Taking a Stand, or Why the âNoâ Vote is a âYesâ to the Idea of Europe

Philosophy

It examines the context of the referendum in Greece in the summer of 2015 in view of theories of sovereignty and theories of judgment.

ΧΡΟΝΟΣ online περιοδικό με αφετηρία την Ελλάδα ENGLISH CONTENTS / ΤΡΕΧΟΝ ΤΕΥΧΟΣ ΧΡΟΝΟΣ // τεύχος ΕΙΚΟΣΙ ΕΠΤΑ, Ιούλιος 2015 taking a stand, or why the "no" vote is a "yes" to the idea of europe Similarities between Heinrich von Kleist's novella, "Michael Kohlhaas" and the Greek situation Dimitris Vardoulakis The July 5 referendum is not simply about whether Greek citizens will accept or reject the final, "take it or leave" proposal by the troika for measures to address national debt. In addition, it poses a question that confronts the whole of Europe, namely, is the idea of a single currency, based on the principle of the separation between the management of the currency and national sovereignty, dead or alive? The "Yes" vote vests the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund with the authority to make economic decisions that bypass and ignore the political process. The "No" vote, to the contrary, affirms the separation between currency administration and political decision making. To understand what is really at stake, an additional factor needs to be considered, namely, the way in which the assertion of national sovereignty is distinct from the possibility of democracy. This distinction is crucial if we are to comprehend what the acceptance or rejection of the proposed measures by the troika entails, as well as why the referendum is not a Greek political affair but rather poses a question about democracy that has a genuinely pan-European significance. To present the struggle for the assertion of national sovereignty, it is expedient to consider the Greek story leading to the referendum in conjunction with Heinrich von Kleist's novella, "Michael Kohlhaas" – a favorite of both Marx and Kafka. The story is set in the Reformation. A humble horse dealer, Kohlhaas, has two of his horses unlawfully confiscated. This eventually leads him to a take up arms against the authorities who were unjust toward him. Let me enumerate the most striking similarities between the two stories: First, the contentious issue unfolds because of the actions of secondary characters, not the proper political authorities. Two men in the service of a local Junker arbitrarily confiscate Kohlhaas' two horses. In parallel fashion, the Greek story unfolds because of the economic interests of unelected figures – the so-called oligarchs – who had the power to impose their will on elected representatives. Second, the results of the actions of these shadowy characters exploiting their position are tragic. Kohlhaas' appeal to have his horses returned is unsuccessful, even leading to the death of his wife. Similarly, the actions of a few oligarchs with their various economic interests and their influence on past governments have led Greeks to unprecedented social misery. This is a modern tragedy. Third, the reaction to this tragic predicament is a fiery uprising. Kohlhaas sacks the castle of the Junker whose employees stole his horses and takes his fight to the center of power, just like the "aganaktismenoi" (the indignants) brought their fight to Syntagma Square in Athens, in front of the Parliament and the center of power. Fourth, eventually Luther, as the supreme spiritual authority of his time, intervenes in favor of Kohlhaas, arranging for Kohlhaas to engage with the political and legal authorities, thereby seemingly enjoying natural justice. This is the predicament of Syriza since its election to power five months ago. They arrived in Brussels not unlike Kohlhaas: they were not embraced by the bearers of power, to whom they appeared a bit uncivilized not only for their forthright manner – Kleist describes Kohlhaas as not being afraid to raise his voice to tell the truth, a "crime" against the manners of good society – but also because of their sartorial impropriety of eschewing neck ties. Fifth, the several pages Kleist devotes to his novella to the legal proceedings are the most pedantic, and consequently the least memorable of the entire novella. This is not unlike the often obscure details of the negotiations between the Greek government and the Troika, compounded by the woeful media reporting in Greece. The reason for this is that practically the entire media is owned and controlled by the oligarchs who were influencing the previous governments that accumulated the Greek debt, and who openly despise Syriza. Unless a Greek uses social media and reads at least English, they have no hope of access to anything but blatantly biased reporting. Sixth – and certainly most importantly – the two stories are about sovereign power. For Greece, as is well known, it is a matter of whether national sovereignty can assert itself in the face of an unelected bureaucracy operating under neoliberal principles and on a biopolitical paradigm – austerity is, should we need reminding, a way of controlling, disciplining and normalizing populations. In the case of Kohlhaas, he is only permitted back to the legal proceedings because the authorities agree to treat him as a foreign invading power, that is, as a sovereign in his own right. Significantly, the first five similarities between Kleist's novella and the Greek situation -the arbitrariness of Dimitris Vardoulakis, CV Dimitris Vardoulakis: Taking a Stand, Or Why the "No" vote is a "yes"... http://chronosmag.eu/index.php/d-vardoulakis-taking-a-stand-or-why-t... 1 of 3 14/07/2015 3:27 PM power, the tragic situation, the revolutionary moment, the representation of the rebel, and the "chatter," as Schmitt calls the liberal procedural emphasis on achieving a compromise – amount to the sovereign right to make decisions. All of them are about the limits, both legal and related to life, of the sovereign power to rightfully make decisions. So, how does this story about the rights of a sovereign end in Kleist's novella? The legal process ends with the elector of Saxony handing out the death penalty to Kohlhaas. And yet, this is a triumph of his sovereignty because as he is executed, Kohlhaas is still in possession of a deadly secret, which he uses to extract retribution from the elector of Saxony. Just before being executed on the scaffold, Kohlhaas learns that all his demands – the demands that sum up his sovereign right – have been satisfied. All those who were responsible for the injustices committed against him have been punished, the horses have been restored to his estate, and his children are taken care of by the elector of Brandenburg. At the same time, the moment of his demise by the executioner signals the mental collapse of the elector of Saxony, his sovereign opponent, who cannot bear the weight of the secret he has lost. Kleist's point is this: sovereign power triumphs, justice within the purview of sovereignty prevails, and revenge – and is there justice without revenge? – has been extracted, at the very instant that life ceases. The apotheosis of sovereignty is accomplished with the cessation of life. Victory is death. According to one interpretation of what the July 5 referendum means, the same sovereign end game is about to unfold in Greece. As Greek media commentators have repeatedly – and almost uniformly – stressed since the weekend call for a referendum, the situation can be resolved in either of two unpalatable ways: Either a "Yes" vote means that Greece remains in the Eurozone, the austerity continues without a prospect of ever repaying the sovereign debt, while also leaving the European "experiment" in tatters, resembling a marionette play in which all the strings are held by bureaucrats who flout national sovereignty. Or, a "No" vote leads to a sovereign debt default, with similar results, namely, indefinite misery for the Greek population and the forced exit of Greece from the single currency. (I am saying "forced" exit, since it is a state policy of Syriza that it is not seeking an exit from the Euro, and hence an exit will not be a voluntary act but an expulsion.) Such an interpretation of the referendum entails a similar death drive to the one exhibited by Kohlhaas. The assertion of sovereignty and its utmost triumphs coincides with its death. The "Yes" vote, in this interpretation, annuls the primary principle of the Euro, that is, the separation of the currency from political power. It vests administrative powers (the EC, the ECB, and the IMF) with political power. The outcome is exactly the same with the "No" vote. Even though the Greeks may assert their opposition to the governmental powers and reaffirm their national sovereignty, the Grexit – the expulsion from the single currency – will confound the principle of the separation of economic management from political authority upon which the single currency was built and thereby signal the death kernel of the idea of Europe as it has been operating since the adoption of the Euro. That's where the narrative of sovereignty, so brilliantly presented in Kleist's novella, ends: in both options, the sovereign end game is the death drive of Europe. This is a false dilemma. The sovereign end game presented in Kleist's novella and repeated in the above reading of the referendum does not capture the essence of what is asked of the Greek people on July 5. There is another reading of the situation, which emerges only when we distinguish the democratic process from sovereignty. To see this democratic alternative narrative, the referendum on July 5 must be seen as presenting two positions, which do not lead to the same