The Joint Commitment Account: Critical Essays on the Philosophy of Sociality of Margaret Gilbert with Her Comments

ProtoSociology Vol. 35

Gerhard Preyer, Georg Peter, Gerhard Preyer, Georg Peter

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783748126645
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9783749492053
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Joint Commitment Account: Critical Essays on the Philosophy of Sociality ofMargaret Gilbert with Her Comments

Part I
Joint Commitment,
Obligations and Rights

STEPS TO A NATURALISTIC ACCOUNT OF HUMAN
DEONTOLOGY

Antonella Carassa and Marco Colombetti

Abstract

In this paper we outline a theory of human deontology from a naturalistic perspective. In doing so we aim to explain how human beings deal with deontic relations (like obligations and rights) thanks to a specialised psychological infrastructure, which evolved to support human cooperation. This infrastructure includes a repertoire of emotions that play a crucial role in evaluating the conformity of actions relative to a deontic relation, in displaying an agent’s attitude toward their own actions or those of their deontic partners, and in motivating suitable behavioural responses. Finally we discuss the special case of interpersonal deontology, analysing its properties and relating it to Gilbert’s concept of joint commitment.

1. Introduction

Human beings have the capacity to create elements of social reality in ways that are considered exclusive of our species. An important component of most (possibly all) social reality is deontology, that is, the complex network of obligations, permissions, rights, and so forth, that people accrue due to a variety of reasons. Part of human deontology, that we label collective, derives from large-scale, relatively stable sources like shared moral principles, laws, religious codes, local regulations, and social etiquette. Another part, that we call interpersonal deontology, is created by people in their everyday small-scale interactions, examples of this being the obligations that stem from promises, agreements, and the like.

In this paper we sketch a theory of human deontology in general, and then analyse in greater detail the case of interpersonal deontology. We find interpersonal deontology particularly interesting because, in spite of being ubiquitous in human life, it remains somewhat elusive. The main problem is to explain how it is possible for people to create such things as obligations and rights simply by interacting with other people, and to understand what types of interactions may have these effects. Most theories dealing with interpersonal deontology tend to concentrate on promises, analysed from a moral perspective: promissory obligations are thus regarded as moral obligations of some sort (see Habib, 2014, for an overview of the main theories of promissory obligations). But if we consider the type of deontic relations that people bring about and manage in everyday interactions, this view seems to go against intuition. Suppose for example that Ann knocks at Bob’s office door asking, “May I talk to you for a minute?”, to which Bob answers, “Please, come in.” This interaction creates a relation between Ann and Bob, to the effect that Ann is now entitled to walk into Bob’s office and talk to him. Now, it seems to us that this entitlement has nothing to do with morality. Certainly, Bob may have moral reasons to accept Ann’s request to talk; for example, he may be aware that Ann is facing a personal difficulty on which he would be able to provide help, and therefore feel morally obligated to talk to her; but Ann’s entitlement to talk to Bob, and Bob’s correlative obligation, derive not from Bob’s moral obligation to help Ann, but from their conversational interaction.

If we accept the idea that a significant part of human deontology is created by people in their daily interactions, we are left with the problem of understanding how this may be possible. In this paper we want to give a contribution in this direction. We shall first consider human deontology in general, and then concentrate on interpersonal deontology in the second part of the paper. In sketching our theory we take a naturalistic standpoint, in that we aim to explain how human beings are able to deal with deontology thanks to their psychological infrastructure, which evolved to support certain forms of cooperation.

The article is structured as follows. In Section 2 we introduce our general view of human deontology as consisting of deontic relations. In Section 3 we consider the affective dimension of deontic relations and examine the main features of deontic emotions. In Section 4 we present our view of interpersonal deontology, which takes the move, but partially departs, from Gilbert’s plural subject theory and in particular from her concept of joint commitment. Finally, in Section 5 we draw some conclusions and delineate possible future developments of our work.

2. Deontology: a Naturalistic View

Human deontology, either interpersonal or collective, is part of social reality; as such, it rests upon representations entertained by human beings. While large-scale collective deontology depends on the representations shared by large communities and is relatively stable, interpersonal deontology is grounded in the representations of a small number of individuals, who create and modify it through their interactions. In both cases, understanding how deontology works calls for an investigation of specific aspects of the human mind. As for any complex phenomenon concerning living organisms, we believe that such an investigation should adopt a naturalistic and evolutionary perspective. This brings in a number of important issues concerning human deontology, more precisely: identifying its function, analysing its structure, understanding the psychological mechanisms involved in its management, and finally, explaining how agents accrue specific deontic positions like obligations, rights, and so on. We shall now submit our proposals concerning the first two issues, leaving the other two to the following sections.

