Interest in the drivers of firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) is growing. However, little is known about the influence of a CEO’s childhood experience of natural disasters on CSR. Using archival data, we explore this relationship by offering three mechanisms that may account for how the CEO’s childhood experience of natural disaster is related to their CSR. More specifically, while prior research has established a positive relationship based on the post-traumatic growth theory, we show that the dual mechanisms of prosocial (...) values and a CEO’s risk aversion explain the positive relationship. We further find that the positive relationship is stronger (1) when CEOs have longer career horizons and (2) when community social capital is high. This study contributes to both research and managerial implications on the topics of CEO’s childhood experience and CSR. In particular, this study advances the upper echelon theory by revealing that a CEO’s childhood experience of natural disaster is a useful yet relatively underexplored variable that can help explain the substantial variations in firms’ CSR. Moreover, we emphasize that a CEO’s career horizons and level of community social capital are important variables that further amplify the effect of a CEO’s childhood experience of natural disaster on the firm’s CSR commitment. (shrink)

Several authors have argued that causes differ in the degree to which they are ‘specific’ to their effects. Woodward has used this idea to enrich his influential interventionist theory of causal explanation. Here we propose a way to measure causal specificity using tools from information theory. We show that the specificity of a causal variable is not well-defined without a probability distribution over the states of that variable. We demonstrate the tractability and interest of our proposed measure by measuring the (...) specificity of coding DNA and other factors in a simple model of the production of mRNA. (shrink)

"This is a fine volume that clarifies, defends, and moves beyond the views that Kim presented in Mind in a Physical World.

(From the Press's Website) -/- Winner of the 2004 Lakatos Prize, Thought in a Hostile World is an exploration of the evolution of cognition, especially human cognition, by one of today's foremost philosophers of biology and of mind. Features an exploration of the evolution of human cognition. Written by one of today’s foremost philosophers of mind and language. Presents a set of analytic tools for thinking about cognition and its evolution. Offers a critique of nativist, modular versions of evolutionary psychology, (...) rejecting the example of language as a model for thinking about human cognitive capacities. Applies to the areas of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and evolutionary psychology. -/- . (shrink)

There is nothing like an overwhelming consensus of opinion to encourage a less than rigourous approach to analyzing complex ethical issues. Unfortunately, this is nowhere more apparent than in the discussion of human reproductive cloning contained in the federal House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs’ report on human cloning, released last August The report may well fulfil the first half of its project, namely the empirical task of adequately summarizing and categorizing the various submissions made to (...) the Committee. However, it is clearly inadequate as a discussion of the ethical and legal permissibility of human reproductive cloning. (shrink)

"No human now gathers for himself or herself the essential resources for life: food, shelter, clothing, and the like. Humans are obligate co-operator, and this has been true for tens of thousands of years; probably much longer. In this regard, humans are very unusual. Cooperation outside the family is rare: though it can be very profitable, it is also very risky, as cooperation makes an agent vulnerable to incompetence and cheating. This book presents a new picture of the emergence of (...) cooperation in our lineage, developing through four fairly distinct phases from a baseline that was probably fairly similar to living great apes, who cooperate, but in fairly minimal ways. As adults, they rarely depend on others when the outcome really matters. This book suggests that cooperation began to be more important for humans through an initial phase of cooperative foraging generating immediate returns from collective action in small mobile bands. This established in our lineage about 1.8 million years ago, perhaps earlier. Over the rest of the Pleistocene, cooperation became more extended in its social scale, with forms of cooperation between bands gradually establishing, and in spatial and temporal scale too, with various forms of reciprocation becoming important. The final phase was the emergence of cooperation in large scale, hierarchical societies in the Holocene, beginning about 12,000 years ago. This picture is nested in a reading of the archaeological and ethnographic record, and twinned to an account of the gradual elaboration of cultural learning in our lineage, making cooperation both more profitable and more stable"--. (shrink)

This book is not a conventional introduction to the philosophy of mind, nor is it a contribution to the physicalist/ dualist debate. Instead The Representational Theory of Mind demonstrates that we can construct physicalist theories of important aspects of our mental life. Its aim is to explain and defend a physicalist theory of intelligence in two parts: the first six chapters consist of an exposition, elaboration and defence of human sentience (the functionalist theory of mind), and the second part considers (...) rivals and objections to this theory. Kim Sterelny aims to introduce people to this area of philosophy by exemplifying it, to show that philosophical and empirical investigations can be synthesized to the benefit of both. --From publisher's description. (shrink)