outcome and one of which will prevail. The two positions are as follows: The "Yes" vote is the continuation of the sovereign game. It is about who holds the right to exercise legal, fiscal and biopolitical control over an entire population. But here the term "population" should not be understood as the Greek people. A "Yes" vote means that governmentality has triumphed in Europe, and every national of every Eurozone state is subjectable to regularization and control by unelected bureaucrats and administrators. By contrast, the "No" vote is tantamount to Europeans rejecting subjection to management, regularization and normalization. From this perspective, the "No" vote, as Stathis Gourgouris rightly stressed a few days ago (see http://www.chronosmag.eu/index.php/s-ggs-p-epsfs.html), is the genuine pro-European vote. It is the option that keeps open the possibility that administration cannot trump politics in the Union, and that political decision-making still matters. A "No" vote in the referendum is a "yes" to the idea of Europe because it asserts that Greece and every other nation state of the Eurozone do not cede their political authority to unelected technocrats. Alexis Tsipras' action to call a referendum introduces an element that Kleist had not countenanced, namely, the possibility that there is an alternative possibility that is not reducible to the death drive of sovereignty, and which presents genuine alternatives between which the people are called upon to decide. The referendum presents the following choice: The "Yes" vote represents the sovereign end game, consisting in the assertion of sovereignty at the same time that the idea the Eurozone is dead because of the collapse of its founding principle – the separation of currency management from the exercise of political authority. By contrast, the "No" vote presents an affirmation of the independence of the political from bureaucratic decisions. This presents a genuine choice and hence an affirmation of the political process – and of Europe. But who are the people who are called to decide? Sure enough, the vote is given to the citizens of the Greek state, but the question of the referendum of July 5 addresses the people of Europe. Is the European Union to cede the sovereign power of its national member states to an unelected bureaucracy? Or are the people of Europe to retain their political rights? There has never been such a clear-cut "Yes" or "No" presented to Europeans since the introduction of the single currency, and everyone who cares about "Europe," whatever this may mean, ought to take a stand. There is a story about the first democratic constitution written by Solon. According to Aristotle in Athenian Constitution, Solon instituted that if one does not take a stand in a political dispute, then they will lose their citizenship and they will be expelled from the polis. The spirit of this law is clear: democracy consists in the necessity of taking a stand between two clear and distinct alternatives. It is this possibility that is missing in Dimitris Vardoulakis: Taking a Stand, Or Why the "No" vote is a "yes"... http://chronosmag.eu/index.php/d-vardoulakis-taking-a-stand-or-why-t... 2 of 3 14/07/2015 3:27 PM Kleist's narrative. It is also this possibility that had been missing in Europe until the call of the referendum last weekend. With the option to say "No," the referendum of July 5 asserts democracy within the sovereign power struggle. It is up to the citizens of Greece through their vote, and to the Europeans through raising their voices, to take up their democratic prerogative. ΧΡΟΝΟΣ 27 (07.2015) ENGLISH CONTENTS / ΤΡΕΧΟΝ ΤΕΥΧΟΣ ΧΡΟΝΟΣ // τεύχος ΕΙΚΟΣΙ ΕΠΤΑ, Ιούλιος 2015 Dimitris Vardoulakis: Taking a Stand, Or Why the "No" vote is a "yes"... http://chronosmag.eu/index.php/d-vardoulakis-taking-a-stand-or-why-t... 3 of 3 14/07/2015 3:27 PM


Review of Carlos Montemayor, Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time (Brill, 2013)

Philosophy

College of Arts and Letters Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2014.07.24 Author Carlos Montemayor Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time Published: July 20, 2014 Carlos Montemayor, Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time, Brill, 2013, 154 pp., $125.00 (hbk), ISBN 9789004228917. Reviewed by Ulrich Meyer, Colgate University This is a book about the psychology of temporal cognition, written by a philosopher. As the author rightly notes in the introduction, "Philosophers have made many tentative empirical claims about time cognition, but very few have taken into account all the current scientific evidence" (p. 5). Carlos Montemayor aims to fill this lacuna in the philosophical literature. Apart from the introductory chapter, the book consists of three chapters of about forty pages each. Chapter II begins with the general question of how to measure time, and then presents two types of clocks. Periodic clocks rely on uniform cyclical processes, such as a swinging pendulum, or the revolutions of the earth around its axis. Interval clocks are based on uniform (but non-cyclical) accumulation or decay processes, such as the growth of tree rings, or the flow of sand in an hourglass. Montemayor claims that both types of clock are realized in living organisms and then considers the empirical question of how they interact with one another. Chapter III argues that organisms with such internal clocks possess (perhaps non-linguistic) clock representations that faithfully represent objective temporal structure. Chapter IV presents a "novel two-phase model of the present." The sensorial present is generated by simultaneity widows, which are non-zero time intervals during which all events are judged simultaneous; the phenomenal present "integrates sequential information into a single unified experience" (p. 125). From p. 40 on, the focus shifts from a general discussion of chronometry to the specific biological bases of temporal cognition. These I found to be the most rewarding parts of the book. There were many instances where I wished that Montemayor had provided a more detailed account of the remarkable ways in which animals process temporal information, rather than refer to the specialist literature on this subject matter. However, his main contention is that these empirical discoveries are philosophically important (rather than merely interesting in their own right), and it is at that point that I think a stronger case could have been made. The main fault line in the philosophy of time runs between those who think that there is something metaphysically special about the present, and that time genuinely flows ("A-theorists"); and those who reject both claims ("B-theorists"). A-theorists typically offer two types of argument for their position. The metaphysical argument claims that only an A-theory of time can give an account of genuine change. The phenomenological argument contends that A-theories of time are supported by our own first-person experience of time: present objects are "vivid" in a way that past and future ones are not, and the passage of time is said to be something that we perceive directly. B-theorists reject both arguments. They do not agree that genuine change requires an A-theory of time, and they try to explain away the first-person evidence for A-theories as either illusory or flatly mistaken. One might expect a philosophically informed discussion of human temporal cognition to shed some light on the phenomenological argument, but this is not how Minding Time plays out. Rather than begin with a neutral stance on the relation between the "human time" in which our own temporal experiences unfold, and the "physical time" that forms the subject matter of physical theories, Montemayor assumes from the outset that physics gives a complete account of the nature of time. He rejects any appeal to introspection about temporal phenomenology as incompatible with his scientific methodology (ch. I; p. 109). On his view, the task of a theory of temporal cognition is to investigate how organisms represent the features of an observer-independent temporal reality that is given by our best physical theories. Such an approach is bound to limit the philosophical impact of the investigation. A-theorists will readily grant that physical theories do little to support their views about time. After all, such theories do not even mention the words 'present' or 'flow'. But A-theorists will also insist that there is more to time than our physical theories let on, and that some of these additional features can be identified in our own conscious experiences. To rule out any introspective appeal to temporal phenomenology therefore not only deprives A-theorists of one of their main arguments, it also eliminates the only part of the debate that is actually concerned with the way humans perceive time. Being a B-theorist myself, I would be happy to accept the conclusion that the A-theory is misguided, but I am not sure that we can acquire new insight into the debate if we assume from the outset that one side is wrong. Moreover, if we agree to ignore the phenomenological argument then it is no longer clear to me why philosophers of time should care about the details of human temporal cognition. At best, such an investigation would be a mop-up operation that tries to explain how an illusion arises that we all along agreed was an illusion. For B-theorists, the important part is to defeat the A-theory, not to settle the precise details of how temporal illusions arise. In a number of instances, such as the discussion of the specious present in Section 4.3, Montemayor