A Descriptive Explanation of Morality

A Descriptive Explanation of Morality
Jose Maanmieli
j.maanmieli@gmail.com
Version 1.0
Published: date
Abstract: Morality is difficult to define because it is itself at the root of language and
definitions. Having to get ‘right’ what it means that an action is ‘right’ is a formal ambiguity
that reflects an ancient confusion of social with natural sources of knowledge. Here I aim
to illustrate and overcome these ambiguities through the kind of explanation that produces
our most reliable theories. This involves an analysis of human belief that is consistent with
biology and makes a clear distinction between description and prescription. It involves
making sense of our puzzling, pseudo-cognitive moral judgements by looking at ourselves
as animals who self-deceive about the nature of reality. Epistemology is then seen in the
light of a false dichotomy between ‘holism’ and ‘atomism’, which are normative attitudes
that pervade our everyday life, for example, when we reason about how resources should
be allocated. I use this perspective to deal with classic philosophical problems, such as that
of induction, realistically and comprehensively. The resulting theoretical framework
situates the corresponding ontological, moral and political problems in the wider context
of the natural sciences, particularly in relation to experiments in moral psychology. Far
from banishing value, this suggests a basis for transcending our long-standing social and
academic disputes. Finally, I discuss how the theory integrates evidence from a variety of
disciplines. All this makes it possible to hypothesise the evolutionary origins of morality
as a well-defined phenomenon that is distinct from what I have called ethics. Morality is a
deceptive linguistic socialisation device that conflates social concepts, like that of a
particular individual or group, with the natural concepts or categories that we use to
explain the world, which creates ‘social realities’. Morality exists because it attempts to
maximise our reproductive success over the generations by exploiting our rational,
cooperative nature.
Keywords: good explanations, animal beliefs, science of philosophy, evolutionary ethics,

pseudo-rationality, self-deception, children and families
Alethes 2018, 1.0 FOR PEER REVIEW

