As many before me, let me begin by thanking the commentators for their thoughtful comments and by apologizing to them for not being capable of responding equally as thoughtfully to all 32 commentaries in one coherent piece in return. I group my responses, insufficient though they be, around four main topic areas. The first three topics revolve around the three diachronic time frames involved: evolution/phylogeny, development/ontogeny, and cultural evolution. I deal with these each in turn, although in a different order. I then address, fourthly, some philosophical issues raised by commentators who have their doubts that a fully naturalistic explanation of obligation (or any other type of normativity) is possible at all.
R1. Variation within and between cultures
A number of commentators pointed out the myriad complexities of the human sense of obligation in its mature form as it operates in a modern culture, and this is indeed a dimension of things that I mostly neglected in my target article. I suggest that there are two aspects to the issue: (1) the participation of individuals in a collective commitment to the cultural group, and (2) the participation of individuals in various roles to which the culture assigns various normative obligations. I focused mostly on the first, whereas the commentators have noted my neglect of the second.
Maranges, Baumeister, & Vohs (Maranges et al.) emphasize that individuals become members of cultures by sharing in its particular doxa, its shared and implicit presuppositions and collective understandings about the way things are. Kish Bar-On stresses that individual members of cultures share commitments and obligations not just to one another but to the culture's shared ideals, values, and moral principles. Dunning stresses the glue that is provided among group members, even in-group strangers, by a sense of mutual trust. And this was my central theoretical point at the second step of my story: At some point in human evolution and human ontogeny, individuals begin to feel a part of, even to identify with, a social structure larger than themselves, and without this feeling of solidarity/trust and shared identity there would be no feeling of obligation. As I asked rhetorically: would we feel a sense of obligation to invading Martians?
Nevertheless, many commentators pointed out that things are much more complicated than this. Clark, Earp, & Crockett (Clark et al.) point out that, within a modern human culture, individuals feel solidarity with and identify with other individuals and groups based on many different types of social relations. Thus, in communal relations of interdependence we feel obligations to all who contribute in all aspects of life, whereas in exchange relations the obligations to a buyer or seller, for example, are quite contained and transitory. Their commentary is a beautiful elaboration of the different forms that obligation can take in complex societies in which we relate to one another in many complex ways. Franks & Stewart echo this theme but emphasize that modern humans participate in many different types of groups – for example, religious, political, and ideological – and these often have conflicting obligations with which individuals must deal. They suggest that this complexity may have been there from the beginning, contributing to the evolution of the human sense of obligation, especially as different hunter-gatherer groups interacted with one another across space and time. Anderson, Ruisch, & Pizarro (Anderson et al.) emphasize that complexity also ensues from the distinctions that humans make between prescriptive (what one should do) and proscriptive (what one should not do) obligations, as they arise in the variegated social relationships and groupings characteristic of a modern culture. Sinnott-Armstrong points out that many of our obligations are to people with whom we actually have competitive relationships and/or asymmetrical power relationships: for example, employer and employee. He proposes paying attention to “norms of partiality” in which the stronger partner uses her strength to forge a favorable social norm with a weaker partner who has little choice. But, following Gilbert, I would argue that the parties creating a social norm still have some obligation to uphold it, even if other considerations (e.g., the more powerful partner's selfish behavior) lead one of them, in the end, to break it. If I promise you to do something, and later find out that it would blow up the world, I should not do it; but I still need to show respect by informing you that I am breaking my promise.
Killen & Dahl argue that the focus on cultural conformity not only misses interesting and important group diversity, but actually misrepresents human morality and its accompanying sense of obligation. Their point is that human morality is decidedly not about group conformity, but rather about the individual living in accordance with her own ideals even if those conflict with those of the group. And even when an individual does accept some cultural norm as legitimate, it is she who judges whether it is or is not legitimate from her perspective. Hirsh, Shteynberg, & Gelfand (Hirsh et al.) echo some of these same concerns, pointing out that individuals in modern cultural groups have many conflicting demands from their many different roles and participation in different types of groups (as argued above), and that the essence of morality is resolving these conflicts. Shaw & Choshen-Hillel also emphasize the many conflicts of obligation inherent in life within a cultural group, for example, to avoid harm to individuals but to be fair to everyone. They opine that “obligations are important, but this is just a starting point for understanding the rich tapestry of interlacing obligations that human beings must traverse.”
