Naïve Normativity: The Social Foundation of Moral Cognition

Abstract

To answer tantalizing questions such as whether animals are moral or how morality evolved, I propose starting with a somewhat less fraught question: do animals have normative cognition? Recent psychological research suggests that normative thinking, or ought-thought, begins early in human development. Recent philosophical research suggests that folk psychology is grounded in normative thought. Recent primatology research finds evidence of sophisticated cultural and social learning capacities in great apes. Drawing on these three literatures, I argue that the human variety of social cognition and moral cognition encompass the same cognitive capacities and that the nonhuman great apes may also be normative beings. To make this argument, 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. I propose a set of four early developing prerequisites implicated in social cognition that make up what I call naïve normativity: (1) the ability to identify agents, (2) sensitivity to in-group/out-group differences, (3) the capacity for social learning of group traditions, and (4) responsiveness to appropriateness. I review the ape cognition literature and 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.

Tactful animals: How the study of touch can inform the animal morality debate

“…Although animals' ability to follow and enforce normative standards of behavior has only begun to be systematically studied in the lab (e.g., by measuring chimpanzees' spontaneous reactions to videos of infanticide [Rudolf von Rohr et al, 2015]), normativity figures prominently in many accounts of morality, and much of the work done on the evolution of human morality has focused on the emergence of our normative capacities (e.g., Joyce, 2007;Kitcher, 2014;Tomasello, 2016). In addition, Kristin Andrews, one of the most prominent philosophers in the animal morality debate, has also focused a great deal of her work on animal normativity (e.g., Andrews, 2009Andrews, , 2013Andrews, , 2020. Thus, it is worth considering to what extent the study of touch can be illuminating here too.…”

Ecological Psychology and Enactivism: A Normative Way Out From Ontological Dilemmas

“…Situated, unreflective and primitive or naive normativity are usually characterized in terms of social or communal practices or customs (see, for instance, Dreyfus, 2005 ; McDowell, 2007 ; Heras-Escribano, 2019b ; Andrews, 2020 ). Normative considerations, whether explicit or implicit, put forward by Wittgenstein (1953) and Ryle (1949) or authors in the phenomenological tradition are linked to practice, to know-how, to bodily action but almost systematically in relation to institutions, to socially established practices.…”

Chimpanzee normativity: evidence and objections

“…Introduction This paper considers the question of whether chimpanzees possess at least a primitive sense of normativity, by which I mean some ability to internalize and enforce social norms -rules governing appropriate and inappropriate behaviour-within their social groups, and to make evaluations of others' behaviour in light of such norms. A number of scientists and philosophers have argued that a sense of normativity does exist in chimpanzees and in several other non-human primate and mammalian species (e.g., Bekoff and Pierce, 2009;Andrews, 2009Andrews, , 2013Andrews, , 2020Musschenga, 2013;de Waal, 2014;Burkart et al, 2018;Vincent et al, 2019;Monsó and Andrews, forthcoming). However, there remains in many circles considerable scepticism about the idea of there being any kind of normative reasoning in non-human animals, even our closest living relatives, the dominant view being that psychological capacities for social norms, normative evaluation and motivation evolved uniquely in the human lineage, after our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos (e.g., Kitcher, 2011;Henrich, 2015;Tomasello, 2016;Schmidt and Rakoczy, 2019).…”

“…Nonetheless, several chimpanzee and other great ape behaviours have been claimed to provide at least strongly suggestive evidence of the presence of social norms and capacities for normative evaluation. Here, I will briefly review some of the relevant work (for other reviews, see de Waal, 2014;Burkart et al, 2018;Vincent et al, 2019;Andrews, 2020). 4 It is well known that wild chimpanzees engage in group hunting of monkeys.…”

“…Andrews (2020) has perhaps gone the furthest in arguing for normative capacities in chimpanzees and other apes, on the back of an account of human and non-human social cognition referred to as "naïve normativity". According to this account, predicting the future behaviour of others is itself frequently a normative exercise, since it often requires us to reason about what agents should or should not do in the relevant situation, given prevailing social norms ("should" here isn't simply being used in the sense of the "should" of prediction or regularity, such as in "it should snow tomorrow").…”