A comprehensive natural history of human deontology has yet to be written; however, there are important contributions to a natural history of morality (Curry, 2004; Tomasello and Vaish, 2013; Tomasello, 2016), which is a substantial part of human deontology, even if it does not exhaust it. In this context, morality is regarded as having the function of supporting human cooperation. To put the matter in the right perspective, however, it is important to construe the notion of cooperation in a suitable way. More specifically, this concept must not only apply to the kind of hic and nunc collaboration that takes place in joint activities, or to cases of helpful and altruistic behaviour, but must be extended to cover all situations in which different agents jointly uphold certain elements of social reality. For example, a rivalry relationship between two agents is a form of cooperation, in the broad sense of the term, because it presupposes that both agents regard each other as rivals.

It is plausible to assume that morality, and deontology in general, has evolved to solve the conflict between the autonomy of human individuals, on the one side, and their interdependence, on the other side. Indeed, the capacity to create and manage obligations, rights, and so on allows people to rely on the fact that their conspecifics will behave in certain predictable ways for suitably extended periods, in spite of their autonomy. A reasonable assumption, therefore, is that the main selective pressure for the evolution of deontology has been the very strong degree of interdependence that humans had to face in certain phases of their evolution (Tomasello et al., 2012). It is difficult to overstate the importance of deontology in human life: most of our social interactions would be impossible without the reliance on the behaviour of others that is licenced by it. Certainly, deontology does not exhaust the solution that evolution has devised to solve the conflict between autonomy and interdependence; for example, affective bonds are another part of the solution to the same problem. However, it would be hard to imagine how we could carry out our everyday life without engaging in a thick network of deontic relations with other people.

In order to cooperate (in the broad sense introduced before), people have to relate to each other; therefore, in view of the fact that the function of deontology is to support cooperation, one may expect that all basic deontic entities, like obligations and rights, have an essential relational component. In the philosophy of law certain scholars, like Wesley Hohfeld (1913), have argued that all legal concepts are relational, in the sense that every obligation is to someone, every right is against someone, and so on. This contrasts with the view, common in the field of ethics, according to which a moral obligation is the obligation to do what is morally right, or to refrain from doing what is morally wrong, without reference to any agent to which the obligation is directed. We find the idea of a non-directed deontic position, like that of an absolute obligation, very implausible. Clearly, what we have called interpersonal deontology appears to be inherently relational, because interpersonal obligations and rights are jointly created by certain specific agents in order to bind them to each other (Carassa and Colombetti, 2013, 2014). But we believe that all kinds of deontology are relational. Consider a possible candidate for a non-directed deontic position, like the moral obligation to protect the environment. This obligation is not directed to any specific person, but can still be considered to be directed to all our kind, and in particular to the future generations. What we have here is a case of an obligation that is directed to a large collection of generic others, rather than to a small number of well-identified partners, but is still directed. The main difference between an interpersonal obligation and a moral obligation is not that only the former is directed, but rather lies in what we can call the source of the obligation. An interpersonal obligation, for instance one deriving from an accepted promise, is directed in that it binds exactly the two agents that respectively made and accepted the promise, that is, the promisor and the promisee. A moral obligation, on the contrary, is not “made” by an agent, but rather recognised as binding on the basis of reasons that may involve values, intersubjective empathy, and other relevant elements. Independently of its source, however, a moral obligation to perform an action is still directed, in the sense that the action is owed to someone (e.g., to a beneficiary, or to the members of one’s moral community, or to a significant moral authority). These considerations lead us to assume that deontology consists of a network of deontic relations, which bind agents to each other.

But what does a deontic relation consist in? This question brings us to the second issue, concerning the psychological infrastructure of human deontology. In order to fulfil its function, deontology has to affect human behaviour in the right ways. In certain specific cases, behaviour may be affected without the need of representing deontic relations explicitly; for example, we usually stop our car at a red light automatically, without bringing to consciousness the fact that a red light means a prohibition to go further. However, there are many actions that we perform not automatically, but because we consciously represent them as obligatory (morally, legally, or whatever). Moreover, even if at red lights we stop automatically, we learned to do so because we have been explained that a red light displays a prohibition to go further. It is plausible to assume that deontology could not possibly exist without mental representations of deontic relations, which we call deontic representations.

We have argued in previous articles (Carassa and Colombetti, 2012, 2014) that deontic representations form a basic dimension of ...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Social Ontology Revisited: Gerhard Preyer, Georg Peter
• Part I: Joint Commitment, Obligations and Rights
• Part II: Collective Belief, Conversation, and Telling
• Part III: Collective Emotions and Emotional Sharing
• Part IV: Plural Subjects, “We”, Coordination and Convention
• Part V: Promising and Patriotism
• Part VI: Replies and Bibliography
• On Contemporary Sociology and Philosophy
• Contributors
• Impressum
• On ProtoSociology
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