5.6 Origins of Normative Governance

     There is another crucial area of Galilean theory that clashes dramatically with Gibbard's account of the origins and nature of human normativity. It has to do with pre-linguistic normativity in our ancestors (and in our cousin species), exacerbated by some definitional sleight-of-hand Gibbard employs with respect to normative governance.

     Let's review three important notions Gibbard discusses for his theory of how norms work for humans: (i) internalizing norms, whereby a pattern of emotions tends toward action prescribed by the norms (71); (ii) normative governance, the influence that our evolved tendency to discuss normative matters and seek consensus has on our thoughts, feelings, and actions concerning the norms of our culture (72); and (iii) accepting norms, a behavioral syndrome whereby one tends not only to be governed by them, but to avow them (75).

     We should begin by noting that, according to Gibbard's definition above, 'normative governance' means something more limited and specific than governing by norms or governing normatively. Gibbard wants to distinguish acceptance of norms, which makes use of normative discussion, from mere internalization of norms, which includes what he calls 'being in the grip of a norm': tending to follow a norm unreflectively, or perhaps even despite belief that the norm is irrational. This is an important distinction to make, but not by denying that norms govern us by other than linguistic means.

     As a result of his view, Gibbard tends to neglect the governance of norms that have us in their grip. Since I suspect this accounts for most of the normative influence humans experience, I would prefer (I trust not unreasonably) to apply the term 'normative governance' to the influence of both internalized and accepted norms, rather than only the latter.

     The main benefit Gibbard offers us is evolutionary insight into the origin and function of normative discussion -- the influence language has had on our normative practices. If humans had departed radically from pre-human approaches to normativity that we see in other mammals, to the extent that human normative judgments were primarily the result of rational discussion, Gibbard's gift to us might be all we need to understand human normativity.

     Sadly, this is not the case. Although language has provided us with the logical tools to justify norms to others, it appears⁸ that few of the moral norms of modern human societies owe their widespread acceptance to logical argument. Instead, they are widely accepted because language allows us to better express our deeply ingrained moral sensibilities, making insistence on conformity to moral norms more effective. Functionally, this differs little from nonverbal expressions of moral sensibilities by our non-human kin (which we will discuss presently).

     In other words, the primary influence language has had on human (moral) normativity is to improve the transmission of internalized norms.

     Let us then extend Gibbard's investigation to include the evolutionary origins of internalized norms, beginning with some fundamental social impulses.

     Social harmony and cooperation have been strategies long in use among social mammals. The default Galilean assumption, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, is that we inherited these strategies from the ancestors we have in common with lions, wolves, African dogs, baboons, lemurs, ground squirrels, and naked mole rats (all of which demonstrate strong tendencies toward social cohesiveness and cooperation). Though it is possible that we humans came by our social traits independently, that explanation is unparsimonious. Most likely, as we'll see, the same general brain circuitry (with modifications of detail, but not of fundamental function) implicated in the social proclivities of our mammalian cousins also does the job for us.

     The venerable history of cooperative and peaceful tendencies undermines the potential (and tempting) claim that they are the result of cultural rather than biological evolution. While culture has no doubt played a very large part in determining how we go about getting along with each other, the motivation to do so appears to be ancient indeed.⁹ How might the evolved architecture of our brain account for this?

     The prevailing theory of large-scale neuroanatomy introduced by Paul D. MacLean¹⁰ (based on work by James W. Papez, and then further developed by Arthur Koestler) holds that the limbic system, or "paleomammalian cortex", drives our social and emotional behaviors. It is the second of three nested, functionally and physiologically distinct brain systems to have evolved in mammals and their ancestors, the first being the brain stem (what MacLean calls the "reptilian brain"), and the most recent being the neocortex ("neomammalian cortex").

     Steven Pinker (1997, pp. 370-372) calls MacLean's Triune Brain theory "mistaken" -- not because of the functional divisions it entails (which I suspect occasioned the writing of Pinker's admirable book), but because of claims (perhaps made by MacLean, perhaps by others, or perhaps not made at all yet inferred by opponents -- I can't say which) that the older functional regions persist unaltered underneath the newer ones, and function quite independently of one another. Such claims are indeed patently false, but the most charitable interpretation of MacLean (and the one I immediately took) does not involve them; instead, what is argued for is the functional division alone. Our limbic system has been specialized to produce emotions suitable for human life on the savannah -- not for, say, the social life of a bat. But it would be odd indeed to find the limbic system doing long division or planning a sequence of actions; it simply isn't designed to do such work.