This general point is one with which I agree wholeheartedly (even if I did not emphasize it in the target article). In a previous publication (Tomasello Reference Tomasello2016a, p. 115), I argued that the process by which individuals construct their moral identities within a culture is precisely by attempting to resolve conflicting demands: “Moral beings can never escape the feeling of obligation to make principled decisions when the norms of their group do not apply in a straightforward manner or, more problematically, when they conflict with one another. Individuals must always in some sense freely assent to and identify with the moral decisions that they make.” The key is that the individual constructs a moral identity and thereby takes responsibility for her decisions in adjudicating among multiple obligations. Olbrich in fact believes that we can dispense altogether with Darwall's notion of external demands coming from a partner or compatriot as an essential part of obligation. He believes that such demands are not of the essence of the matter, but are merely “a second-order compliance mechanism.” The essence of the matter is that the individual identifies directly with the joint commitment she has made. This focus on the positive side of obligation is also emphasized by Beeler-Duden, Yucel, & Vaish (Beeler-Duden et al.), who point out that we have emotional support, such as the emotion of gratitude, for fulfilling our obligations because we want to (not just because we have to). This is an extremely interesting point about which I have speculated in the past but which is not represented in the target article: People operate from aspirational motives to live up to some very high standards (typically somehow “higher” than is normative in the group, e.g., because of some religious aspirations), as well as feeling an obligation to conform to the standards even if they do not want to at some personal level. The relation between obligational and aspirational relations to cultural norms and standards is an extremely interesting question for future research.
In addition to the fact that individuals must somehow navigate a social terrain full of various and possibly conflicting obligations, both Bender and Buchtel emphasize that, in different cultural groups, obligations can take much more varied forms than we Western scientists ever consider. Bender documents examples from non-Western cultures of social structures that generate obligations of the type we do not normally consider in Western discussions. Buchtel notes, in particular, that in some East Asian cultures – echoing the point of the previous paragraph – it is quite common for individuals to take a more aspirational attitude to their obligations, and feel joy in fulfilling them. In my target article, I had a brief section on the lack of cross-cultural research, and these commentaries serve to emphasize that lacuna even more strongly.
R2. Phylogenetic origins of obligation
Kaufmann claims that chimpanzees’ group hunting of monkeys is fully collaborative in a human-like sense. As evidence, she cites Boesch's description of the process in terms of a shared goal with individual roles (like the players on a soccer team). But one can describe the plants, streams, soil, and microorganisms of an ecosystem as playing roles in that ecosystem as well; that does not mean, however, that they understand themselves to be playing such roles. The question is how the chimpanzees understand what they are doing. Other researchers who have observed chimpanzees hunting monkeys do not describe it using shared goals and individual roles, and I myself have done much experimental research trying to pin down pieces of the process. Clearly, what chimpanzees are doing is collaborative in a general sense, and clearly it was the evolutionary precursor of humans’ more complex forms of collaboration. But it is missing key elements both in terms of coordination of the activity via joint goals and social/communicative coordination, and in terms of dividing the spoils via notions of fairness (Tomasello et al. Reference Tomasello, Melis, Tennie, Wyman and Herrmann2012). Kaufmann goes on to compare the chimpanzee version favorably to modern-day hunter-gatherers. But when human hunter-gatherers are hunting, they do such things for their partners as give them weapons, clear trails for them, share information with them, carry their child for them, repair their weapon for them, instruct them in best techniques, and so forth (Hill Reference Hill2002). There are no reports of chimpanzees helping one another in their group hunting in any way. This tells you that the cooperative structure of the human version is somehow different.