1. Introduction
A three-year-old doesn’t like that her siblings have taken some toys from the playroom. Her
mother doesn’t like it either, calls it stealing and says it is ‘wrong’. These can be two different
ways to dislike the same event. The first is more likely to be complaining that the other
children keep her from playing with these toys in the future, and we would take her
explanation to be quite ‘right’. Similarly, we would have no quarrel with the siblings’ claim
that they are upset because they didn’t get any presents when they expected them, nor with
their new explanation that their mother broke her promise because she got angry at them.
About the mother’s dislike, however, we cannot so easily say, and we may debate her
decision to not buy them any presents because she feels ‘they were bad’. Her explanation
would also convey a higher sense of reality and rationality to that of the children. Yet this
type of feelings will eventually become a strong part of the children’s identity, only to repeat
an intergenerational scenario that is thousands of years old and that spans thousands of
different cultures.
I have begun with this example because I think in it lies the psychological essence of all
philosophical and scientific thought; and that even if we can still make useful advances,
major advances require understanding this most important interaction and its relation to
the question of knowledge. After all, the discipline of philosophy is still unclear about how
we ‘should live’ and hosts a multiplicity of arguably cultural positions on it [22; 30; 57].
Meanwhile, the sciences seem to live an illusion of global consensus about what we ‘should
infer’.1 Like the child’s mother, and after thousands of years of such conflicting scenarios
both within and between human groups, we still feel that things ought to be right with the
world and its people, though we lack an objective understanding of this phenomenon.
Instead, we tend to assume the validity of a certain definition of knowledge, typically, ‘what
1 I pay special attention to the work of Karl Popper due to 1) its influence on modern science, 2) its relevance to
a naturalistic view of child learning [42], and 3) its failure to be genuinely rational and critical. Indeed, Popper’s
‘non justificationist’ theory of critical rationalism begins with a logical solution to the ‘problem of induction’ [23]
which (at least for those who experience shock at the thought that inference is compatible with ‘should’ or rule
following) is still justificationist [45]. Here my solution will instead be bio-logical: we can but grant that human
life predates the practice of epistemology (and moral argument) both evolutionarily and developmentally. This
way I shall try to satisfy critical rationalism’s own requirement that scientific theories be comprehensive by
explaining why human beings arrive at a ‘problem of induction’ in the first place, and how asking oneself ‘what
is science’ is like asking oneself ‘what is good’. I hope that my treatment of ‘science’, ‘explanation’, ‘knowledge’
and other such concepts in this work will be considered sufficient inasmuch as I have succeeded at this.
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is verifiable’ or ‘falsifiable’. But can our resulting accounts be trusted if we believe that these
things ought to be?
Indeed, epistemology works from the top down, as it were, by assuming the absolute
existence of its sources of truth or falsehood (e.g. society in the case of social
constructionism, nature in the case of naturalism, or nothing at all in the case of radical
scepticism), which is itself knowledge. This circularity seems intrinsic to language, a more
recent philosophical obsession [9]. However, language is acquired by the child along with
the mother’s feelings, and so its relationship with truth remains un-divorced from a moral
form of life whether it concerns ‘language games’ [9] or ‘correspondence with reality’ [12].
Thus, she will come to use words like ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ to communicate about social and
epistemic correctness indistinctly. She will then grow up to find that the word ‘ethics’ can
refer to the study of the social kind of meanings, though this is done via the same confusing
use of words. Speaking about the moral quality of an action does imply some detached
evaluation of ‘society’, its language and its codes. Still, the adjective ‘ethical’ is often used
interchangeably with ‘moral’.
The assumption seems to be that good or bad, right or wrong, rest on some kind of
principles for action or non-action, whether these principles be absolute or relative [23],
general or particular [49], unconditional or conditional [18], spoken or unspoken [14]. This
might appear like an inescapable triviality, but it makes the definition of ‘principle’ rather
ambiguous. It forces us to conceive of abstractions like ‘metaethics’ [56] in the search for
further principles that are hopefully descriptive. Similarly, attempting to overcome the
tribalism of morals (the fact that she will strongly favour her own family and culture, even
if such norms are supposedly universal) has to be called ‘metamorality’. 2 And of course,
‘metaphysics’ owes much of its purpose to these efforts.
In contrast, the study of biological principles by people like Charles Darwin has not
produced a need for ‘metabiology’, because biology does not concern itself with concepts
that we think should exist or be good, not even the concepts of life and nature. Biology
produces principles about something we currently call living organisms, and it is in their
being descriptive that these principles may be discarded or improved upon in a search for
2 This standard was proposed by Joshua Greene in Moral Tribes [24] (p. 25) even if he’s unwilling to live up to it
(p. 268). I think that this ‘hypocrisy’ is optimistic as representative of mankind, in the sense that we are becoming
more conscious about ourselves and what morality is. This is conspicuous on the internet, which bridges these
intertribal gaps.
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better knowledge. Similarly, human organisms adapt to reality and owe their existence,
behaviour and knowledge to this quality. When they pursue ethical and political
knowledge, however, these organisms aim for principles that categorically prescribe their
own actions, in denial of that individual, adaptive quality. What makes us suppose that
these linguistic attempts to determine action are possible or advantageous in nature? What
is the natural motivation for it otherwise? How does it condition our society and sociology?
What makes us behave ‘morally’ anyway?
To answer these questions, we need to genuinely situate ourselves beyond morality, so
we can see it clearly. For this, I suggest we subsume what is commonly understood by ethics
and morality under the second term, and suspend the idea that it must refer to something
certain and necessary for life. Arriving at knowledge might not be synonymous with formal
necessity and other ways of being ‘right’ either. These assumptions can be misleading for
the reasons already mentioned. Perhaps languages need not formally confuse ‘you cannot
steal’ as said to a man who considers appropriating an expensive drug to save his comatose
wife, with ‘you cannot steal’ as said to the wife.3 Perhaps expressing outrage at the man’s
action need not involve non-questions such as ‘how could you?!’ There must be a reason
languages are so imprecise around these important distinctions, but are on the other hand
complex enough to support the intricacies of narrative, rhetoric and myth [4; 5]. Perhaps
this is because moral order has always had something to do with cosmic order and thus
with the norms that divide philosophy and science.
Previous biological accounts of morality make a valuable contribution from the vantage
point of a relatively integrated natural science [1; 20; 29]. However, they leave these major
linguistic, psychological and anthropological phenomena unexplained, and so they do not
say what exactly makes a rule, an intuition or a prohibition ‘moral’. This goes back to Robert
Trivers‘ original assumption that the punishment of cheaters by altruists is ‘moralistic‘ [67]
as well as the associated prosocial emotions. It stands in contrast with a great many anti-
3 This formal conflation of moral and physical impossibilities involves the linguistic notion of modality and is a
feature of probably all languages [34; 38; 39]. The stealing example is my version of the famous Heinz’s dilemma
in moral psychology [31]. Moral psychology has an experimental tradition that widely supports my present
theory of morality, especially those concerning the mental representation of possibilities. Researchers have
recently tried to explain these results through the study of language, which they call ‘the cognitive science of
modality’ [41]. But this approach only models the formal conflation at the expense of genuinely understanding
morality, which moral psychology has already shown to be closely related to language in more bodily ways [25;
52; 71].
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social phenomena that we would also call moralistic (e.g. war, crime, capitalism) as well as
with humanistic tendencies that seem to create problems of cooperation rather than solve
them (socialism, religion, marriage) if not problems for individuals themselves (alienation,
addiction, mental illness). Generally, these theories focus on the horizontal dimension of
cooperation among peers and ignore the kind of cooperative interaction in which we learn
to speak a language and think about cooperation. Appealing to our common understanding
of words like ‘acceptable’, ‘values’, ‘rules’ or ‘principles‘ does not provide an objective
definition of morality either. That seems to require a revision of those concepts precisely,
along with the basic concepts of ‘belief’, ‘reality’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘rationality’, all of which
seem to be understood under a conflation of social and natural meanings.
I shall therefore rebuild these concepts by working from the ground up instead, without
losing touch with the personal environment in which they primarily appear. This involves
seeing how our relatively accurate depictions of reality simply derive from good
explanations (section 2). It enables us to tell what is descriptive in our use of concepts, as
opposed to other uses that are prescriptive, even if they do not seem to be. Accordingly,
section 3 presents a biologically consistent understanding of belief by making this and other
key distinctions. And I support it, as a system of belief itself, by showing how it explains
widespread and readily verifiable facts, as well as some salient scientific findings and their
associated puzzles. This happens especially in sections 4 and 5. One of those facts raises the
following question: how could a social animal that so successfully feeds its costly brain and
population expansions, which it does through intelligent problem-solving, have been so
unable to solve its most important social problems? The answer to this question becomes a
hypothesis as to why morality evolved to perpetuate these stresses precisely, which I
present in section 5. Finally, in section 6, the road is clear to conclude with a definition of
ethics as our latent ability to solve these problems.
2. Explanations
When Isaac Newton invented differential calculus to explain motion, he probably wasn’t
thinking that he had to conform to a criterion of demarcation by which he could be certain
to be doing science. What his contemporary, Bishop Berkeley, called the ‘Ghosts of departed
Quantities’ [3] then became a matter of controversy for those who claimed such criterion.
When Albert Einstein broke through the certainty that the universe has an absolute system
of reference, he probably wasn’t thinking about following any such standard for truth, but
simply attempting to provide an explanation for an empirical problem.
Similarly, the child who effectively learns about ordinary events, how to deal with them
and why they happen, does so in spite of her parents’ righteous claims. She doesn’t need
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the language. She doesn’t have a ‘valid system of belief’ or need to validate one for this. She
is not concerned with certainty or support by foundationalist or coherentist theories of
knowledge.4 She simply has beliefs, subjective expectations that develop organically toward
explanatory power and strategic choice, which produces a system. And so, if she believes
that her siblings take her toys because they want to play with them in the future, we say that
this belief is ‘quite right’ because it seems to fit a better explanation. But what is a better
explanation?
Better explanations are harder to vary because they make a greater commitment to facts
[15; 16]. This is easily achieved against explanations like that the children steal because they
are ‘bad’. They could just as well be ‘good’ or ‘sick’, whereas it’s not so easy to dismiss that
their actions are motivated by a desire to control these objects. For example, they will be
seen playing with them and keeping them in a place they can access; and if they didn't do
that, her explanation would have failed, unlike that of their being ‘bad’. She could, as a
result, choose to offer them a cooperative deal instead of feeling that she ought to punish or
correct them, the success of which would reinforce her belief and psychological explanation.
From there, she can go on to make a greater commitment to facts.5
Imagine that she has never seen a dog and that her siblings have been cooperating for
some time now. A friend has come to visit with his smelly dog while our three-year-old was
away. The dog became very fond of the toys and took them out of her bedroom. When she
returns, she notices the smell and other marks. She dismisses the thought that her siblings
are back to their old ways, because it ignores those unusual facts. Her mother says that there
was ‘a dog’ in the house. So, though she has never seen one, she now believes that it is a
smelly individual that can get into rooms and take toys. This makes that greater
commitment to facts, creating new concepts and possibilities. It happens by itself, without
much linguistic or logical guidance. The new conceptual possibilities, in turn, generate
4 See ‘The Dialectic of Foundationalism and Coherentism’ [10]. This is a specific manifestation of what I shall
refer to as a moral dialectic between holistic and atomistic epistemologies.
5 The hard-to-vary argument is due to theoretical physicist David Deutsch [15; 16]. Both good explanations and
negotiations require conceptual cohesion with reality. Negotiations on meaning are a big part of what languages
themselves are [61], which must be ultimately grounded if they are to serve a practical purpose. Therefore, it is
not necessary here to settle the developmental question of whether three-year-old children are capable of
‘cooperative deals’ or good explanations (difficult as it is to settle due to the strong influence of culture on both
children and experimenters). It is enough to know that the capacity must develop at some point and that it
involves a distinct attitude from the parents’ attitude in my example.
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testable predictions, for example, that her room won’t smell if she lets her siblings have the
toys next time around, but theirs will. The same applies to all sorts of entities we have never
seen, from subatomic particles to gravitational waves, which are part of very good
explanations.
There is also an important conceptual flexibility involved in the child’s considering the
proposition ‘dogs take toys’. Anything that takes toys and isn’t a child could be a dog, or
maybe it isn’t that different from a child. Dogs would probably be different if this one hadn’t
been referred to as a ‘bad boy’ by the mother. But because it had, it now has an important
behavioural property in common with the siblings in her mind. The language restricts her
conceptualisation by mixing up social and natural properties. Perhaps this creature is some
kind of smelly child. Imagine now that it came to live with them. Without the richness of
direct experience, she would still have reasons to consider the ‘dog’ as a particular kind of
unruly sibling. Giving it the name ‘Charlie’ as a family member does not help either. But,
obviously, the animal has many traits that warrant a distinction at a greater explanatory
level than that suggested by its behaviour in relation to the toys, even if the parental
language has hardly changed (e.g. ‘good guys don’t steal!’) Without transcending this local
language game, there would be little reason to regard the dog as another kind of organism
for which it is harder to learn and cooperate. She would see her siblings take the toys and
possibly call them ‘charlies’ with an admonishing attitude.6
On the other hand, the mother’s tendency to blame these creatures is part of a bad, easy-
to-vary explanation that doesn’t allow great conceptual flexibility. The father, too, could be
thinking or implying that they are ‘good’ instead, because so is ‘freedom’ or ‘responsibility’,
6 Correspondingly, she might call other people ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ for their good qualities, as small children
sometimes do. They see similarities in traits (e.g. dogs and children are small and take toys; adults are big and
take children) and so probably expect the concepts to apply. This is known as ‘overextension’ in developmental
linguistics [55]. It suggests that children have a certain tendency to put things and people in natural categories.
But the idea of ‘overextension’ only reflects how elders oppose that tendency through ‘natural’ standards of
extension that are actually inconsistent and culturally contingent. Such conflation appears primarily when elders
reserve mama and papa words for single individuals through child-directed speech (e.g. when the father says
‘Daddy will take you out’ he does not mean any daddy). This might explain why learning the meaning of words
involves biases that are not yet understood [55] (p. 234), since researchers avoid the moral aspect of why parents
speak to their children as pets [11; 19].
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and that he doesn't call their behaviour ‘stealing’ but something else. Either way, those rigid
parental beliefs create a certain state of affairs that keeps the children from choosing and
learning from things like cooperative deals and other forbidden possibilities. In turn, such
ideal state of being supports a theory of knowledge that validates those beliefs. For the
mother, the knowledge of where the toys are is justified by the principle that ‘children do
not steal’; this is how one knows that the toys must7 be in the playroom. For the father,
knowledge is more complicated because ‘children take toys sometimes’; this is how one
knows that the toys must be with whomever deserves them, and that ‘stealing’ is when this
is violated. Of course, both of them have a conflict with reality, but this does not make each
position any less of a claim to reality.8
Philosophically put, a moral system necessitates an ontology, and this presupposes
objective truth. Namely, saying that something ought to be with the dog and the children
means having a criterion for what can be, is, or isn’t, and in that a theory of knowledge.
Conceptual possibilities, such as that children are more able to learn than dogs, are not
considered in this frame of mind; because dogs and children exist as the same kind of
individual in the constrained, social ‘reality’ of the home, and such reality is the basis for
whether anyone knows anything. Where the girl has privately adapted her understanding
of ‘dog’ upon seeing the real thing and regardless of Charlie’s social behaviour, her parents
remain dependent on language, convinced that there is such a thing as ‘good guys’, even if
reality shows otherwise. This is not limited to a philosophy of the home. Even Karl Popper
had to conceive a ‘third world’ where his ‘objective knowledge’ would ontologically reside
independently of matter and minds [45]. As we shall see, this relates to what he believed
ought to be with a tolerant, Open Society [43] in which ‘no opinion is perfect’ (except his
own opinion that no opinion is perfect).
Hence, while ontologies and epistemologies might not necessarily be moral, we would
expect morality to be better understood without any abstract criteria for being or truth, and
so be more accurately spotted wherever it may be hiding. ‘Stealing’ does then not happen
7 Again, language confuses a prescriptive (social) and a descriptive (natural) interpretation of ‘must’. The
parents’ moral judgements are, effectively, descriptive, and therefore ontological. Some of the most recent
experiments in moral psychology support this. They find ‘a default bias toward representing immoral or
irrational actions as being impossible. Although this bias is diminished upon deliberative reflection
[approaching a good explanation], it is the default judgments that appear to support higher-level cognition.’ [40]
8 As psychiatrist R.D. Laing once wrote, one is told as a child that ‘one is a good or a bad boy or girl, not only
instructed to be a good or bad boy or girl.’ [28] Similarly, one ‘is right’ or wrong about something.
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in relation to abstract ideas about property, but to de facto individual or collective control
over material objects in close proximity. Through this grounded approach, we may
demonstrate how this ancient clash between common and individual interests is only made
problematic by language. We do this by looking at how a proposition like ‘people do not
steal’ changes meaning within the different types of belief, how it finally acquires moral
meaning, and how this last meaning can affect all propositions.
3. Systems of belief
In our everyday lives, we either believe things to be the case or not, such as whether we left
something cooking. The expectations of creatures without language or symbolic thought
may also be called beliefs.9 With certain hominids, these began to refer to things not
immediately present, to be symbolically shared and, in some cases, organised as rational
systems relying on basic propositions I shall call principles. Regardless of how accurate our
statistical models may be today, or how testable our conjectural theories, they are still based
on principles, if only the fundamental laws of logic, arithmetic and geometry. These
explanations involve beliefs that are descriptive, like those implied by the hypothetical
statement ‘you should keep the fire away from the bush if you want to wake up alive’ in a
band of hominins. At the same time, there are explanations like that implied by the
statement ‘you should give the meat to Mother if you want to wake up alive’, which are
prescriptive explanations, because they involve human action. Thus, language brings two
other types of belief that concern what is expected of people instead of nature: social and
moral belief. In all three cases, belief involves propositions whose subjects (concepts like
‘child’ or ‘toy’) aim to represent the supposedly real, directly or indirectly perceived entities
I shall call objects (particular children or toys). The use of these labels will make it easier to
compare the social to the natural as we go along. I have drawn parallels between the three
sections and used similar examples for the same purpose.
3.1. Principles
9 For more about concepts and propositions in non-human animals see The Origins of Meaning: Language in the
Light of Evolution [8].
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The name ‘principle’ comes from its descriptive function as the primary proposition any full
explanation departs from in any area of knowledge. This means that their subjects must seek
universality, to conceptualise all objects possibly having any given property or properties.
In the three-year-old’s case, who had not seen a dog yet, the subject ‘dog’ would be extended
to anything that could steal toys and wasn't a child. Once she gets the chance to observe one,
more criteria for extension become available to her, such as that dogs cannot learn as easily
as humans but are better learners than wolves. Likewise, biology posits certain principles
about a much greater set of objects called living organisms (e.g. ‘organisms reproduce’), not
only about what we call whales or microbes; Newton proposed three laws of motion that
apply to all material objects. The concepts of ‘organism’ and ‘matter’ seek universality with
respect to the properties of reproduction and motion, which allows us to make predictions
(‘an organism will try to reproduce’; ‘the speed of material objects will remain constant in
the absence of a force’) independently of observer and context. The concept of spacetime
achieved even greater universality in physics, and so forth.
Possible ‘black swans’ or exceptions to the rule are also not a problem when these
conceptualisation criteria are adaptive and constitutive of explanations. So while it is true
that one doesn’t inductively derive laws [27], their conceptual frameworks require inductive
generalisation insofar as propositions are not inferred in isolation. Indeed, the reason it may
not be possible to infer that ‘all swans are white’ is that we have already made a number of
inferences about swans that have much more explanatory weight or importance: Any non-
white entities that closely resemble swans have to be conceptualised as swans if they are to
fit a good biological explanation, which itself rests on inference and generalisations such as
‘all swans are living organisms’ and ‘all living organisms are made out of cells and
reproduce’, for instance. Similarly, if all the swans we had ever seen were white, we would
not declare the finding of a ‘black swan’ that wasn’t made out of cells and couldn't reproduce
a failure of induction.
Thus, let us picture ‘stealing‘ as a potential behavioural property of human beings. A
human who ‘stole’, would do what the siblings did earlier by taking items that are treated
as common. If someone in such situations experiences that people do not steal, his inductive
conclusion that ‘people do not steal’ is implicitly accompanied by a more-or-less conscious
explanation that involves inferences (such as ‘ostracism harms the individual and thieves
will be ostracised because they harm the community’) and is not just a simple generalisation.
Induction, like myth, simply draws its inferential quality from the need and the will to
explain; especially in an ecological reality where ‘people obey the social contract’ or ‘the sun
is a star orbited by a rotating Earth’ might not be so practical a generalisation to make as
‘people do not steal’ or ‘the sun always rises in the east’, or where there might not be any
overarching, causal reality to describe.
10
Hence, our ambivalence about induction, the so-called ‘problem of induction’, arises
because principles are primarily the product of our private, developmental and daily need
to discover a complex ecological reality no matter what we are told about it; especially a
reality that involves human minds, intention and deception.10 One inevitably begins with
proximal observations of immediate, unexplained phenomena (e.g. ‘he did not steal from
me’) proceeds with distal, associated observations in space and time (‘nobody has ever
stolen from me’, ‘it wouldn’t be very wise to steal because …’) and ends with a general
proposition (‘people do not steal’) that one believes until proven false. This need not be
exclusively human or explanatory either; it is the adaptive need to approach a correct
representation of the environment, however imperfectly or hastily. There is a clear economy
too in having rules of thumb, and not having to constantly check one’s assumptions about
the nature of things and people, even if we aim for a greater understanding.
In this light, principles are fundamental propositions whose subjects refer to the objects
of experience universally, whether they appear directly or as a result of our experimental
and theoretical activity. We observe particular objects (e.g. rocks falling, organisms
reproducing, children not stealing toys), and we expect and discuss universal subjects
(‘rocks fall’, ‘organisms reproduce’, ‘children do not steal toys’). Objects belong to the realm
of being, and universal subjects belong to the realm of descriptive belief. The latter mental
representations become ‘knowledge’ inasmuch as they are part of good explanations of
reality (Fig. 1). Our perception of objects may well be, in this sense, subject-laden (our
perception of what we would call ‘children’, ‘stealing’ or ‘toy’), but the process is descriptive
as long as our principles do not make a rigid or certain claim to being, which is represented
in Figure 1 by the hard separation between reality and knowledge. Description, so
understood, does not presuppose or need metaphysics.
10 Small children’s generalisations of situations, let alone things and people, seem dependent on the need and
the will to explain [11]. A strong position against inductive inferences might then be a reaction to the
instrumental use of ‘rationality’ (what I shall call pseudo-rationality) in the inculcation of cultural prejudices that
take the same inductive form, and which pervade the unexamined personal environment: ‘For instance, knowing
one “generous” Scotsman will not demolish the common English assumption that “all Scotsmen are mean”. In
this sense, category-based explanations are what Sacks calls “protected against induction”’ [52].
11
Figure 1. Principles are fundamental propositions of descriptive belief whose universal subjects
describe objects. The objects of experience (left side) are systematically described through principles
and other propositions derived from them. Their subjects refer to and influence our observations but
are ultimately separate from them as mental representations (right side). We call these propositions
‘knowledge’ inasmuch as they are part of good explanations.
3.1.1. Rationality
Rational inquiry is characterised by this search for universality and explanatory power,
which is a search for the appropriate subjects and their properties. Saying that a horse
reproduces because it is a living organism and one of the features of life is reproduction is
more rational than saying it is just a property of horses. In turn, saying that people do not
steal because it would have negative consequences for them as living organisms is more
rational than saying it is just a property of ‘good people’. Hence, we primarily seek what I
shall call a general principle (G) like ‘organisms reproduce’ or ‘people do not steal’.
Biology and our daily epistemic activities have a certain lack of exactitude in common.
Exceptions to the rule appear to happen at the edges of our conceptualisation criteria and,
as before, we don’t necessarily declare that induction has failed, because these criteria tend
to come with good explanations. Let us pick the example of mules, which cannot reproduce,
just as we can imagine somebody called Jack was found stealing. Depending on how
relevant they are for our descriptive purposes, these exceptions can either have no effect on
the general principle, as we declare that ‘mules are not organisms’ and ‘Jack is not people’;
or they can lead to ‘some organisms do not reproduce’ and ‘people steal sometimes’. Here
‘some’ and ‘sometimes’ represent any specific conditions. For example, the Newtonian
principle that ‘every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless
compelled to change its state by the action of an external force’ can be seen as this type of
‘sometimes’ principle with respect to the hypothetical principle that ‘every object will
remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line (in all circumstances)’. In order to
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compare the two particular principles, we also adhere to the same definition of the property
(reproduction, stealing) as seen from the perspective of the general principle.
Thus, the uniformity or wholeness of the general principle is either preserved or
abandoned, respectively, in the search for universality. This is linguistically reflected in how
the word ‘Jack’ becomes a common noun, unlike ‘mule’, which was already common. In
both cases, however, new principles are put forward which are, of course, universal in their
explanatory aim but which are particular with respect to the general principle. Namely, the
natural concepts they describe (organisms/mules; people/jacks) are particular universal
subjects in a discussion or potential explanation (about reproduction; about stealing) as
opposed to the particulars of observation (an organism/a mule; a person/Jack) which I have
called objects. Because of the inextricable link between theory and reality, the word
‘particular’ refers to the breaking of perceptual or conceptual sameness indistinctly: objects
are particular as differentiated from a whole and principles are particular as differentiated
from a general principle. I find this terminology appropriate also to highlight the fact that
not only observations are embodied and situated, but also the theoretical process.
The principle arrived at in each case would then be particular with respect to the general
principle in two optional ways. In the first case, the non-stealing property is considered of
primary importance and a defining property of ‘people’. Therefore, a separate principle about
Jack’s behaviour is issued, and ‘people’ becomes a particular universal, separate from ‘jacks’
and describing a different set of objects. Similarly, ‘mules’ become distinguished from
‘organisms’ because they do not appear to reproduce. In the second case, however, the
property isn’t as important as the subject, and the revised principle accounts for the
conditions under which the same objects (people; organisms) appear to steal sometimes or
to not reproduce. Hence, when observations challenge our general principle, we are given
a logical option between:
● The 1st descriptive particular (D1): preserves the uniformity of the general principle
and issues another principle whose subjects do not have the property (‘jacks steal’;
‘mules do not reproduce’).
● The 2nd descriptive particular (D2): breaks the uniformity of the general principle by
describing the particular negations of the property for the same subject (‘people steal
sometimes’; ‘some organisms do not reproduce’).
Principles thereby adapt to concrete cases depending on what kind of explanation we are
seeking. In D2 the property is not as important as in D1 with respect to the subject ‘people’
or ‘organism’, but it is still important enough to warrant its function as a principle. This
means that D2 can become a general principle (G’), for example, by redefining ‘stealing’ as
13
involving greater force or invasiveness (G’: ‘people do not steal’), or by redefining

