How to Build a Normative Creature
From an evolutionary point of view, the most basic normative ideals are goals: potential states of affairs that the organism imagines and values over others and so acts to realize (with the possibility of both success and failure). Beyond such instrumental normativity, humans operate, in addition, with a fundamentally social form of normativity: they decide what one ought to know and do to coordinate rationally and morally with others in the rational/moral community. Individuals coordinate their actions with others via agreed-upon sociomoral norms or ideals, and they coordinate their thinking with others via agreed-upon epistemic norms or ideals. These norms and ideals have special force and universal reach (what 'one' ought to know and do) because they are not personal preferences but rather what 'we' can justify to one another via an idealized and externalized rational/moral order; they are 'objective'. In this chapter, we attempt to explicate the foundations of human normative functioning, beginning with its evolutionary roots in instrumental normativity and ending with its species-unique forms of social normativity.
