ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to examine the forms of reasoning that are specific to collective (social and political) life, where we move beyond the personal and interpersonal spheres to the larger social context and where humans begin to engage with moral and social sentiments of others at an impersonal scale. We will discuss what I refer to as quorum sensing or quorum reasoning—namely, intelligence gathering regarding local sentiments (the attitudes of “people hereabouts”). In quorum reasoning, we gather and organize information that serves us in deciding what to do in practical contexts—it is moral reasoning broadly speaking. This chapter thus focuses on the project of analyzing moral reasoning, in its various forms and contexts, building on the taxonomy of relations first articulated by anthropologist Alan Fiske, and in that way extending and further elaborating the account of reasoning we began in the last chapter. In this account, there is room for the sort of human freedom that is unavailable in the accounts of my competitors in moral psychology (Jonathan Haidt) and linguistics (Steven Pinker and George Lakoff). This account shares the philosophical temperaments exemplified by WD Ross and Frederich Nietzsche.
