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Leges sine moribus vanae: does language make moral thinking possible?

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Abstract

Does language make moral cognition possible? Some authors like Andy Clark have argued for a positive answer whereby language and the ways people use it mark a fundamental divide between humans and all other animals with respect to moral thinking (Clark, Mind and morals: essays on cognitive science and ethics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996; Moral Epistemol Nat Can J Philos Suppl XXVI, 2000a; Moral Epistemol Nat Can J Philos Suppl XXVI, 2000b; Philosophy of mental representation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 37–43 and discussion, 44–61, 2002). I take issue with Clark’s view and argue that language is probably unnecessary for the emergence of moral cognition. I acknowledge, however, that humans unlike other animals seem to posses what Haugeland in Philosophy of mental representation. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2002) terms ‘norm-hungriness’: an idiosyncratic need or desire to create and abide by a multitude of norms. Our peculiar norm-hungriness, I suggest, depends on what can be called florid control rather than on language.

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Notes

  1. The fact that some non-human animals engage in altruistic behaviour does not clash with my suggestion that non-human animals cannot be motivated to engage in biologically-arbitrary behaviour. In fact, unlike biologically-arbitrary behaviour as characterised above, altruistic behaviour is defined as behaviour that has both costly fitness consequences to the actors and beneficial fitness consequences to others.

  2. Churchland (2011, p. 26) writes: ‘Of course only humans have human morality. But that is not news, simply a tedious tautology. One might as well note that only marmoset have marmoset morality, and so on down the line. We can agree that ants are not moral in the way humans are, and that baboon and bonobo social behavior is much closer to our own.’

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Acknowledgments

I am sincerely grateful to Andy Clark, Liz Irvine, Julian Kiverstein, Mike Wheeler, Chiara Lisciandra and Jan Sprenger for their generous feedback on previous versions of this paper. A special thank you to an anonymous referee for this journal and to the editor, Kim Sterelny, for their constructive comments and helpful suggestions. This work was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as part of the priority program “New Frameworks of Rationality” (SPP 1516). The usual disclaimers about any error or mistake in the paper apply.

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  1. Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, 5000 LE, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Matteo Colombo

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From Horace, Odes, III, 24. Transl.: “Laws without morals [are] empty.”

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Colombo, M. Leges sine moribus vanae: does language make moral thinking possible?. Biol Philos 28, 501–521 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-012-9346-y

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