Reddy & Wellman believe that the ur-context for the evolution of a sense of obligation is the mother-child relationship. They point out that when a child screams, it is in effect “coercive” because the mother would much rather stay doing what she is doing; she is obliged to react. But such maternal behavior is widespread in virtually all mammals, and so the question arises why the full-fledged sense of obligation arose only in the primate lineage leading to humans. Humans’ closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, engage in group hunting of various small mammals (see above), and the proposal here is that this is the special context that took humans beyond general mammalian maternal relationships. In Reddy & Wellman’s formulation, “proto-obligatory motivations and expectations may begin with, ‘X helps me because X is my mother/I must help X because X is my offspring.’ As individuals in group-living species grow up, this understanding may develop into ‘because X is my friend’ and ‘because X is Y's daughter.’” Perhaps. But I simply do not see how this general reciprocity relation contains the seeds of an individual who sees that others have legitimate claims on her by virtue of their mutual interdependence.
And this is in many ways the same problem I have with the analysis of Rotella, Sparks, & Barclay (Rotella et al.). They basically propose an account of the origins of a sense of obligation in terms of reciprocity. I have argued at length (in Ch. 2 of Tomasello Reference Tomasello2016a) that reciprocity cannot be the psychological basis of human morality, normativity, and obligation. Their argument is “the feeling of obligation arises anytime that failure to complete the obligated action would result in negative social consequences” (p. 42). But I would claim that the feeling of obligation can arise only if those negative social consequences are of a particular type. Yes, concern for reputation would be an important step along the way, and, as noted in the article, humans have a concern for having a cooperative reputation that other great apes do not seem to have. This is a key starting point. But to get to obligation, I do not believe that concern with what “they” think of me is sufficient because it does not confer the legitimacy needed for a sense of obligation: I agree with them that I should do X, so it is the evaluation of “we” that concerns me. The standards that we have agreed to are what concern me. In Rotella et al.'s analysis, is hard to see why I should feel the need to apologize or make an excuse to someone when I do not fulfill my obligation, or else to feel guilty on my own. This is the special force of obligation beyond “negative social consequences.”
R3. Ontogenetic origins of obligation
Some commentators with a background in developmental psychology had different proposals for the cradle of children's sense of obligation. The two main ones were (1) parent-child interactions and (2) the understanding of groups from a third-party perspective (rather than from participation). These will each be treated in turn, followed by treatment of a few other proposals from a developmental perspective.
R3.1. Parent-child relations as basic
Thompson criticizes the view that children's earliest sense of obligation emerges from their more-or-less egalitarian interactions with peers and, in some contexts, with adults. Rather, he believes that the key is infants’ earliest interactions with their caregivers, as affectively laden relationships cemented by obligations. Thompson argues that “early experiences of cooperation and shared social agency between parents and infants … provide a foundation for developing understanding of the mutual obligations of close relationships,” which can then be extended later to others. Carpendale & Lewis have a similar view, elaborated in more detail as follows: “Moral obligation is not the result of realizing that others are equals and therefore should be treated with respect. Instead it is a natural outcome of mutual affection and understanding. This caring and concern for others is what later develops into a sense of obligation, first to those close and, later, extended to others.” Although this is clearly a reasonable view, and has the virtue of beginning with children's first important social relations, in the end I do not believe it can get us to obligation.
The main issue is that the sense of obligation is mainly self-regulatory. It is “another voice” alongside of humans’ most basic and natural tendencies for social action and interaction. In my opinion, children's earliest social relations with mothers and other caregivers are forming the foundation for their primary skills and motivations for interacting with others in all kinds of ways, both cooperative and otherwise. The sense of obligation arises from an executive level of consideration that evaluates the social options and puts its finger on the scale for certain ones of them (particularly in contexts of joint agency in which “we” are evaluating “me”). But this is potentially an empirical question. Marshall reports a study (Marshall et al. Reference Marshall, Mermin-Bunnell, Gollwitzer, Shinomiya, Retelsdorf and Bloomin preparation) in which 5-year-old and older children expressed the belief that parents have obligations to their children (they have to do things for their children that others do not). But as Marshall herself notes, these are older children, and they would already have a group-minded understanding of the role-obligations inherent in various social relations in their culture, including parent–child relations. My view would be that infants and young children understand parent–child social relations in terms of basic emotional and social processes of mutual affection and reciprocity, but without a sense of obligation. Many mammalian mothers care for their infants and young children as assiduously as do human caregivers, but neither they nor their offspring come to an understanding of obligation (as far as we know). So my prediction would be that if Marshall's study were done with 2- to 3-year-old children, they would not think that parents have special obligations to their children, above and beyond their natural social affections.