The philosophy of mind has always been a staple of the philosophy curriculum. But it has never held a more important place than it does today, with both traditional problems and new topics often sparked by the developments in the psychological, cognitive, and computer sciences. Jaegwon Kim’s Philosophy of Mind is the classic, comprehensive survey of the subject. Now in its second edition, Kim explores, maps, and interprets this complex and exciting terrain. Designed as an introduction to the field for (...) upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, Philosophy of Mind focuses on the mind/body problem and related issues, some touching on the status of psychology and cognitive science. The second edition features a new chapter on Cartesian substance dualism-a perspective that has been little discussed in the mainstream philosophy of mind and almost entirely ignored in most introductory books in philosophy of mind. In addition, all the chapters have been revised and updated to reflect the trends and developments of the last decade. Throughout the text, Kim allows readers to come to their own terms with the central problems of the mind. At the same time, the author’s own emerging views are on display and serve to move the discussion forward. Comprehensive, clear, and fair, Philosophy of Mind is a model of philosophical exposition. It is a major contribution to the study and teaching of the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

If contemporary analytic philosophy can be said to have a philosophical ideology, it undoubtedly is naturalism. Naturalism is often invoked as a motivating ground for many philosophical projects, and “naturalization” programs abound everywhere, in theory of knowledge, philosophy of mind, theory of meaning, metaphysics, and ethics. But what is naturalism, and where does it come from? This paper examines the naturalism debate in midtwentieth-century America as a proximate source of contemporary naturalism. Views of philosophers like Roy Wood Sellars, John Dewey, (...) John Herman Randall, Sydney Hook, and Ernest Nagel are cited, and some of the central tenets of naturalism, such as an adherence to “scientific method” as the sole source of knowledge and the causal/ explanatory closure of the natural world, are explored. The paper ends with a brief discussion of how certain naturalistic constraints lead to some of the problems currently debated in metaethics and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Responsible leadership is rare. It is not that most leaders are irresponsible, but responsibility in leadership is frequently defined so that an important connotation of responsible leadership is ignored. This article equates responsible leadership with virtuousness. Using this connotation implies that responsible leadership is based on three assumptions—eudaemonism, inherent value, and amplification. Secondarily, this connotation produces two important outcomes—a fixed point for coping with change, and benefits for constituencies who may never be affected otherwise. The meaning and advantages of responsible (...) leadership as virtuous leadership are discussed. (shrink)

This collection reports on the latest research on an increasingly pivotal issue for evolutionary biology: cooperation. The chapters are written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and utilize research tools that range from empirical survey to conceptual modeling, reflecting the rich diversity of work in the field. They explore a wide taxonomic range, concentrating on bacteria, social insects, and, especially, humans. -/- Part I (“Agents and Environments”) investigates the connections of social cooperation in social organizations to the conditions that make (...) cooperation profitable and stable, focusing on the interactions of agent, population, and environment. Part II (“Agents and Mechanisms”) focuses on how proximate mechanisms emerge and operate in the evolutionary process and how they shape evolutionary trajectories. Throughout the book, certain themes emerge that demonstrate the ubiquity of questions regarding cooperation in evolutionary biology: the generation and division of the profits of cooperation; transitions in individuality; levels of selection, from gene to organism; and the “human cooperation explosion” that makes our own social behavior particularly puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. (shrink)

This research was focused on investigating why some consumers might support cause-related marketing campaigns for reasons other than personal benefit by examining the influence of moral emotions and cultural orientation. The authors investigated the extent to which moral emotions operate differently across a cultural variable (US versus Korea) and an individual difference variable (self-construal). A survey method was utilised. Data were collected from a convenience sample of US ( n = 180) and Korean ( n = 191) undergraduates. Moral emotions (...) significantly influenced purchase intention for a social-cause product. The influence of an ego-focused moral emotion (i.e., pride) on purchase intention was greater for US than Korean participants. The influence of another-focused moral emotion (i.e., guilt) on purchase intention was greater for high-interdependent participants than for low-interdependent participants. The findings of this research provide important and relevant implications to marketers and policy makers in developing persuasive messages and customer relationship programmes. (shrink)

