those with whom they are interdependent, namely, kin and friends.

Tomasello et al. (2012) provide an account of the evolution of uniquely human cooperation that focuses on how, from this great ape starting point, early human individuals became ever more interdependent with one another for cooperative support. The interdependence hypothesis—whose basic framework we adopt here—is that this took place in two key steps, both of which involved new ecological circumstances that forced early humans into new modes of social interaction and organization: first collaboration and then culture. The individuals who did best in these new social circumstances were those who recognized their interdependencies with others and acted accordingly, a kind of cooperative rationality. Although the individuals of many animal species are interdependent in various ways, early humans’ interdependencies thus rested on a new and unique set of proximate psychological mechanisms. These new and unique mechanisms enabled individuals to create with others a plural-agent “we,” as in what “we” must do to capture a prey or how “we” should defend our group from other groups. The central claim of the current account is that the skills and motivation to construct with others an interdependent, plural-agent “we”—that is, the skills and motivation to participate with others in acts of shared intentionality (Bratman, 1992, 2014; Gilbert, 1990, 2014)—are what propelled the human species from strategic cooperation to genuine morality.

The first key step occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago, as a change in ecology forced early humans to forage together with a partner or else starve. This new form of interdependence meant that early humans now extended their sense of sympathy beyond kin and friends to collaborative partners. To coordinate their collaborative activities cognitively, early humans evolved skills and motivations of joint intentionality, enabling them to form together with a partner a joint goal and to know things together with a partner in their personal common ground (Tomasello, 2014). On the individual level, each partner had her own role to play in a particular collaborative activity (e.g., hunting antelopes), and over time there developed a common-ground understanding of the ideal way that each role had to be played for joint success. These common-ground role ideals may be thought of as the original socially shared normative standards. These ideal standards were impartial in the sense that that they specified what either partner, whichever of us that might be, must do in the role. Recognizing the impartiality of role standards meant recognizing that self and other were of equivalent status and importance in the collaborative enterprise.

In the context of partner choice, in which all individuals had bargaining leverage, this recognition of self–other equivalence led to a mutual respect among partners. And since it was vital for partners to exclude free riders, there also arose the sense that only collaborative partners (and not free riders) were deserving of the spoils. The combined result was that partners came to consider one another with mutual respect, as equally deserving second-personal agents (see Darwall, 2006). This meant that they had the standing to form with one another a joint commitment to collaborate (see Gilbert, 2003). The content of a joint commitment was that each partner would live up to his role ideal and, further, that both partners had the legitimate authority to call the other to task for less than ideal performance. Early humans’ sense of mutual respect and fairness with partners thus derived mainly from a new kind of cooperative rationality in which it made sense to recognize one’s dependence on a collaborative partner, to the point of relinquishing at least some control of one’s actions to the self-regulating “we” created by a joint commitment. This “we” was a moral force because both partners considered it legitimate, based on the fact that they had created it themselves specifically for purposes of self-regulation, and the fact that both saw their partner as genuinely deserving of their cooperation. Collaborative partners thus felt responsible to one another to strive for joint success, and to shirk this responsibility was, in effect, to renounce one’s cooperative identity.

In this way, participation in joint intentional activities—engendering both the recognition of partners as equally deserving second-personal agents and the cooperative rationality of subordinating “me” to “we” in a joint commitment—created an evolutionarily novel form of moral psychology. This novel form of moral psychology was not based on the strategic avoidance of punishment or reputational attacks from “they” but, rather, on a genuine attempt to behave virtuously in accordance with our “we.” And so was born a normatively constituted social order in which cooperatively rational agents focused not just on how individuals do act, or on how I want them to act, but, rather, on how they ought to act if they are to be one of “us.” In the end, the result of all of these new ways of relating to a partner in joint intentional activities added up for early humans to a kind of natural, second-personal morality.

The second evolutionary step in this hypothesized natural history—beginning with the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens some 150,000 years ago—was prompted by changing demographics. As modern human groups started becoming larger, they split into smaller bands that were still unified at the tribal level. A tribal-level group—call it a culture—competed with other such groups for resources, and so it operated as one big interdependent “we,” such that all group members identified with their group and performed their division-of-labor roles aimed at group survival and welfare. Members of a cultural group thus felt special senses of sympathy and loyalty to their cultural compatriots, and they considered outsiders to be free riders or competitors and so not deserving of cultural benefits. To coordinate their group activities cognitively, and to provide a measure of social control motivationally, modern humans evolved new cognitive skills and motivations of collective intentionality—enabling the creation of cultural conventions, norms, and institutions (see Searle, 1995)—based on cultural common ground. Conventional cultural practices had role ideals that were fully “objective” in the sense that everyone knew in cultural common ground how anyone who would be one of “us” had to play those roles for collective success. They represented the right and wrong ways to do things.