defends positions that differ in subtle ways from the accounts that many B-theorists simply made up (without bothering to read the empirical literature on temporal cognition). It would have been helpful to hear more about why he believes that these minor differences are philosophically important, and what additional insight they provide on the debates in the philosophy of time. Montemayor nicely lays out how temporal cognition takes many different forms, even within one and the same animal, and how the different modes of temporal cognition interact. (See, e.g., the illuminating discussion of cross-modal simultaneity windows in Section 4.1.) But many aspects of temporal cognition do not feature prominently in philosophical disputes about time. For instance, the long Chapter II is about measurement of durations, which is an issue that Aand B-theorists largely agree on. On the other hand, the book says very little about the flow of time, and most of the discussion in Chapter IV is really about perceptions of simultaneity, rather than the contentious question of whether there is a principled difference between the present and past and future times. In closing, let me briefly comment on two specific issues. The first concerns Weber's Law, according to which the justnoticeable difference between two stimuli is proportional to the magnitude of the stimuli. Section 2.3 takes this to mean that any time measurement is subject to a tradeoff between scale and resolution, and that the ability to measure longer time intervals must be bought with a sacrifice of precision (p. 22; see also p. 49). I do not think this is right. To get a higher resolution with an hourglass, we use finer sand. To measure longer durations, we use more sand. Nothing prevents us from getting both, by using a larger quantity of finer sand. Weber's law is an empirical generalization about actually realized biological clocks, not a physical law of chronometry. The second issue concerns the isomorphism thesis defended in Section 3.1. Montemayor argues that the clock representations possessed by organisms with internal interval clocks are detailed enough to be isomorphic to intervals on the real line. If that were right, though, then humans and other animals would have aleph-one many clock representations. That not only seems to be an implausible claim about the informational capacity of the human nervous system, it also appears to be incompatible with claims that Montemayor himself makes elsewhere in the book. If the isomorphism thesis were true then all clock representations would have maximal resolution, undermining Montemayor's (and Weber's) thesis that there is a scaleresolution trade-off. Similarly, if the claims about non-zero simultaneity windows in Section 4.2 are right, then there is a nonzero lower bound on possible temporal resolution, again ruling out aleph-one many clock representations. When I arrived at the end of the book, I felt that I had learned a lot about the biology of temporal cognition, but I was less sure how this newly acquired knowledge might change or deepen my understanding of debates in the philosophy of time. Partially, this might be due to the fact that Minding Time makes surprisingly little contact with the standard literature on the philosophy of time, and often hints at philosophical implications rather than develop them in detail. But I also suspect that many of the issues addressed are ultimately of more interest to philosophers of mind and psychology (who are concerned with processes that take place in time) than they are to philosophers of time (who are interested in the nature of time itself). Copyright © 2014 ISSN: 1538 1617 College of Arts and Letters Notre Dame, IN


Philosophy

A Defense Against Attacks on Negative Liberty Stuart T. Doyle1 ABSTRACT: Isaiah Berlin made the distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty. Since then, prominent contemporary philosophers including Charles Taylor and Martha Nussbaum have declared negative liberty insufficient or incoherent. This is a critique of those declarations, which have been unduly accepted to a large extent. The critique primarily focuses on Taylor, who made the most direct and complete argument against negative liberty. His argument is shown to be ineffective. And further, his conception of positive liberty is shown to be incoherent. Many conceptions of freedom have been formulated over the centuries. As Isaiah Berlin (1969, 4) pointed out, there are two basic contrasting categories into which most of these conceptions may be seen to fit: theories of negative liberty and theories of positive liberty. Negative theories define freedom exclusively in terms of the independence of the individual from interference by others. Lockean theories are prominent examples. In contrast, the positive theories contend that freedom resides at least in part in collective control over common life toward some positive goal. Theories descending from Rousseau exemplify this category. In the decades since negative and positive liberty were clearly delineated, the most lauded contemporary philosophers, such as Charles Taylor and Martha Nussbaum, have categorically denounced all concepts of negative liberty. In an essay titled, "What's Wrong with Negative Liberty," Taylor argues that a negative definition Stuart Doyle (firstname.lastname@example.com) is in the US Marine Corps and holds a M.S. degree in criminology from the University of Pennsylvania. J LS Journal of Libertarian Studies Volume 24, No. 2 (2020): 317–322 Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License 318 - Journal of Libertarian Studies 24, No. 2 (2020) of freedom cannot be adequate and that we should understand freedom as a positive ability to fulfil our purposes. Nussbaum has not dedicated an entire writing to the topic per se, but in her book Creating Capabilities she declares the idea of negative liberty to be "incoherent" (Nussbaum 2011, 65). Though she does not form an argument in support of this claim, I bring it up only to emphasize a blind spot needing attention. Denouncing negative liberty seems to have become so fashionable that when it is done in a work of philosophy apparently no substantiating argument is needed. This is a strange state of affairs considering that the best arguments which have been made against negative liberty are severely defective. I see Taylor's essay as the most prominent example. So, my goal here is to show that Taylor's conception of freedom is incoherent. After we briefly observe the conspicuous absence of Nussbaum's argument, I will address Taylor's argument, which seems to have made philosophers comfortable in dismissing negative liberty out of hand. Nussbaum writes: Fundamental rights are only words unless and until they are made real by government action. The very idea of "negative liberty," often heard in this connection, is an incoherent idea: all liberties are positive, meaning liberties to do or to be something; and all require the inhibition of interference by others. This is a point that must be emphasized particularly in the United States, where people sometimes imagine that government does its job best when it is inactive. (Nussbaum 2011, 65) After this claim about negative liberty being incoherent, the passage reads with the cadence of justification, as if the next clause gave reason to believe the claim, but it does not. It merely endorses the antithesis: positive liberty. We are supposed to just see the incoherence of negative liberty once it has been gestured at. But counterexamples come too easily for that. From the Bill of Rights: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated... Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted" (U.S. Const., amend. IV and VIII). It would take significant rhetorical writhing to rephrase these as positive freedoms. Rather than freedom from search and seizure, would it be freedom to privacy? How does one "do" privacy except by simply not being searched? Maybe one could construct a satisfactory positive reformulation of these freedoms, but it would certainly be ugly and inelegant compared to the easy coherence of the negative formulations. A Defense Against Attacks on Negative Liberty - 319 So a quick bit of examination shows that on a topic of monumental importance, Nussbaum has made a strong assertion, which is not self-evident and is not justified by any subsequent reasoning. But, to my knowledge, this has been widely accepted as exemplary work in philosophy. Maybe certain arguments against negative liberty have silently become consensus, so that we can all now just assume that negative liberty is wrong. But such a consensus would be premature. The arguments against negative liberty have not been so effective. I will now show that the vanguard essay attacking negative liberty, Taylor's "What's Wrong with Negative Liberty," fails completely. Taylor's argument is as follows. We care more about some freedoms than we do about other freedoms. For example, we care about freedom of religion more than we care about the freedom we lose at a traffic light. And there must be some reason that different freedoms have different importance. According to Taylor, freedoms get their differing importance from the differing importance of the purposes they serve (Taylor 1979, 217). Thus purpose is said to be inexorably tied to freedom. And purposes are positive things, which we can fail to fulfill, even if the government does not set up any obstacles that would hold us back from their fulfillment. Taylor writes of how internal obstacles such as our own baser desires or fears can prevent us from fulfilling