‘reproduction’ as not involving domestication or human interference (G’: ‘organisms
reproduce’). (The same happened for the Newtonian principle above when the concepts of
motion and force were redefined or obviated by Einstein's relativity.) Eventually, G’ can be
similarly challenged by observations, become a D’1, and so on. This shows how the two
particular principles are just ‘two sides of the same coin’. They are only different with
respect to each other, and our analysis only has to focus on the primary case.
To be sure, since our purposes here are descriptive, the importance of a property is a
function of explanatory power, not a whim. This is what debunks a principle like ‘people
do not steal’ more readily than ‘people steal sometimes’ and gives us a criterion for
rationality: to hold onto the former principle in the face of reality is irrational. But this kind
of irrationality is one that preserves the uniformity of the general principle and may be
called holistic for its emphasis on the property over the parts that instantiate it. Conversely,
holding onto the unlikely principle that ‘some organisms do not reproduce’ (over
‘organisms reproduce’) is an atomistic irrationality for its emphasis precisely on those parts.
In this sense, explanatory power, universality, rationality and understanding amount
to the same thing. We prefer the principles that ‘people steal sometimes’ (however irrational
this one may also be, as an atomistic principle) and ‘organisms reproduce’ over the others
because they fit into an entire body of knowledge that is harder to vary by virtue of certain
facts (e.g. our things disappear and are found in the possession of others; mules have all the
other features of living organisms) and this confers a strategic advantage at the ecological
level. We may certainly put forward alternative, easy-to-vary postulates to account for them
(‘people lend things and forget that they did’, ‘the Holy Ghost impregnates only some
organisms’) but by doing so we will be at a disadvantage relative to those who arrive at the
better explanation. Insisting in the latter doesn’t make a lot of sense for a learning animal,
other than as a form of deception.
I will return to these notions of particularisation and importance since they are
important for the present explanation of belief. Nevertheless, importance here is part of the
deliberative attitude involved in issuing descriptive explanations, which do not make direct
claims to reality or being as illustrated by Figure 1, but only to knowledge about reality.
3.1.2. A science of philosophy
There has been great confusion around the validity of theories in the philosophy of science.
Given the dichotomy just introduced, it is no accident that there has been a debate between
two opposing types of justification, essentially: inductive generalisation versus falsifiable
conjecture. These attitudes may become entrenched and be militantly called ‘inductivism’
and ‘falsificationism’ respectively [2]. But the quarrel can be obviated by noticing what both
14
approaches have in common, as we did above regarding particular principles whose

concepts and definitions change. Namely that generalizing a repeating, theory-laden
experience such as ‘the sun always rises in the east’ is itself a conjecture; and that ‘the sun is
a star orbited by a rotating Earth’ is still an inductive generalisation as far as this greater
conjectural reality must also be a repeating experience. The former is simply the attitude of
betting that generalizing will be right, and the latter that it will be wrong; both inevitably
bound to the uncertain, psychological nature of descriptive belief as rational expectation.
The former is optimistic in its clinging to probable truth, whereas the latter is pessimistic in
its clinging to improbable truth. Both resemble the ambivalent relationship with probability
that characterises the uncertainty of love, and are equally commonplace.
This problem wants no solution. One way to see this is precisely that, like political
theories, neither position is very concerned with explaining the problem in itself or why
people seem to fall for the opposite view. The inductivist simply generalises that
falsificationists are underconfident and weak of belief, whereas the falsificationist
generalises that inductivists are weak in their overconfidence. Both try to establish with
certainty that the other is wrong, which gets them in trouble. 11 The following analogy will
shed more light on this situation and capture the psychological essence of the present work.
Picture a situation where two friends play repeated games of chess. We know that the
rules of chess exist as social beliefs (see the next section) and so do they. One of the players
is a skilled cheater, who breaks the rules occasionally in order to gain advantage; the other
one is perhaps a bit distracted. Let us confer the pieces with the human capacity to observe
their surroundings and explain their workings, though they still have no volition and are
moved about by the players. The pieces are stuck in the chessboard (except for periodic
moments of ‘sleep’) like human beings have been for most of our evolutionary history, and
so their perception is limited to the chessboard and the other pieces. As life would have it,
one white knight and one black knight have become keen natural philosophers. The white
knight has been observing the pieces move in repeating patterns, game after game, and has
a theory about some ‘laws of nature’ we know to be the rules of chess, which he discusses
with the black knight. The black knight, however, is not so convinced about the white
knight’s theory, and argues that sometimes the pieces seem to break the ‘principles’
11 Considering Popper’s definition of science as falsifiable myths, his literal dismissal of induction as a myth [46]
(p. 70) might not be the best choice of words. For if the theory that laws can be inferred from many observations
has been falsified by him, then it is a falsifiable myth, hence a ‘scientific theory’.
15
conjectured by the white knight. Whereas he takes these exceptional moves seriously, the
white knight dismisses them and thinks that those might not be chess pieces after all.
There are two possibilities in this scenario as to how the black knight might proceed
with his own explanation: he might conjecture and explore a reality beyond that of the
chessboard, or he might continue to consider the board and its pieces as the only possible
reality. In the first case, and drawing parallels with the world as we know it, he would find
out about the human players, the ‘true cosmos’ and, eventually, the rules of chess. This
would become a better explanation with its own laws of nature. In the second case, however,
the black knight would not arrive at the rules of chess, but some other game, as his
conjectures try to account for the odd moves which he doesn’t know are produced by the
cheating player.
Let the rules of chess represent a cosmology involving the principle that the sun always
rises in the east. Through the previous analogy, epistemically working from the ground up,
we can see that the two explanatory approaches are not mutually-exclusive if the reality of
the chessboard is put into question. For the rules of chess would have probably been arrived
at either way, just as the law that the sun always rises in the east (for observers on most parts
of Earth) can stem both from a geocentric and a Newtonian cosmology (in the geocentric
case by introducing the relevant exceptions, for example, the polar areas and that clouds can
block the sunlight). But the black knight’s failure to question the initial cosmology becomes
a trap from where he cannot make better predictions than the white knight. And had the
white knight had the same issue, his relative predictive success would have also been
accidental, since he would have easily dismissed certain odd moves that are relevant to the
rules of chess. They would not be rational, as defined above, for they would lack a crucial
conceptual flexibility. 12
12 For example, Einstein’s relativity, while considered scientific by Popper, is not exactly the same sort of
falsifiable theory as ‘men are mortal’ [45] (p. 10) because it arose creatively out of the questioning of
epistemological assumptions such as there being an absolute physical reference frame. Popper falsifies ‘men are
mortal’ by manipulating the definition of mortality, which is not how we may falsify the theory of relativity. The
chessboard analogy suggests that such limitations are intrinsic to formal systems, which rely on definitions, and
therefore that falsifiability is not a good enough criterion.
16
This has been an illustration of the ‘scientific’ fallacy of debating which one of the two
approaches is true; a consequence of psychologically projecting the workings of an
unquestionable ‘society’ of chess pieces onto the workings of nature, as do myths, and so
having to epistemically work from the top down. The analogy also illustrates how biology
is especially sensitive to such false dichotomy, as the conflict around social Darwinism lives
on. This is perhaps best exemplified by the disputes between the reductionist, gene-centred
view (black knight) and those views advocating larger units of natural selection. As a matter
of fact, to this day, we do not really know what a gene is because it has to be constantly
redefined13 in the same way as our misguided black knight would have had to keep
correcting his piece-centred conjectures. Traditional philosophy thus permeates our
attempts at explaining the world, as if succumbing to its own love of knowledge.
Other important notions for the understanding of biological reality are those of causality
and dynamic equilibria. Physics and chemistry have vastly demonstrated their explanatory
power. This does not only suggest that the conceptual frameworks of good science represent
an objective reality, it sets the basis for an understanding of society through biology, instead
of the usual (holistic) ‘understanding’ of biology through society. I begin by applying these
notions to everyday scenarios. Any ordinary account of events validates the notions of
causality and order; there are things and people in reality whose nature we constantly
appeal to as doers and makers. Morality certainly implies that human beings are causal
agents capable of bringing about a preferable or ‘desired to be desired’ state of things. Yet
there are simpler forms of first bringing about what is preferred or desired that are routinely
confused with the former. The claims to being or becoming through which this is achieved
will be the topic of the next section. Thus, here I draw the line between descriptive and
prescriptive systems of belief, which is perhaps the most important distinction I shall make
in this paper.
13 In ‘The Evolving Definition of the Term "Gene"’ [47], Portin and Wilkins identify the different incarnations of
the gene with historical periods, thus making a similar society–chessboard analogy: ‘the first two phases of 20th
century genetics are designated the “classical” and the “neoclassical” periods, and the current molecular-genetic
era the “modern period.” While the first two stages generated increasing clarity about the nature of the gene, the
present period features complexity and confusion.’
17
3.2. Social rules
Descriptive theorising allows a group to predict what will happen in reality (as above, ‘jacks
will steal’ or ‘the bush will catch fire’) but also to determine it insofar as they are themselves
natural agents and share a language (‘Jack will not steal’, ‘people will keep fire away from
the bush’). We can therefore continue the parallel between natural and social events by
thinking about rules in terms of their more-or-less predictable results, or the state of
behaviour that they intend to achieve. This may be for whatever purpose, though we stay
with ‘not stealing’ as a means to facilitate access to resources in a small group.
As we often find in the casual interactions of ordinary life, a description like ‘people
here do not steal’ can achieve the same effect as explicit commands or signals to not steal by
psychologically projecting such description into the future. Let us call this mode of
representation descriptive prescription. This is a way of saying that prescription can be
descriptive or take descriptive form, though the notion is inherent in the etymology of the
word (prescription: ‘to write before’). According to our nomenclature, this means that
objects adapt to subjects instead, and acquire the properties set by propositions (Fig. 2), but
not universally. Objects are no longer the full set we called ‘people’ in the previous section,
in an open-ended, universal context. They are a closed subset of people with an individuated
existence in the ecosystem. Therefore, they are identified empirically (e.g. by proper name,
physical traits, location, bearing of a token) and according to their disposition to cooperate
or their membership.
Group members may then become the subjects of a descriptive prescription (to not
steal) by putting themselves in this state as objects (not stealing) or they may not. Contrary
to natural description, we do not expect objects to behave like the subjects of these
propositions other than as the result of human intention, but the potential for their truth or
fulfilment makes them claims to the reality of a particular set of objects, instead of mere
representations of them. They are prescriptive beliefs, which presupposes being: the objects
referred to by the subjects of propositions and the properties they will acquire or effect
through their actions are expected to exist. This is significant when the rules are in place as
18
a solution to a problem of the commons or a coordination problem.14 In these situations, we