R.3.2. The understanding of groups as basic
Recent studies have found that, in looking at time studies, human infants have certain expectations about how members of a group (even if they are represented by shapes on a screen) behave. Children 3 years of age and older have intuitive theories about social groups independent of their own participation in them, and they can even speak coherently about the normative relations of members: things they should or must do for one another. Several commentators, therefore, expressed the view that perhaps children's early expectations and intuitive theories about social groups – in contrast to their direct participation in collaborative social interactions – might be the developmental cradle of children's early understanding of how individuals, including themselves, are obligated to one another.
Rhodes characterizes my view involving children's direct participation in social interactions as “inside-out.” That is, they first feel a sense of obligation to their collaborative partners, and then generalize outside that to their and other social groups more broadly. She contrasts this with her own “outside-in” view that children's understanding of obligations develops from their understanding of social groups independent of their own participation in them. Chalik expresses a similar view, focusing on children's intuitive theories of social groups. Both commentators note that it is possible that both children's direct collaborative interactions and their intuitive understanding of social groups contribute to the process, although, if true, the relation of these two processes remains totally unexplored. The possibility that these two sources develop in parallel is an interesting and plausible one, but for the moment I remain skeptical that the infant version is truly group-minded. More likely, in my view, the kinds of “outside-in” judgments about the obligations that group members have to one another that 3-year-old children make are not continuous with infants’ non-normative expectations about the behavior of similarly shaped dots on a screen. Instead, my proposal would be that 3-year-olds’ judgments reflect a maturationally structured understanding that first emerges at around that age: a kind of group-mindedness that encompasses both themselves in their own groups as well as others. This is clearly an extremely interesting and provocative question for future research.
In a somewhat similar vein, Liberman & Du Bois criticize my account for its almost exclusive focus on the developmental period comprising several years on either side of the third birthday. They cite a good bit of the infant literature on children's expectations and preferences toward experimental stimuli based on their apparent group status. But, again, the continuity of these nonnormative expectations and preferences with children's later sense of moral obligation is at this point unexamined. They go on to point out, in agreement with some of the culture theorists discussed above, that working out obligations in social interactions with others is a lifelong process that involves understanding not only other individuals but also the social norms of the group (at whatever level of analysis). Bartsch provides some very interesting developmental analyses of young children in conversation with adults and other children focused on moral issues and obligation. It is undoubtedly in such discourse interactions that young children begin the process of understanding how to interact with others cooperatively in more complex ways across the lifespan.
R.3.3. Other views
In contrast to accounts focused on children's intuitive theories of social groups, Corbit & Moore focus, as I do, on interactions in which the child herself participates. They argue that my account does not really specify the kinds of interactions through which young children gain the ability to form a joint agency with others in the first place. They argue that infants’ earliest triadic interactions with others around objects provide the requisite experiences whereby the infant learns to coordinate first-person perspective, second-person perspective, and the object on which they both are focused. In my view, this is a reasonable characterization, but, based on the comparative work with great apes – even those raised in rich interactions around objects with humans – I believe we must recognize a role for the maturation of capacities for shared intentionality that structure these early learning processes. Only if one can form a joint goal with joint attention, in my view, is it possible to take different perspectives in the first place; otherwise we are just doing and seeing different things. So, I am not convinced that infants are learning to coordinate perspectives before their capacities for joint intentionality mature. Corbit & Moore also cite evidence supporting the view that acting together toward a joint goal – even if that goal is not obtaining resources – leads children to distribute resources more fairly with others.
