Joint Action at the Roots of Ethical Cognition

These are slides and notes based on work in progress with John Michael for a talk at CEU, Vienna, on 2025-05-12.

‘The next challenge for the field of joint action is to generate an integrated perspective that links coordination mechanisms to normative, evolutionary, and communicative frameworks.’ (Sebanz & Knoblich, 2021, p. 138)

Abstract

Processes likely to be evolutionarily ancient and to appear early in development (perhaps linked to philosophers’ moral sentiments) influence adults’ ethical intuitions. What is the best computational description of these processes? The leading answers involve principles. Thus Greene (2015; 2017) models fast processes as operating in accordance with deontological principles such as ‘do not harm.’ On such a view, basic moral processes yield values adaptive in a pre-historic world. This talk defends a speculative alternative, one which involves capacities for joint action and no principles. Joint action is (so the proposal) at the root of ethical cognition in two ways: it enables us to converge on what feels disgusting, bitter, unfitting, or otherwise wrong; and, as I will explain, joint actions enable us to turn these feelings into a form of normative guidance by upholding norm-like patterns of behavior. While full-blown normative attitudes and legal codes are important tools for modern societies, the impossibility of explicitly codifying every useful value indicates that joint-action-based forms of normative guidance are indispensable.