need to trust that belief is turned into being or non-being by others. However, this still
involves no attempt at reasoning about (universally establishing) that those things must be,
that is, no metaphysics.
This way to ‘construct reality’ is not an ‘institutional’ activity any more than children’s
imaginative play is. One can describe an intended situation once the required meanings
have already evolved, which will evolve due to the need to prescribe situations precisely.
The need itself may change, but the meanings will be in place. This creates a system of belief
(e.g. that people keep tools by the campfire) that can be used to describe any future states
(‘people keep tools by/away from the campfire’) without the need for additional agreements
on meaning, let alone institutional agreements.15 It is what children do when they pretend
14 This is an idea from game theory [32; 51]. In a problem of the commons (or a prisoner’s dilemma) one must
believe, for example, that others will not take more than their share for the action of taking one's share (less than
one could have) to be beneficial. Throughout section 3, I discuss this in relation to the coordination problem
called ‘battle of the sexes’, where each party has a chance to pursue its own interests but is always better off
doing so with the other's cooperation. The respective ‘holistic’ and ‘atomistic’ forms of solving the problem of
the commons may achieve ecological independence in the case of social rules. With social principles, however,
there is probably a long-term reproductive incentive to remain in the same ‘society’, which means that the ‘battle
of the sexes‘ takes precedence. In any case, it is important to get a feel for these games, as they are imbued with
the strategic tension that characterises many of the emotions we call ‘moral’ or related to ‘justice’, but which I
here refer to as, simply, social or prosocial emotions.
15 In The Construction of Social Reality [58], John Searle, like Wittgenstein, does not distinguish between institutions
and language games because his analysis ignores the presence of morality. He does, however, distinguish
between ‘constitutive’ and ‘regulative’ rules respectively (p. 27), where the latter is another example of social
rules that do not require new meanings (e.g. ‘let us drive on the left side of the road’). The local behaviour of
people may indeed be organised through a descriptive prescription that needs no prior, exclusive concept of
player (‘here people drive on the left side of the road’). Likewise, Searle’s moral conception of money as an
institution does not allow for money to be defined in ways consistent with biology, such as a ‘formal token of
delayed reciprocal altruism’ [13] (p. 244) because of its prescriptive or symbolic exclusivity, in other words, its
arbitrariness. Objects functioning empirically as such tokens in a country could not be regarded as money by
another country that did not institutionally accept them. In Searle’s view, players must be institutionalised first
(person X counts as ‘money user’ in context C) in order that money may also exist as a social ‘fact’. This approach
begs the question and contradicts its own scientific ontology, since it ignores the fact that there are institutional
interests, failure and conflict, and basically differences of opinion over what constitutes such definition and
19
play, which they can do freely, joining one game or the other. Indeed, their social games
could reproduce the behaviour and effects of any human institution if they had the skills
and power. They can be systematised to achieve a greater level of coordination, along which
higher agentic and functional concepts may also be introduced. Thus, we typically expect
game players to behave as the subjects of a game description involving such statuses and
functions (‘the goalkeeper catches the ball’, ‘the President decides’). The same goes for
organised activities involving consent or coercion (‘the tenant pays the deposit’, ‘prisoners
sleep in their cells’). I am not trying to describe anything that doesn’t ordinarily happen or
hasn’t already happened among adult individuals. People set up businesses, trade and
choose their friends in this manner. When one looks at the remains of an ancient city, there
is nothing intrinsically moral or institutional either about the serious kind of activity that
brought it all about.
Figure 2. Social rules are propositions of prescriptive belief whose particular subjects describe objects.
Therefore, their subjects explicitly determine our perception of objects as having a function in a game,
which overlap inasmuch as the propositions are made true by experience. The process starts with the
natural exemplification and/or description of the intended activity to whomever will enter the
situation.
context C: what is ‘money’ or ‘reality’ and for whom. Something that is money for one society may not be for
another, or may be for the same society at a later time, or for a fraction of that society. This renders the idea of
an institutional ‘epistemic objectivity’ absurd, for it is impossible to determine which group of people is objective
or correct about the ‘fact’ corresponding to object X. As I argue in the present section, these are more accurately
referred to as particular subjects or social concepts.
20
These systems adapt to evidence through the prescriptive feedback illustrated in Figure
2, in which the original belief is reinforced, thus motivating objects to behave as subjects. To
return to our stealing example, in which there are long-term incentives, people will choose
not to steal motivated by their observations of people not stealing. Exceptional observations
(i.e. deviation from the rule) may also be described (‘Jack steals’), conceptualised (‘Jack is a
thief’) and dealt with through further rules (‘thieves are punished’) for the purpose of
sustaining the original belief and the resulting common behaviour. Rules can then be
restated in terms of statuses and functions (e.g. ‘there are no thieves in the Hotel’, ‘Dick is
the guard’). However, Jack will have set a precedent that erodes the original belief and can
motivate others to join him, as we shall see later.
Prescriptive feedback is available for social rules and not for principles (Fig. 1) because
these descriptions are not of a natural kind; our words cannot command or motivate the
elements. However, our influence on the elements, and vice versa, means that there is a
relationship between natural principles and social rules we may call socio-natural. Describing
observed behaviour then involves a similar explanatory process as that in the previous
section, particularly in identifying basic patterns that repeat (e.g. people appear to not steal
…) in connection with natural facts (... because sharing tools enables them to solve more
problems), but this is limited by our having to use social concepts like ‘Jack’ or ‘group
member’ and so we wouldn’t say that these patterns are universal. For example, another
group might dedicate more time to the production of common tools and care less about
people sometimes taking them for themselves, which they might do to benefit the group.
(To provide a modern example, picture a successful business that contributes to the
community without which it could not exist.) Generally, we would not expect our socio-
natural beliefs to hold outside the group or see people we don’t recognise as members abide
by our rules, no matter how sensible the rules may seem to us. The natural fact of how
common resources in a group benefits its members in the long run may explain their use of
the concept of ‘thieves’ and their negative attitude toward them; but this explanation arises
21
from their seeking the benefit of membership in the first place, or otherwise being trapped
in the group.16
Hence, regardless of the abstract, seemingly rational level used to describe human
behaviour in these contexts, the subjects of propositions that express social rules must be
particular. ‘Jack’ or ‘Hotel guests’ are social concepts, distinct from the natural concepts that
inform our descriptive, rational explanations. The objects they describe are in a state of being
set by the prescriptive quality of these propositions, behaving more-or-less as subjects in the
context they have got themselves into or have been put into (e.g. we would see the object
‘Dick’ acting as the subject ‘guard’ in the context of ‘Hotel rules’). Again, the fact that these
situations involve intention (if only the intention to live and avoid harm) means that people
may not always behave as these subjects do, especially in voluntary situations. Still, we may
think of people (and things) as having a status associated with a certain expectation that
they become the subjects of social rules or particular subjects. This has an existential
connotation: the situation makes them ‘be’ something (a guard, a Flyers goalkeeper) which
resembles the universal subjects of descriptive propositions (a dog, a human being).
Furthermore, their socio-natural condition will make them be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (a good guard,
a bad goalkeeper). But it would be an error to argue that this being involves universal
properties (dogness, humanness) or rationality, because it is contingent on propositions that
are only valid locally. (This ‘error’ is morality.) Thus, unlike a dog or a human, a man who
behaves like a guard in a group without a rule against stealing would be called something
else (let alone a goalkeeper in a game of American football), no matter how much they
identify themselves with their role. Since social rules are not principles, their subjects or
statuses are not facts; they only incidentally refer to facts, such as the person who is a guard
or the building that is a Hotel.
Nevertheless, blurring the line between the social and the natural becomes useful when
moving toward understanding what morality is. Returning to the three-year-old’s mind, a
dog might become ‘a charlie’ if it were similar to Charlie, due to the social concept ‘Charlie’
being confused with a natural concept. Conversely, imagine they called their adopted pet,
16 Like many other organisms, when humans learn to solve problems and so become more adaptive, they are
more able to disperse. This makes membership to a group a decision made more freely, an evaluation of costs
and benefits that puts into question how people tend to perceive such membership. Moral argument typically
involves ‘reasons’ as to why membership is inevitable or even ‘contractual’. But this is, of course, inconsistent
with the way homo sapiens has dispersed throughout the planet, relied on trade, and existed for most of its
evolutionary history as roaming bands of hunters and gatherers.
22
‘dog‘, instead. The word becomes a proper name of sorts, ‘Dog‘, in an exclusive
psychological space. Other dogs are ‘dogs’, but not ‘Dog’. This might seem strange, but it is
what happens with the name ‘Father’, which refers both to a single individual and a
biological category. Learning a language, and learning to reason with it, need not involve
confusing social with natural concepts, but clearly, it does. It makes what one culture calls
a ‘father’ be something else in another culture that is not only out of place, but is also ‘bad’
and existentially objectionable. As a result of this offending ‘father’ being around, this group
of people would organise themselves much in the way we saw in the previous sections, as
if enacting natural principles.
3.2.1. Social rationality
It is understandable that socio-natural contingency would bring with it a contingent notion

