From shared intentionality to moral obligation? Some worries

Abstract

ABSTRACTAccording to Tomasello’s natural history of human morality, morality's key structures come into being in the dyadic joint action of early human hunters. Such joint action, Tomasello claims, involves the generation of a new entity, a “joint agent,” and brings with it insight into the agent-independence of agential roles. These two features are, Tomasello argues, decisive for the inception of early humans’ “respect”-based proto-morality. The key structures at work are then, he claims, “scaled up” in the “group morality” of modern humans. I raise three worries about the narrative at the level of early humans’ proto-morality. These concern the content of proto-moral “respect,” the role of language or proto-language, and the limits of focusing on dyads. In a final step, I express the concern that Tomasello’s construal of the “scaling up” process appears to lose the key structural features of respect, as it seems unable to distinguish social and moral norms.