Following the Rules Quotes

“As a result, the scientific revolution left philosophers (and society more generally) without a plausible moral ontology. While beliefs could be described as being "about" the physical world, in some sense, and desires could be "about" the passions, or some set of internal somatic states, it was no longer clear what moral judgments could be about. And no matter how much ingenuity has been deployed by moral realists, trying to show that evaluative judgments have some kind of empirical correlate, all of their labors seem only to reinforce the impression underlying John Mackie's judgment that values are "ontologically queer."62 (The arguments of moral realists often bring to mind Wittgenstein's remark that on hearing G. E. Moore's proof of an external world, he began to understand why skepticism was such a problem.)”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“The question is, if we already know what the right and the wrong answers are to moral questions, prior to the formulation of an abstract principle, what is the point of formulating the principle?”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“When altruistic behavior benefits individuals belonging to another species, it is impossible for the gene to be benefiting some other copy of itself.”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“Milgram successfully demonstrated the important role that conformity plays in securing social order, and showed also that this conformist disposition is basically neutral between "good" and "evil," that is, it can be used to transmit any sort of behavior. The conclusion usually drawn is that in order to reduce the occurrence of evil, people should stop conforming, and begin to rely on their own judgment. What we might choose to infer, instead, is that when it comes to promoting "good" and discouraging "evil," social context matters.60 In a sense, Milgram was the first to show how much human morality depends upon the scaffolding supplied by social institutions-take away the scaffolding that people are accustomed to, replace it with one that is perverse or evil, and you will find that people do not behave all that morally.”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“The fact that people buy beer by the six-pack, and pay more per bottle to do so, suggests that external control is an important feature of self-control. It means also that the all-night beer store is not an unmixed blessing. While providing increased convenience for some, it also pulls away a part of the external scaffold that many people use as part of their self-control system (namely, the unobtainability of more beer, after the six-pack is consumed). Thus late-night hours at the beer store should correctly be viewed as an innovation that decreases the autonomy of these people, by withdrawing a form of social cooperation that they at one time relied on to exercise self-control.”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“Humans start out, much like other primates, relying on a massively parallel system of cognition, made up of a set of domain-specific heuristics that have evolved as a way of addressing particular problems that presented themselves with some frequency in the environment of evolutionary adaptation. All primates engage in social learning (whereby, instead of engaging in trial-and-error learning, they look to the behavior of conspecifics for clues as to the best strategy). Humans, however, hit on a particular heuristic-imitation with a conformist bias-that has significant adaptive value. In particular, the fidelity of the copying strategy is sufficiently great that it enables cumulative cultural change, and thus creates a cultural inheritance system.28 It also creates the preconditions for genuine rule-following to emerge, and hence for the development of norms-implicit-in-practice. This creates the possibility of semantic intentionality, and propositionally differentiated language (whereby the meaning of propositions becomes independent of their immediate context of use). Thus language develops, initially, as an external social practice. However, the enhancement of our cognitive abilities associated with this "language upgrade" leads individuals to increased dependence on language as a tool for planning and controlling their own behavior. Thus the intentional planning system develops as the seat of conscious, rational action. Theories of rational action (such as decision theory) are not psychological theories that attempt to model underlying "springs of action." They are essentially expressive theories, which attempt to work out the normative commitments that are implicitly undertaken whenever we act on the basis of our beliefs and preferences. Thus they are part of the toolkit that is provided to us by the language upgrade.”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“David Buss found that males were consistently more likely than females to regard "no previous sexual intercourse" as an important characteristic of a potential mate. In 23 of the 3 7 samples, males expressed a stronger preference in this regard than did females, while in the other 14 samples "no significant sex differences were found."94 This is the sort of finding that is sometimes taken to be grist for the sociobiologists's mill, since it seems easy to produce an "evolutionary" explanation for this pattern. Yet the same study also found that the overall intensity of this preference varied even more dramatically-from China, where both men and women almost uniformly viewed a potential mate's chastity as "indispensable" (over 2.5 on a 3-point scale) to Sweden, where it was regarded by both sexes as practically "irrelevant" (around 