of ‘rationality‘ that mixes social and natural concepts. Apart from our being unable to escape
nature (e.g. not having a father), there are natural reasons for any choice of rules or for the
strategies played in competition, including reasons of efficiency and maximum payoff such
as those studied in game theory. For example, if most people are stealing, it will probably
not be advantageous to persist in the strategy of refraining from it. This might be called
‘rationality’ in a practical or instrumental sense; game theory refers to players as being
‘rational’ in this sense. But this concerns problem-solving for biological individuals in a
universal context, not in a group.
Social rationality is the ability to explain the behaviour of players in a game or social
rules context by treating the rules as ‘principles’. Namely, it can be explained that if one is
constrained by a socio-natural environment according to a number of social rules, then an
action is ‘good’ or ‘rational’ because it is consistent with these rules (e.g. ‘the doors are
unlocked because people in the Hotel do not steal’) as well as with logic and physical reality.
This is a softer, more relaxed, more educational notion of goodness or rationality for such
prescriptive environment. It also applies when the rules outline a competitive setting. For
example, a valid chess move is a ‘good’ or socially rational move, even if it will cause one to
lose.
Social rationality may apply to a generic player or potential group member, such as
‘chess players’ or ‘the non-stealing Hotel guest’. For this reason, it might be confused with
practical rationality as providing solutions for ‘the individual‘. But these solutions cannot
be generalised to the biological individual. Whether a valid chess move or ‘not stealing‘ is
practically good or instrumentally rational depends on one's universal goals as such
23
individual, not on particular states of social equilibria.17 Perhaps losing a chess match means
that one will catch the last bus and be promoted at work. Contexts of rules like ‘people do
not steal’ and its secondary, ‘people steal sometimes’, also lend themselves to confusion.
When members believe in either proposition they enter a socio-rational conflict that can be
mistaken for a rational conflict, because it involves a particularisation resembling that of
natural principles discussed above. Let us see this in more detail.
Our example scenario begins with non-stealing as a behavioural state desired and
enforced by a particular set of objects, a group of people. In this context, it is ‘good’ or
‘rational’ to not take the common resources for oneself. This scenario is described by a
general rule, a proposition resembling a general principle, just as ‘organisms reproduce’ is
a proposition about an observable set of objects. To see Jack stealing then would amount to
making an exceptional observation that invalidates this belief and starts a revision of the
rules. Obedient people would preserve the original belief and correct or expel Jack from the
group (‘D1’), whereas deviant people can agree with Jack on a new belief regarding the
conditions under which ‘stealing’ will be practiced (‘D2’). (Again, we use ‘stealing’ for
comparison, though Jack’s group will probably apply such disapproving label to a more
invasive action.) In this clash, we would expect the former people to have a more idealistic,
holistic attitude regarding the validity of their uniform belief and social organisation;
compared to the latter, who see themselves as realists who cannot ignore the atomistic truth
of their own deviance, and who therefore seek a ‘conjecture’ regarding when stealing is good
or valid. This would manifest linguistically in there being ‘jacks’ for the first, and some other
way for the second to label the first.
At this point, we find the key difference with respect to natural principles. Of course,
tensions will ease from the need to stop cooperating with those who believe otherwise. This
will split the original group into two subgroups, each with their own prescriptive ‘reality’.
Whereas the former people conceptualised and dealt with ‘thieves’, the latter will do
likewise with, say, ‘fools’. Observed behaviour, to be cooperatively reproduced (stealing
sometimes) or cooperatively avoided, becomes a reference for further prescription. This
divides people into two particular groups seeking distinct equilibria (p1: not stealing, versus
17 Faced with the same practical problems, hominins from different proto-cultures worked out the same
solutions, such as fire and tools, since they were advantageous at the level of the individual (‘practical reason’).
On the other hand, cultural difference probably evolved because there are many ways to achieve group cohesion
(social rationality), though such cohesion was enhanced through what I call pseudo-rationality (section 3.3.1).
24
p2: stealing sometimes) and incentivises differentiation over enforcement. That is, insofar as
the purpose of rules is to establish beneficial social equilibria, the integrity of groups is
variable. Solving the problem of the commons takes precedence over the need for group
cohesion. This is clear in the case of p1. For the second group, the problem becomes that
people can still deviate and steal, under a new definition of ‘stealing’ as requiring a greater
invasiveness. There is rationality in this dynamic of relocation and reassociation as
individuals ‘scientifically’ determine who they can and cannot trust, or whether their beliefs
actually yield a benefit. This leads to their exercising and validating their respective social
beliefs in separate locations or through discrimination.
Certainly, as people negotiate their rules and conditions this way, it becomes difficult
to make any principled assertions about human behaviour with respect to taking control of
resources or anything else. That is because, in spite of the resemblance, describing the
natural behaviour of ‘people’ is wholly separate from descriptive prescription, as is the
purpose of finding patterns that repeat universally. There is no ‘here’ or ingroup boundary
limiting the concept of human organism, and so eventually we would find a descriptive
equilibrium (knowledge) regarding the expected properties of people whenever possible.
We would find ‘people use language as a tool’ and ‘people are decision-making social
animals’, not so much ‘people do not steal’ nor ‘people steal sometimes’. Social rules are
thus mere propositions without principled force, whose importance (why one prefers e.g.
the rule p1, which resembles D1) is prescriptive and not a function of explanatory power,
no matter how much we would like to argue for our exclusive social arrangement. In other
words, the difference between understanding a game and understanding the world is that
the former involves social rules and the latter principles; and given the contingency of the
former kind of propositions, only a purely descriptive mode of mental representation can
be explanatorily powerful. Thus, if Jack pleads innocent for his original stealing action, he
might attempt to give a good explanation about the benefits of his action against our own
explanation that he must not steal. But we would part ways under the recognition that these
are not absolute claims.
These group-bounded ideas of prescriptive importance and prescriptive explanation
will be descriptively important later, when looking at morality from a perspective devoid
of such cognitive constraints. Again, because of the strong influence of morality, which
conflates them, these formal parallels between the social and the natural lead to confusion
and are worth exploring. For instance, if we apply the social rule ‘the people in the Hotel do
not steal’ and we find Jack stealing, we might be more inclined to describe him as a separate
category of people (‘he is a thief!’) because stealing is an important property for our
purposes; but this might not be an accurate estimation of his tendency to steal outside this
normative context, i.e. his natural tendency. Similarly, we would not attempt to establish
25
that rhesus macaques (who are notorious for it) ‘do not steal’ on the basis of a situation in
which we have conditioned them not to.
Summing up, social rules define a system of belief about the intended and actual behaviour
of a group of people and its effects. The purpose of this system is to create a state of being
that involves social and natural elements, introducing human causality. Along with the
benefits it brings, we would expect things, people and actions to be evaluated as ‘good’ or
‘bad’, this leading to non-moral prohibitions, habits, intuitions, and the corresponding
prosocial emotions that we begin to see in non-human primates. The social rationality in
these arrangements of mutual trust (e.g. it is good to keep tools by the campfire if ‘people
do not steal’, and to keep them individually if ‘people steal sometimes’) is demonstrated
through the lack of necessary group integrity; a more sensible form of justice. When
individuals are free to cooperate in this manner, they are more able to benefit from the rules
they live by, which puts into question the need for a universal formulation of such rules. 18
Social rules are equally capable of shaping perception, cognition and emotion through
evolutionary time, as they are the prescriptive essence of morality. Children create social
‘realities’ in play, which are clearly not institutional, but which still condition their
perception. Any features of reality (e.g. ‘guards’ and ‘common property’ for those who want
the rule ‘people do not steal in the Hotel’) may appear enhanced to the individual because
they serve a social purpose and there are biological incentives to participate in it, but they
are not objective like the reality that supports them. They are intersubjective: a projection of
the subjects of social rules onto factual, natural-theory-laden objects that happens in the
minds of a group of people. These particular subjects inform prescriptive explanations,
which must build on the universal subjects of descriptive explanations because we
ultimately live in reality. The former are fictional in comparison to the latter. Evolutionarily
speaking, and bearing in mind the ubiquity of deception in nature, there is pressure for a
kind of prescription that confuses such distinction between reality and fiction, and thereby
elicits responses to something ‘real’. Thus, one might experience that things universally ‘are’
as they have been defined within a persistent context of rules, especially that they ‘are good’
18 This has been recently corroborated by an important study on captive chimpanzees [65]. It suggests that an
understanding of morality cannot be found in the ‘premoral sentiments’ of the great apes, although this is the
sentiment that has influenced such line of research [14; 21; 59]. In other words, researchers are victims of the
confusion I am pointing out, and see a continuity between the instinctive ‘social rules’ of non-human primates
and their deceptive, abstract manifestation in the form of human morality.
26
or ‘are bad’; but that is only a matter of resemblance, and it is never to the advantage of a
learning animal to be fully convinced of it.
3.2.2. An unusual clash of cultures
In light of the above, one could picture the remains of an ancient, moral civilisation as those
of a civilisation that simply took social rules too seriously. Imagine that we are a more
sensible, stable form of the second kind of civilisation, and the only humans we have ever
seen. We are advanced, wealthy, benevolent and have just arrived in pre-colonial America.
We have overwhelming power over the Indians. They take us for their Gods and are willing
to obey us, whereas we see them biologically, as people largely equal to ourselves.
Let the Indians represent the case of p2 above: They do not consider a violation of p1 as
stealing, but more invasive actions. They tend to take individual control of resources that
we consider common, such as ‘tools by the campfire’ or ‘toys in the playroom’ because they
expect others will do likewise. In their less trustful social equilibrium around ‘stealing’, they
have a retributive attitude about actions that they consider as ‘stealing first’, but this is now
a moral attitude.
We are very much unlike them and invest in our common resources. This has always
seemed to us a fact of human behaviour, as beneficial as using language or breathing:
‘people do not steal’ (D1).19 Seeing what the Indians do has made us revise this belief and
seek a better explanation of human behaviour. For their part, the Indians observe that ‘Gods
do not steal’. Suppose that given the power they grant us, with minimal interference, we
begin a process of social rule creation for Indians that strictly adapts to their moral behaviour.
We refer to them as ‘people’ in their particular, American context and tongue. That is, we
immerse ourselves in their social environment and systematically make Indian objects the
subjects of propositions, such as ‘people steal sometimes’, who will act as they descriptively
prescribe just as those Indians would have acted anyway (Fig. 2). They are very pleased with
us as a result, since we have come to reassert their way of life and have accepted our godly
title.
Have these rules suddenly become moral? The answer is surely no. Indians would
interpret our proposition ‘people steal sometimes’ with greater force (e.g. ‘people ought to
19 Richard Joyce refers to this kind of people as having inhibitions, as opposed to prohibitions [11]. Social rules
do imply prohibitions, but, as I have described, they can potentially shape groups of people ‘oozing prosocial
emotions’ [29] (p. 50), or otherwise make dealing with violations a mere practical matter.
27
steal sometimes!’) but that is not exactly what we mean. However, working our way from
natural facts and principles through social rules, we have arrived at a system of belief that
almost matches theirs. We can predict when particular Indians will probably steal, just as
we can predict that none of us will steal. Correspondingly, they can predict that they
themselves will steal when stolen from, just as they know that ´Gods do not steal´. What is
the missing ingredient making their system moral and not ours? From an intuitive
perspective, this seems like a matter of attitude. But from our more conscious perspective,
it appears that they do not interpret ‘people’ as a social concept: They are obeying and take
our rules to be ‘principles’, which explains why they feel we are superhuman.
3.3. Social principles
Continuing our thought experiment, we immerse ourselves in the ‘social mind’ of the
Indians, whom we now represent through natural concepts. We have arrived at a system of
belief that involves basic, ‘descriptive’ propositions such as that they ‘steal sometimes‘.
However, inasmuch as these Indians seem to be human beings, the rules we impose on them
become ‘people steal sometimes’ also in our language. This forces us to choose between not
stealing and stealing sometimes due to the prescriptive function of these rules turned
principles. Since we do not steal nor have any intention to, we produce the two separate
principles ‘people do not steal’ (D1) and ‘Indians steal sometimes’, where the subjects
‘people’ and ‘Indians’ are particular universal-subjects (or natural concepts), the latter being
the equivalent of ‘jacks’ in the section on principles (3.1).
Without this cognitive shift, we would have simply particularised the property of
stealing: we would have chosen ‘people steal sometimes’ as a new descriptor of human
behaviour by examining the exceptional evidence gathered from America, because it seems
to fit a better explanation of biological reality. Thus, it is the underlying prescription that
makes non-stealing an important property of subjects, not explanatory power, and, in turn,
forces us to pick D1 in holistic attitude. We have effectively created ‘Indians’ as a separate
category of living organism, adopted the same attitude as the Indians in our American
godlike activity, and given up descriptive accuracy. We now mean that Indians ought to steal
sometimes. We also find that our description of ourselves as people who do not steal
acquires a prescriptive quality it didn’t have before. It is an absolute claim to being (‘it ought
to be that people do not steal, and only Indians do’) which must be in our nature to follow,
not only seem to be in our nature. We have become another moral group, ‘a society’, and
established a universal prohibition on stealing, a social ‘principle’.
Of course, this story is not that dissimilar from what happens in any such historical
encounter between two cultures. Their moral view of each other produces descriptions that
28
either dehumanise or deify. But because we’re aware of what we are doing in this thought
experiment, that we are tricking or deceiving ourselves, we are not so happy with it. We
would much rather keep considering everyone as people and avoid having to defend our
way of life. We are also especially annoyed and ambivalent about the Indians, because
inasmuch as they naturally seem to be people equal to ourselves, they now ought to abide
by our contrived principle to not steal. Prescription seems to be working along with
description so that we will have to be violent and integrate them. However, not all of our
needs are conscious, and this socially cohesive tendency suggests that there are clear
biological incentives for the evolution of such cognitive confusion, as I shall address below.
I must emphasise that none of this drama would have happened if we had continued
to think of ‘Indians’ as children who pretend play, instead of as children to be socialised. If
they were the particular subjects of social rules, ‘people steal sometimes’ would have simply
been a descriptive prescription implicit in the Indian game, like the command ‘Indian, steal
when stolen from!’ Besides, as I have explained, our observations that we do not follow their
vengeful stealing rule would have still been compatible with a descriptive principle like
‘people steal sometimes’, ‘Indians steal sometimes and non-Indians do not’, or any other
principle we might have regarded to accurately describe the nature of the observed
behaviour, if there were such a nature. It is the turning of social rules onto principles that
has had a definite segregating effect as well as an unexpected, prescriptive effect on
ourselves. I shall call this mode of representation prescriptive description.
Notice that prescriptive description seems the opposite of social rules (descriptive
prescription), yet it seems absurd to say that these principles are a ‘prescriptive form of
description’ or ‘descriptions turned prescriptive’, as that would defeat the explanatory
purpose of natural description and its deliberative attitude. Prescription can be descriptive,
but description cannot be prescriptive. What we have is an effective confusion of these: a
prescription through a claim to descriptive knowledge that must be self-deceptive and, one
would expect, anxiety producing. Conversely, we would expect situations that elicit this
anxiety to activate such constrained mode of representation. There is increasing
experimental evidence for this,3, 7, 24 though it still underrepresents (no pun intended) the
presence of morality in our everyday theorising and experimenting.
Hence, we have arrived at a definition of morality. Social principles are a refinement
over social rules and the highest level of prescription, whereby behaviour can be absolutely
commanded through claims to natural knowledge. Picture the context of a parent
admonishing a child and saying ‘people do not steal’. The same descriptive utterance has
acquired a different meaning or illocutionary force. Namely, it is ‘impossible’ that people
steal; people ought not be found stealing. This is a step up in terms of abstraction over the
social rule ‘people do not steal’ (in a place, in a group, or even in a kind of group) and, in
29
turn, over the simple command ‘do not steal’. Conversely, utterances that are prescriptive
in form like ‘do not steal’ acquire a moral meaning through their association with principles.
Description is no longer merely the expression of prescriptive belief, but is definitely
conflated with prescription, which is why social rationality, as defined above, is so often
interpreted morally as ‘rationality’. 20
This linguistic device now equates subjects to objects in the universal context that is
described by natural principles (Fig. 3), expecting them to behave like the elements. It turns
a human being into some sort of acting natural category: a paradoxical universal object that
must act as an object according to its function as the subject of propositions about itself in
the world. Ontologically speaking, what has happened is that the group’s behavioural
equilibrium has been projected beyond its own confines, within which members can have a
strategically reliable belief about each other's actions. The social belief that ‘we do not steal’
now refers to ‘we’ as an undetermined, ideal group of people; it becomes absolute and
blindly imposes the quality of natural concepts (knowledge) onto objects (being) a priori,
thus making them ‘universal’. A primary form of this is ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ words, which
denote a universal quality but are applied exclusively to specific individuals; a sort of
common–proper noun that mixes an act of natural reference (‘I wonder who my father is’)
with an act of address (‘Father, why did you forsake me!’)
Such claim to human nature now does require metaphysics proper, and a concern with
certainty. It implies an existential condition (‘being people‘, ‘being a father’) commonly
noted through the properties of moral goodness or badness (‘good people do not steal’, ‘bad
fathers do not take care of their children’) which leads to a certain state of behaviour. To use
our original example, the three-year-old would have to call her siblings ´bad´ if she sided
with her mother and them with their father, and this is akin to the above dehumanisation of
Indians, if not its developmental origin. Without the cognitive incentive that universalises
the notion of ´good´ (or ‘mother’) this would not affect the girl's description of dogs as quite
20 Notably by John Searle in the Construction of Social Reality [58], p. 36: ‘even in the case of games, there are
systematic dependencies on other forms of institutional facts. The position of the pitcher, the catcher, and the
batter, for example, all involve rights and responsibilities; and their positions and actions or inactions are
unintelligible without an understanding of these rights and responsibilities; but these notions are in turn
unintelligible without the general notion of rights and responsibilities.’ Which presumably addresses the circular
arguments in a more popular classic, The Social Construction of Reality [8] (p. 54): ‘Institutionalization occurs
whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by [institutional]types of actors. Put
differently, any such typification is an institution.’
30
similar to wolves, a canine; because ‘good’ would refer to a particular context of social rules,
whether such context is isolated or repeatedly expected in time and space, like a game of
chess or a type of Hotel in which guests do not steal. Instead, ‘good’ makes a (holistic)
behavioural distinction between ‘dogs’ and other canines at the level of biology. The
distinction may begin as an ideal, but it eventually produces pets. (This is how we would
expect domestication to have taken place; not so much as the result of human desires but
human desirability.) Similarly, in order to arrive at a biological explanation of fatherhood,
one would have to avoid picturing all males who are socially called ‘Dad’ as fathers.
Back to the Indians, we regard them as ‘bad’ or inhuman to some degree, because they
do not follow the ‘law of nature’ we have come up with. Our appearing like gods to them is
also counterpart to how they would dehumanise us for not following their own law of
stealing when stolen from, if we were not so powerful (picture how often the dominant
become leaders who are exempted from the norms). All while each culture still wishes to
change the other because such dehumanisation is descriptively incorrect. These two distinct
attitudes therefore appear together as conflicting socialisation devices, not as solutions to
problems of social coordination which is the purpose of social rules. They appear as the
result of the impossibility to ‘prescriptively describe’ the behaviour of volitional agents
(who might find use in breaking those rules) under general principles. They therefore
appear both as intersubjective (group) and subjective (individual) representations, which
historically and prehistorically 21 has been in the form of the Golden Rule versus the Law of
Retribution. Indeed, one may not steal back because one ought to treat one’s neighbour as
one would like to be treated; but stealing back might be what one ought to do sometimes, if
only to be treated as one would like to be treated. Both attitudes have in common the desire
to be ‘treated well’ by an indefinite number of people.
Nevertheless, the idea that a human being has become a wilful natural object, which
can break the absolute laws it is supposed to conform to, is central to the following analysis
of morality’s pseudo-natural reality.
21 Compare, for example, the greater egalitarianism of traditional societies in Natural Justice [17] with their feuds
and greater homicide rates in War Before Civilization [18].
31
Figure 3. Social principles are fundamental propositions of prescriptive belief whose universal subjects
describe objects (!) They involve a cognitive conflation where mental representations of knowledge
‘exist’ or acquire ontological status.
3.3.1. Pseudo-rationality
Since social principles (P) build on social rules, their explanatory process must rely on
prescription and a similar feedback or belief reinforcement (Fig. 3). Moral rules also direct
their descriptive expectations back into being, but these are now universal expectations
(‘knowledge’). Our words supposedly command the elements because they already
command people as elements. This way morality makes use of the fact that we may explain
the socio-natural situation that social rules generate (social rationality) in order to portray
itself as naturally descriptive. Where social rationality was the ability to explain the
behaviour of players in a game or social rules context by appealing to the rules as
‘principles’, pseudo-rationality is the pretension that those are universal scenarios and that
the rules are indeed principles.
Hence, social rationality becomes a source of ex post justification for pseudo-principles.
Suppose our original social group enacts and morally believes that ‘people do not steal’.
They could practically benefit from their common access to resources (e.g. tools can be found
by the campfire), which they will use to justify such principle in an explanation of their own
behaviour. Conversely, if another group agrees upon the belief that ‘stealing sometimes’
and allocating tools individually is moral, they will be less vulnerable to theft, a fact they
will use to justify their own principle. It is universally easier to access a variety of resources
if they are shared, and it is universally harder for them to get stolen if they are not shared;
both arrangements have their own natural advantage. Thus, the concept of social goodness
resulting from social rules (‘it is good to keep tools by the campfire because we intend to be
group members and have easy access’ / ‘it is good to keep tools for oneself because we intend
to be group members and avoid theft’) acquires universality in both cases from a prescriptive
approach to natural description. When Jack pleads innocent for stealing, he now faces our
32
group on a mode of explanation that appears to seek explanatory power, as he argues

