Normativeness: A Cross-Cultural and Non-Speciesist Conceptualization [Jul07 1230am]

On De Waal's argument
against Lorenz's thesis (1)
From a psychoanalytic perspective, De Waal's argument somewhat supports Lorenz's thesis
According to the psychoanalytic (but also a Piagetian) reconstruction of the human psyche, irrational thinking permeates us all the time as relics of our early childhood—even when we have become adult individuals
From a psychoanalytic perspective, guilt is to be understood as the unconscious anticipation of punishment by, and/or of the loss of the love of a caregiver for having inflicted damage or suffering to them
From a psychoanalytic (and Piagetian) perspective, irrational anticipation of punishment is close to being a full-blown guilt
Shame
Shame is learned by the child by observing her caregiver's disgusted face (and other verbal or nonverbal communication) when she performs (or attempts so to do) certain actions (e.g., playing with her defecations) or abstains from certain actions (e.g., washing her hands before eating)
This is the domain of Sphinktermoralität (sphincter morality), as Sándor Ferenczi (1925) called it
Hans Müller-Braunschweig (1922) spoke of Reinlichkeitsangewöhnung as the first core of superego (rather than the taboo of incest)
The experience of shame amounts to experiencing oneself as an object of disgust, like a defecation
I suspect that shame cannot be found among non-human animals (this view is held also by van Schaik & Burkart forth, § 2)
Shame cannot be explained without considering disgust
Disgust
On disgust, see Angyal, Becker, Rozin, and Haidt
Their basic idea is that disgust is a human cultural universal that concerns everything reminding us of the fact that we shall die
As long as non-human animals are not regarded as capable of anticipating and thinking intensively of their own and their loved ones' death, I think we can hypothesize that they are not capable of experiencing normative disgust, but only the drive to throw up something potentially dangerous to their own body
Again, the psychoanalytic hypothesis that the human psyche is at once extremely plastic and irrational, and that it works chiefly unconsciously explains, why we are able also to experience normative disgust proper (e.g., against the Nazi—see Sherman et al. (2007) Nazis really are disgusting.)
Via socialization we learn to experience disgust towards the most diverse behaviors and people, which in turn may be sometimes rationalized into norms, prohibitions, obligations, banishments, genocides



Pride
According to psychoanalysis, pride originates from the child's believing to be able to measure up to his caregiver, and subsequently to selected peers
SF spoke of ego ideal
Sense of duty, in many cases, must be reduced to the individual's drive to perform certain (dangerous) actions 'to the goal' of experiencing this pleasant emotion, which, too, is a relic of archaic situations
I wrote to the goal in inverted commas because it must be unconscious or subconscious, because in order for us to be facing a full-blown ateleological normative motivation pride must attach to the behavios
I did not come across any ethological text where pride in non-human animals is described
Conclusion (1)
Based on the above, my conclusion is that the only full-blown normative phenomena that can be traced among animals are jural phenomena (Rechtsphenomene), namely, phenomena involving some sense of entitlement—if we are to use the conceptualization of Recht, pravo, droit, proposed by Leon Petrażycki (1867-1931)
Further, we can also hypothesize the presence of forerunners of guilt
As for jural phenomena, in order for us to be facing a full-blown jural phenomenon, it must be traced:
either in a bystander
or in the 'right'-holder (or victim), as long as her or his release of aggressiveness is not a conscious goal-oriented use of violence, and so may turn out to be beyond or counterproductive as to the pursuit of the 'right'-holder's long-term interests or discharge of biological functions
Conclusion (2)
Based on the above, I define normative emotions as those emotions:
that the adult 'learns' to experience during primary socialization and
that may be elicited regardless or against any goal consciously pursued by the individual.
The basic structure of a normative phenomenon is as follows:
perception/representation of an action/abstention + normative emotion.
Based on the psychoanalytic hypothesis of the plasticity of the human psyche we can predict the plasticity of normative phenomena (what LP called their blanketness)
Based on Freud's and Piaget's hypotheses on the way children experience their caregiver(s), we can predict normative emotions are experienced as somewhat mystic-authoritative.
Based on the psychoanalytic hypothesis that the Id contains no time arrow, we can predict that normative emotions may be experienced as one's caregiver(s)'s voice even much later her death.
Finally, based on all the above, we can predict that adults who grew up as feral children are not able to experience any normative emotion, unless some sort of socialization with some nonhuman animal which raised them occurred.
Guilt as unconscious and irrational fear
Based on psychoanalysis, I define guilt as the unconscious and irrational fear to be punished and/or to lose the love of one's own caregiver for having harmed her or having inflicted suffering to her
Do non-human animals love their master or primates love their caregivers?
The emergence of the ability to experience guilt presupposes the ability of the child to empathize with her caregiver and so realize that she inflicted upon the latter damage or suffering
Once learned, this fear (i.e., guilt) may be experienced even in cases where there is no possibility whatsoever for the caregiver to know what the experiencer did (e.g., because the caregiver passed away)
Moreover, guilt, as it were, 'attaches' to given actions or abstentions, and so provides an ateleological motivation for the individual to avoid guilt-eliciting actions or abstentions, which eventually are experienced as culpable per se
This mechanism was called, in a pre-psychoanalytic psychological terminology projection