our important purposes (ibid., 215). Since those purposes are supposedly necessarily tied to freedom itself, our own baser desires and fears make us unfree when they foil the fulfilment of our important purposes. And so, by Taylor's reckoning, freedom necessarily entails positively overcoming our own baser desires and fears and fulfilling our important positive purposes. Like Nussbaum's assertion, Taylor's claim is not merely that some positive liberties should exist, but that no negative liberty can ever coherently exist. Taylor opens the possibility that a government which is supposed to guarantee freedom may be required to structure society in a certain way that would enable us to positively fulfill our purposes. But he leaves this application an open question. Taylor's argument goes wrong in its crude taxonomy of freedoms. He contrasts the nature of the freedom we lose at traffic lights to the nature of freedom of religion (Taylor 1979, 218). He means to show that the two kinds of freedom differ in quality, nor merely in quantity. He needs to establish the notion that there are differing inherent levels of importance in freedoms in order to establish the notion that freedoms vary in qualitative kind, which he needs in order to argue that the 320 - Journal of Libertarian Studies 24, No. 2 (2020) different freedoms serve different positive purposes. Some freedoms do seem more important than others. But in order to establish difference in quality, Taylor must rule out difference in quantity as the relevant variable. To do this, he compares crude counts of freedom. He says that many people only practice their religion once per week, while many people lose freedom at red lights multiple times per day. Thus by Taylor's count, traffic lights are a quantitatively greater loss of freedom than the loss of religious freedom. But since our care is greater for loss of religious freedom, the difference must be qualitative, not quantitative, by Taylor's reasoning. This crude accounting fails to notice that freedom of religion is a collection of many freedoms. Religion can be totalizing. Imagine a country which required us all to be Amish. This would entail loss of freedom of transportation, communication, hairstyle, clothing style, profession, education, and artistic expression, to name a few. All of these freedoms would be lost at all hours of every day. Most religions even require that certain types of thought be practiced or avoided at all times. Likewise, a mirrored loss of many freedoms is suffered by those who very much wish to be Amish where it is prohibited. By looking just a little more closely at the rough bucket of classification called "religion," Taylor's analysis starts to crumble; loss of religious freedom entails a much greater sheer quantity of lost freedom than does the imposition of multiple daily stoplights. Even the agnostic or the casual practitioner who attends worship once per week or less fears the loss of religious freedom because of the potential for totalization. Freedom of religion has at times been thought not so important; communist revolutions sometimes preceded with a popular lack of concern for freedom of religion. From the later stages of such cases, many of us have gained an appreciation of the potential for totalization when freedom of religion is lost. These days, many of our judgments are affected by fears of potential totalization, as they should be. Freedom of religion always includes a huge quantity of freedoms for some people, and its loss always includes the potential loss of a huge quantity of freedoms for everyone. So, to make a more valid comparison between freedom of religion and traffic light freedom we should imagine a quantitatively totalizing traffic light. Suppose you had to wait for a red light to change before you took each step, or before you moved any part of your body in any direction at all. And suppose that rather than thirty seconds, the light could remain red for an hour, A Defense Against Attacks on Negative Liberty - 321 or a day. It is easy to imagine a red light that would make Taylor beg to give up his freedom of religion if he could just be free of waiting at the red light. Simple quantity changes everything. If red lights were a category that we knew to have realistic potential for quantitative totalization, we could easily care more about freedom from red lights than we care about freedom of religion. This means that Taylor has not ruled out quantity as the important variable in his example as he needed to. He has not given us any reason to believe that different freedoms get their legitimacy from different purposes, and so he has not made an effective argument for positive purposes being intrinsic to freedom. Not only does Taylor's argument fail, but the positive freedom which he goes on to describe is incoherent. I mentioned that Taylor focuses on how our freedom could supposedly be foiled by our own baser desires and fears. His conception of positive freedom describes the times when we overcome those undesirable desires: we have more important and less important desires. For Taylor, to be free means that we must act in accordance with our more important desires. He says that "we can speak of freedom or its absence without strain" in this sense (Taylor 1979, 221). But normally acting in accordance with one's more important desires is called discipline or will power. And when labeled as such, it seems normal to say that freedom means being free to exercise discipline or not. We can certainly "speak of freedom or its absence without strain" in this sense too. But Taylor's view of freedom necessarily entails not being free to exercise or not exercise discipline. There seems to be a contradiction, but it gets worse. Taylor's positive freedom demands that we always act righteously. He at first seems to allow leeway by individualizing our important purposes and desires; each person's self-actualization may be different. But Taylor needs to show that some of our desires are more significant than others. And once he has elevated our significant desires to the status of "import-attributing" (Taylor 1979, 226), he cannot allow the individual to be trusted with deciding which of his desires are important, for he could easily get it wrong. As an example of getting it wrong, Taylor offers the case of Charles Manson, who had long-term desires and purposes which imparted a sensation of importance. He had a sense of fundamental purpose (Taylor 1979, 227). Clearly, Taylor and I agree that Manson's sense of purpose was wrong. But for Taylor this implies that Manson was not 322 - Journal of Libertarian Studies 24, No. 2 (2020) free, because he could not act in accordance with his true significant purpose. And Taylor's point here is that, for all we know, any one of us could be like Manson: incorrect about our true significant purposes. So none of us are to be the arbiter of our own right purpose. The standard of rightness must necessarily be external to the individual if Taylor's point is to mean anything at all. So, in order to be free at any moment, we must act righteously, as determined by some externally imposed standard. This turns freedom into its opposite; freedom cannot mean strict compulsion to act in a prescribed way. We can easily say that Charles Manson was wrong in his desires and perceived purpose. And we can agree that each of us has certain purposes we should try to fulfil. But these evaluations are just not part of freedom. I have not ruled out that a government could be right in instituting some kind of promotion of righteous virtue, which would promote the fulfilment of good purposes. But this would likely be a tradeoff with a loss of freedom. Desirable values can conflict in such tradeoffs. When conflicting values such as freedom and righteousness are mashed together into a single concept, the conflict becomes a self-conflicting incoherence, like Taylor's positive freedom. Being free includes being free to act in a less than perfectly righteous, honorable, or self-actualizing way. Otherwise, freedom entails a single, extrinsically prescribed course of action, which is a nonsensical idea of freedom. Taylor's conception of positive freedom contradicts itself, and his argument against negative freedom fails. If this is the kind of position on offer from the critics of negative liberty, then assertions such as Nussbaum's are wildly unfounded. This is a simple critique, without any full theory offered as an alternative, but it is an absolutely necessary step toward identifying or constructing a better theory of freedom. REFERENCES Berlin, Isaiah. 1969. "Two Concepts of Liberty." Pp. 1–54 in Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2011. Creating Capabilities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1985. "What's Wrong with Negative Liberty." Pp. 211–29 in Philosophical Papers: Volume 2, Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Philosophy

Addressing the question of how medicine should engage with people who consider their clinical disease condition to be importantly constitutive of their identity, this article focuses on one groupâadvocates for the fat acceptance (FA) or body positivity movement in American society. Drawing on philosophical analysis, I try to show that FA and physician communities represent different traditions within the larger culture and that whether obesity should be considered a disease is a culture battle. I argue that diseases (medical) and illnesses (cultural) are 2 different designations of clinical symptoms and that both disease and illness designations can change over time or be uncertain.