against our ‘descriptive’ or prescriptive-descriptive explanation that he ought not steal, and
therefore that he ought to belong to our group. 22 Jack is no longer allowed to disperse with
his own group of ‘thieves’ but has to be punished and remain in the constrained
psychological space of ‘society’.
Continuing the parallel with social rules, our group would start with an equilibrium set
by general principles (G) such as ‘people do not steal’, which is challenged by exceptional
observations of people who steal sometimes. These deviant people would then agree to
justify their stealing through the particular principle that ‘people steal sometimes’ under
whatever conditions, but this extends also to the former people in its universality. The
descriptive feedback or belief reinforcement is now open; it transcends any closed
boundaries and concerns the undetermined set of objects conceptualised by the subject
‘people’. We might have never seen many people, but our respective moral beliefs guarantee
in our minds that they will steal sometimes, or not steal. Thus, there is no group-splitting in
this situation and the two prescriptive intentions coexist in the same ‘society’ (common
noun) as if it were the universe, ‘society’ (proper noun). Social principles have created a
game-theoretical ‘battle of the sexes’, which impedes the solution to each problem of the
commons in a context of social rules.14 And the reason is, arguably, that there is a greater
reproductive incentive to remain together. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to explain why
the greater cognitive effort and stresses this generates would evolve.
Let us illustrate how this turns into an epistemological battle by assuming that a
majority prefers the general principle, against a minority that steals sometimes and negates
it. The majority would have to particularise the subject as we did earlier against the Indians
(choose ‘D1’). But now the minority cannot be dehumanised so quickly, because they are
(prescriptively) regarded as group members as well as (descriptively) under ‘D1’ by virtue
of their being ‘people’, as we were then ourselves. Those who don’t steal are therefore
idealised by the majority against the biological reality of those who do: they are ‘morally
22 Here both parties will have more intensely negative feelings than in the social rules context. Feelings of shame,
guilt and self-rejection, whose existential quality is unlike what one would experience if the rule and its
explanation were purely prescriptive. Who hasn’t felt like this as a child after being told off for not obeying a
(moral) rule. Say, for example, cleaning after yourself. The rule might be justified through the socio-rational
explanation that each diner adds to the overall job of cleaning the table. But the need to clean the table is
essentially arbitrary. It is a game, but it gets treated as a principle.
33
good’. Correspondingly, the stealing minority has to particularise the property (choose ‘D2’)
in order to establish the ideal of people who steal sometimes against the reality of a majority
that doesn’t. (If the Indians had not regarded us as gods before, but as people like themselves
in a common society, then this would be the ideal they would have tried to impose on us if
they could.) In the first case, stealing is an important property for a definition of universal
subject; ideal subjects do not have it. Whereas in the second, stealing is of secondary
importance, but ideal subjects ought to have it, under whatever conditions, thus denying
the first principle and establishing a second. Either way, the subject has to be idealised as a
consequence of prescription applying to everyone in the group-as-universe, which didn’t
need to happen in the case of social rules because they were extended to particular members
only. Idealisation didn’t need to happen in the case of descriptive principles either, because
objects could be openly categorised together (as ‘people’) or separately (as ‘people’ and
‘jacks’) until arriving at a universal explanation without the need for goodness or badness
(other than our calling it a ‘good explanation’ out of sheer epistemic enjoyment). But
idealisation is, for this reason, merely the positive side of the dehumanisation that takes
place between separate groups and their respective universes (if we assume that being
human is positive). Both attitudes of calling the other morally ‘good’ or ‘bad’ carry the same
‘natural’ discrimination.
Resembling natural description, then, the wilful negation of the general principle by the
occasional thief results in the following two optional principles:
● The 1st prescriptive particular (P1): preserves the uniformity of the general social
principle by describing an ideal universal subject (‘Good or Ideal People do not
steal’).
● The 2nd prescriptive particular (P2): breaks the uniformity of the general social
principle by describing particular negations of the property for an ideal universal
subject (‘Good or Ideal People steal sometimes’).
Description becomes an idealistic affair between (holistically) rejecting exceptions to the

general principle and (atomistically) affirming them, because the group’s categorical,
‘natural’ integrity is of primary importance. The resulting particular principles represent
this social ideal through a behavioural property that is important in P1, and not so important
in P2.
This is the equivalent of rejecting mules as ‘not organisms’ because they cannot
reproduce (they are not ‘ideal organisms’) versus affirming that organisms ought to not
reproduce in certain instances (so that they be ‘ideal organisms’, see Table 1). Choosing any
one of the two options against the other is an appeal to a principled view of the world, and
34
in that an attempt to prescribe behaviour through rational persuasion, whether ‘reason’ or

‘inference’ is invoked or not; because rationality, as we have seen, is fundamentally a search
for principles. Social rationality takes place when the subjects of description are particular,
i.e. refer to a specific set of objects in a game or context of human intention. But the rational
faculty is primarily natural; it makes appraisals of regular patterns in an open-ended
universe of objects. Hence, saying that social arrangements such as ‘people do not steal’ may
be universal is a pretension of rationality; it betrays an honest depiction of the world, which
cannot be ultimately admitted, and must be disguised.
In consequence, what philosophy has traditionally referred to as ‘rationality’ in a
prescriptive context is better described as pseudo-rationality. Where rationality involves the
descriptive choice of principles and a hard separation between subject and object, pseudo-
rationality involves the prescriptive and purportedly descriptive choice of principles, as
well as the idealistic conflation of subject and object (Fig. 3). Society is understood in the
same way as the world, through ‘universal’ objects and ‘descriptive’ explanations where
social and natural concepts are indistinguishable. As I mentioned, this is a consequence of
the claim to objective being and truth that moral or social principles necessitate in their
function as rules or prescriptive beliefs. The role of metaphysics here is to establish such
ontological certainty (see section 4).
Table 1. Systems of belief by type.
‘People do not ‘Organisms Mode Explanation Subjects

steal’ means reproduce’
means
Natural people do not organisms description descriptive universal

appear to steal appear to
reproduce
Social group members group members descriptive prescriptive particular

ensure that they ensure the prescription
will not steal reproduction of
organisms
Moral it ought to be that it ought to be prescriptive ‘descriptive’ ‘universal’

people do not steal that organisms description (!)
reproduce
3.3.2. Holism versus atomism
Because of the asymmetry introduced by volitional agents in a descriptive context, the two
alternative particular principles may be represented in Figure 3 by the placement of their
prescribed objects respectively further from or closer to objects. We may picture P1 as
35
overlapping less with the reality that people can and do steal sometimes, and P2 as
overlapping more. The placement of rational, mental representation or ‘knowledge’ to the
left of the diagram, and the overlap as a whole, depicts the ontological conflation of
universal subject and object. Observations of human actions that do not match expectations
are thought to be ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ in both cases: In the first case, because of the claim to an
ideal reality where the property of non-stealing characterises human subjects. In the second,
because of the claim to an ideal reality where people must steal sometimes, where ‘people
do not steal’ cannot be true because there is a ‘problem of induction’ about it. P1 is explicitly
idealistic because objects are able to refute it through their stealing or deviance, whereas P2
is implicitly idealistic or ‘realistic’, for it approaches such ability. But they are both idealistic
inasmuch as they are challenged in a direction of uniformity (toward not stealing) or the
lack of it (toward ‘stealing sometimes’ or stealing more invasively). Conversely,
observations that match expectations are said to be ‘good’ or ‘right’ because they are
interpreted ‘rationally’: explicitly rationally (as in moral rationalism) because the resulting
socio-natural order is their own ‘proof’ or ‘justification’; or implicitly rationally (moral
intuitionism) through appeals to emotions and scepticism about such order and its benefits.
That is, observations no longer merely work to reinforce either social belief, as they do in
the rules case, but to provide a ‘reason’ or an ‘intuition’, respectively, which are both
pseudo-rational justifications for it. For instance, the rule ‘people do not steal in the Hotel’
determines a certain socio-natural order and this would be interpreted as being ‘right’, as
would the alternative rule ‘people steal sometimes in the Hotel’.
This asymmetry between the 1st and the 2nd prescriptive particulars is the source of
the epistemological conflict that I discussed in my chessboard analogy (section 3.1.2), and
whose development I hinted at in the section on social rules (3.2), if not throughout the
paper. Social principles bring a lack of distinction between human and other objects, which
means projecting society onto the universe as religious myths do. The ‘chessboard reality’
is therefore not questioned: If objects behave ideally ‘right’ as the general principle states
(for the white knight) then P1 is a valid inductive generalisation, not vulnerable to disproof
by objects possibly behaving ‘wrong’ (the chess pieces move in unexpected ways). However,
since objects will ‘disprove’ P1 sometimes, then these become the ideal objects of more
complex generalisations like P2 (for the black knight) which carry forward the now attested
falsifiability of the former principles and whose universal objects behave ‘right’ in
opposition to those former principles (e.g. ‘the rook becomes a queen once in every game’,
which is not valid in chess, against the laws postulated by the white knight). Non-
vulnerability and uniformity is the ideal in the first case, and vulnerability and variability is
36
the ideal23 in the second. As I have been arguing, this is an essentially moral, unnecessary
conflict between a holistic and an atomistic epistemological attitude, to be further elucidated
in the following section. I do not see any other way of explaining why scientists, even
biologists, often defend their theoretical positions as someone favours their own culture.
4. Morality as natural idealism
Prescriptive description is as clumsy a means for social coordination as it is circular in its

