Kadish Workshop in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory: Michael Tomasello

Michael Tomasello is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, and emeritus director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. His research interests focus on processes of cooperation, communication, and cultural learning in human children and great apes. 

Paper Title and Abstract:

How to Build a Normative Creature

Human individuals often make judgments about what they or others ought to believe or do in a situation. In this paper we pursue the hypothesis that the supra-individual force and generality of normative thinking and attitudes – both sociomoral and epistemic – is a natural consequence of their source in humans’ species-unique skills and motivations of shared intentionality. Specifically, human normative thinking and attitudes represent psychological adaptations for aligning, coordinating, and negotiating one’s actions, thoughts, and attitudes with others within shared agencies, both joint agencies with cooperative partners and collective agencies with social groups. We support our hypothesis with experimental studies comparing human children to their nearest great ape relatives, resulting in a kind of recipe for constructing a creature that evaluates and justifies both actions and beliefs with respect to various kinds of normative ideals.

About the Workshop:

A workshop for presenting and discussing work in progress in moral, political, and legal theory. The central aim is to provide an opportunity for students to engage with philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars working on normative questions. Another aim is to bring together people from different disciplines who have strong normative interests or who speak to issues of potential interest to philosophers and political theorists.

The theme for the Spring 2024 workshop is “Intelligence: Human, Animal, Artificial,” and we will host scholars working in Philosophy, Biology, Psychology, Law, and Engineering. Our underlying concern will be the normative implications of different ideas of what intelligence is and can do.

This semester the workshop is co-taught by Christopher Kutz and Josh Cohen.