AMA Journal of Ethics, December 2018 1195 AMA Journal of Ethics® December 2018, Volume 20, Number 12: E1195-1200 HISTORY OF MEDICINE Why Naming Disease Differs From Naming Illness Marvin J. H. Lee, PhD, MDiv Abstract Addressing the question of how medicine should engage with people who consider their clinical disease condition to be importantly constitutive of their identity, this article focuses on one group- advocates for the fat acceptance (FA) or body positivity movement in American society. Drawing on philosophical analysis, I try to show that FA and physician communities represent different traditions within the larger culture and that whether obesity should be considered a disease is a culture battle. I argue that diseases (medical) and illnesses (cultural) are 2 different designations of clinical symptoms and that both disease and illness designations can change over time or be uncertain. When Conditions Constitute Identity How should medicine engage with people who consider their clinical disease condition to be importantly constitutive of their identity? To answer this question, I focus on a group whose claim to not having a disease strikes many physicians as odd: advocates for the "fat acceptance" or "body positivity" movement. Fat acceptance (FA) and body positivity describe characteristic features of the same movement, and, for this reason, I use these terms interchangeably here. Nevertheless, a technical distinction can be made; the former is "more of a reaction to fat shaming" while the latter is "a more commercial selfesteem movement, [which] came later."1 Based on my philosophical diagnosis that the issue of whether obesity is a disease involves a culture battle, I present the physicians and the FA activists as having agendas derived from 2 different traditions cohabiting the greater culture. Physicians, by training, tend to subscribe to the medical tradition with its primary agenda of furthering excellence in physical functioning and longevity. Because obesity is an adverse condition that impairs functioning and decreases life expectancy,2 it is reasonable to call it a disease. On the other hand, the FA movement represents one creative adaptation of the secular liberal individualist (SLI) tradition, which has as its agenda the protection of individual autonomy and social tolerance,3 which are regarded as the most important socioethical values. FA advocates creatively adapt this agenda to obesity, arguing that being fat is an individual's autonomous lifestyle choice that deserves social tolerance and respect.4 The FA movement is a relatively new development, so it is too early to call it a www.amajournalofethics.org 1196 new independent tradition or an established branch of the SLI tradition. Thus, it is better to understand it as a social movement. Some physicians might be members of the SLI tradition if they openly or clandestinely avow that individual autonomy and social tolerance are the supreme socioethical values. Nevertheless, physicians would distance themselves from a group that creatively uses the SLI moral agenda to claim that being fat is a personal lifestyle choice and that the obese lifestyle can be healthy. That is, physicians can accept obesity as a lifestyle to be socially respected. But what the physicians find impossible to accept is the activists' extended claim that the obese lifestyle can be healthy, which is contradictory to the traditional medical view. Therefore, the physician community and the FA movement are in a sharp disagreement with each other on the particular issue of whether obesity is a disease. I maintain that the disagreement is a culture battle. It is cultural in that the dispute will be resolved by the verdict of the culture within which this tradition and movement coexist, each vying for its own survival. It is a battle rather than a war because the conflict here occurs between one tradition and one social movement within the culture to which they both belong, not a clash between different cultures. Tradition and Culture In current scholarly literature, there are various definitions of culture, tradition, heritage, custom, and so on, which are largely equivocal; the meanings of the terms overlap without clear explanations about how they are conceptually related to one another. According to Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, a tradition can be "primarily religious or moral (for example Catholicism or humanism) ... economic (for example a particular craft or profession, trade union or manufacturer), aesthetic (for example modes of literature or painting) or geographical (for example crystallizing around the history and culture of a particular house, village or region)."5 Following Mulhall and Swift, I define tradition as "a medium by which a set of practices are shaped and transmitted across generations."5 In other words, tradition is formed under a particular teleological agenda (which I shall call a telos henceforth) and is in turn the means by which practices socially or intellectually worthy of preserving are shaped and transmitted, with the ultimate vision that the practices will survive, be reproduced, and thrive. I consider culture to have the same meaning as tradition. Thus, culture, just like tradition, derives from a telos and is a medium by which a set of practices are shaped and transmitted across generations. However, tradition and culture, I argue, are distinct from each other in that the former is considered to participate in the latter. Various participating traditions get woven together to yield the final product called a culture. AMA Journal of Ethics, December 2018 1197 The Secular Liberal Individualist Tradition and the Fat Acceptance Movement The SLI community thriving in the United States preserves a distinct tradition that carries a few-centuries-old ethical ideology, namely, secular humanism.6-9 The SLI community in the United States is one of the existing contemporary heirs of the secular humanist tradition that is sustained by a telos of social harmony and order via the power of human agency.6-9 But situated in the American democratic sociocultural context where no single custom, belief system, or ideology can be considered culturally superior, members of this community have naturally come to stress respect for voluntary, individual adult agency and social tolerance as the quintessential virtues to achieve the prized social harmony and order. In other words, in their effort to find common ground, members of the SLI community emphasize respect for individual adult autonomy and social tolerance over respect for the customs and values of certain racial, religious, or political communities. In the 1970s, some activists within the American SLI tradition pushed the agenda-in advance of the culture's readiness to change-that homosexuality was a personal identity (inborn or acquired) expressed through an individual's sexual lifestyle. Nevertheless, they were able to convince the psychiatric community, as the American Psychiatric Association removed the diagnostic category of homosexuality from the second edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973.10 Given hindsight, medicalization of homosexuality was an ethical issue the psychiatric community needed to resolve. Now, FA advocates have arisen, creatively adapting the SLI's telos to body appearance while demanding recognition and visibility for the new body-proud people. For FA activists, everyone should feel proud of their own body shape, regardless of whether they have obesity (but, interestingly, not anorexia).11 Thus, FA advocacy is essentially for nondiscrimination in society, which FA advocates regard as an ethical fight.4 As a result, their controversial medical claim of being fat but fit should be considered not as its core agenda.1,11 The Tradition of the Physician Community The medical community, whose primary members include clinicians and medical scientists, is also a community of tradition. But I will use the term physician community due to my focus on physician members. Originating presumably in the ancient Hippocratic tradition, the community's telos, as mentioned previously, is supporting or restoring excellence of physical functionality and longevity.12,13 However, while the super-healthy body is the ideal, the desired functional excellence and optimal lifespan have become troubling questions physicians need to answer. Is it medically normal for elderly people to suffer from knee problems? Are some couples naturally infertile? Is it clinically OK to feel depressed or sad? Is dying a pathological symptom we can find a cure for in the near future? The answers to these questions depend on whether there is a consensus among physicians about whether to define them as diseases. www.amajournalofethics.org 1198 Is Obesity a Disease or an Illness? Physicians or researchers have power to name diseases, not illnesses. The distinction between disease and illness has been well explored already by quite a few scholars; we understand the former to be medical and the latter to be cultural.14 To be more accurate, the 2 concepts have 2 different designating authorities. The physician community decides if a certain condition is a disease while the general culture determines whether it is an illness. In the case of homosexuality, the Western medical community and the public eventually converged on naming it neither a disease nor an illness. But note that homosexuality is still considered an illness by some Muslims and by some conservative Christians. Schistosomiasis also illustrates that disease classification is not always clear cut. It was not seen as an illness in 20th-century Egyptian culture since it was named the "male menstruation."14 Today Egyptian physicians seem to call it a disease, but the disease designation arguably does not have a great deal of appeal to the Egyptian public for it is difficult to adduce whether, or how many, people die of schistosomiasis because death certificates rarely identify schistosomiasis as the primary cause of death.15 Obesity in the United States seems similar. The physician community, represented by American Medical Association, calls obesity a disease state.16 But we do not identify obesity as the primary cause of death, which allows FA advocates to have leeway to say, in effect, "It is all right to be obese. You don't die of it," or "You can be fat but fit (whatever 'fit' means)." Winning a Culture Battle It is important to understand that whether the public accepts the physician community's disease designation of obesity as an illness is not a problem to solve but a conflict to resolve, for we can solve a problem only when stakeholders share the same paradigm and telos, which is not the case here. This is a conflict between the physician community and the FA community, as the 2 groups are fighting for cultural endorsement by the general public. Accordingly, it would be a mistake to think that the physician community could or should find a way of treating a disease that the FA community, in its view, erroneously or delusionally refuses to accept. It can be argued that the FA and physician communities hold the "truths" of 2 different realms, the ethical and the medical, respectively. If so, then the primary question that physicians should struggle to answer is this: What would the physician community do to win the heart of the general public to resolve the conflict? References 1. deVos K. The problem with body positivity. New York Times. May 29, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/opinion/weight-loss-bodypositivity.html. Accessed October 4, 2018. 