claim to reality and certainty. It is the moral will that mixes the social with the natural in
pseudo-rational idealism and hinders the organic production of good explanations. In this
view, the ‘dog’ our three-year-old has never seen (section 2) exists as a universal object that
steals toys. In the same way, ‘bad guys’ exist as creatures who steal in the mind of her
mother, together with the ideal of ‘good guys’. Seeing the actual dog would not change this
paradoxical representation, and her expectation would remain that it is impossible to see it
not taking the toys if given the chance. If the dog became ‘good’ and accepted, this would
bring the same rigidity to her perception of it as not being ‘physically’ able to steal toys
instead. Indeed, children will often report that immoral actions are impossible, especially in
an experimental setting.24
Such idealism is ontological because it involves making rational conclusions about
being. This strongly impacts the child, whose representation of the world and its actual
possibilities is as small as the home. It is a description of a desired and necessary (i.e.
‘desirable’) state of behaviour and its effects, which ought to be true in the sense of a natural
23 As Popper wrote in another strange analogy, the scientist or the philosopher should marry the problem ‘till
death do ye part’ [44] (p. 8). By definition, this would keep the philosopher from pursuing the further problems
that await, whether they be ‘more fascinating’ or ‘problem children’ (p. 8). Or it would otherwise bring him a
rather stressful family life.
24 The research tends to report that children have a greater tendency than adults to say that things are impossible
[40]. As far as I am aware, researchers have not considered that children might be highly sensitive to their
experiments due to the language game in which they are probably conducted, and, basically, their cognitive
position as children. Their deliberative activities are more likely to be private, like our own. It is therefore
unlikely that these results demonstrate that they haven’t developed such an ability. It is not necessary to set up
an experiment to know that children will consider wild possibilities, both regarding knowledge and action, when
given enough space. Nor do we need to go very far to find evidence of someone’s shock at unusual events they
call ‘impossible!’, particularly social events. An adult’s ability to deliberate can be constrained by the same
pressures at their own level.
37
law. Thus, in any such moral ‘Group’ of people who coordinate their actions, but which is
so taken to be the universe through language, ‘people ought not steal’ translates as: the
descriptive belief that ‘People do not steal’ is true, resulting in the following circularity: if
‘People’ do not steal, then it will be that whoever does not actually steal, anywhere, is
‘people’, which, in turn, allows one to ‘infer’ the generalisation that ‘people do not steal’.
This might be easier to see in the case of a concept about which we have stronger moral
intuitions. Suppose I, as a child, think: if Mother and Father take care of their children, then
it will be that whoever takes care of their children, anywhere, is a mother or a father (or a
parent). From this, I ‘infer’ that ‘parents take care of their children’. Similarly, if ‘Dog’ does
not steal toys, then, ‘rationally’, ‘dogs do not steal toys’.
Hence, the non-rationalist moral philosopher would agree about the lack of inference
in establishing morals, but disagree about the use of inference his own moral position
implies, namely, how he has arrived at the ontological principles such moral position
necessitates. In other words, one does infer an ought from an is that one believes ought to be,
since nature must be obeyed. David Hume, effectively, said ‘The Individual steals
sometimes’ when he discussed his ‘sensible knave’ [37]. He argued for an egocentric
scepticism that frees the subject from reality in the same way as he is ‘free from morality’.
Whereas Immanuel Kant argued for a sociocentric conviction that should not enable the
subject’s freedom from reality nor morality. We can see that both are forms of a natural
idealism in their denial of external and internal reality, respectively, and that they are
opposed.
These conceptions of rationality, being or truth are often the cause of heated debates,
especially in their political form, because morality so underlies them. Following the above
circularity, then, one would expect to see a moral and ontological idealism in people, from
which the corresponding epistemological idealism arises, which in turn supports the former
ontology, and so on. I have also shown how social principles attempt to validate themselves
through the prescription of behaviour within the group, which creates a dialectic between
two opposing types of descriptive principle. I call those who argue for P1 holists and those
who argue for P2 atomists. (It would be interesting to see how this relates to the personality,
though I do not mean to express a personality judgement but to describe psychological
traits.) Both are idealists in the sense that they must create a metaphysics where moral
behaviour takes place independently of reality. Their respective idealist ontologies
emphasise similarity and universality, versus difference and particularity, through what I
have paradoxically called universal objects. This dialectic manifests in prescriptive (moral)
and ‘descriptive’ (ontological and epistemological) argumentation.
Of course, ontologically speaking holists will tend to idealise the universal. They will
be moral rationalists because this preserves the uniformity of the general principle: the
38
‘duty’ of the object is to approach the existence that can be rationally inferred.
Epistemologically, holists will not value empirical falsification because particular human
behaviour can always contradict P1. Therefore, they will support holistic conceptions of
truth and the reasoning from induction.
Conversely, atomists will tend to support the ontological ideal of the particular, like
Aristotle. They will be moral empiricists because their prescriptive intention breaks the
uniformity of the general principle through particular instances of deviance: the ‘duty’ of
the object now is to claim rationality and universality for the conditions that justify its
exceptional behaviour. Epistemologically, atomists will value empirical falsification because
human behaviour can determine it. Therefore, they will support atomistic conceptions of
truth and the reasoning from fallible conjecture.
Thus, there is one line of thinking extending all the way from the Platonic world of
forms to the Kuhnian paradigms, and another one from the Aristotelian world of the senses
to the Popperian anti-paradigms, both motivated by what they have in common, and which
I submit is the need to justify the social principles of culture. Similarly, moral philosophy
finds distinction in realism versus anti-realism, or between common and individual utility.
In a sociological vein, it is between ‘the social construction of reality’ [8] and ‘the
construction of social reality’ [58]. In psychology, it is between those who disregard
evolution and those who overemphasise it [69]. In moral psychology, it is between the two
choices available to Heinz, who considers stealing a drug to save his wife [31], or between
the two choices offered by the many versions of the popular ‘trolley problem’.25 In
psychoanalysis, it is between the relational and classical narratives of the human condition
[62]. A satisfactory discussion of these different manifestations is beyond the scope of the
present work, though the next section provides further insight.
5. Evidence and origins
Morality is everywhere. A clear definition of it must surely find support in a great if not
overwhelming amount of evidence. Here I attempt to outline it and provide some structure,
as well as propose why we became moral animals. Thinking of morality as social principles
is paradoxical because it introduces universality into the concreteness of human action: how
25 Many would agree [7] that ‘trolleyology’ is a questionable conception of ethics, to say the least, but there’s a
reason it has captivated the philosophical imagination.
39
can a natural law be followed by an agent with the capacity to violate it? Then again, this is
a very familiar, omnipresent paradox. In St. Augustine’s version of it, one can be condemned
to eternal damnation by God unless one has control of one’s will (idealisation, prescription),
but failure to control one’s will is predetermined by God (dehumanisation, description).
Indeed, the possibility that humans fail to conform to ‘absolute social norm’ is a priori
consistent with the moral appeal to our betterment, and it is obviously consistent with
evolutionary logic and common sense. Being able to break these norms sometimes,
especially without others noticing, is the advantage and ‘original sin’ of what we inevitably
are: living organisms under natural selection.
The paradox is intrinsic to myth and its cosmological and sociological functions. But
just as saying that ‘children steal because they are bad’ is a bad explanation, so is saying that
human societies ‘need’ to explain the world they live in or justify their social order. If
anything, a need to convince individuals about the cosmic/social order is a sign that
something about such order might be against their best interest. Other social animals
certainly manage life as a group without such efforts. For an explanatory animal, we
certainly don't have a good explanation as to why describing the workings of the
environment and planning our actions about it should be extrapolated to the cosmos at
large, let alone how this should confer a selective advantage.
Therefore, I shall propose the following hypothesis in the light of the previous sections
and the present discussion of the evidence: The cognitive conflation of social with natural
concepts has evolved to be a strong feature of our psyche because it harnesses the power of
rationality for the biasing of cooperation toward the ingroup. Indeed, such conflation is the
linguistic essence of all kinship and marriage systems, which rely on mama and papa words.
It allows self-domesticating, competing groups to maximise their own reproductive
potential by projecting their group concept beyond its practical, ecological boundaries and
onto the universal, phylogenetic scenario. This explains why our capacity for problem-
solving has not extended to the kind of ecological problems I illustrated in section 3.2,
though we are certainly able to solve them in contexts of voluntary association. There
appears to be a major incentive for social cohesion, beginning with families and clans,
because this maximises our reproductive success [6] in the long run. This makes us relatively
conscious and stressed about the conflicts such cohesion brings, but unconscious about why
we ‘must’ keep having them.
The paradox of social principles also highlights the psychological nature of the
phenomenon as a whole, and it would manifest itself in three forms that have been part of
my previous analysis of belief. Firstly, at the inter-group level, we would expect languages
that confuse the distinction between the universal and the particular in order to emphasise
the primacy of one’s group. At the intra-group level, we would see ontological and
40
epistemological theories that fall into the two opposing categories of pseudo-rationality
identified above. But, primarily, we would see a personal motivation to argue for a
description of the world that cannot hold and must be self-deceptive.
5.1. Us versus us
If language conferred an evolutionary advantage on certain hominins it was probably

related to the capacity to elicit cooperation from certain others who were actually or
potentially related, and refuse it to the rest. Therefore, the concept of one’s group as a
particular, identifiable set of objects would have been a main propositional referent. As we
have seen, saying that something is the case within a group of people, like ‘we do not steal’,
can imply a socio-rational rule that brings it about and maintains it (descriptive
prescription). But an enhanced primacy for the group and its shared language would easily
come about through a universal interpretation of the rule, as ‘people do not steal’, if it were
not interpreted universally to begin with. This projection would allow the group to expand
inasmuch as the offspring’s representation of ‘the world’ remains limited to such group,
though there would be competing interests also within the group. Thus, politicians still often
address ‘the people’, when they really mean a subset of people (their fellow nationals), just
as some tribes call themselves ‘the people’ in their own language; or we will refer to ‘society’
when we really mean our society. Saying that something is (in the sense of ‘ought to be’) the
case with the group then becomes a principle involving ‘rationality’.
That pseudo-rationality is an old, common, yet elusive linguistic phenomenon is
registered in language itself. Probably no language [38] (p. 28) offers a formal distinction for
expressing what might be impossible to learn about the world (e.g. that there can’t be any
bacteria in the sun) versus what is impossible a priori (that there can’t be any bacteria in the
sun by virtue of theoretical formalisms) or between the epistemic and alethic modalities [34;
39]. This directly implicates moral claims to the reality of human objects (prescription) and
their necessary inference of such reality (description). Again, we see that in a context of
social rules, one may equate a posteriori what one observes (particular objects) with what one
expects (particular subjects). On the other hand, social principles require these to be equated
a priori, as if objects could be universal. Therefore, it is plausible that language co-evolved
with morality to lack a distinction between the belief of what is being prescribed (epistemic
modality) and the logical necessity of it (alethic modality): What the moral self believes must
surely ‘ought to be’, be knowledge in the traditional sense, and be such matter of contention.
And what it does not believe must surely be ‘impossible’ [40]. For example, the moral
prescription ‘you ought not φ’ is often phrased in English and other languages in the form
41
of a prediction (‘you shall not φ’), a practical necessity (‘you cannot φ’), or a human necessity
(‘you need not φ’), all of which will be understood descriptively in a descriptive context.
The omnipresence of morality in discourse provides many more examples, like the
double meaning of ‘meaning’ (intention 26 versus reference). As in my original example,
correcting a particular child often involves telling them that they ‘are’ something, but this
suggests that they couldn’t do otherwise (and might this be the reason they seem unable to
learn) [33]. Words that literally denote both a human universal and a human particular are
also very common, since any social (rules) function within a moral group tends to receive
moral character. This begins with the use of ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’ to simultaneously refer to
a natural category and single individuals, as I have been noting, in a conflation of address
and reference. They are common–proper nouns whose referents are the universal–objects of
social principles like ‘honour thy father and thy mother’ (common), which is
interchangeable with ‘honour Father and Mother’ (proper).
Again, let us compare this to the social rules case: If an office boss, who is also a father,
uttered ‘Secretary, you must respect your superiors!’, he would not be necessarily ascribing
his subordinate the same function as that of his daughter in ‘Honey, you must respect your
parents!’ (which is why he is more likely to use the form of address ‘Wendy’ than ‘Secretary’
in actuality). Strictly speaking, he tells her how the company she has willingly entered is,
not how the world is. But we all know how the company easily becomes ‘the world’, and
Wendy becomes ‘Honey’. Ingroup bias is a strong feature of our social psychology
presumably because groups have been so becoming the world for thousands of years and
within thousands of different circumstances. Lockean notions of individual rights do not
put an end to this process, because rights are a social construct in exactly the same moral,
group-binding sense.27
Thus, through universal-object words (including ‘the individual’) one experiences
reality, even the reality of games, as a myth where these conceptual projections may exist
and their actions ‘explained’. Political and cultural leaders are called ‘fathers’, nations
26 The question ‘what is the meaning of life?’ is perfectly nonsensical, as Wittgenstein found logic to be. It is
perhaps the quintessential moral question. This question asks: ‘how is life described by language, so that I may
feel part of it by obeying such description?’ It illustrates how powerfully language is laden with morality.
27 The expansion of the British and American empires should be enough testimony to this. In any case,
I believe that human society, biologically understood, approaches the reality of the independent, cooperative
decision-maker through these notions of individual rights.
42
‘mothers’, peers ‘brothers and sisters’; individuals become fully defined by their natural
attributes or skills (‘Hey, Indian!’, ‘Good morning, Doctor!’) This brings existential
connotations and anxiety to what would otherwise be playful or practical social activity.
Correspondingly, animals or material objects perform their own social function in this
mythical, anthropomorphised reality: A bird does not fly as a fact of embodied perception
to be interpreted in creative ways, but as the consequence of its fitting the category and
purpose of being a bird in a single narrative; natural phenomena are interpreted as signs or
premonitions. The moral individual has little cognitive energy left to find out about reality
and form authentic social groups, because he spends it constructing a social ‘reality’ that
will channel the formation of a more ambitious group.
This distinction between group and category-group, or between a person and a
category-person, is foundational to the sociological field of conversation analysis [54; 60],
particularly in relation to parent–child categorisation devices [53]. Practically or
institutionally speaking, only certain, particular people can self-organise around common
labels such as family, ethnic group or nationality; yet the descriptive, universal quality of
these labels is pseudo-rationally maintained. This suggests a solution to the moral-
psychological puzzle of disgust: Despite its particular, bodily origins, it seems to have
culturally evolved into an ‘emotion’ with no identifiable common elicitor [52]. Disgust is
then a universal, mental trait that can be shaped by elders for the bodily rejection of the
cultural other, especially as a potential mate [68]. This solution suggests why the person
feels that their disgust has something to do with reason but is ultimately ‘dumbfounded’
[25; 26], unable to justify their conviction. It also explains why moral psychologists are
themselves dumbfounded around what some call our ‘dual-process system’ of moral
judgement: Experiments show that emotions play the main role in our aversion to pushing
a man off a footbridge in order to ‘rationally’ save five people. But they attribute these
emotions to equally pseudo-rational, cultural notions of individual rights and their
hypothetical social systems [24] (p. 117), not to particular, eco-logical means to treat other
primates in our vicinity, as the physiological nature of this aversion would suggest.
Accordingly, there arises the problem that morality seems necessary for getting along
with people, yet moral codes are highly variable cross-culturally, are used against other
people, and are, of course, not innate [48]. But this is no problem if by ‘morality’ we mean
our socio-rational sense, which we confuse with rational sense, and which emphasises our
biological similarities (such as that nobody likes getting stolen or pushing a man off a
footbridge in order to ‘save five people’). Our history and prehistory are thus ambiguously
marked by inter-group conflict, with its ambivalent, multi-level dehumanisation of
outgroup members [3]. These are rivers of suffering where old loyalties flow, but which
43
become harder and harder to justify in a technologically advanced and increasingly