Proponents of corporate environmental responsibility argue that corporations shortchange shareholders by investing too little in environmental responsibility. They claim that corporations can improve their financial performance by increasing their investment in environmental responsibility. Opponents of corporate social responsibility argue that corporations shortchange shareholders by investing too much in environmental responsibility. They claim that corporations can improve their financial performance by reducing their investment in environmental responsibility. Yet, others claim that corporations serve their shareholders well by investing just enough in social (...) responsibility, not too little and not too much. If so, corporations increase their investment in environmental responsibility when an increase improves financial performance and reduce their investment in environmental responsibility when a decrease improves financial performance. Our evidence is consistent with this last claim. We find that the behavior of corporations is consistent with the claim that they act in the interest of shareholders, increasing or decreasing their investment in environmental responsibility as necessary to improve their financial performance. (shrink)

In this article, I present a substantive proposal about the timing and nature of the final stage of the evolution of full human language, the transition from so-called “protolanguage” to language, and on the origins of a simple protolanguage with structure and displaced reference; a proposal that depends on the idea that the initial expansion of communicative powers in our lineage involved a much expanded role for gesture and mime. But though it defends a substantive proposal, the article also defends (...) and illustrates a methodological proposal too. I argue that language is a special case of a more general phenomenon—cumulative cultural evolution—and while we rarely have direct information about communication, we have more direct information about the cumulative cultural evolution of technical skill, ecological strategies, and social complexity. These same factors also enable us to make a reasonable estimate of the intergenerational social learning capacities of these communities and of the communicative demands these communities face. For example, we can, at least tentatively, identify forms of cooperation that are stable only if third party information is transmitted widely, cheaply, and accurately. So we can use these more direct markers of information accumulation to locate, in broad terms, the period in our evolutionary history during which we became lingual. (shrink)

The subsistence technology of forager communities has varied greatly over space and time. This paper (i) reviews briefly the main causal factors the literature identifies as responsible for this variation; (ii) analyzes in some detail the most prominent idea in the literature on spatial variation:Complex technology is an adaptive response to elevated risks of subsistence failure; (iii) it argues that the alleged empirical support for this hypothesis depends on dubious proxies of risk; (iv) it argues that it fails to explain (...) the subsistence technologies of desert foragers, who generally live with simple technologies in high‐risk environments; (v) it offers an alternative analysis, based on the reduced opportunity costs of complex technologies in highly seasonal environments, on the high value of typical forager targets in those environments and their relatively predictable location in space and time; and (v) the paper concludes with a conjecture about the role of environmental variation in toolkit change over deep time. (shrink)

Until relatively recently, it was often supposed that changes in the material record of hominin life indexed advances in hominin cognitive sophistication in a relatively direct way. In particular, the “Upper Paleolithic Transition”—an apparently abrupt increase in the complexity and disparity of our material culture—was thought to signal the arrival of the fully human mind. While the idea of a direct relationship between material complexity and cognitive sophistication still has some defenders, this view has largely been abandoned. It is now (...) widely appreciated that aspects of ancient hominins’ demographic and social organization have a powerful influence both on the material culture they need and the material culture they can sustain. But if this more nuanced view is right, what does the deep material record tell us about the evolution of hominin cognition? I explore that question in this article. (shrink)

This paper begins by calling attention to a puzzling feature of our deep past: an apparent mis-match between morphological evolution in our lineage, including the expansion of our brain and neocortex, and changes in material culture. Three ideas might explain this mis-match. The apparent mis-match is an illusion: change in material culture is indeed driven by biological evolution, but of a kind difficult to identify in the fossil record; the mismatch is caused by the fact that material culture is sensitive (...) to the social and demographic environment, not just the native cognitive capacities of individual agents. Innovation and its uptake is more reliable in larger social worlds. The mis-match is made possible by adaptive phenotypic plasticity; in particular, cognitive plasticity. Just as material culture evolves through cumulative cultural learning, so too do cognitive skills, including ones which make innovations in, and the transmission of, material culture more efficient. This paper is targeted on the second of these ideas, and distinguishes three different versions of the view that increases in social scale support increases in the complexity of material culture. Those are: cultural selection is more efficient in larger social worlds; larger social worlds support more specialisation, which in turn supports a more complex material culture; cultural learning is more efficient in larger social worlds. The paper argues that the first two of these pathways are probably more important than the third in explaining otherwise puzzling features of the archaeological and ethnographic record. (shrink)

