Robert B. Pippin
Natural & normative
The flood of recent books in the last
decade or so by neuroscientists, prima-
tologists, computer scientists, evolution-
ary biologists, and economists about
issues traditionally considered of inter-
est to the humanities–issues like moral-
idad, política, the nature of rationality,
what makes a response to an object an
aesthetic response, and value theory–
and the incorporation of such research
methods by some academics tradition-
ally thought of as humanists have pro-
voked a great deal of discussion, alguno
controversy, and a growing number of
conferences about the “two cultures.”
The great majority of this discussion
has involved a kind of invitation to hu-
manists to make themselves aware of
the new discoveries and new possibili-
ties opened up by this research, y para
reorient their thinking accordingly. Como
far as I have been able to discover, rela-
tively little of the discussion has been
concerned with what scientists work-
ing in this area might pro½tably learn
from humanists, or whether becoming
better informed about traditional and
modern humanist approaches might
suggest some hesitations and quali½ca-
tions about just what the phenomena
actually are that our friends in the sci-
© 2009 by Robert B. Pippin
ences are trying to explain. I do not in
any way count myself an expert in this
emerging literature, but I do want to of-
fer some initial and very general reasons
to hesitate before jumping on some of
these particular bandwagons.
I work within a strand of the modern
philosophical tradition that can be said
to have begun with two extremely influ-
ential essays by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
En 1749, Rousseau won ½rst prize in a
contest held by the Academy of Dijon in
answer to the question, “Has the prog-
ress of the sciences and arts contributed
to the corruption or to the improvement
of human conduct?” Rousseau’s answer,
famously, was “corruption.” In 1754, re-
sponding again to an Academy question,
he wrote his Discourse on the Origin and
Basis of Inequality Among Men, otro
blistering attack on modernization, en-
cluding the presumptions of scienti½c
and technical modernization. Estos
two essays represented one of the ½rst
attempts to mark out the limits (in prin-
ciple; not limits based on temporary em-
pirical ignorance) of modern scienti½c
understanding in contributing to human
self-knowledge. The essays insisted on
an unusual sort of necessary indepen-
dencia (unusual for not relying on theol-
ogy or revelation, as in much of the Eu-
Dædalus Summer 2009
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Robert B.
Pippin
on being
humano
ropean counter-Enlightenment, o cualquier
form of traditional metaphysical dual-
ismo), and they privileged the importance
of moral and normative matters. En el
way he argued for the distinctness of hu-
man beings, Rousseau became a major
influence on German philosophy in its
classical period from the end of the eigh-
teenth to the ½rst third of the nineteenth
siglo, and many of the arguments, como
formulated by Kant and Hegel especially,
continue to be relevant to these new nat-
uralizing enterprises.
Por supuesto, those thinkers who later
objected to the belief that the natural
scienti½c paradigm is wholly and exclu-
sively adequate for human self-knowl-
edge were nowhere near as radical as
Rousseau. He seemed to be decrying
the ethical insuf½ciency of modernity
sí mismo, claiming that its social organiza-
tion and division of labor were creating
forms of human dependence that weak-
en and enervate, degrade and immiser-
ate; that we were busily creating a nov-
el way of life that was as unsuited for
human flourishing as life in a zoo is to
the animals therein. Yet there is a more
common, narrower concern that often
derived from Rousseau and that persists
as a complex problem.
Let us say that the basic problem is
the status of normative considerations,
considerations that invoke some sort
of “ought” claim. Two such claims have
always been more important than any
otro: what ought to be believed and
what ought to be done. Para mí, estos
claims are at the heart of what we in
this country call the humanities (qué
elsewhere are called the Geisteswissen-
chaften or les sciences humaines), y ellos
contribute to the traditional case that
the humanities form the indispensable
core of any credible university educa-
ción. While these considerations seem
like distinctly philosophical questions
(and while philosophers have often been
rightly accused of imperialist ambitions,
treating everything else in the humani-
ties as bad versions of philosophy, bastante
than as possible good versions of what
ellos son), I don’t think the questions are
con½ned to philosophy. They turn up
everywhere: how a text ought to be in-
terpreted (eso es, what it means to get a
text right or wrong); how a character’s
professions of love in a novel ought to
be assessed (is he lying, a hypocrite, self-
deceived, honest but naive?); si
y, if so, how an abstract expression-
ist painting can be said to mean some-
thing, y, if so, of what signi½cance or
importance is such painterly meaning;
what ought we to believe about the sig-
ni½cance of the crisis of modernism
in music in the late nineteenth century
(why does so much contemporary art
music sound so different from the way
music had almost always sounded; qué
is of value in the new music?); and tra-
ditional philosophical issues, like under
what conditions is the state’s use of co-
ercive power justi½able.