     Similarly, it would be odd to find the right hemisphere usurping the functions of the left hemisphere or the limbic system -- say, doing computations or parsing a sentence, or caring about or endorsing some thing or concept. This is especially compelling with respect to functional differences between the right hemisphere and the limbic system. After all, the neurochemistry and cellular organization of these two regions are quite different from one another -- hardly reason to argue that they do the same sort of job. I suspect that Gibbard nonetheless believes the right hemisphere cares, endorses, and does other such evaluative work that he refuses to credit to the limbic system -- since he explicitly casts the right hemisphere in the role of producing peculiarly human emotions (136).

     Indeed, this is the theoretical core of norm-expressivism. The content of our concepts seems inseparable from our evaluation of them, so it isn't bizarre to imagine that they are deliverances of a single mechanism by a single process. The monolithic view of judgment I warned of early on follows quite naturally from the way we experience our judgments. It happens, though, that such an interpretation isn't well supported by neuropsychology. Much more likely is the division of labor by which the right hemisphere is specialized to process conceptual content, while the limbic system applies its well established specialty of producing evaluations with emotional flavors to evaluating those cognitive states -- just as it always has evaluated perceptual states in, say, the sensory association cortex of the parietal lobe.

     Ross Buck (1984, p. 58), whose earlier work seems particularly influential for Gibbard (134-136, 145 note 15) writes of this key functional division: "However, recent evidence from a variety of sources suggests that it is useful to regard emotion and cognition as based upon separate systems (cf. Tucker, 1981; Zajonc, 1980), and of the two it is emotion which is the more 'basic.'" Interestingly, he also illustrates what I'm calling 'the monolithic view of judgment', citing the case of Charles Whitman, who killed his wife and his mother, then famously shot 38 people from a tower at the University of Texas. He had a tumor near the amygdala. Before his spree, he wrote (Buck 1984, p. 56), "It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight after I pick her up from work. ... I love her dearly, and she has been a fine wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationally pinpoint any specific reason for doing this...." Whitman, though suspicious of his own rationality, nonetheless accepted the fateful decision as a decision, and as his own.

     I know of no one in neuropsychology or related fields who fails to acknowledge that the limbic system is specialized to produce emotions and guide species-typical (especially social) behaviors; that the reptilian brain is specialized to govern matters of personal survival and reproduction on a non-cognitive level; that the right hemisphere of the neocortex is specialized for what I have been calling 'intuitive' operations -- pattern recognition, Gestalt conceptualizations, and perhaps heuristic judgments and schemata (though it's possible the left hemisphere may be involved in these last two); and that the left hemisphere is now substantially specialized for the use of language and methodical reasoning processes.

     While these systems constantly interact (without producing paralyzing conflicts in healthy animals), MacLean cites much evidence that they are often competing with each other rather than functioning smoothly together. Gibbard notes an aspect of this disharmony when he talks of "motivational systems in conflict" (56): our modern human normative control system vs. an ancient animal control system. His example of a failure of will¹¹ serves to underscore the tentative connection between norms that are fully understood and the motivation to follow them. Often we simply don't do the things we know we should. Similarly, his example of being "in the grip" of a norm (following the norm even while believing it to be inappropriate), and lacking the motivation to act against it, shows that the force of norms is not merely a matter of understanding.

     Clinical studies in psychology underscore this last point. In cases where the orbitofrontal cortex (the region connecting the neocortex to the limbic system) has been damaged, subjects can demonstrate understanding of norms and accept the rationale behind them, and yet feel no motivation to comport with those norms.¹² The implication is that the neocortex may decide what should be done, but requires the help of motivation from the limbic system if one is to follow through on the judgment.

     The import of conflicting control systems for metaethics is that, in any given situation, we need to know how to determine which system is "right". That requires understanding what those systems were "designed" to accomplish, and whether present and future needs will be served by them. That understanding will involve a speculative history of the evolution and function of these systems -- substantially, I trust, like what follows.

     The ancient systems evolved to evoke behaviors that were effective in promoting the success of oneself and one's close kin -- behaviors that were powerless to affect more than several generations of one's conspecifics within limited geographical confines. Conflicts between the reptilian brain and the paleomammalian cortex were, broadly speaking, conflicts between narrow personal interests (survival and reproduction) and wider kinship interests (the survival and reproduction of relatives).

     The neocortex can play three general roles in this scheme: (i) it can take sides in reptilian/paleomammalian conflicts; (ii) it can support one or another of competing motivations within either the reptilian or paleomammalian systems (e.g., flee or fight; challenge or submit); and (iii) it can compete to promote goals of its own over conflicting reptilian or paleomammalian goals.

