Might We Be Essentially Normative Animals?

This chapter poses the question of whether humans might be essentially normative animals, i.e. whether traditionally prominent specificities of the human life form—our linguistic, social, and moral “natures”—might ground in a basic susceptibility, or proclivity to the deontic regulation of thought and behaviour: the “normative animal thesis.” The chapter lays out the issues at stake in attempting to answer this question. It divides into two main parts. The first begins by clarifying the—norm-related—concept of normativity at issue, distinguishing it from the—reason-related—conceptualisation current in meta-ethics and theories of rationality. It then discusses the primary candidates for generic features of norms, before dividing the normative animal thesis into various sub-claims. The second part presents the key questions at issue in the discussion of social, moral, and linguistic norms, comparing ways of conceiving them and marking the significance of such conceptualisations for the normative animal thesis.