Before we reach any question of inter-
disciplinary cooperation with the sci-
ences, I should note that it has become
extremely controversial within the hu-
manities to treat the humanities like
este, as if all were contributing to the
same conversation about various “live”
normative issues. Por ejemplo, the idea
that literary products or paintings could
be said to imply, presuppose, or require
truth or value claims has in itself very
little purchase on the contemporary
academic mind. The idea that these are
truth claims about normative matters–
that there simply are truth claims about
normative matters that ought to be pur-
sued–and that these ought to be dis-
cussed and assessed as such, en vez de
only as deeply historically contextual-
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ized bits of evidence about what peo-
ple believed at a speci½c time and place,
now sounds like a rather stale human-
ismo. It is often immediately assumed
that any proponent of such views must
serve a conservative agenda.
This is so for a number of complex
razones. Uno, there is a great suspicion
about there being any one way to ad-
dress or engage these normative issues
(ought claims) at a ½rst-order level, eso
es, by simply taking them on, trying to
think about them and making up one’s
mind in conversation with texts and
with others about what one ought to
believe or what one, or some character,
ought or ought not to do or have done.
The idea is that this would be naive, y-
critical, or unreflective, ignorant of the
collapse of the notion of objective natu-
ral moral order, a hierarchical chain of
being and of natural purposes linked in a
harmonious whole that provides a basis
for such normative judgments. Sin
such a secure natural whole and harmo-
ny, how could there be any objective ba-
hermana, any independent truth makers, para
such a conversation? I’m not saying that
this is a particularly good objection; justo
that it has been extremely influential.
Another suspicion is that ½rst-order
normative claims have been so various
and have changed so often that we have
a better chance of explaining why people
have come to have various views about
what ought to be believed or ought to
be done, rather than we have of assess-
ing the quality of their answers. Pablo
Ricoeur once referred to the nineteenth-
century thinkers who inspired this skep-
ticism–Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud–
as the “Masters of Suspicion.” Such sus-
picion has had the most lasting impact
in the Western academy on the study
of art, literature, and some philosophy,
prompting a kind of shadow scientism,
which traces the meaning of various
representative activities to the psycho-
logical or social conditions of their pro-
ducción.
I would suggest that this skepticism
about the independent or autonomous
status of the normative, the state of be-
ing “fraught with ought,” as the philos-
opher Wilfrid Sellars described it, es
something like a necessary condition for
the ever more popular empirical study
of why people have come to believe what
they generally do, or did, at a particular
tiempo. That’s all one would really think
there is to study or research if there is no
way to resolve ½rst-order questions of
normative truth. Además, many peo-
ple have also come to believe that a de-
fense of any perspective on human ani-
mals other than a strictly naturalist one
will unfairly and dangerously, and for
muchos, immorally privilege the human
animal above all others, thus playing
an ideological role in how we farm, eat,
and experiment on other animal species.
Others believe that such an enterprise
must be ideological, where this is under-
stood to mean either uncritically accept-
ing the views of the modern West, or be-
ing unaware of how contingent, possibly
de lo contrario, such views are.
This is all understandable in a more
general sense, también. A great deal of hu-
manistic study is devoted to objects not
created to be studied: not academic re-
search projects, but Greek plays written
for communal religious festivals, church
música, wall hangings for the rich and
mighty, commercial story writing, Hol-
lywood ½lms, etcétera. It is only very
recently in the long history of the uni-
versity that it came to be considered ap-
propriate to devote university resources
to the study of not merely Greek and
Latin classics, but vernacular art and lit-
erature; to study not just Christian texts
and Christian apologists, but the issue
of secular morality. It is perhaps then un-
Natural &
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Dædalus Summer 2009
37
Robert B.
Pippin
on being
humano
derstandable that while we have some
vague sense that an educated person
should be familiar with some such fa-
mous objects, we have not yet settled
on anything remotely like a common
research program for studying them.
And this sort of uncertainty (accom-
panied often by a vague lack of con½-
dencia) has recently led to these even
more serious quali½cations on any pu-
tative “independence” of such norma-
tive issues, all in favor of more natural-
ist accounts.