     The goals peculiar to the neocortex are cognitive ones, concepts that we find attractive or important for one reason or another. Finding something attractive, I claim, is the (evaluative) job of the limbic system -- so there's good reason to think that an anthropocentric interpretation that "higher" brain functions naturally control "lower" ones is more than suspect. Most likely, the phylogenetically older systems develop a "trust" for the deliverances of the neocortex that have, over time, proven fruitful. "Trust" is itself perhaps an anthropocentric term, but I intend it only to convey the quality of acceptance conferred by the ancient brain structures.

     Once some aspect of neocortical function gains that trust, it can then exert a measure of control over its elders. The older systems will first come to trust intuitive/heuristic deliverances involving the right hemisphere during youth (for they develop then, and are quite useful without being logically reliable), and may come to trust even more the methodical and logical (and more difficult) reasoning processes of the left hemisphere if they have become adept at dealing with problems in ways that are "apparent" to those older systems. The older systems may even allow their own biases to be overruled by the goals of the neocortex if sufficient trust has been established. For any individual, the idiosyncratic placement of "trust" in all these cases results for an individual in what David Keirsey (1984) calls 'temperament', determined by such things as a preference for dealing with the abstract or the concrete, or for either the feeling or the thinking aspects of brain function. We'll pursue this a bit further in the next subsection.

     I'm not alone in attributing a more fundamental role to the ancient systems than to the neocortex. Jaak Panskepp (1996, p. 36) writes,

I would suggest that it is among the lower brain processes, the subcortical affective and motivational circuits, rather than higher cognitive areas, where we must presently seek the general foundation principles that psychology so desperately needs. ... This is not to deny that cognitive processes are more evident in the moment-to-moment occurrences of human lives, but to suggest that hidden affective processes are often the final arbiters of what is important to think about and to act on.

     Some of the neocortical goals we are particularly interested in are the epistemic foundations of our Galilean pursuits. For ethics, on another hand, the most important of these goals recognize personal interests in less parochial domains than the reptilian self or the mammalian tribe -- a personal interest in people who are remote from us in kinship, in both space and time and, ultimately, a personal interest in all life. Such broader concerns are due to a developing cognitive appreciation of value in other lives (and, given sufficient facility with abstractions, in the age-old process of Life). This comports with (and can explain) the prevailing view among philosophers that moral concerns transcend narrow personal interest.

     We might suspect, then, that the "linguistically infused motivational control system" Gibbard discusses (57) could involve norms related to all three of the available roles just mentioned. We might have norms that put concerns for family and kin ahead of concerns for the individual, norms to select from among competing options that might serve our personal survival or our kinship group's success, and norms that transcend the priorities of self and kin, promoting abstract goals or principles (such as the preservation of life in general, potentially at the expense of personal and familial survival -- or values such as honesty, objectivity, or autonomy).

     Furthermore, it stands to reason that the neocortex evolved precisely because it could serve the first two roles, long before the conceptual sophistication arrived that would allow it to develop goals of its own. After all, conflicts between motivations within either the reptilian brain or the limbic system would bring serious risks. A reliable mechanism for settling such conflicts would be a tremendous benefit to an organism. Similarly, conflicts between the reptilian brain and the limbic system introduce other risks, and a reliable mechanism for settling those conflicts would be likewise beneficial. But there is a large gap between these concerns and the development of a relatively independent faculty for making judgments on principle (where I think the future of human morality must lie) rather than choices among extant motivations. We may wonder, therefore, whether we are likely to be very adept at developing the third role in the face of all the clamoring from the evolutionary depths of the psyche.

     Yet it's clear that we do pursue the third role, sometimes despite fierce internal opposition. Take the situation of a kidnapped child, for example. Modern wisdom warns us never to pay kidnappers, for doing so only invites more kidnappings; but every fiber (rhetorically speaking) of the limbic system is screaming to get the child back at any cost. How can such a cool, abstract norm prevail in such cases?

     When the neocortex plays its self-directed third role in such cases, it is clearly accepting norms in Gibbard's terms. But many (if not most) of the moral norms we accept -- against killing, or cheating, or incest, say -- help our primate cousins to prioritize primitive personal and social wants and needs at a different level. Indeed, there's little doubt that they would avow such norms verbally if they had the capacity; they certainly appear to express nonverbally their commitment to them.