connected world.
5.2. She versus him
This title represents biology only inasmuch as ontogeny puts the individual in a relative
position of power. It represents the distinct tendencies of holism and atomism, the theories
of being and knowledge through which group members try to justify such power in a ‘battle
of the sexes’. It is similarly understood that Athens is ‘female’ and Sparta (whose divinity
was King Lacedaemon) is ‘male’ in terms of their antagonistic means of exerting power; that
they would attempt to justify their respective natural gifts of wisdom versus force, harmony
versus victory, as their respective myths did. Thus, the following could have equally been a
political sketch of such dialectic in history (e.g. Rousseau versus Hobbes) or have covered
other levels of moral confrontation within society. After all, today’s democracy still involves
the two distinct tendencies of equality versus inequality as justified by their respective
transnationalistic or nationalistic worldviews. Academics still study dilemmas such as the
‘paradox of moral tolerance’ [28], in which the morality of the public order conflicts with
that of civil liberty. Scientists affirm or deny climate change. Families quarrel over whether
they should forget or find the wrongdoer, downplay or praise the achiever; and so forth.
Nevertheless, philosophy offers the most pertinent example of this household fight for our
present purposes.
Socrates was an odd cross between Athens and Sparta, and is often credited as the
founder of western philosophy for a good reason. He didn’t of course ‘know nothing’ about
anything. He probably knew ‘nothing’ because he enquired into what were the moral beliefs
of the people of Athens, and out came nothing. Not even after being sentenced to die by the
polis (‘society’) did he question its existence and universality, and paradoxically praised its
virtue. This led to Plato’s account of existence, which was one that idealised the universal in
being and virtue. Subsequently, Aristotle focused the ideal down on the particular both
ontologically and morally. The dialectic then notably continues in the form of a platonic St.
Augustine followed by the Aristotelian revolution of Thomas Aquinas.
Centuries later, divinity is beginning to be replaced by psychological insight. Socratic
doubt, again, brings Descartes to existential despair, marking a new beginning for
philosophy. He resolves this through another platonic ontology that idealises the universal
of thought and puts God or moral perfection back in the picture. This is notably countered
by Hume, who places this psychological ideal in the contingency of experience, and the
moral ideal in the passions therein. The ontological standards had now been raised. Kant’s
conflation of moral ideals with logic and mathematics (‘pure practical reason’) was only
44
appropriate for minds of the Enlightenment, and it was a response to the disillusionment
with God that empiricists like Hume represented. Despite this attempt to unite rationalism
and empiricism, philosophy continued to be similarly divided through modern times
between idealist and existentialist conceptions of truth, respectively.
Finally, the contemporary focus on language is understandable given the dominance of
the scientific worldview. Here the analytic/continental divide is equally supported by the
difference between those who see a universal ideal in truth, and those who think it is
dependent on person and context. Farther still, one can venture inside analytic philosophy
and find that there too is an opposition between holists and atomists [50]. For the conflict
can certainly lie within the analytic philosopher himself, like with Wittgenstein, if he
strongly feels the ethical implications of his work.
What did all these philosophical giants have in common? They all believed in some
form of social absolute. Indeed, for as long as the philosopher does not question the virtue
of the ‘Polis’, the cohesive function of the social principles he lives by, the conflict can but
continue.
5.3. I versus me
Let us now be the spectators of a personal interaction, where a self-identified member of a

social group attempts to convince another to join him (e.g. ‘people do not steal in my group,
because they want to share tools’). The man speaks with the knowledge that there is the
possibility for people to not enter the situation, or to leave it, which makes any exploitative
attempt on his part simply deceptive, or a case of motivated irrational belief at most. The
moral case, however, would have this man effectively arguing for a description of himself
and the other as natural objects who are in ‘society’, which means that no subject has the
possibility for leaving the situation. As such attempt, however, it presupposes that objects
do have this possibility and therefore need to be convinced not to take it.
To the integrated individual who is able to sense the incongruence, this can only
communicate that the speaker is at best divided between the intentions to act morally and
immorally, and at worst that she is being duped. If she is unable to escape the man and his
group, it will pose a double bind where she will be forced to self-deceive too. For an
awareness of her own disobedience will lead to disclosure and punishment, and full
obedience will lead to her being exploited. This double bind is clearly illustrated by the
postmodern, passive-aggressive parental instruction ‘you shouldn’t steal, but only if you
want’. If she doesn’t want, she will have antagonised her parents; and if she wants, then she
will probably lose her toys to the more cunning children. Either way she is still under St.
45
Augustine’s rationale: her wanting to be obedient is a consequence that she might not want
to be obedient, and this is as punishable as her not wanting to be obedient.
The punisher’s denial of self-contradiction is inherently self-deceptive. But it is, as
evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers puts it, fooling yourself the better to fool others [66]
and therefore the better to economise on the costs of punishment. Recent experimental
psychology studies thus reveal the centrality of moral integrity for the social perception and
continuity of the self [36; 63; 64], while others show the complete opposite whenever the self
is governed by situations [17]. Moral rules are self-contradictory statements: of the
possibility and impossibility to violate such rules. This conflict with oneself and reality is
arguably the essence of the human condition. But for a means of deception to be successful,
it only needs to enhance survival and reproduction, not make our lives better and more
enlightened. Indeed, the ubiquity of self-deception in humans [70] should not come as a
surprise, since it is consistent with the evolutionary logic that cooperation breeds deception
[35] and that a fit individual should be able to get the best of both worlds.
6. An ethical conclusion
The theory I have presented has something in common with the frameworks of physics,
chemistry and biology, among which there is now relatively little disconnection or
disagreement. Newton better described physical motion with reference to an ideally
undisturbed state of rest or constant speed for any object. In biology, allele or genotype
frequencies in populations are better understood with reference to an ideal absence of
evolutionary influences through the Hardy-Weinberg principle. And so, human sociality is
better described with reference to an ideal state where individual cognition is not disturbed
by social mores, even if we have never existed without social mores. This makes important
connections between the less integrated fields of anthropology, psychology and linguistics.
I think that it also builds a bridge between science and the humanities.
Naturally, I welcome any objections to this theory. They would have to show flaws in
the argument or be part of a better explanation that takes into account the evidence,
particularly that coming from moral psychology. Otherwise, I believe that the theory can
show these objections to be ‘prescriptively descriptive’ as they favour formal explanations
that make a lesser commitment to facts. This has its purest form in Gödel’s incompleteness
theorems, which showed the futility of a purely syntactic conception of truth already in
1931: One does not transcend mathematics by conceiving of ‘metamathematics’ in the same
way as saying that one is ‘good’ does not confer a natural property. One only uses language
to escape the fact that knowledge must bear some relation to everyday life, be alive, and be
conscious.
46
The same is the case for the myriad institutional ways in which we believe to be
reasoning about things that are ‘problematic’, not least about ethics. The parents’ statement
that stealing is ‘wrong’ at the beginning of this essay is probably the most basic form of this.
It cannot be tackled from a perspective of ‘metaethics’ which bears the same formality. It is
just another form of biological deception, through self-deception. Thus, if the small child
can agree with her siblings on a mutually satisfactory way to play with toys, as her parents
do with peers on a daily basis, I would not call that moral but ethical goodness. Ethical habit
(the etymology of the word ‘ethics’) simply emerges out of individual freedom in the
implicit or explicit enactment of social rules. These mechanisms of trust are a natural given,
as is our ability to tell when we are being fooled, or fooling ourselves. Contrary to what
some say, value does not disappear in ‘a world of fact’ because value is a fact of intelligent
cooperation; and the most intelligent thing one can do, in the wider perspective of lifetimes,
is to preserve the ability and willingness of others to cooperate.
Morality itself, as a tribalistic device that exploits such cooperative intelligence,
demonstrates this fact. Our true selves are as vulnerable to mimicry and exploitation as any
other successful phenotype in nature. Our embodied, ethical goodness feeds the abstract,
moral fabric of ‘society’, which appropriates its meaning in blind, reproductive greed. A
linguistic device like ‘you ought not steal’ only mimics the fact that the behaviour of stealing
or other invasive actions are not valued by a cooperative group. So, morality is, after all, a
sign of the noble way in which we can and do associate with one another at a more basic
level, including the big with the small.
Unfortunately, prescriptive natural categories are what they are. They compete for
space at the expense of their members’ well-being and animal grace, as we allow ourselves
to be fooled by moral language or find it painfully inevitable not to. The cognitive stress
associated with becoming the ‘right’ citizen edges on the unbearable, which does not
produce fully functioning, stable groups of people with a free will, but population
explosions, resource depletion, war, and diagnostic manuals of Orwellian proportions. I do
not want to advocate that ‘we’ do anything about it, since that would probably be yet
another moral contention. But I trust that good explanations will continue to improve
everything that depends on explanations.
47
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A Descriptive Explanation of Morality

Keywords: good explanations, animal beliefs, science of philosophy, evolutionary ethics,

Alethes 2018, 1.0 FOR PEER REVIEW

involving greater force or invasiveness (G’: ‘people do not steal’), or by redefining

3.1.2. A science of philosophy

approaches have in common, as we did above regarding particular principles whose

3.2. Social rules

a solution to a problem of the commons or a coordination problem.14 In these situations, we

3.2.1. Social rationality

It is understandable that socio-natural contingency would bring with it a contingent notion

3.2.2. An unusual clash of cultures

3.3. Social principles

group on a mode of explanation that appears to seek explanatory power, as he argues

Description becomes an idealistic affair between (holistically) rejecting exceptions to the

in that an attempt to prescribe behaviour through rational persuasion, whether ‘reason’ or

Table 1. Systems of belief by type.

‘People do not ‘Organisms Mode Explanation Subjects

Natural people do not organisms description descriptive universal

Social group members group members descriptive prescriptive particular

Moral it ought to be that it ought to be prescriptive ‘descriptive’ ‘universal’

3.3.2. Holism versus atomism

4. Morality as natural idealism

Prescriptive description is as clumsy a means for social coordination as it is circular in its

5. Evidence and origins

If language conferred an evolutionary advantage on certain hominins it was probably

become harder and harder to justify in a technologically advanced and increasingly

5.2. She versus him

Let us now be the spectators of a personal interaction, where a self-identified member of a

1. Alexander, R. D. (1987) The Biology of Moral Systems. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction

4. Barnard, A. (2013) Cognitive and social aspects of language origins. In C. Lefebvre, B.

5. Barnard, A. (2016) Language in Prehistory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6. Barnard, C. J. (2004) Animal Behaviour: Mechanism, Development, Function and Evolution.

15. Deutsch, D. (2009) A new way to explain explanation. [Video/DVD]

19. Ferguson, C. A. (1964) Baby talk in six languages. Am.Anthropol.,

38. Nuyts, J. (2000) Epistemic Modality, Language, and Conceptualization. Amsterdam:

42. Popper, K. (2005) Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography. London: Routledge.

45. Popper, K. R. (1972) Objective knowledge: An evolutionary approach. Oxford: Clarendon

48. Prinz, J. (2008) Is morality innate. Moral Psychology, 1, 367-406.

54. Sacks, H. (1979) Hotrodder: A revolutionary category. In G. Psathas (Ed.), Everyday

56. Sayre-McCord, G. (2014) Metaethics. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of

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