The standard view of the function of reason is that it emerged to enable individuals to make better judgements and choices. Once individuals could think better, and once we had suitable communicative tools, individual reasoning acquired a public face; we reasoned together as well as privately, in our own mind. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that this gets the story the wrong way around: reasoning evolved for public purposes: to persuade, negotiate, assess. Once it was established publically, perhaps it (...) acquired a private function too. With the exception of a few minor complaints, this evolutionary case is well made. However, Mercier and Sperber embed their evolutionary case within a modular view of the mind and suggest a modular view of public reasoning itself. While I find the evolutionary case persuasive, I am sceptical of the cognitive science framework. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. One is to defend an incrementalist view of the evolution of language, not from those who think that syntax could not evolve incrementally, but from those who defend a fundamental distinction between Gricean communication or ostensive inferential communication and code-based communication. The paper argues against this dichotomy, and sketches ways in which a code-based system could evolve into Gricean communication. The second is to assess the merits of the Sender–Receiver Framework, originally formulated by David Lewis, (...) and much elaborated and set into an evolutionary context by Brian Skyrms and colleagues, as a framework for thinking about the evolution of language. Despite the great strengths of that framework, and despite the great value of a framework that is both general and formally tractable, I argue that there are critical features of language that it fails to capture. (shrink)

Debates on the contingency of history have largely focused on the history of life. This article targets the supposed contingency of human history. It does not defend a global claim about the overall contingency of history. Rather, it aims to identify and explain the difference between robust and fragile historical trajectories. It does so by considering a set of contrasting cases and identifying critical differences among the cases. The analysis shows that one important source of contingency is the historical emergence (...) of command-and-control institutions; one important source of robustness is the existence of population-level processes structured by relatively stable institutions. (shrink)

In his profound discussion, Sterelny draws out common themes in the contributions to this topic: selective drivers in the coevolution of cognition and culture, the role of language in it, characteristics of cumulative cultural evolution, and issues of testability. He highlights the growing body of evidence for positive feedback mechanisms in cultural evolution, but also notes that progress is piecemeal, calling for more cross‐border work between cognitive science and research on cultural evolution.

This study viewed students majoring in public relations as prospective public relations practitioners and explored their perceptions about corporate social responsibility (CSR) as their job attraction condition. The results showed that the students perceived CSR to be an important ethical fit condition of a company. One of the significant findings is that CSR can be an effective reputation management strategy for prospective employees, particularly when a company’s business is suffering. In examining the effect of CSR efforts on attitudinal and behavioral (...) outcomes, person–organization (P–O) fit appeared to serve as a mediator between CSR performances and organizational attractiveness. (shrink)

The basic idea of Birch’s analysis is plausible: normative guidance began in agents’ assessment of their own craft skills. But I suggest developing that idea in a different way. I suggest that proto-normative affect plays its guiding role diachronically, in the development of those skills, rather than synchronically, in modulating their moment-by-moment execution. More importantly, I suggest a different pathway to normative affect’s direction at second and third parties. Normative response became social in the context of skilled collaborative activities, for (...) in those activities others’ failures have material consequences for each agent. In such collaborations, all have reason to care about others’ skill, or lack of it. (shrink)

This paper responds to Birch and Buskell's thoughtful critique. In it, I defend my use of behavioural ecology. I argue, contra Birch and Buskell, that I can give a principled defence of the emergence of conventions for respecting property, modelling as a network of pairwise iterated PDs between incipient farmers. Second, I defend my scepticism about the power of cultural group selection to optimise community normative packages. Finally, I located my views, as requested, against those of The dawn of everything. (...) I argue that the more complex “original position” envisaged in Dawn depends on special conditions rarely found on Pleistocene Africa. (shrink)

In the U.S. there has been considerable interest in connecting low-income households to alternative food networks like Community Supported Agriculture. To learn more about this possibility we conducted a statewide survey of CSA members in California. A total of 1149 members from 41 CSAs responded. Here we answer the research question: How do CSA members’ socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds, household conditions potentially interfering with membership, and CSA membership experiences vary between lower-income households and higher-income households? We divided members into LIHHs (...) and HIHHs. We present comparisons of LIHHs’ and HIHHs’ employment, race/ethnicity, household composition and education, use of food support, and enjoyment of food-related activities; conditions interfering with membership and major life events; and sources of information influencing decision to join, reasons for joining, ratings of importance of and satisfaction with various CSA attributes, gaps between importance of and satisfaction with various CSA attributes, valuing of the share and willingness to pay more, and impacts of membership. We find that LIHHs are committed CSA members, often more so than HIHHs, and that CSA members in California are disproportionately white, but that racial disproportionality decreases as incomes increase. We conclude by considering: the economic risks that LIHHs face in CSA membership, the intersection of economic risks with race/ethnicity and cultural coding in CSA; and the possibilities of increasing participation of LIHH in CSA. (shrink)