2. Abdelaal M, le Roux CW, Docherty NG. Morbidity and mortality associated with obesity. Ann Transl Med. 2017;5(7):161. AMA Journal of Ethics, December 2018 1199 3. Zuckerman P, Galen LW, Pasquale FL. The Nonreligious: Understanding Secular People and Societies. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 2016. 4. Kirkland A. Think of the hippopotamus: rights consciousness in the fat acceptance movement. Law Soc Rev. 2008;42(2):397-432. 5. Mulhall S, Swift A. Liberals and Communitarians. Oxford, UK: Blackwell; 1992. 6. Holyoake GJ. English Secularism: A Confession of Belief. Ashland, OH: Library of Alexandria; 2012. 7. Walter N. Humanism: What's in the Word. London, UK: Rationalist Press Association; 1997. 8. Norman R. On Humanism. London, UK: Routledge; 2004. 9. Rorty R. Religion as conversation-stopper. In: Rorty R, ed. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York, NY: Penguin; 1999:168-174. 10. Bayer R. Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis. New York, NY: Basic Books; 1981. 11. Cwynar-Horta J. The commodification of the body positive movement on Instagram. Stream Insp Crit Thought. 2016;8(2):36-56. 12. Kass L. Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs. New York, NY: Free Press; 1985. 13. Giordano J. Foni phronimos-an interview with Edmund D. Pellegrino by James Giordano. Philos Ethics Humanit Med. 2010;5:16. 14. Skolnik R. Ethical and human rights concerns in global health. In: Riegelman R, ed. Global Health 101. 3rd ed. Burlington, MA: Jones and Bartlett; 2016:146-167. 15. Faqs.org. Schistosomiasis. http://www.faqs.org/health/topics/42/Schistosomiasis.html. Accessed September 14, 2018. 16. American Medical Association. Recognition of Obesity as a disease H-440.842. https://policysearch.amaassn.org/policyfinder/detail/obesity%20disease?uri=%2FAMADoc%2FHOD.xml0-3858.xml. Modified 2013. Accessed October 11, 2018. Marvin J. H. Lee, PhD, MDiv is a bioethics consultant at the Institute of Clinical Bioethics at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is also the editor of the Journal of Healthcare Ethics & Administration. Lee studied philosophical and theological bioethics at Cambridge University and Yale University, where he earned a PhD and an MDiv, respectively. His research areas include medical ethics and bioethics, health care administration and policy development, East Asian philosophy and religion, and multiculturalism. www.amajournalofethics.org 1200 Citation AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(12):E1195-1200. DOI 10.1001/amajethics.2018.1195. Conflict of Interest Disclosure The author(s) had no conflicts of interest to disclose. The viewpoints expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the AMA. Copyright 2018 American Medical Association. All rights reserved. ISSN 2376-


Philosophy

Dubreuil (Biol Phil 25:53â73, 2010b , this journal) argues that modern-like cognitive abilities for inhibitory control and goal maintenance most likely evolved in Homo heidelbergensis , much before the evolution of oft-cited modern traits, such as symbolism and art. Dubreuilâs argument proceeds in two steps. First, he identifies two behavioral traits that are supposed to be indicative of the presence of a capacity for inhibition and goal maintenance: cooperative feeding and cooperative breeding. Next, he tries to show that these behavioral traits most likely emerged in Homo heidelbergensis . In this paper, I show that neither of these steps are warranted in light of current scientific evidence, and thus, that the evolutionary background of human executive functions, such as inhibition and goal maintenance, remains obscure. Nonetheless, I suggest that cooperative breeding might mark a crucial step in the evolution of our species: its early emergence in Homo erectus might have favored a social intelligence that was required to get modernity really off the ground in Homo sapiens

Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Cooperative feeding and breeding, and the evolution of executive control Krist Vaesen Philosophy & Ethics Eindhoven University of Technology The Netherlands E-mail: email@example.com http://home.ieis.tue.nl/kvaesen/ forthcoming in Biology & Philosophy Abstract Dubreuil (2010b, this journal) argues that modern-like cognitive abilities for inhibitory control and goal maintenance most likely evolved in Homo heidelbergensis, much before the evolution of oft-cited modern traits, such as symbolism and art. Dubreuil's argument proceeds in two steps. First, he identifies two behavioral traits that are supposed to be indicative of the presence of a capacity for inhibition and goal maintenance: cooperative feeding and cooperative breeding. Next, he tries to show that these behavioral traits most likely emerged in Homo heidelbergensis. In this paper, I show that neither of these steps are warranted in light of current scientific evidence, and thus, that the evolutionary background of human executive functions, such as inhibition and goal maintenance, remains obscure. Nonetheless, I suggest that cooperative breeding might mark a crucial step in the evolution of our species: its early emergence in Homo erectus might have favored a social intelligence that was required to get modernity really off the ground in Homo sapiens. 1 Introduction There is a growing trend against the model known as the "Human Revolution", according to which modern behaviors (such as art and symbolism) emerged suddenly some 50,000 years ago, an event supposedly signaling a dramatic cognitive advance, most likely triggered by a reorganization of the human brain (see, most notably, McBrearty and Brooks, 2000, and the collection of essays in Mellars et al., 2007). Against the model, scholars in various disciplines nowadays try to offer an account portraying the evolution of human culture and of human higher cognitive abilities as gradual, rather than abrupt. Following this trend, Dubreuil (2010b, this journal) provides an argument meant to show that two fairly modern behaviors (i.e. human cooperation in matters of feeding and breeding), supposedly indicative of two fairly high-level cognitive capacities (i.e. inhibitory control and goal maintenance), can be traced back to Homo heidelbergensis (700,000 300,000 years ago).1 If his Acknowledgements: Krist Vaesen would like to thank Carel van Schaik, Kim Sterelny and one anonymous reviewer for their useful comments on previous versions of this paper. Research by Krist Vaesen was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). 1 A similar argument is found in Dubreuil's book Human evolution and the origins of hierarchies (2010a). There, however, the focus is more on joint attention and norm following than on executive control; and on how these abilities account for the evolution of cooperative feeding and breeding in humans. Here I will focus on executive control for two reasons: first, because Dubreuil's discussion of joint attention and norm following has already been criticized by Driscoll (forthcoming; see more below); and second, given that executive control is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for norm following, any problem for Dubreuil's views concerning executive control is de facto a problem for his views concerning norm following. In light of this, I will refer to Dubreuil's book only when useful. 2 Krist Vaesen argument is sound, Dubreuil indeed has a case against the "Human Revolution", since some forms of higher-level cognition (c.q. inhibition and goal maintenance) would have been around some 250,000 650,000 years before the supposed great leap forward. However, in the next few sections I show that Dubreuil's argument fails. I do so in two steps. First, I explain that cooperative feeding and cooperative breeding are poor indicators of inhibition and goal maintenance (Section 2 & 3). So even if one could date the emergence of these two cooperative behaviors (which Dubreuil fails to do, see the second point), that wouldn't suffice as evidence for the emergence of the two higher cognitive traits. Second, I show that Dubreuil likely misdates the occurrence of human cooperative feeding and cooperative breeding (Section 4). Science's best conjecture is that these behaviors arose in Homo erectus, ca. 1 million years before Homo heidelbergensis. Both points of course do not imply that the idea of the "Human Revolution" is true. They do show, however, that Dubreuil's argument doesn't provide (extra) reason to abandon it. Still, I think that cooperative breeding can be used as evidence against the "Human Revolution", and in the final section (Section 5) I suggest how. 2 Cooperative feeding and executive control According to Dubreuil (2010b), two cooperative foraging strategies stand out as evidencing increased executive control in the Homo lineage: hunting in group and extensive food sharing. In both, Dubreuil believes, cooperation is secured by agents' ability to stick to the cooperative arrangement (i.e. goal maintenance) and the ability to resist the temptation of acting selfinterestedly (i.e. inhibition). This seems an intuitively plausible interpretation. Prospective cooperators have an incentive to consume the public good, without contributing to it. In case of food sharing, the temptation is to receive food, but not to give away. To secure cooperation, then, agents must keep in mind the goal and benefits of long-term sharing relationships (e.g., pooling risks yields a more regular energy intake), and inhibit the current desire to eat a bit more now, at the expense of eating less later. In