Indignation vs. anger
I propose to conceptualize indignation in the sense Sigmund Freud (SF) conceptualizes the so-called narcissism of small differences***
I conceptualize indignation as a release of aggressiveness the child learns by observing her caregiver(s) being aggressive toward given behaviors owing to their merely being cognitively salient*
The phenomenon is closely related to derision
As is known, SF argued that the containment of aggressiveness for human animals is per se quite difficult**, and so many of us just yearn for opportunities to be aggressive, even despite their not being direct victims or not empathizing with any victim whatsoever at all
While anger and guilt—or at least their forerunners—can be definitely traced among non-human animals, I have not yet come across any scientific work suggesting the possibility of tracing indignation in this sense among non-human animals
* Ranulf, in this regard ** To be sure, also Lorenz, in his Sogenannte Böse elaborated a lot on this ideas of SF's ***To be sure, this ideas was expressed by Ferenczi as early as 1913: > Ferenczi, seems to ignore altogether the possibility of an aggressiveness prompted exclusively by empathy with the victim.
Is there a chimpanzee infants'
'right' not to be attacked
In Rudolf von Rohr et al. (2011) the authors show that third parties (also called bystanders) often intervene in the case of attacks on chimpanzee infants. The authors argue that
(2011: 11)
The authors prefer the term indignation, but for reasons I will explain in the next slide, I prefer to use the term anger.
In these cases, we can speak of a full-blown jural phenomenon: the infant's 'right' not be attacked by anybody, including the alpha male, only if we can prove that this disposition to anger is learned via primary socialization
Even in the case that could be demonstrated, the term right should still be written within inverted commas since here we are hardly facing a full-blown rationalization, but rather—if at all—merely positional thinking (or affektuelles Handeln)
It should be born in mind that many language do or did not have a term for right
For instance, in classical Latin the term ius could be used in an objective sense (more or less like law) only
Irrational sense of entitlement
As we know, in human animals, the sense of entitlement may have the most diverse objects, and in many cases it may lead an individual to act against her own long-term interests
This point was already made by von Jhering (RvJ ) in his Kampf ums Recht even though it is hardly understandable how this idea can be at all compatible with the ideas he expounded in his Zweck im Recht
I am aware that the boundary between a teleological use of violence to pursue a certain goal and anger proper is not a clear-cut one, but I think we need this distinction, and must search for ways for operationalizing it
However, we face this operationalization problem only when we are dealing with the victim's anger
As far as a third party's anger is concerned, according to the here proposed conceptualization, we face a full-blown jural phenomenon (rechtliches Phänomen, pravovoe javlenie)

On De Waal's argument
against Lorenz's thesis (2)
The plasticity and irrationality of the human psyche hypothesized by psychoanalysis explains why we may feel guilty for the most diverse behaviors—even behaviors prima facie quite different from harming another suffering being (including ones harming ourselves)
So, during their secondary socialization children and adolescents may learn to experience as culpable also behaviors quite different from those they learned to experience as culpable during their primary socialization
In the language of psychoanalysis (and Lorenz's), secondary socialization provides opportunities for the re-direction of guilt
In the final analysis, De Waal seems to reinterpret Lorenz's anecdote as an anecdote concerning a forerunner of guilt
What matters to settle this question only whether or not primary socialization plays a role in dogs as well
A further quotation from De Waal
In regard to the penultimate point made in the previous slide I deem it useful to present the following quotation:
(1996: 108, first emphasis added)
So, my Petrażyckian point is simply that, as long as in certain species—first and foremost—the capability of experiencing this irrational fear arises through primary socialization, both its emergence and the behaviors to which it is directed can be affected by primary socialization, and to some extent by secondary socialization as well as, if to a lesser extent, by psychoanalytical treatment too
This amounts to having provided a hopefully adequate theory in LP's terms

