Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2018
I respond to the many thoughtful suggestions and concerns of my commentators on a wide variety of questions. These include whether moral norms form a unified category, whether they have a distinctive phenomenology, and/or whether moral normativity is a cultural construct; whether moral externalization is necessary for correlated interaction or human prosociality; precisely how such externalization generates correlated interactions among prosocial agents; and whether there are any convincing alternative explanations for it.
Target article
The difference between ice cream and Nazis: Moral externalization and the evolution of human cooperation
Related commentaries (23)
A cognitive, non-selectionist account of moral externalism
Coordination, conflict, and externalization
Disgust as a mechanism for externalization: Coordination and disassociation
Do the folk need a meta-ethics?
Do we really externalize or objectivize moral demands?
Externalization is common to all value judgments, and norms are motivating because of their intersubjective grounding
Externalization of moral demands does not motivate exclusion of non-cooperators: A defense of a subjectivist moral psychology
From objectivized morality to objective morality
Generalization and the experience of obligations as externally imposed: Distinct contributors to the evolution of human cooperation
Green beards and signaling: Why morality is not indispensable
How does moral objectification lead to correlated interactions?
Is all morality or just prosociality externalized?
Moral cues from ordinary behaviour
Moral demands truly are externally imposed
Moral externalisation fails to scale
Moral externalization is an implausible mechanism for cooperation, let alone “hypercooperation”
Moral externalization may precede, not follow, subjective preferences
Moralization of preferences and conventions and the dynamics of tribal formation
Norms, not moral norms: The boundaries of morality do not matter
Not as distinct as you think: Reasons to doubt that morality comprises a unified and objective conceptual category
The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow: Morality also fuels aggression, conflict, and violence
The difference between the scope of a norm and its apparent source
The objectivity of moral norms is a top-down cultural construct
Author response
Moral externalization and normativity: The errors of our ways