Michael Tomasello begins his engaging target article by marking two features of the human sense of obligation. First, it has peremptory force: “Unlike the most basic human motivations, which are carrots, obligation is a stick” (Introduction, para. 1, item 1 [Special Forces]) And second, it is socially embedded: ‘Breaches of obligations often prompt normative protest, from the offended party, and apologies, excuses, and justifications, from the offender’ (Introduction, para. 1, item 2 [Special Social Structure]).
I agree that obligations, at least those we associate with morality, have these features. Together, they mean that when we face a conflict between inclination and obligation, going with the inclination – giving in to it – counts as a sort of failure, leading to “a sense of guilt”; in particular, a failure for which others will hold us responsible and which we will be expected to explain away or apologize for.
Tomasello postulates that selectional pressures have elicited a capacity among humans to pursue goals jointly: a “species-unique … preference … for pursuing goals by collaborating with others” (sect. 2.1.2.1, para. 1). And he thinks that this generates a feeling among them “of obligation or responsibility to treat their partner respectfully and fairly (sect. 2.1.3, para. 1). He documents this idea in evolutionary and developmental terms, showing that even toddlers feel “the normative force of joint commitments to collaborate” (sect.2.1.2.1, para. 3).
The account sketched is not only evolutionary and developmental, it is meant to operate at the level of both interpersonal and society-wide morality. My remarks here bear most directly on the evolutionary story at the interpersonal level. They rehearse a difficulty I have elaborated elsewhere (Pettit Reference Pettit2018b), on the basis of a distinct, language-dependent story about how morality could have emerged among creatures like our forebears in Erewhon (an anagram of “nowhere”) (Pettit Reference Pettit2018a).
In expanding on the fact that we are a collaborative, interdependent species, Tomasello draws on the literature of joint action, in particular the work of Michael Bratman (Reference Bratman2014) and Margaret Gilbert (Reference Gilbert2014). But these philosophers have presented two very different models of joint action, as indeed Tomasello (Reference Tomasello2016a) has noted elsewhere, and I see a problem for his derivation of the human sense of obligation, if he starts from either. Hence my claim that he faces a hard choice.
Bratman offered a normatively austere account of how joint action may materialize. According to him, all that may be needed, roughly, is that it is a matter of common assumption among two or more agents that they each desire a certain result – say, saving a child in the water; that there is a certain plan whereby they achieve that result together rather than on their own – this may involve forming a chain into the water; and that if they play their part in that plan, then others will play theirs.
Gilbert offered an alternative under which this is not sufficient, and may not even be necessary. According to the alternative, what is also needed, roughly, is that each at a crucial point recognizes that there is a “joint commitment” among the parties to carry out the plan, where this shows up in the fact that they will complain to and about any defector.
Gilbert's account is normatively richer than Bratman's, because it presupposes that the people involved in the joint action have mastered a normative concept: that of a joint commitment. This concept is normative insofar as it is already tied up with the idea of obligation and responsibility; as she presents it, people can understand what a joint commitment is only insofar as they have an idea of what it is to hold someone responsible.
If Tomasello goes with Bratman's model of joint action, then it is not clear to me how he can get a sense of obligation out of it (Pettit Reference Pettit2018b). He argues plausibly that the parties to joint activity, even understood on this model, will each try to choose and control partners so as to maximize the chance of success, recognizing the traits that make a partner attractive; and that their reliance on joint action will lead, across a variety of contexts, to a pattern of partner assessment and selection, reform and rejection. But why should this introduce a sense of obligation among participants?
As I view things, such joint activity might have evolved, at least in a basic form, under familiar mechanisms of reciprocation illustrated by the tit-for-tat discipline (Axelrod Reference Axelrod1984; Nowak Reference Nowak2006). Thus, I see no convincing reason why “early humans,” in view of having developed “a unique form of partner control” (Sect. 2.1.1, para. 2)– and even a unique sense of a joint “we” – should have begun to hold one another responsible for failures, protesting normatively “against non-cooperative behavior” and giving “the non-cooperator a chance to mend her ways voluntarily of her own accord” (Sect. 2.1.1, para. 2).
Would Gilbert's account serve Tomasello better? Yes, but without offering an explanation of how early humans could have progressed from a stage where they lacked normative concepts, in particular that of obligation, to one at which they developed them. Her model puts the normative in place at the beginning so that it leaves us unsurprised, but also unenlightened, by the fact that it also appears at the end.
I am persuaded by Tomasello that we have inherited distinctively collaborative dispositions from early humans, and that even children articulate them normatively. But I think that the dispositions might have operated in early humans without normative conceptualization and that something else is needed to explain how we came to think in a normative fashion and to regulate our interactions normatively.