Norms as rationalizations
I propose to define a normative phenomenon as the coupling of
the perception or representation of a given behavior, and
the experience of a normative emotions toward that behavior
I propose to conceptualize norms (as well as obligation, prohibitions, rights) as rationalizations—in the sense of Weber's (MW) Rationalität—of normative phenomena
Norms are to be understood as Sinne (in MW's terms) of behaviors (i.e., their possible intentional causes)
Guilt-based norms
Guilt gets rationalized into a norm when an individual's anticipation of guilt* in the case she should abstain from (or perform) a given action is turned into the thought (Sinn) that "she should (or should not, respectively) perform that action"
A more complicated rationalization takes place when the individual, not only thinks the she should or should not behave in a given way, but also that everybody, somebody else, or nobody should behave in that way**
This rationalization may, but need not, occur
In the cases it does not occur, by using MW's terminology we can speak of affektulles Handeln or kaum sinnhaftes Handeln, while by using Petrażycki's (LP) terminology we can speak of positional normative motivation (as distinguished from judgmental motivation)
*To be sure, anticipation of guilt is a different phenomenon from anticipation of punishment or loss of love. The fact that the latter bring about the former does not imply that the former is nothing else but the latter **Short discussion of SF's hypothesis on the emergence of the taboo of incest as against the Westermarck effect
Anger
I propose to conceptualize anger as a form of socialized aggressiveness
Usually, during the child's helplessness, the caregiver displays intolerance towards her child's, as well as toward other people's, aggressiveness (or violence) except for the cases it is used:
the react to a bodily aggression
the overcome a bodily impairment*
With an exception we shall discuss below, other kinds of aggressions are not tolerated
*The caregivers' intolerance towards these two kinds of aggressiveness may result in severe psychical damage within the individual. Intensive care (BG)
From anger to rights
If we assume our ability to empathize, we must conceptualize as anger also the third party's (T) aggressiveness towards an aggressor attempting to harm or impair the bodily movements of a victim, provided that the third party's aggressiveness is caused by her empathizing with the victim, and not by other motivations
I propose to conceptualize rights as rationalizations of anger
Rights, as Sinne, emerge out the rationalization of actions or abstentions NOT leading to the release of anger
Thus, the right to bodily integrity is to be understood as the inverse rationalization and typification of certain circumstances that typically prompt anger, such as attacking physically a suffering being


De Waal's criticism on Lorenz's reconstruction of his dog's guilt
> (De Waal 1996: 113)
My thesis—obviously indebted with psychoanalysis—is that as long a given individual experiences certain emotions prompting her to perform or abstain from certain actions regardless of given goals, but only because she is unconsciously and irrationally* reminiscent of interactions occurred during her primary socialization, we are facing a full-blown normative phenomenon
This is the way I propose to single out the subclass of normative motivations from the class ateleological motivations
*By the term irrational I mean that they may not serve any biological function whatsoever, or even be dangerous to the individual's survival or the transmission of their genes, as well as that that they may be utterly incompatible with the scientific view of the world

On teleological motivation
In the case of teleological motivation the individual experiences a drive toward performing or abstaining from a certain action as a means to certain goal, and so, in the case that individual should realize that that means is not an effective means to achieve that goal**, we can predict that that individual will choose other means to pursue it
To use a psychoanalytical jargon, teleological motivation falls within the domain of the reality principle (and so within the domain of the ego*)
By using the term goal, I am not implying that the goal must be achieving pleasure or avoiding pain: it may also be a normative one
What matters is solely means-end thinking
*More complicated are those situations where an individual consciously anticipates that a given behavior will prompt within herself an unpleasant normative emotion and consciously act to avoid that behavior. In these cases we have a self-conscious manipulation of the individual's emotions by the individual herself, and we face a phenomenon that is in between a normative and a teleological motivation. This may be well part of the process whereby the ego becomes more and more 'master in its own houses' to used Sigmund Freud's (SF) words ** The goal must be understood as an intentional object, namely, as the object of a specific conscious or subconscious (i.e., immediately potential) representation


Normativeness:
a Cross-Cultural and Non-Speciesist Conceptualization
By Edoardo Fittipaldi
On the concept of cross-cultural
I use the term cultural—as opposed to natural—to refer to whatever mental attitude, disposition, or knowledge of an individual that is not genetically inherited but rather acquired via interactions with other individuals
Since the existence of cultural phenomena has been demonstrated also among certain non-human animals, I shall use the term cross-cultural to refer to an approach able to consider also certain phenomena to be found among certain non-human animals
Thus, the approach proposed here understands the term cultural within the compound word cross-cultural in a non-speciesist way
Distinguishing normative motivations
within the class of ateleological motivations
My starting point is that certain animals become capable of experiencing certain cultural ateleological motivations (based on certain emotions) owing to the long time of helplessness and dependence upon their caregiver(s) during their childhood
During this time, on the one hand, children learn habits and knowledge eventually falling within the reality principle, on the other hand, they 'learn'* to experience or "structure" emotions in ways that are independent of the pursuit of given goals (objects of representation)
Both kinds of learning obtain thanks to interactions with other individuals, notably, via:
first and foremost, primary socialization,
and then, secondary socialization
* I use the inverted brackets to emphasize that I use to learn in a broad sense
From ateleological motivations
to normative motivations
In order to properly conceptualize normative motivations, we must first distinguish teleological from ateleological motivations, and then distinguish normative motivations as a subclass of ateleological motivations
When an individual is prompted by ateleological motivations she experiences a drive toward performing or abstaining from a given action for its own sake, and not as a means for achieving a further goal
Ateleological motivation comprises not only motivations resting on shame, guilt, etc., but also those resting on hunger, thirst, sexual appetite, etc.
* Cf. Leon Petrażycki and Enrico Pattaro

Normativeness and motivation
I use the term normative to refer to a particular kind of motivation of individuals' behaviors
I shall call normative motivations those motivations ultimately resting upon the following emotions:
anger
indignation
guilt
pride
shame
certain forms of disgust
I am not implying that this list is exhaustive
Below, I will shortly mention derision
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