If truth claims are at issue–if we
want to know why a particular picture
of human life appeals to us, or not; why
a certain character repels us; why we
cannot make up our mind about anoth-
es; whether a character’s sacri½ce of
his self-interest for a greater good was
rational or foolish; what form of pleas-
ure we take in reading a poem or looking
at a Manet–then, according to an often
unexpressed assumption, why shouldn’t
we assume that some advanced form of
the evolutionary-biological and neuro-
logical sciences, or at least the social sci-
ences, will explain that to us?
I am not trying to dispute that there
are valuable things that can be learned
when some of the social and natural sci-
ences take as their object of study vari-
ous representational and imagination-
directed human activities. It is a strange
thing for people to gather in the dark
and watch other people pretend to be
people they aren’t while doing ghastly
things to each other (sometimes sing-
ing about it all); to care so much about
what happens to little Nell or Hedda
Gabler; to travel thousands of miles
to stand in front of a temple in Kyoto.
And these aesthetic appreciators, aunque
humano, occupy space and time like any
other bit of extended, causally influence-
able matter. The problem I am interested
in is what happens when such explana-
tory considerations are understood to
have replaced or superseded what I have
been calling ½rst-order normative ques-
ciones (what ought to be believed and/or
hecho), all in favor of so-called sideways
on or second-order questions: what ex-
plains why people do this or that, believe
this or that?1
“What problem?” you might ask.
Well, simply that the two sorts of ques-
tions are logically distinct and irreduc-
ibly different. Normative questions,
I mean, are irreducibly “½rst-person-
al” questions, and these questions are
practically unavoidable and necessari-
ly linked to the social practice of giving
and demanding reasons for what we
hacer, especially when something someone
does affects, cambios, or limits what an-
other would otherwise have been able
to do. By irreducibly ½rst-personal, I
mean that whatever may be our “snap
judgments” or immediate deeply intu-
itive reactions, whenever anyone faces a
normative question (which is the stance
from which normative issues are issues),
no third-personal fact–why one as a
matter of fact has come to prefer this
or that, for example–can be relevant
to what I must decide, unless I count it
as a relevant practical reason in the jus-
ti½cation of what I decide ought to be
done or believed.
Knowing something about evolution-
ary psychology might contribute to un-
derstanding the revenge culture in
which Orestes ½nds himself in Aeschy-
lus’s Oresteia, or why he at once feels
compelled to avenge his father’s mur-
der by his mother Clytemnestra and
horri½ed at the prospect of killing her
in cold blood. But none of that can be,
would be, in itself at all helpful to Ores-
tes or anyone in his position. Knowing
something about the evolutionary ben-
e½ts of altruistic behavior might give us
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an interesting perspective on some par-
ticular altruistic act, but for the agent,
½rst-personally, the question I must de-
cide is whether I ought to act altruisti-
cally and, if so, why. I cannot simply
stand by, waiting to see what my highly
and complexly evolved neurobiological
system will do. The system doesn’t make
la decisión, I do–and for reasons that
I ½nd compelling, or that, al menos, afuera-
weigh countervailing considerations.
Por supuesto, there are times when I cannot
provide such reasons; perhaps I am even
surprised that, given what I thought my
commitments and principles were, I act-
ed as I did. Sin embargo, we cannot leave the
matter there, especially when confront-
ed by another’s demand for a reason,
and given that what I did affected what
she would otherwise have been able to
hacer. It is in this sense that the ½rst-per-
sonal perspective is strictly unavoidable:
I am not a passenger on a vessel pulled
hither and yon by impulses and desires;
I have to steer. Or as Kant put it: cada-
thing in nature happens according to
law; human actions happen in accord
with some conception of law.2
Freud’s famous remark about psycho-
análisis, and the third-personal, explan-
atory stance it seems to encourage per-
sons to adopt toward their own motiva-
ciones, provides another ½ne example of
what I’m trying to suggest. His remark,
en efecto, con½rms the unavoidability
of the distinction we have been dis-
cussing, if one is actually to take up the
position of, as we say, leading one’s life:
“wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (“what was
Él [or Id] should become I [or Ego]").