case of hunting the temptation is to drop out early from the hunting coalition (thereby putting others at a greater risk), yet get hold of a piece of meat. Again, joint hunting is stable and effective, only if individual hunters stick to the shared goal, and inhibit impulses to step aside and put themselves in safety (rather than to do their fair share of stone-throwing and clubbing). Yet, there are two reasons for thinking that both cooperative behaviors are poor indicators of inhibition and goal maintenance. The first is that cooperative hunting and food sharing is widely present in our closest relative the chimpanzee, which lacks advanced, human-like mechanisms for inhibition and goal maintenance. The second reason is that much simpler cognitive mechanisms may explain cooperative hunting and food sharing. Let me address these issues each in turn. 2.1 Hunting and meat sharing in chimpanzees Dubreuil acknowledges that joint hunting and meat sharing is present in apes, yet thinks these practices are not as pervasive as in humans. The advent of cooking and large-game hunting (presumably in Homo heidelbergensis) has made cooperation in matters of meat necessary and default, and-so Dubreuil thinks-required mechanisms for inhibition and goal maintenance (i.e. in humans, but not apes). The first problem with this line of reasoning is that the human diet is probably not as meat-based as Dubreuil suggests. In colder climates, meat may perhaps account for a large fraction of energy intake, in the tropics and the subtropics, many traditional hunter-gatherers forage primarily for plant foods, and meat is only a very small part of the overall diet-indeed, just like in our closest relative the chimpanzee (Stanford, 2001). Interestingly, Dubreuil (2010b, p. 60; 2010a, p. 70) makes the very same observation, yet shies away from the fairly obvious consequence: that the necessity of sharing may be as large/small for chimps as it is for humans. Cooperative feeding and breeding in humans 3 But even if one grants that humans cooperate more pervasively, there is a second, more fundamental problem. The pervasiveness of a practice doesn't count as extra evidence for the reality of the mechanisms supposedly subserving it. For an existential proof, a species-wide observation of the practice suffices-whether or not the practice is more pervasively present than in another species. For instance, the fact that subtropical human foragers hunt not as frequently as their colleagues in cooler climates, doesn't imply they don't have the requisite mechanisms for inhibition and goal maintenance. Rather, subtropical foragers are not as frequent hunters, most likely because plant foods are more abundantly and reliably available in subtropical habitats. The crucial fact is that they are able to and do in fact hunt, not how often they do. In a similar vein, then, the robust, species-wide observation of joint hunting in chimpanzees (see e.g., the overview of Muller and Mitani, 2005), though less pervasively as in humans, should suffice to demonstrate chimpanzees' capacity for inhibition and goal maintenance (or any other capacity deemed necessary for joint hunting)-unless Dubreuil can show that human and chimpanzee hunting are qualitatively (rather than quantitatively) different, and additionally, a much harder nut to crack, that that qualitative difference is attributable to a difference in capacities for executive control.2 Now, in his detailed comparison of hunting practices of traditional hunter-gatherers and chimpanzees, Stanford (2001) finds seven such qualitative differences. But only one of these directly links to cooperation: whereas cooperation in chimpanzees just involves increased numerical strength, cooperation in human hunters is actively coordinated through vocal and/or gestural communication. Inasmuch as prehistoric hunters can be modeled on contemporary traditional hunters, it would be more natural to argue that human cooperative hunting depends on improved communicative abilities, rather than on better executive control (inhibition, goal maintenance). Stanford also observes a difference that indirectly links to cooperation. Humans bring back their (excess) returns to share with individuals not present at the kill; chimpanzees, in contrast, eat and share meat from hand to mouth on the spot. Whether this difference attests to a difference in executive control cannot be taken for granted, though, for differences in locomotion (bipedal vs. quadrupedal) provide a much more parsimious explanation for the lack of meat transportation in chimps, and consequently for their smaller networks of exchange. Incidentally, Dubreuil (2010a, p. 71) observes that chimpanzees are not as fond of sharing as humans. Yet again, it remains to be shown that this difference is due to a difference in executive functions. Plausibly, in order to be able to share, sharing-averse individuals need more inhibitory control than individuals endowed with a spontaneous prosocial psychology. Finally, meat sharing in chimpanzees can be reconstructed in terms of inhibition and goal maintenance just as easily as meat sharing in humans. According to a first common explanation of chimp meat sharing, meat is shared with others to build and strengthen social bonds (de Waal, 1998); according to a second, males share meat with females, and hope to get sex in return (Stanford et al., 1994; Stanford, 1996). Here is the reconstruction: on both accounts, current appetite is suppressed for a future goal (strategic and reproductive, respectively). To be sure, I don't deny that contemporary humans outperform chimpanzees in matters of executive control, since there is ample evidence that they do (for an overview, Vaesen, forthcoming). Still, the idea that cooperative feeding can be used as an evolutionary marker of this cognitive divergence, as Dubreuil suggests, does not stand firm in light of the above.3 2 Another possibility is to argue that human and chimpanzee hunting are qualitatively similar, but are produced by different mechanisms (in humans, through executive control, in chimpanzees, through something else). This is a reasonable suggestion (which will be discussed more fully in Section 2.2). Yet, it will not help Dubreuil. If cooperative feeding may be realized by mechanisms other than executive control, its discriminating power is too low to qualify as an evolutionary indicator of executive control. 3 Even if chimpanzees did not involve in cooperative feeding practices at all, cooperative feeding would be a good indicator of the emergence of inhibition and goal maintenance in humans, only if chimpanzees didn't involve in any other cooperative behaviors requiring inhibition and goal maintenance. Chimpanzees, however, are known to cooperate on many non-food issues (e.g., social grooming, territorial defense, attacking enemies); and these behaviors may all be reconstructed (just like hunting and food sharing) in terms of inhibition and goal maintenance. 4 Krist Vaesen 2.2 Alternative cognitive explanations of hunting and food sharing While it may be convenient to reconstruct cooperative feeding practices in terms of inhibition and goal maintenance, it is a mistake to think that only such sophisticated future-oriented attitudes offer a plausible explanation. Cognitively undemanding backward-looking mechanisms may perform as good-and, even better. For example, chimpanzees commonly involve in reciprocal relationships (e.g., in matters of food sharing, social grooming, agonistic support, territorial defense) notwithstanding their poor inhibitory control, and notwithstanding their inability to foresee future events. The most plausible explanation for chimp reciprocation, then, is that it is motivated by past altruism received, rather than by the expectation of future rewards (Schino and Aureli, 2009, see also, de Waal, 2000). According to Schino and Aureli, a simple mechanism of "emotional bookkeeping" suffices here: chimpanzees make decisions on whether to act altruistically towards a partner based on emotions associated with previous encounters with that partner. Emotions, not reasoned projections, guide social interactions. Another primate example concerns marmoset and tamarin monkeys. These cooperatively breeding species are known to spontaneously share foodstuffs with their own offspring and the offspring of others, to act prosocially even with unrelated others (for tamarins: see Hauser et al., 2003; for marmosets: see Burkart et al., 2007), and to cooperate when harvesting and processing large fruits (Garber, 1997). In general, marmosets and tamarins engage in cooperative feeding more spontaneously and generously than chimpanzees. Given that marmosets and tamarins are relatively small-brained, and given that they do not outperform their independently breeding sister taxa (e.g., squirrel monkeys) with respect to inhibitory control and working memory (Burkart et al., 2009; Burkart and van Schaik, 2010), there is good reason to think that their cooperative feeding practices do not trade on high-level cognitive abilities. The most plausible explanation for marmoset and tamarin cooperation is a simple and spontaneous prosocial psychology. Such cognitively undemanding prosocial machinery arguably guides much of reciprocal altruism even in modern humans (Schino and Aureli, 2010). An emotion as gratitude, for instance, is a potent motivator for subsequent altruism. In light of this, and in light of marmoset/tamarin prosociality, affect-based explanations for cooperative feeding in Homo heidelbergensis seem at least as plausible as explanations in terms of executive control. In sum, the multiple realizability of cooperative feeding is bad news for Dubreuil. Cooperative feeding is too coarse-grained to mark unequivocally the emergence of increased abilities for inhibition and goal maintenance. So even if one could accurately date its occurrence in the early human lineage, that wouldn't show that humans got cognitively more sophisticated at that point. And, unfortunately, the same kind of argument holds for cooperative breeding-a topic I turn to now. 3 Cooperative breeding and executive control In cooperative breeding systems, some individuals actively engage in caring and provisioning infants that are not their own. Clearly, humans are cooperative breeders in this sense. For example, a large fraction of the 13 million calories that are needed to rear a modern human from birth to maturity (approx. age 15–16) is provided not by the mother, but by other caregivers, both kin and non-kin (Hrdy, 2009). The delayed maturity