How can we have a sense of the presence of ordinary three-dimensional objects (e.g., an apple on my desk, a partially occluded cat behind a picket fence) when we are only presented with some parts of objects perceived from a particular egocentric viewpoint (e.g., the facing side of the apple, the unoccluded parts of the cat)? This paper presents and defends a novel answer to this question by incorporating insights from two prominent contemporary theories of perception, naïve realism and sensorimotor (...) theory. Naïve realism is the view that perception is fundamentally a matter of obtaining a relation of ‘acquaintance’ with some mind-independent entities (e.g., objects, properties, events). Sensorimotor theory holds that perception involves implicit practical understanding or ‘anticipation’ of the covariance between movements and sensory changes. I argue that perceptual presence is best accounted for in terms of the combination of our direct ‘acquaintance’ with some parts of perceived objects and sensorimotor ‘anticipations’ of how the objects would look different depending on some movements and actions. (shrink)

Considering questions at the intersection of time and fiction deepens our understanding of fiction, introduces new questions for philosophy of time, and brings analytic philosophy in discussion with narratology. Philosophers debate whether fictional time can be tensed, whether fictional time can branch, repeat, pause, rewind, or skip and whether fictional time travel is possible. Much of the way we answer these questions will depend on our overall commitment to the nature of fiction. It’s also unclear what, if anything, we can (...) learn about the metaphysics of time from fiction. This chapter will introduce readers to discussions that are shaping the debates in this domain. (shrink)

There is a very striking difference between even the simplest ethnographically known human societies and those of the chimps and bonobos. Chimp and bonobo societies are closed societies: with the exception of adolescent females who disperse from their natal group and join a nearby group (never to return to their group of origin), a pan residential group is the whole social world of the agents who make it up. That is not true of forager bands, which have fluid memberships, and (...) regular associations with neighbouring bands. They are components of a larger social world. The open and fluid character of forager bands brings with it many advantages, so the stability of this more vertically complex form of social life is not difficult to explain, once it establishes. But how did it establish, if, as is likely, earlier hominin social worlds resemble those of our close pan relatives in the suspicion (even hostility) of one band to another? How did hominin social organisation transition from life in closed bands, each distrustful of its neighbours, to the much more open social lives of foragers? I will discuss and synthesise two approaches to this problem, one ecological, based on the work of Robert Layton and his colleagues, and another that is organised around an expansion of kin recognition, an idea primarily driven by Bernard Chapais. The paper closes by discussing potential archaeological signatures both of more open social worlds, and of the supposed causal drivers of such worlds. (shrink)

The issue of human nature or xing 性 was a major philosophical topic of the mid- and late-Warring States period of ancient China. It was famously discussed, for example, in the Mencius. Zhuangzi 莊子 lived around the same time as Mencius and one might expect that he, too, would have discussed it. Surprisingly, the term xing is absent from the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi. There have been different responses to this, namely, that Zhuangzi: used different terms equivalent to xing; (...) believed that human nature is bad (despite not mentioning xing); was deliberately silent on xing as an oblique way of criticizing others such as Mencius. I review these claims and provide an analysis of how xing was mainly conceptualized during the Warring States period in essentialist terms. I shall read Zhuangzi’s philosophy as transcending this conceptual framework. Instead of a theory of human nature, Zhuangzi provides stories and descriptions of the different facets of human behavior and their psychological and other complexities. These often have an epistemic focus that stand independently of any theory of human nature. (shrink)

What do events such as scandals, industrial accidents, activist threats, and mass shootings have in common? They can all trigger an audience’s stigma judgment about the organization involved in the event. Despite the prevalence of these stigma-triggering events, management research has provided little conceptual work to characterize the dimensions and processes of organizational event stigma. This article takes the perspective of the evaluating audience to unpack the stigma judgment process, identify critical dimensions for categorizing types of event stigma, and explore (...) the role of the stigmatizers’ aesthetic, emotional, and cognitive reactions as well as their practical considerations in producing what we call “sticky stigmas.” Our event stigma typology provides clarity regarding how stigmas differ based on the types of events and audiences’ reactions and why some event stigmas are stronger and more long-lasting than others. We highlight the role of emotions and aesthetics in stigma formation and the various ethical dilemmas that influence stigma stickiness. (shrink)