0.25 on the same scale). Within both Chinese and Swedish cultures, however, men were more likely to identify this issue as a concern than women. Yet the difference was only about 0.1 in both cases. What this shows is that the cultural difference was two orders of magnitude greater than the gender difference. This”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“At the same time, some sexual practices are much more common than others. Moderate polygyny, for instance, is exceedingly common; polyandry is not. Compulsory homosexuality is not unheard-of, but is far less common than compulsory heterosexuality. The best way to formulate a "biological" explanation for these phenomena is not in terms of the adaptiveness of the practices, but in terms of a set of unconscious cognitive structures or somatic responses that bias cultural reproduction in the direction of one or another practice”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“while reciprocal altruism does require a higher level of cognitive sophistication and behavioral flexibility than kin selection altruism, insofar as the altruist must be able to recognize free riders and discontinue interactions with them, too much cognitive sophistication may in the end undermine the altruistic impulse.”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“The grouper could wait until the gobie was finished removing ectoparasites, then eat it, yet refrains from doing so.”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“These considerations help to explain why many philosophers are loathe to ascribe beliefs to animals. To a certain extent, this is a terminological dispute, since almost everyone is prepared to grant that dogs and cats have some kind of protobelief that is functionally similar to beliefs in humans."g The question is really how much sense it makes to ascribe beliefs to an organism when that organism is incapable of accepting or rejecting any of the inferential consequences of that belief, and where most of the standard criteria we use to individuate belief cannot be applied. In other words, since the vast majority of conclusions that follow from the claim "x believes that p" simply do not follow when x is a dog, rather than a person, there is something very misleading about using the term "belief" in this context.19”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“there is good reason to believe that rational choice theory permits greater perspicacity when it comes to articulating the structure of decision in nonsocial contexts, but that it fails to offer comparable illumination when it comes to analyzing social interaction. Indeed, many of the arguments that have been used to immunize rational choice theory against the sort of anomalies
detected by experimental game theorists have the effect of obscuring, rather than elucidating, the intentional structure of social interactions.”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“Unfortunately, the dominant inclination among economists has not been to expand the model of rational action, but rather to drop the rationality postulate entirely, in favor of evolutionary or behavioral models of action. Thus "cooperation" often gets mentioned in the same breath as cognitive biases, framing effects, bounded rationality, and other well-known instances in which individuals are clearly violating the canons of "ideal" rationality.”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“The plausibility of this approach has a lot more to do with the popularity of certain sorts of philosophical theories of mind than with any sort of empirical psychological evidence. It's not as though actual human infants learn how to deal with "easy stuff" like tables and balls first, then go on to deal with more complex subjects, like their mothers. They learn to deal with people first. It is in fact a commonplace observation in developmental psychology that human infants begin by treating all objects in their environment as essentially social, and only much later learn to separate out the animate from the inanimate, and the nonhuman from the human. Thus it is quite possible that we do not "build up" from reasoning in nonsocial to social contexts, but rather, we "scale back" our reasoning when we drop down from social to nonsocial contexts.”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“Not only is there no a priori reason to suspect that the problem of order should be resolvable within the framework of an instrumental conception of rationality, there is good reason to think that it should not be. In the background of the instrumentalist strategy is an assumption that, on reflection, can easily be seen to be dubious. The idea that decision theory should provide the "foundations" for game theory amounts to the assumption that all of the "equipment" a rational agent brings to bear on the world is already in place and deployed in nonsocial contexts.”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“Here the rule-utilitarian believes that the only justifiable rules are ones that will promote the greatest happiness, when generally adhered to in a deontic fashion. Thus the rule-utilitarian rejects "deontology" as a theory of moral justification, but accepts deontic constraints as an essential element of moral action.”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“There are a variety of traits that set humans apart from our closest primate relatives. The "big four" are language, rationality, culture, and morality (or in more precise terms, "syntacticized language," "domain-general intelligence," "cumulative cultural inheritance," and "ultrasociality").”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint