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S. Nichols, On the Genealogy of Norms: A Case for the Role of Emotion in CulturalEvolution, Philosophy of Science 2002, vol. 69, pp. 234-255.

I. Summary

(1) Theses:

(a) Normative prohibitions against action X will be more likely to survive if action X elicits

(or is easily led to elicit) negative affect.

(b) Norms prohibiting core-disgusting actions (i.e., actions that are likely to elicit core

disgust) will enjoy greater cultural fitness than norms prohibiting actions that are unlikely to

elicit core disgust (or other emotions).

(2) Abstract:

The author supports epidemiological approach to cultural evolution. On this account, one

investigates cultural evolution by considering what makes certain cultural items more likely to prevail. Furthermore, the epidemiological approach maintains that the characteristics of

human psychology will play an enormous role in determining which items are likely to

survive. There is a large amount of data from psychology that supports the thesis that if a

representation has an emotional component, this component enhances the chances of retention

of such representations. Because, on a popular account, norms are considered to be

representations, it follows that if norms elicit emotional responses there is a greater

probability of their retention in comparison with norms that do not elicit such responses.

Using this data, the author proceeds to investigate whether norms governing manners that

elicit core-disgust (which is considered as a basic emotion) had greater chance of survival

than norms governing manners that were affectively neutral. Testing of the above-mentioned

thesis consisted in comparison of the etiquette norms from the most important manners book

in history, Erasmus On Good Manners for Boys, with contemporary etiquette. The resultsshowed that, out of 57 investigated norms from Erasmus book, over 90% that elicited core-

disgust were part of contemporary manners and only around 30% of norms that did not elicit

such response are regarded as a part of contemporary etiquette. These findings support the

thesis (b). What is especially interesting, is that the author states that some of the moral

norms, e.g. norms against harming others, prohibit actions that are likely to elicit negative

affect. Because these moral norms possess such emotional component, it shows why they

ended up being so successful.

2. Comments:

(1) The article presents a very interesting and promising approach to the issue of the

genealogy of norms. Traditional approaches to this issue (e.g. Nietsches account,

evolutionary account) focus on the origin of norms (especially moral norms). The main

problem with these approaches is that there is a lot of different origin stories which seem to

be equally plausible. The epidemiological account offers a more modest solution: we

investigate what makes cultural items more likely to prevail.

(2) Because the main thesis states that norms which elicit emotional response are more likely

to prevail, the familiar question about moral norms comes to mind: is an action wrong

because we disapprove of it, or do we disapprove of it because its wrong?

(3) There is no doubt (the author agrees with that) that societal factors play an enormous rolein determining which norms survive. If so, then perhaps societal factors play a more

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significant role in the survival of moral norms than in the survival of manner norms.

Therefore, moral norms require a similar investigation to the one carried out on manner norms

before we can plausibly extrapolate thesis (a) on moral norms.