Michael Tomasello begins his engaging target article by marking two features of the human sense of obligation. First, it has peremptory force: “Unlike the most basic human motivations, which are carrots, obligation is a stick” (Introduction, para. 1, item 1 [Special Forces]) And second, it is socially embedded: ‘Breaches of obligations often prompt normative protest, from the offended party, and apologies, excuses, and justifications, from the offender’ (Introduction, para. 1, item 2 [Special Social Structure]).
I agree that obligations, at least those we associate with morality, have these features. Together, they mean that when we face a conflict between inclination and obligation, going with the inclination – giving in to it – counts as a sort of failure, leading to “a sense of guilt”; in particular, a failure for which others will hold us responsible and which we will be expected to explain away or apologize for.
Tomasello postulates that selectional pressures have elicited a capacity among humans to pursue goals jointly: a “species-unique … preference … for pursuing goals by collaborating with others” (sect. 2.1.2.1, para. 1). And he thinks that this generates a feeling among them “of obligation or responsibility to treat their partner respectfully and fairly (sect. 2.1.3, para. 1). He documents this idea in evolutionary and developmental terms, showing that even toddlers feel “the normative force of joint commitments to collaborate” (sect.2.1.2.1, para. 3).
The account sketched is not only evolutionary and developmental, it is meant to operate at the level of both interpersonal and society-wide morality. My remarks here bear most directly on the evolutionary story at the interpersonal level. They rehearse a difficulty I have elaborated elsewhere (Pettit Reference Pettit2018b), on the basis of a distinct, language-dependent story about how morality could have emerged among creatures like our forebears in Erewhon (an anagram of “nowhere”) (Pettit Reference Pettit2018a).
In expanding on the fact that we are a collaborative, interdependent species, Tomasello draws on the literature of joint action, in particular the work of Michael Bratman (Reference Bratman2014) and Margaret Gilbert (Reference Gilbert2014). But these philosophers have presented two very different models of joint action, as indeed Tomasello (Reference Tomasello2016a) has noted elsewhere, and I see a problem for his derivation of the human sense of obligation, if he starts from either. Hence my claim that he faces a hard choice.
Bratman offered a normatively austere account of how joint action may materialize. According to him, all that may be needed, roughly, is that it is a matter of common assumption among two or more agents that they each desire a certain result – say, saving a child in the water; that there is a certain plan whereby they achieve that result together rather than on their own – this may involve forming a chain into the water; and that if they play their part in that plan, then others will play theirs.
Gilbert offered an alternative under which this is not sufficient, and may not even be necessary. According to the alternative, what is also needed, roughly, is that each at a crucial point recognizes that there is a “joint commitment” among the parties to carry out the plan, where this shows up in the fact that they will complain to and about any defector.
Gilbert's account is normatively richer than Bratman's, because it presupposes that the people involved in the joint action have mastered a normative concept: that of a joint commitment. This concept is normative insofar as it is already tied up with the idea of obligation and responsibility; as she presents it, people can understand what a joint commitment is only insofar as they have an idea of what it is to hold someone responsible.
If Tomasello goes with Bratman's model of joint action, then it is not clear to me how he can get a sense of obligation out of it (Pettit Reference Pettit2018b). He argues plausibly that the parties to joint activity, even understood on this model, will each try to choose and control partners so as to maximize the chance of success, recognizing the traits that make a partner attractive; and that their reliance on joint action will lead, across a variety of contexts, to a pattern of partner assessment and selection, reform and rejection. But why should this introduce a sense of obligation among participants?
As I view things, such joint activity might have evolved, at least in a basic form, under familiar mechanisms of reciprocation illustrated by the tit-for-tat discipline (Axelrod Reference Axelrod1984; Nowak Reference Nowak2006). Thus, I see no convincing reason why “early humans,” in view of having developed “a unique form of partner control” (Sect. 2.1.1, para. 2)– and even a unique sense of a joint “we” – should have begun to hold one another responsible for failures, protesting normatively “against non-cooperative behavior” and giving “the non-cooperator a chance to mend her ways voluntarily of her own accord” (Sect. 2.1.1, para. 2).
Would Gilbert's account serve Tomasello better? Yes, but without offering an explanation of how early humans could have progressed from a stage where they lacked normative concepts, in particular that of obligation, to one at which they developed them. Her model puts the normative in place at the beginning so that it leaves us unsurprised, but also unenlightened, by the fact that it also appears at the end.
I am persuaded by Tomasello that we have inherited distinctively collaborative dispositions from early humans, and that even children articulate them normatively. But I think that the dispositions might have operated in early humans without normative conceptualization and that something else is needed to explain how we came to think in a normative fashion and to regulate our interactions normatively.