Kalish introduces the notion of a reason for action and notes that children's earliest moral statements belie a kind of objective notion: the reason my sister is opening the box is because there is candy in there. But, he argues, this is a rationality of individual action. When the child must coordinate with a partner toward a shared goal, now the reasons must become more person-specific involving the beliefs and attitudes of the partners vis-à-vis one another. He notes that if a partner in the collaboration misbehaves, he is obligated to give the other a reason and “citing the obligation is an effective way of restoring coordination. I remind you of the reason, and expect you to adjust your behavior in light of it.” This is an elegant way of construing the situation, because, in my view, while individuals’ behavior is driven by beliefs and desires, reasons only come into existence as kind of self-regulatory mechanisms in shared intentionality interactions in which one individual is obligated to the other already. Rakoczy notes a number of ways in which my account conflates – or at least fails to keep separate – children's sense of an intentional stance, a group stance, a moral stance, and shared intentionality. He very articulately illustrates how even a single interaction may instantiate these different stances and capacities such that, over developmental time, they become more distinct aspects of human social psychological functioning.
Li, Pesch, & Koenig extend the analysis of obligation in extremely interesting ways to testimonial exchanges and note the various ways that children holds others accountable – evincing a sense of obligation – epistemically.
R4. Whence normativity?
Four of the philosophers who have provided commentaries are those upon whose work I have drawn most deeply and directly to construct concepts of collaboration that are adequate for describing developmental changes in young children's ability to cooperate with others across the first years of life. It is gratifying that they all seem to believe that although my account is misguided, it is at least worthy of criticism. The most basic issue concerns the very possibility of a naturalistic account of normative phenomena, including obligation.
Bratman's (Reference Bratman2014) account of shared intentional activities is mainly instrumental, with no sense of obligation among partners: An adult and child can play with the ball together, and “The child can reason instrumentally concerning this jointly intended end of playing together without thinking that she owes it to the adult to give him the ball.” Pettit thus says that “Bratman offers a normatively austere account of how joint action may materialize.” In contrast, again according to Pettit, “Gilbert's account is normatively richer than Bratman's, because it presupposes that the people involved in the joint action have mastered a normative concept: that of a joint commitment.” And, according to Gilbert herself, “The general notion of commitment at issue is normative, rather than psychological.” Darwall concurs: “obligation is a normative, rather than a psychological (or sociological) phenomenon.” Most psychologists, myself included, find it difficult to comprehend what obligation and other normative phenomena could possibly be if not psychological (or sociological) phenomena. For sure, obligation and other normative phenomena go beyond individual psychology; but that is precisely why we need a shared intentionality account.
Perhaps because of this non-naturalistic conception of obligation and other normative phenomena, all four philosophers seem to agree that a naturalistic account going from Bratman-like, instrumentally based collaboration to Gilbert-like, normatively based collaboration is problematic. Pettit says I have a hard choice. If I define joint action à la Bratman, then I cannot get to a normatively richer version involving obligation without some kind of magical leap. If I define joint action à la Gilbert, then I build obligation into the definition. Bratman makes a similar argument. He claims that collaboration itself – in his “thin” version – does not lead to the sense of obligation to one's partner, but rather obligation arises from joint commitments in Gilbert's sense, comprising a “web of assurances” between individuals that is only contingently linked to collaboration: “So what is undergirding [obligation] involves a crucial element that is separable from intentional collaborative activity.”
But my phylogenetic and ontogenetic account is intended precisely to get us from Bratman-like collaboration to Gilbert-like collaboration as cemented by a joint commitment involving obligations. The key is not to think of normative phenomena in absolutistic terms but rather as graded. Joint commitments – as collaboratively created forms of collaborative self-regulation – can be weaker or stronger based on several factors. Consider a recent experiment modelled on the stag hunt from game theory (Siposova et al. Reference Siposova, Tomasello and Carpenter2018). Children were in a situation in which they could only get a large reward if they collaborated with an adult partner. As they were busy collecting small rewards (hare), the opportunity to collaborate for the large reward (stag) suddenly appeared at a distance. In one condition, the adult excitedly looked to the child with wide eyes and then to the stag in the distance without explicitly proposing any kind of joint commitment. The idea was that the adult would just be making it clear that she had just seen the stag and knew that the child had seen the stag and knew that the child had seen her seeing the stag, et cetera – that is, they had common ground knowledge that the stag was now available. But no one explicitly suggested a joint commitment. Nevertheless, not only did the child commit to pursuing the stag, but if the adult slacked off, the child quite often castigated her normatively. Our interpretation was that children understood that it was in their common knowledge with the adult that they depended on one another for collaborative success and that they both knew that the stag was present: which, it turns out, is sufficient to create a mutual sense of obligation. If we both know together, in common ground, that you need help and that I am in a position to provide it (at little cost), I feel the pressure of obligation.