Unlike early humans, modern humans did not get to create their largest and most important social commitments; they were born into them. Most important, individuals had to self-regulate their actions via the group’s social norms, the breach of which evoked censure not only from affected persons but also from third parties. Deviance in a purely conventional practice signaled a weakness of one’s sense of cultural identity, but violation of a moral norm—grounded in second-personal morality—signaled a moral breach (see Nichols, 2004). Moral norms were considered legitimate because the individual, first, identified with the culture and so assumed a kind of coauthorship of them and, second, felt that her equally deserving cultural compatriots deserved her cooperation. Members of cultural groups thus felt an obligation to both follow and enforce social norms as part of their moral identity: to remain who one was in the eyes of the moral community, and so in one’s own eyes as well, one was obliged to identify with the right and wrong ways of doing things (see Korsgaard, 1996a). One could deviate from these norms and still maintain one’s moral identity only by justifying the deviation to others, and so to oneself, in terms of the shared values of the moral community (see Scanlon, 1998).

In this way, participation in cultural life—engendering both the recognition that all in-group compatriots were equally deserving and a sense that the culture’s collective commitments were created by “us” for “us”—created a second novel form of moral psychology. It was a kind of scaled-up version of early humans’ second-personal morality in that the normative standards were fully “objective,” the collective commitments were by and for all in the group, and the sense of obligation was group-mindedly rational in that it flowed from one’s moral identity and the felt need to justify one’s moral decisions to the moral community, including oneself. In the end, the result of all of these new ways of relating to one another in collectively structured cultural contexts added up for modern humans to a kind of cultural and group-minded, “objective” morality.

One outcome of this two-step evolutionary process beyond great apes—first to collaboration and then to culture—is that contemporary human beings are under the sway of at least three distinct moralities. The first is simply the cooperative proclivities of great apes in general, organized around a special sympathy for kin and friends: the first person I save from a burning shelter is my child or spouse, no deliberation needed. The second is a joint morality of collaboration in which I have specific responsibilities to specific individuals in specific circumstances: the next person I save is the firefighting partner with whom I am currently collaborating (and with whom I have a joint commitment) to extinguish the fire. The third is a more impersonal collective morality of cultural norms and institutions in which all members of the cultural group are equally valuable: I save from the calamity all other groupmates equally and impartially (or perhaps all other persons, if my moral community is humanity in general), with perhaps special attention to the most vulnerable among us (e.g., children). The coexistence of these different moralities—moral orientations or stances, if you will—is of course anything but peaceful. Conflicts among them are the source of many of the most perplexing moral dilemmas that humans face—should I steal the drug to save my friend? should I keep my promise if it means harm to unknown others?—that seemingly have no fully satisfactory solutions (Nagel, 1986). The bare fact of such unsolvable incompatibilities in the dictates of morality suggests a complex and not totally uniform natural history in which different cooperative challenges have been met in different ways at different times.

The possibility that humans operate with several different, sometimes incompatible, moralities—and that they are due, at least in part, to processes of natural selection—raises the specter, feared by many thoughtful persons from Darwin’s time on, that evolutionary explanations may serve to undermine the whole idea of morality. But this need not be the case. The point is that the ultimate causation involved in evolutionary processes is independent of the actual decision making of individuals seeking to realize their personal goals and values. The textbook case is sex, whose evolutionary raison d’être is procreation but whose proximate motivation is most often other things. The fact that the early humans who were concerned for the welfare of others and who treated others fairly had the most offspring undermines nothing in my own personal moral decision making and identity. I am able to speak the English language only because of my evolutionary, cultural, and personal histories, but that does not determine precisely what I decide to say at any given moment. In all, we should simply marvel at the fact that behaving morally is somehow right for the human species, contributing to humans’ unparalleled evolutionary success, as well as to each individual’s own sense of personal moral identity.

And so with this apologia, let us tell a story, a natural history, of how human morality came to be, beginning with our great ape ancestors and their sympathy for kin and friends, proceeding through some early humans who began collaborating interdependently with one another with joint commitments and a sense of partner equivalence, and ending with modern humans and their culturally constituted social norms and an objectified sense of right and wrong.

2

Evolution of Cooperation

And could this scarcity [of resources] not be alleviated by joint activities, then the domain of justice would extend only to the avoidance of mutually destructive conflicts, and not to the cooperative provision of mutual benefits.

—DAVID GAUTHIER, MORALS BY AGREEMENT

Sociality is not inevitable. Many organisms live, for all practical purposes, completely solitary lives. But many other organisms live socially, prototypically as they stay in close proximity to others of their kind to form social groups. The evolutionary function of this grouping is primarily protection against predation. Such “safety in numbers” sociality is sometimes called cooperation, as individuals aggregate with others relatively peacefully. But in more complex social species, cooperation may manifest in more active social interactions, such as altruistic helping and mutualistic collaboration.

The increased proximity of social life brings with it increased competition for resources. In social species individuals must actively compete with one another on a daily basis for food and mates. This competition can even lead to physical aggression, which is potentially damaging to all involved, and thus to a system of dominance status in which individuals with lesser fighting ability simply allow those with greater fighting ability to have what they want.

We thus have the two fundamental axes of animal sociality (Figure 2.1): a horizontal axis of cooperation based in individuals’ propensities (high or low) for affiliating with (or even collaborating with or helping) others of their kind, and a vertical axis of competition based in indiv...