     We might expect that, for humans, normative discussion will naturally introduce more abstract concerns, promoting the neocortex from referee to legislator. But I've found no Galilean reason to believe that in practice we normally do much more than give voice to modern variations of the same primitive norms that the ancestors we share with other apes internalized, say, 8 or 10 million years ago. Even the norms of our human cultural veneer (such as those by which we decree whether presenting a gift with one's left hand is a generous gesture or a mortal insult, or whether working every day of the week is industrious or disrespectful) generally fulfill the same fundamental social functions (in these examples, demanding respect) and operate at the same level as do more primitive norms: by the automatic adoption of the emotional evaluations and expressions displayed by one's role models. We can and do accept such norms -- being governed by them and avowing them -- without ever understanding or justifying them. That sort of acceptance may be unworthy of mature human beings, and is certainly unworthy of philosophers.

     Gibbard discounts the possibility that what he calls our "linguistically infused motivational system" is simply an older motivational system with new linguistic "inputs" (136), saying that if the right hemisphere is capable of generating peculiarly human emotions, "then human emotionality may consist of more than mere variations on animal emotion with language tacked on." He then proceeds as though the antecedent were true -- thereby missing his opportunity for better insight into motivation and norms. It is in this regard that his account is seriously incomplete; I'll return to this issue in a moment.

     Gibbard's account is also apparently based on mistaken notions surrounding the genesis of human normativity. It is clear that the class of motivations he is interested in are those controlling voluntary normative behavior -- and that he believes non-human animals do not function in this realm. But Gibbard underestimates the normative complexity of "beasts" (non-humans, in anthropocentric terms). While they "'follow rules' for social interaction," he says, they "have not, of course, decided to conduct themselves by these rules, and they do not criticize each other for deviation" (69).

     On the contrary, the literature of ethology is rife with examples -- particularly among baboons and chimpanzees -- of deliberate (often surreptitious) departures from group norms (regarding such things as food sharing, proper treatment of youngsters, male restraint in conflicts with females, political loyalties, displays of outrage at transgressors, and rewards for compliance).¹³

     There are some other hints that Gibbard's evolutionary account of normativity is insufficiently grounded. First, we have his frank admission that other animals apparently internalize norms (70) -- that is, they follow social rules (expressible by norms) even though they are unaware they are doing so. This warns us to watch for some force running deeper than does human normative discussion when trying to explain our normative behavior.

     Next, there appears to be a sort of tautology in Gibbard's emphasis on the benefits of coordination that are furthered by normative discussion and governance. His examples involve norms of coordination -- a subset of social norms that we would expect to produce benefits of coordination. What of other social norms -- say, perfectionistic norms regarding the development of positive personal traits? "Don't be cruel to animals." "Be industrious." "Look before you leap." Though one can doubtless find spin-off benefits to others that might result from an individual following such personal norms, their immediate force is clearly directed toward attaining benefits for the individual -- or, in the first example, benefits to non-humans along with the benefits of social approval for the individual -- as opposed to benefits for the group (including benefits of coordination). Pursuit of positive feelings of self-esteem constitutes a powerful internal motivation to comport with such perfectionistic norms -- a motivation more sophisticated than external pressure such as threat of punishment, and one that I think includes the existential commitment Gibbard writes about.

     This warns us to watch for ways in which personal norms -- say, "Be the sort of person who is considerate" -- subsume norms of coordination ("Be considerate"), in such a way that the primary motivation for being considerate is to comport with one's self-image as a considerate (and therefore good) person. In other words, it is possible that the benefits of coordination are not the primary evolutionary benefits leading to normative governance. Older, better established goals such as attracting mates (in virtue of one's stellar personal qualities) might explain the development by our pre-human ancestors of the tendency to be governed by norms for personal comportment.

     While coordination, as Gibbard contends, may somehow have been the most adaptive overall effect of pursuing personal norms such as "Be the sort of person who is considerate," it seems clear that normative governance (involving vocal and physical expressions of approval and disapproval) was well established beforehand among the ancestors we share in common with some of our primate cousins. The benefits of coordination that Gibbard extols should perhaps not be credited with shaping the genesis of normative governance.

     These doubts are at least cautionary. My purpose here is certainly not to discredit coordination as an adaptive force, but to establish earlier origins for normative governance than Gibbard acknowledges. This isn't merely a squabble over chronology, but a dispute over the central role Gibbard claims for language as our normative propensities evolved. We need to consider whether Gibbard's linguistically infused normative control system is anything more than an ancient normative control system with some new linguistic inputs. If (as I suspect and he denies) it is not, we must ask whether the language now infused into that system generates norms that are adequate for the lives we lead today -- and if so, how.

     My answer to this question is, "Yes, but not in the norm-expressive way Gibbard promotes." I will need to explain elsewhere how metaethical functionalism provides a better answer. At present, I should press my functional account deeper to consider the development of normativity's key components, motivation and judgment.