But clearly this is “less” of a joint commitment than if the adult says to the child “Let's work together,” and the child responds “Okay.” In that case, the joint commitment is proposed and accepted explicitly and publicly. In the analysis of Pettit (Reference Pettit2018a), the explicitness and publicity provide stronger assurances because they foreclose the possibility of excuses like “I didn't know you were counting on me” and/or “I changed my mind [without excuse].” The point is that joint commitments and their associated obligations can vary in strength based on such things as how certain the participants are about the intentions of the other and how important one's contribution is to joint success. Thus, one can imagine a situation in which one makes a joint commitment of one type or another, but one's contribution is only minimally helpful; for example, I commit to you to join you at a party, but as only one of 30 people, and as only an acquaintance, I know that you are not depending on me that strongly, so breaking the commitment is not that big of a deal; my sense of obligation is weaker as a result. If joint commitments and their associated obligations can vary in strength based on several factors like certainty of the commitment's content and its social importance, then one can imagine that early humans and young children begin with Bratman-like instrumental collaboration, and then such things as mutuality looks to up the ante in terms of commitments and obligations, and then explicit proposals and acceptances make the web of assurances stronger and more certain. This kind of gradualistic account makes a naturalistic explanation of the emergence of normative phenomena, including the human sense of obligation, at least a bit more plausible. Supportive of this idea, Kachel and Tomasello (Reference Kachel and Tomasello2019) reported an experimental demonstration that implicit joint commitments lead to a weaker sense of obligation than do explicit ones.
My naturalistic account has two other key concepts as well, and attention to these might make the account more plausible to these and other philosophers. The first is borrowed from Nagel (Reference Nagel1970b), and that is the idea that seeing other people as in some sense equivalent to myself (I am only one among many other individuals) provides a kind of cognitive, not motivational, basis for a sense of equal deservingness. I might want more of the spoils myself, and I might even take them, but I certainly do not feel that I deserve them because we (self and other) are, in all important respects, the same in this context. I feel obliged to treat you as you deserve to be treated. The second concept is borrowed from Korsgaard (Reference Korsgaard1996), and that is the idea that the notion of obligation is tied to my cooperative or moral identity. I, as a member of a “we” community, judge people normatively. And I can turn this on myself and judge myself from the perspective of that “we.” It is simply an empirical fact that it is important to human beings that they can view themselves, from the perspective of “we” in the community, positively; they want to be an integral and contributing member of the “we,” and indeed they feel obliged to do so. This also lends legitimacy to the social demands that one feels from others. I reiterate these two points to emphasize that my account is not simply that the sense of obligation arises from individuals solving a puzzle together instrumentally. It arises from a cooperative way of life, which shapes human understanding of their relation to others and their need to form plural agencies in their quest to survive and thrive in their social group.
One final point on this general topic. Darwall takes issue with the proposal that obligation is a fully psychological phenomenon. He argues that “it is irreducibly normative and moral, not empirical.” He does not believe that my account in which children come to feel a sense of obligation solely from their interdependent collaborations with equally deserving partners with whom they feel a sense of “we” is sufficient. He thinks that the normative sense of obligation presupposes something less of this world: not an empirical “we,” but an ideal “we.” I do not disagree with this, on one level, and indeed I said in my target article that the larger cultural group (at the second step) was not just a finite collection of individuals but “everyone who would be one of us,” thus tying the normative force to a kind of idealized characterization of the group with which I identify. Nevertheless, I do not see what Darwall could possibly mean by the claim that “Although the ‘sense of obligation’ is psychological, what it is a sense of is decidedly not.” The sense of obligation is a sense of what I should do to comport with the mutual understanding that my partners and I have about how someone in my position should treat others. What is not psychological about that?