characteristic of humans, and the unusually short intervals between births, makes indispensable the aid of fathers, older siblings, aunts, uncles and even unrelated others. Thus, Dubreuil is right that human cooperative childcare implies huge transfers of resources. But again, it is a mistake to think that such transfers can be secured 'only once individuals [are] able to represent and ascribe value to long-term cooperative goals [i.e. goal maintenance], as well as to resist the temptation of defection on a daily basis [i.e. inhibition].' (Dubreuil, 2010, p. 62) To start, it is questionable whether cooperative breeding drives on long-term cooperation at all. Dubreuil thinks it is: adults invest so much in children, because children 'are generally expected to provide support for parents in their old age, as well as to help build economic and Cooperative feeding and breeding in humans 5 political alliances' (Dubreuil, 2010a, p. 75). In other words, the benefits children receive now are paid back only several years later. For care by kin, however, no such extra return on investment is needed; parents and other kin have a genetic interest in helping related infants. In case of non-kin breeding assistance, investments by helpers can usually be explained in terms of short-term benefits. According to a review by Bergmüller et al. (2007), helpers may help raise non-related infants to gain parenting experience; to avoid expulsion from the territory of the breeders they are assisting; to avoid expulsion from the group; to benefit from group augmentation effects (e.g. safety in numbers effects); or to advertise their genetic quality and thereby gain social prestige and perhaps increase future mating opportunities. The authors also mention the theoretical possibility of non-kin longterm cooperation sensu Dubreuil; but note that conclusive evidence for it is currently lacking. Importantly, even if benefits for kin and non-kin caregivers are situated in the future, that doesn't imply that care is motivated by future gain. Future gain may operate at the level of ultimate causes, without figuring at the proximate (i.e. motivational) level. de Waal (2008) gives the example of the honeybee that stings an intruder. That altruistic behavior has been selected for its long-term fitness consequences, yet is motivated by anger, rather than by predictions of future events. The same applies to cooperative breeding in marmosets and tamarins. These monkeys typically live in family groups composed of a breeding pair, its dependent offspring and helpers (Burkart and van Schaik, 2010). Helpers include older siblings, members of the extended family, and unrelated others, some of which get reproductively inactive to serve the reproductively active pair (Digby et al., 2007). Help encompasses infant carrying, food sharing, babysitting, and even allonursing.4 There is a strong correlation between the availability of male and female alloparental caregivers and infant survival rates (Hrdy, 2009). In sum, in tamarin and marmoset groups, substantial transfers of resources take place. Yet, as mentioned above, these monkeys are fairly modest-brained, and have no increased abilities for inhibition and working memory. So at the proximate level, tamarin and marmoset other-regarding behavior is likely not motivated by expectations of future reciprocation, but rather by simple and spontaneous helping impulses. If Dubreuil thinks this is different for humans, for Homo heidelbergensis in particular, he definitely needs to tell us why. What about Dubreuil's suggestion (2010a, p. 81) that cooperative breeding requires increased inhibitory control to allow individuals to conform to sexual norms? These sexual norms (e.g., norms of monogamy), Dubreuil argues, see to it that males living in multimale groups can assess paternity with relative confidence, which decreases the risk that they invest in infants which are not their own. Dubreuil thus sees high paternal certainty as a necessary condition for the evolution of paternal care; and conformance to sexual norms as the most salient way of increasing paternal certainty. Both assumptions are problematic. First, low paternal certainty is consistent with high male-infant care. Saddle-back tamarins, moustached tamarins, lion tamarins, blackcapped capuchins, olive baboons, chacma baboons, barbary macaques, stumptail macaques, Japanese macaques all live in multimale polyandrous groups, thus face high paternal uncertainty, yet all exhibit high male investment (Smuts and Gubernick, 1992). These investments are likely motivated by the benefits Bergmüller discerns (see above). Second, social norms are a fairly expensive way of increasing paternal certainty. Much less-demanding solutions include concealed ovulation (even if just exapted for that purpose), a natural aversion to casual sex in females, mechanisms of pair-bonding and of female-female competition, or a combination of these (see e.g., Geary, 2000). To sum up the previous sections: cooperative feeding and breeding are poor indicators of inhibition and goal maintenance.5 They are not particular to humans, and moreover may be 4 Cooperative childcare in marmosets and tamarins is a response not so much to long childhoods as to a remarkable fecundity: twins and triplets are common, and females often produce two litters per year (Garber, 1997). 5 In my opinion, much better indicators are long distance trade (150-200kya), the colonization of Sahul (45kya) and, as Coolidge and Wynn (2005) point out, technologies like traps and deadfalls (which obviously do not preserve well in the archaeological record). 6 Krist Vaesen realized by fairly undemanding cognitive traits. In addition, it is doubtful that Dubreuil dates cooperative feeding and breeding in humans correctly-the next section explains why. 4 When did cooperative feeding and breeding arise? Let me start with Dubreuil's timing of cooperative breeding. Cooperative breeding scholars commonly estimate that cooperative breeding arose with Homo erectus, ca. 1.8 Ma -rather than with Homo heidelbergensis (700kya), as Dubreuil has it. van Schaik and Burkart (2010) summarize several convincing lines of argument. First, cooperative breeding is favored where successful dispersal is difficult, and infant helping positively affects survival rates. The idea is that novel habitats ask for novel foraging strategies; juveniles whose earlier strategies do no longer work must be assisted, so as to bridge the food scarcity in between colonization and their development of the appropriate skills. Homo erectus, now, colonized two novel habitats-i.e. savanna habitats and habitats outside Africa-and as such, faced unpredictability with respect to food availability twice. Moreover, following an argument of Hawkes & O'Connell and colleagues, shifts toward cooler and drier climates around 1.8 mya decreased the availability of easy-to-process foods. Infants would have had to rely more on foods harvested and pre-processed by others, most notably, their grandmothers (O'Connell et al., 1999; Hawkes et al., 2000). Second, body size of Homo erectus was much larger than that of earlier hominins. One reasonable solution to the increased reproductive burden for females was cooperative breeding, with energetic inputs being provisioned to infants by mothers and allomothers. In a similar vein, third, hominin brain size clearly exceeded that of the great ape range for the first time in Homo erectus (Schoenemann, 2006). Energetic inputs provided by others may have enabled this marked increase. This is consistent with the idea that larger brains ask for longer maturation times, which external aid would again have made possible. The timing of cooperative breeding in Homo erectus has ramifications for the timing of cooperative feeding too, since cooperative breeding implies cooperative feeding almost per definition (Driscoll, forthcoming). Sharing food with (un)related infants is the paradigmatic example of cooperative childcare. True, cooperative breeding doesn't imply large game hunting; and that practice perhaps appeared indeed with Homo heidelbergensis. 5 Down with the revolution? Dubreuil's argument was supposed to show that human cooperation and culture did not evolve in one step (ca. 50kya, with the advent of symbolism and culture), but developed gradually, with modern-like abilities for inhibition and goal maintenance already appearing with Homo heidelbergensis. I have shown that Dubreuil's argument is unsatisfactory: cooperative feeding and breeding do not need to mark enhanced abilities for inhibition and goal maintenance, and cooperative feeding and breeding most likely arose long before Homo heidelbergensis. Nonetheless, I think there is still room to deploy cooperative breeding (in particular) against the idea of the "Human Revolution". This has to do with the finding that cooperative breeding primates, presumably given their strong reliance on others, outperform their independently breeding sister taxa in socio-cognitive tasks (but not in non-social cognitive tasks, like those mentioned by Dubreuil, 2010b).6. That is, in their systematic review of the literature, Burkart and van Schaik (2010, see also, Burkart et al., 2009) explain that cooperatively breeding tamarins and marmosets are better than their independently breeding sister taxa with respect to: social learning, vocal communication, teaching-like behaviors, gaze understanding, cooperative problem solving (but not with respect to: general cognitive ability, working memory of actions, innovation rates, tool-use rates, patience, and inhibitory control). Burkart et al. (2009) argue that such social intelligence is as much a necessary ingredient for human cooperation and culture 6 Dubreuil (2010a) tries a similar idea: cooperative breeding marks enhanced capacities for joint attention and norm following Cooperative feeding and breeding in humans 7 as the general intelligence commonly invoked. They suggest that when both intelligences were combined (from Homo erectus onward), the divergence between humans and apes really gets going. In other words, an increase in general intelligence, as usually implied in the model of the "Human Revolution", could be powerful only given a set of previous innovations, including (refinements to) a suite of socio-cognitive skills that accompanied (refinements to) cooperative breeding practices. Modernity might have taken off with Homo erectus, rather than with Homo sapiens. References Bergmüller, R., Johnstone, R., Russell, A., and Bshary, R. (2007). 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