Michael Tomasello (2016), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. (x + 194 pp.; hardcover ISBN 9780674088641; paperback 2018, ISBN 9780674986824) — DOI-10.4159/9780674915855
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, as one of the natural-history accounts of morality that the record lacked (ADR-018).
Unavailable because no lawful full text was reachable, so it is not read
and no NOTE is filed.
Contents (titles and pages from Crossref’s chapter records):
- Preface (ix–xii)
- 1 The Interdependence Hypothesis (1–8)
- 2 Evolution of Cooperation (9–38)
- 3 Second-Personal Morality (39–84)
- 4 “Objective” Morality (85–134)
- 5 Human Morality as Cooperation-Plus (135–157)
- Conclusion (158–164); Notes, References, Index (165–194)
What it is said to argue, attributed: per Harvard University Press, it “offers the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral psychology. Based on extensive experimental data comparing great apes and human children, Michael Tomasello reconstructs how early humans gradually became an ultra-cooperative and, eventually, a moral species.” The press lists the APA’s Eleanor Maccoby Book Award (2018) and a PROSE Award (2017).
Relation to LIT-125 (inference from the chapter titles and from NOTE-185, not from the book). Tomasello’s “The moral psychology of obligation” (LIT-125) has the same two-step shape as chapters 3 and 4: an obligation that arises first inside joint commitment with a collaborative partner, and then extends to in-group members through collective identification (NOTE-185, summary). That BBS paper appeared three years later and confines itself to obligation; the book is the full natural history of which it is one strand. NOTE-185 records that in 2016 the author conceded that reciprocity’s tie to obligation is culturally contingent (its claim C6, citing the paper’s note 4); whether that concession is in this book is for a reading to check.
Relation to morality-as-cooperation (inference, labelled). Both say human morality evolved from cooperation, and Curry 2016 (LIT-503) lists Tomasello’s earlier statement with Vaish (2013) among the “previous cooperative views of morality”. They differ in three ways a reading should check against the text. MAC derives morality from seven types of cooperation game; Tomasello, on his chapter titles, from one route, interdependence in collaboration (mutualism), through shared and then collective intentionality. MAC treats reciprocity as a moral domain; Tomasello’s later paper argues that reciprocity cannot generate obligation (NOTE-185, C6). And “cooperation-plus” says morality is cooperation with something added (on LIT-125’s account, a self-regulating “we” and its normative force), where MAC identifies morality with the solutions to cooperation problems. MAC’s contest, division and possession domains have no chapter here.
Neighbours. Trivers (LIT-510) is the reciprocity account Tomasello sets aside. Alexander (LIT-495) and Boehm (LIT-514) also give natural histories, by reputation and by social selection. The joint-commitment philosophy LIT-125 draws on is in the record through LIT-125’s commentaries (NOTE-185) and Gilbert (LIT-477, LIT-492).
Topic. moral-psychology first. cognition for shared and collective
intentionality as cognitive capacities, social-ontology for joint and
collective agency (as on LIT-125), social-science for the developmental
and comparative experiments. ethics is not added: nothing reachable
says the book argues what is owed, although it offers, in Kitcher’s
endorsement on the press page, “a philosophically relevant genealogy of
morality”.
Anthology. No instruction for machine-learning practice; not held there.