R5. Conclusion
Reading and responding to 32 commentaries on one's best efforts at a coherent theoretical account of something, anything, is a humbling experience. There exist so many different perspectives and valuings in the intellectual community that reads and profits from this journal. “We” in this community will make progress only if each of us feels as legitimate a kind of we > me sense of obligation to take all of these different perspectives and valuings seriously – and, perhaps, to make improvements as a result.
I believe that to make further progress on the questions I have raised, my account needs to be modified and improved in the following ways:
We need to integrate humans’ various normative attitudes, including the sense of obligation, with their more basic social relations, especially those that precede them in evolution and development, such as parent-child relations and perhaps friendships as the initial and most basic forms of human sociality.
We need to identify the many faces of obligation as it manifests in the many different social contexts and social roles in a modern society. Moreover, we need to recognize that there may be different forms of obligation in different societies with different social structures and arrangements and seek to identify those.
In terms of ontogeny, we currently have no good account of how children's understanding of social partnerships and groups that they derive through participation in them are related to their understanding of social partnerships and groups that they derive through observation of others (from a third-party perspective). This is a challenging, but ultimately empirically tractable, question.
Finally is the issue of how far we can go in our understanding of normative attitudes, including the sense of obligation, empirically. From its beginnings, philosophy has recognized a kind of ideal world that is – to some degree and in one way or another – independent of (scientific) observation and experience. Applied to the current case: “ought” cannot be explained in terms of “is.” But I would argue that the human sense of “ought” is a psychological phenomenon capable of scientific explanation, and so the question is whether there is still something left over unexplained. Of course, no explanation of obligation, scientific or otherwise, can tell us what we ought to do. But we can describe and explain the processes by which people come to feel that they ought and ought not to do certain things, without leaving out of account any supposed non-empirical aspects.
In any case, one of the surprises I had in writing this target article was how little empirical work there was on obligation. I am hopeful that the current exchange will lead more scientists and philosophers to investigate this interesting and centrally important human phenomenon from as many different perspectives as possible.
Target article
The moral psychology of obligation
Related commentaries (32)
A hard choice for Tomasello
A lifelong preoccupation with the sociality of moral obligation
Caregiving relationships as evolutionary and developmental bases of obligation
Children's everyday moral conversation speaks to the emergence of obligation
Conflicting obligations in human social life
Cooperation and obligation in early parent-child relationships
Differentiating between different forms of moral obligations
Does the concept of obligation develop from the inside-out or outside-in?
Feelings of obligation are valuations of signaling-mediated social payoffs
How does inequality affect our sense of moral obligation?
How is the moral stance related to the intentional stance and group thinking?
Integrating perspectives: How the development of second-personal competence lays the foundation for a second-personal morality
Intuitive theories inform children's beliefs about intergroup obligation
Is that all there is? Or is chimpanzees group hunt “fair” enough?
Obligation at zero acquaintance
Obligations to whom, obligations to what? A philosophical perspective on the objects of our obligations
Obligations without cooperation
Personalizing the demands of reason
Psychological consequences of the normativity of moral obligation
Shared Intentionality, joint commitment, and directed obligation
The divided we and multiple obligations
The joy of obligation: Human cultural worldviews can enhance the rewards of meeting obligations
The moral obligations of conflict and resistance
The nature of obligation's special force
The role of affect in feelings of obligation
The sense of moral obligation facilitates information agency and culture
The sense of obligation in children's testimonial learning
The sense of obligation is culturally modulated
Tomasello on “we” and the sense of obligation
Tomasello's tin man of moral obligation needs a heart
Who are “we” and why are we cooperating? Insights from social psychology
Who are “we”? Dealing with conflicting moral obligations
Author response
The many faces of obligation