Towards an Ethology of Normativity

Three philosophers who have deeply investigated our economic, social and political reality as Friederich August von Hayek, Robert Nozick and John Searle drew a new image of human beings that goes against the classical image of “purposeseeking animals”. According to them, human beings are primarily “rule-following animals”, i.e. animals having the ability to follow rules. But, if human beings are rule-following animals, are they the only animals that have this ability to act in the light of rules? A negative unexpected answer to this question comes from the researches on non-human primates’ morality conducted by the Ducht ethologist Frans de Waal and the theory of mute law proposed by the Italian jurist and anthropologist Rodolfo Sacco. The paper aims to discuss the question set out above, starting from these two theoretical proposals.