The Evolution of Individualistic Norms

It is generally recognized that descriptive and normative individualism are logically independent theses. This paper defends the stronger view that recognition of the falsehood of descriptive individualism is crucial to understanding the evolutionary and developmental basis of normative individualism. The argument given for this is not analytic; rather, it is based on empirical generalizations about the evolution of markets with specialized labor, about the nature of information processing in large markets, and about the socialization of human children. 1. DESCRIPTIVE AND NORMATIVE INDIVIDUALISM The venerable doctrine of “individualism” comes in two tropes: descriptive and normative. Often they have been subsumed—and not infrequently confused—under the label of “methodological” individualism. This paper is about the relationships among these ideas in light of the genetic and cultural evolutionary history of humans. It argues that we best appreciate the persuasiveness of normative individualism to most modern people by understanding why their evolutionary history has made working, everyday descriptive individualism hard to achieve and maintain. A normative individualist is someone who maintains that the justification of all values ultimately lies in the normative judgments of Evolution of Individualistic Norms 2 individual people, and in assessments about the effects of change on the welfare of individuals. This view has polemical bite against one version or another of normative collectivism, according to which groups— clans, nations, ethnic communities, classes—may have and promote valuable objectives that transcend the preferences of their individual members. In nonsecular traditions it has sometimes been maintained that religious communities are obligated by value considerations that might, at least in dark periods, animate none of their members. But this is an extreme case. Politically and philosophically relevant versions of normative individualism allow that there must be some relationship between individual and collective valuations. But normative collectivists typically suppose that groups can have goals that are conceived only vaguely by most of their members. At least as importantly, collectivists typically endorse some second-order normative beliefs to the effect that members of groups should at least sometimes avoid pursuing their individual objectives when these conflict with the good of their teams. Someone is persuaded by descriptive individualism to the extent that she thinks that, as a matter of fact, people are generally motivated by considerations that refer to their private welfare, or to the welfare of a restricted set of specific individuals that they value as individuals. Descriptive collectivists, by contrast, emphasize the capacity they attribute to at least as many people of putting aside personal interests when these conflict with what they consider best for collectives that mainly include other members with whom they are specifically unacquainted. Framed in these terms, the conflict between the descriptive individualist and the descriptive collectivist is likely to seem to rest on a simple false dichotomy. It is widely supposed that most people are relatively self-interested across a wide range of common decision settings and problems but also recognize various duties to collectives with which they are affiliated, and often subordinate their private goals to satisfaction of these duties. Descriptive individualism and collectivism come into genuine conflict only insofar as someone seeks to prioritize one class of motives over the other in the context of promoting a general view about the best way to explain and predict broad tendencies in human action. This is why most scholarly discussions of descriptive individualism focus on it as a methodological thesis. Vol. 7: Morality and the Cognitive Sciences