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@ Scott H.
2025-05-16 20:24:03
"Early humans were characterized by cognitive capacities for joint intentionality (e.g., ‘We want to hunt a stag’)—a basic form of shared intentionality that enables humans to understand their partner’s perspective in a joint activity and make recursive inferences about their mental states. From a sociomoral point of view, they developed a form of second-personal morality based on joint commitment towards shared activities and a sense of fairness that ensures one’s partner’s trust and sustained cooperation over time. Later in evolution, modern humans preserved these ancestral traits but were also selected to extend these capacities to a collective level by entertaining representations that go beyond an individual’s perspective because of the need to apply them to a large pool of peers. These representations are then conceived as being somewhat objective, which in turn increased the epistemic demands on humans by creating standards of what is reasonable and justifiable. From a sociomoral perspective, this led to a form of group-minded morality characterized by explicit social norms." [1]
But, shared cultural cognition towards goals has limits.[2]
This is related, as we tend to work under the influence of memes and shared cultural cognition vs. morality maps, which are cultural artifacts that supplement above. Maps are anything longer than we can handle with [2], which is two teams and three tools. From my perspective it doesn't matter how we create those maps, but we need them. This matches your point below about survival. We have tossed maps, in general, as a culture and/or just run on the simplest of rules (profit above all, and the rest follows, for instance, except for a few agreed on norms). I'd add that where you draw the "norms" line is a different topic. Most reasonable people, for instance, might be "do what thou wilt; love is the law, love under will" or something 180 degrees different, but they still won't rape children. I think this topic can be divided twice. On each side of that division we could consider cultural relativism; however, one side is more like an angels on the head of a pin conversation, and the other hits us every day in our lives as we navigate, and should get some priority.
Anyway... a few reactions and ideas.
[1] https://philpapers.org/archive/GONMTB-2.pdf
[2] https://www.eva.mpg.de/documents/Cambridge/Tomasello_Understanding_BehBrainSci_2005_1555292.pdf