Context
The owner asked how the record covers morality-as-cooperation. It held the theory’s main empirical test, Curry et al. 2019 (LIT-047), read with its commentaries, and Fitouchi, André & Baumard’s “Moral disciplining” (LIT-101), which answers the commentaries’ sharpest objection without the record saying so. Almost none of the theory’s own programme, its rivals (Moral Foundations Theory, dyadic morality, relationship regulation) or its evolutionary sources was filed.
Curry et al. carried ethics and social-science. But ethics is “moral
philosophy — what is owed, permitted or good”. Morality-as-cooperation is
a descriptive theory of what morality is and where it came from, and says
nothing about what is owed. “Moral disciplining” carried no moral word at
all, and Tomasello’s “The moral psychology of obligation” (LIT-125) carried
ethics for a paper about how children come to feel obligated.
Decision
Add moral-psychology to topics, in the philosophy group, after
social-ontology. Its blurb: “morality as a natural phenomenon — moral
judgement, emotion and norms, and their evolution, development and
variation across cultures; descriptive, where ethics is normative”.
It sits in the philosophy group because moral psychology is argued by
philosophers and psychologists in the same literature; the group is a
label over words, not a claim about who writes the papers (ADR-003). A work
that also argues what is owed keeps ethics beside it.
Retagged. No tag was removed.
- First tag: LIT-047 (Curry et al., morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies), LIT-101 (Fitouchi, André & Baumard, moral disciplining) and LIT-125 (Tomasello, the moral psychology of obligation).
- Second tag: LIT-493 (Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society), whose
social norms are a subject of both this word and
social-ontology.
Alternatives considered
- Widen
ethics. The record would then have one word for “what is owed” and “why people believe things are owed”. Morality-as-cooperation and Moral Foundations Theory are disputes about the second, and a reader of moral philosophy would meet them as if they were arguments about the first. - Leave it to
social-science. That holds the empirical method, not the subject. Tomasello’s developmental account and the evolutionary game theory behind morality-as-cooperation would share a page with housing markets and inequality. - A narrower word,
evolution-of-cooperation. It names the lineage of one theory. Moral Foundations Theory and dyadic morality are its rivals precisely because they deny that morality is all about cooperation, so a word that presupposes it would beg the question the batch is filed to ask.
Consequences
The filings in the same contribution lead with the new word. The
cooperation sources (Hamilton, Trivers, Axelrod, Nowak) take it only where
they are read as accounts of morality; read as biology, they belong to
natural-sciences and complex-systems.