Such an “I,” or ego, must make an eval-
uation of herself and of the attitudes
that she should take up toward herself
y otros. Something is going wrong
–haywire–if these determinations are
the result of the “It,” or id. Psychoanal-
ysis tries to “cure” precisely what goes
wrong when a subject experiences her
own deeds as not hers, as the product
of psychological forces outside her in-
tentional control.
This is all compatible with the pos-
sible discovery of neurological dispo-
sitions toward certain attitudes or ac-
ciones. My point isn’t to dispute that,
but to suggest that no such discovery
can of itself count as a reason to do or
forebear from doing anything; it cannot
eliminate the agent’s perspective when-
ever she has to decide what to believe
or do. It is also compatible with the fact
that people are often self-deceived, o
even grossly ignorant, of why they do
what they do, devising reasons or fables
for their actions only afterward, in what
we have come to call rationalization. Pero
there is simply no translation or bridge
law that will get one, qua agent, de
those facts to a claim like, “Well, ellos
have discovered at mit that people of-
ten act without being able to explain or
justify why, so the hell with it: I’m just
going to steal Sam’s idea and pass it off
as my own.” The claim is that I can no
more answer the question, “Why did
you do that?” with, “No reason; I just
did,” than I can answer the question,
“What caused the ½re to start?” with,
“There was no cause; it just started.”
Social relations make this much clear-
es. None of us, I would venture to bet,
when we offer to a friend what we take
to be compelling moral reasons concern-
ing an action that friend is contemplat-
En g, would be at all happy for our friend
to respond with an explanation of why
such reasons seem to us compelling
based on an account grounded in biolo-
gy and evolution. Such a response is, en
that context, an evasion, not a response,
and we would justly feel “treated like an
object” by such a claim, rather than as a
co-equal subject.
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Dædalus Summer 2009
39
Robert B.
Pippin
on being
humano
The point I am making is a simple
uno: that the autonomy, or possible self-
regla, at issue in these discussions is not a
metaphysical one, but involves the prac-
tical autonomy of the normative. Yet the
point still needs emphasis. Consider the
book published by the Harvard biologist
Marc Hauser called Moral Minds: Cómo
Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of
Right and Wrong. Hauser made his repu-
tation in animal communication, trabajar-
ing with monkeys in Kenya and with
birds, and his book is an almost perfect
example of what often goes wrong with
some of this purportedly “interdiscipli-
nary” work. Hauser proposes that people
are born with a “moral grammar” wired
into their neural circuits by evolution,
and that this grammar generates instant
moral judgments, cual, in part because
of the quick decisions that must be made
in life-or-death situations, are inaccessi-
ble to the conscious mind. Since Hauser
argues that this moral grammar operates
in much the same way as the universal
grammar proposed by the linguist Noam
Chomsky as the innate neural machinery
for language, he has to claim some sort
of common Chomsky-like moral univer-
sals for all suitably evolved human ani-
mals. This he does with breathtaking
sweep, even while conceding some local
variations of emphasis, or local “para-
meters.” Human behavior is said to be so
tightly constrained by this hard wiring
that many rules are in fact the same or
very similar in every society: do as you
would be done by; care for children and
the weak; don’t kill; avoid adultery and
incest; don’t cheat, steal, or lie. Más-
encima, he claims that the now universal
moral grammar probably evolved into
its ½nal shape at a particular stage of the
human past, during the hunter-gather-
er phase in northeast Africa some ½fty
thousand years ago. Here is a typical
summary of his claim:
We are equipped with a grammar of so-
cial norms based on principles for decid-
ing when altruism is permissible, oblig-
atory, or forbidden. What experience
does is ½ll in the particular details from
the local culture, setting parameters, como
opposed to the logical form of the norm
and its general function.
O,
The universal moral grammar is a theory
about the universal suite of principles and
parameters that enable humans to build
moral systems. It is a toolkit for building
a variety of different moral systems as dis-
tinct from one in particular.
