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Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. x + 194.
‘It is inconceivable’, Michael Tomasello memorably claimed in a 2010 lecture, ‘that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together’ (Page-Barbour lecture at the University of Virginia). Decades of research by Tomasello and colleagues – at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (of which he is co-director) and elsewhere – have provided extensive data suggesting that whereas human infants and chimps do not differ much at individual problem-solving, when it comes to social and cooperative tasks, humans are without peer. What chimpanzees lack (or have in only rudimentary form) and what humans have in comparative abundance, is what Tomasello calls ‘shared intentionality’. According to the shared intentionality hypothesis, the key development in our ancestors’ cognitive evolution was the ability to form joint goals structured by shared attention and multiple individual sub-goals. This crucial development encouraged new forms of interaction, inference and practical self-guidance, such as monitoring one's own social and communicative behaviour from another's point of view. It makes possible not just mundane tasks like carrying a log together, but is a vital precursor to the astonishingly complex and cumulative human culture that now surrounds us all.
This hypothesis was presented in Tomasello's well-received 2014 book, A Natural History of Human Thinking, as a way of explaining the evolution of human culture, language and social institutions. A Natural History of Human Morality is the companion to this earlier volume, in which Tomasello builds on the previous work to explain how, from this complex cooperative cultural foundation, our ancestors ‘came to engage in moral acts that either subordinated or treated as equal their own interests and the interests of others, even feeling a sense of obligation to do so’ (p. ix). He seeks to account for the emergence of the human sense of fairness, of desert, of mutual respect, of obligations extending to others with whom one has never interacted, and of objective right and wrong. It is a relatively concise book (less than 200 pages) of five chapters, the first being a brief scene-setter. I shall run through the other four chapters before offering some critical comments.
Chapter 2 begins by describing the...