Cognitive Science, Social Theory, and Ethics

The terms in my title form an odd triple. Social theory has been largely immune from, or has ignored, cognitive science. Ethics and social theory have a long and well-grounded history of antagonism, interspersed with moments of mutual borrowing. Cognitive science and ethics have a more intense relationship. One of the main critiques of John Rawls, for example, was that he lacked an adequate moral psychology. Many philosophers have at least entertained the thought that the antiquated moral psychology of the eighteenth century, on which philosophers routinely rely, might get some valuable content from cognitive science. There is also the idea that the experimental work on moral matters done by psychologists on topics shared with ethics, such as the moral/conventional distinction, might be illuminated by a cognitive science approach to the mechanisms of moral reasoning (Kelly and Stich, forthcoming 2007). And there is plenty of intriguing material to work with. " Neuro-economics " has used fMRI techniques for brain-imaging to determine what parts of the brain itself are activated in various " moral " situations, such as the punishment of free-riders. And behind cognitive science is evolutionary psychology, which has long sought to account for such " ethical " phenomenon as altruism and reciprocity. These examples of potential rapprochement between ethics and cognitive science all involve universals or universal phenomena, and indeed, ethics as a subject, like evolutionary psychology, has typically focused on universals, so there appear to be grounds for matching the two. In contrast, the relation between cognitive science, especially the part associated with evolutionary psychology, and social theory has been one in which cognitive science has taken over the critique provided by evolutionary psychology of " the standard social science model. " The phrase comes from Tooby and Cosmides (1992). The " Standard Social Science Model " is usually explained historically in terms of Anthropology (because Tooby is himself an anthropologist), and attributed to Franz Boas, especially as exemplified in the writings of his student Margaret Mead. The " Standard Social Science Model " is one in which individuals internalize culture, which consists of norms and values, which is both a unified and coherent whole, and is widely variable between societies. Culture is also largely unconstrained either by biology or by psychology. The origins of the model are in a critique of instinct theory from the point of view of a kind of behaviorism which understood the …