Y,
Underlying the extensive cross-cultural
variations we observe in our expressed so-
cial norms is a universal moral grammar
that enables each child to grow a narrow
range of possible moral systems. When we
judge an action as morally right or wrong,
we do so instinctively, tapping a system
of unconsciously operative and inaccessi-
ble moral knowledge. Variations between
cultures in their expressed moral norms
is like variation between cultures in their
spoken languages.3
Hauser is willing to concede that from
the point of view of the agent one often
does not do what one is powerfully in-
clined to do (however quickly comes the
inclination), and that one can often do
what one feels an aversion to. nunca-
menos, he remains wedded to a view of our
possessing a “core” or biological basis
for moral response and motivation, nev-
er conceding that the perspective of an
agent is–indeed cannot but be–that
of a practical reasoner, not an animal re-
sponder. (animales, por supuesto, act for rea-
sons–the feeling of fear providing a rea-
son to flee or ½ght, for example–but not
reasons such as deliberative considera-
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tions that may be acted on or not, de-
pending on the justi½catory force of
the reason.)4 Not to mention that al-
most all great literature, from Sopho-
cles to Shakespeare to Henry James to
John Coetzee, is not just about moral
conflict and tragic dilemmas, but con-
cerns the extreme dif½culty of moral
interpretación, about which more in
a minute. Only the hopelessly jejune
assumptions operative here about what
the moral point of view consists in
could allow Hauser even to begin to
make his simplistic case about moral
universals and evolutionary ½tness.
En efecto, the most obvious interpretive
question that we would have to settle be-
fore Hauser’s ideas could be entertained
concerns what separates morality from
other social proprieties, like etiquette
and prudential reasoning.5 Beyond that
(and Hauser does very little to help us
with this general issue, besides occasion-
ally appealing to the greater emotional
weight that attends moral questions),
the very questions of, Por ejemplo, qué
we are doing, what another is up to, o
how to assess our own motives are far
more complicated than ever admitted
in Hauser’s book.
Take Henry James’s novel Washington
Square. A father, also a widower, forbids
future contact between his shy and not
socially successful daughter and a young
suitor. James leaves the reader to con-
front a number of interpretive possibili-
corbatas. Is he protecting his daughter from
a fortune hunter? Does he have some
important stake in continuing to infan-
tilize his daughter? Is he romantically
jealous of the suitor because his daugh-
ter has become a kind of wife-substi-
tute? Might he be simply reluctant to
give up his companion, afraid of lone-
liness? Is he a tyrant, unable to accept
any challenge to his authority and rule
over his household? He is in fact a ty-
rant, and the situation in the novel is so
complicated because each of these pos-
sibilities is a plausible explanation and
potentially true. (To complicate matters
further, the suitor is a fortune hunter;
but it remains very hard to know just
how that fact is relevant to the father’s
conduct.) It seems very unlikely that
the father’s avowed intention–to pro-
tect his daughter–is true, and it is quite
possible that he has some sense that any
one of the other possibilities might more
correctly describe what he is after. Pero
it would not be correct to say that he
“knows” he is motivated by something
other than his professed commitments,
and that he is hiding that knowledge
from himself. The situation is far too
unstable, complex, and subject to too
many various interpretations for that
to be the de½nitive analysis. We–and
more interestingly the father himself–
will not know what view to settle on
until we, y el, come to learn how
he acts in many other situations. Incluso
entonces, the matter will remain quite dif-
½cult.
What really takes one’s breath away,
aunque, is Hauser’s claim that we are
“hardwired” with moral universals: hacer
as you would be done by; care for chil-
dren and the weak; don’t kill; avoid
adultery and incest; don’t cheat, steal,
or lie. This banal list of modern, cris-
tian humanist values was written by a
Harvard professor in a contemporary
world still plagued by children sold in-
to slavery by parents who take them-
selves to be entitled to do so; by the
acceptability of burning to death child-
less wives; by guilt-free spousal abuse;
by the morally required murder of sis-
ters and daughters who have been raped;
by “morally” sanctioned ethnic cleans-
ing undertaken by those who see them-
selves as entitled to do so–one could go
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Dædalus Summer 2009
41
Robert B.
Pippin
on being
humano
on and on. De nuevo, Hauser concedes
variations and local parameters, pero
he thinks the essential picture of our
moral nature, governed by these moral
universals, has now come into focus.
Hauser deals most directly with the
problem of very wide variations in deep
moral intuitions when he discusses the
evidence that philosopher Jesse Prinz
has brought against Hauser’s claims of
moral universals. It becomes increasing-
ly unclear what Hauser would count as
any sort of empirical discon½rmation of
his basic claim:
Príncipe, Por ejemplo, trots out many exam-
ples of close relatives having sex, of indi-
viduals killing each other with glee, y
of peaceful societies lacking dominance
jerarquías. These are indeed interesting
casos, but they are either irrelevant or in-
suf½ciently explained with respect to the
nativist position. They may be irrelevant
in the same way that it is irrelevant to cite
Mother Theresa and Mahatma Ghandi as
counterexamples to the Hobbesian char-
acterization that we are all brutish, nasty
and short [sic].6
Príncipe, aunque, cited not one or two
individuals, but whole societies existing
over many generations. What else could
possibly count as counterexamples to
Hauser’s theory if such evidence can’t?