Individuals’ beliefs about the malleability of emotions have been theorised to play a role in their psychological distress by influencing emotion regulation processes, such as the use of emotion regulation strategies. We conducted a meta-analysis to test this idea across studies with a focus on the relationships between emotion malleability beliefs and five distinct emotion regulation strategies: cognitive reappraisal, suppression, avoidance, rumination, and acceptance. Further, using two-stage meta-analytic structural equation modelling (TSSEM), we examined whether the emotion regulation strategies mediate the (...) cross-sectional relationship between emotion malleability beliefs and psychological distress across studies. Thirty-seven studies were included in the meta-analyses and 55 cross-sectional studies were included in the TSSEM. Results demonstrated that, across studies, emotion malleability beliefs were significantly associated with greater use of putatively helpful strategies (particularly with cognitive reappraisal) and less use of putatively unhelpful strategies (particularly with avoidance). The use of cognitive reappraisal and avoidance partially mediated the relationship between emotion malleability beliefs and psychological distress. These results highlight the importance of considering beliefs about the malleability of emotions in the context of emotion regulation. These findings suggest the potential role of emotion malleability beliefs in interventions for individuals with emotion regulation-related difficulties and psychological distress. (shrink)

The Hwang affair, a dramatic and far reaching instance of scientific fraud, shocked the world. This collective national failure prompted various organizations in Korea, including universities, regulatory agencies, and research associations, to engage in self-criticism and research ethics reforms. This paper aims, first, to document and review research misconduct perpetrated by Hwang and members of his research team, with particular attention to the agencies that failed to regulate and then supervise Hwang’s research. The paper then examines the research ethics reforms (...) introduced in the wake of this international scandal. After reviewing American and European research governance structures and policies, policy makers developed a mixed model mindful of its Korean context. The third part of the paper examines how research ethics reform is proactive (a response to shocking scientific misconduct and ensuing external criticism from the press and society) as well as reactive (identification of and adherence to national or international ethics standards). The last part deals with Korean society’s response to the Hwang affair, which had the effect of a moral atomic bomb and has led to broad ethical reform in Korean society. We conceptualize this change as ethical modernization, through which the Korean public corrects the failures of a growth-oriented economic model for social progress, and attempts to create a more trustworthy and ethical society. (shrink)

The concept of the cheng xin in the Zhuangzi claims that the cognitive function of the heart-mind is not over and above its affective states and in charge of them in developing and controlling virtue, as assumed by the Confucians and others. This joint cognitive and affective nature of the heart-mind denies ethical and epistemic certainty. Individual perspectives are limited given habits of thought, attitudes, personal orientations and particular cognitive/affective experiences. Nevertheless, the heart-mind has a vast imaginative capacity that allows (...) the open-endedness and broadening of perspectives. (shrink)

The use of ethnography to understand archaeology is both prevalent and controversial. This paper develops an alternative approach, using ethnography to build and test a general theory of forager behaviors, and their variations in different conditions, one which can then be applied even to prehistoric sites differing from contemporary experience. Human behavioral ecology is chosen as the framework theory, and forager social learning as a case study. The argument is then applied to social learning in the late Pleistocene, and hence (...) to a famous archaeological puzzle: the late Pleistocene acceleration of technical innovation and regional differentiation. (shrink)

Buchanan and Powell develop a concept of moral progress, and build a middle-range theory of how moral progress comes about. They argue on the basis of their view of the evolutionary origins of normative thought that further moral progress towards more inclusive moral and political systems is possible. In doing so they rebut a conservative reading of the evolution of normative thought: a reading that regards the hope for inclusive moral systems as utopian. Buchanan and Powell argue that this ‘evoconservative’ (...) argument overlooks overwhelming evidence of the adaptive plasticity of normative thought. I agree with their rejection of that evoconservative position, but give an alternative account of the evolutionary foundations of normative cognition and its plasticity. But I also argue that there is a gap in their defence of their view of moral progress: it begs the question against exclusive, relational conceptions of the naturalistic foundations of normative obligations and rights. Their account is less fully naturalistic than they seem to suppose, for it lacks a developed account of the natural facts which make normative claims true, and it is not clear that there is an account to be given that would vindicate their inclusive liberal intuitions about the norms we should have. (shrink)