At least Chomsky’s theory is open to
possible discon½rmation, as the recent
discussion about the putative absence of
recursion in the Pirahã language studied
in Brazil by Dan Everett makes clear.7
Hauser seems to have arbitrarily insulat-
ed his theory.
And there is no need to appeal only to
contemporary evidence. Well over ½f-
teen hundred years ago, the Greek his-
torian Herodotus reported with amaze-
ment about cultures where it was con-
sidered morally abhorrent to bury or
burn one’s dead relatives rather than
eat them, and the many others where
nothing could be imagined more abhor-
rent than eating one’s dead relatives.
If we are to talk about interdisciplinary
collaboration on, decir, moral universals
in any meaningful way, perhaps the ½rst,
most reasonable suggestion would be
that Hauser spend a quiet Sunday with
Herodotus and Henry James. This is not
what people usually have in mind when
they encourage cooperation between
contemporary science and the humani-
corbatas. As noted at the outset, they usually
mean something like “applying” “the
exciting new discoveries” to that area
of the academy that “does not seem to
ever make any progress.” I want to say
that this attitude reveals a profound
confusion about the humanities from
the outset, and reveals especially a lack
of appreciation for the permanently
unsettled and irreducibly normative
nature of much of the humanities.
ENDNOTES
1 Here I use “explains” to mean a nomological, ultimately causal explanation, as it does in
the natural sciences. In the speci½c example I will discuss later, Marc Hauser’s Moral
Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (Nueva York: Harper
collins, 2006), the author is very clear about the “shift” for which he wants to argue:
“This account [su] shifts the burden of evidence from a philosophy of morality to a sci-
ence of morality”; ibid., 2. The book that undoubtedly has had the greatest influence in
recent years is Richard Dawkins, The Sel½sh Gene (Oxford: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 1976).
See also Frans de Waal, Good-Natured: The Origin of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other
42
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animales (Cambridge, Masa.: Prensa de la Universidad de Harvard, 1996), and his recent Tanner lec-
turas, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton: Universidad de Princeton
Prensa, 2006); and S. R. Quartz and T. j. Sejnowski, mentirosos, amantes, y héroes: What the
New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are (Nueva York: Guillermo Morrow,
2002). Especially revealing about the simplicity with which many such researchers treat
the notion of “morality” is Laurence Tancredi’s Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience
Reveals about Morality (Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 2005).
2 I am not entirely sure of Hauser’s ½nal position on this issue. The extreme ambition of
the book’s title (“Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong”) and many of the things he
says are to some degree undermined by his concession that he means something very re-
stricted by the word “sense.” At some points he opens the door to the concession that
whatever “science” might teach us about our immediate moral reactions to events and
persons, those reactions are quite preliminary and may not contribute very much to an
explanation of our all-things-considered or ½nal moral judgments. Cf., “Taking account
of our intuitions does not mean blind acceptance. It is not only possible but likely that
some of the intuitions we have evolved are no longer applicable to current societal prob-
lems”; Hauser, Moral Minds, xx. This leaves open quite a lot that, in other respects, su
book appears to want to ½ll with an evolutionary and biological account of our moral
lives.
3 Ibídem., 190, 300, 410.
4 Cf. the commentary by Christine Kosgaard, in de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, 98–119,
esp. 112 y 117: “Even if apes are sometimes courteous, responsible, and brave, it is not
because they think they should be.”
5 This is a point made by Richard Rorty in his review of Hauser’s book; “Born to be Good,"
The New York Times, Agosto 27, 2006. Rorty also points to the weakness of Hauser’s analo-
gy with Chomsky’s program in linguistics. He notes that moral codes are not assimilated
with the astonishing rapidity of language acquisition, and that the grammaticality of a sen-
tence is rarely a matter of doubt or controversy, “whereas moral dilemmas pull us in op-
posite directions and leave us uncertain.”
6 I use “sic” here because I don’t think Hobbes’s point was that most of us are little people.
We are not brutish, nasty, and short, life is.
7 John Colapinto, “The Interpreter,” The New Yorker, Abril 16, 2007.
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