Evolutionary Ethics 2357 ENHANCEMENT NORMS AND CONTROL NORMSAn anthropologist studying human social systems might observe that human be-
ings employ both what might be called “control norms” and what might be called
“enhancement norms”, and that many social rules are fusions of the two types.
“Control norms” target natural dispositions as needing to have their expression
blocked. Examples of control norms are the proscriptions on the murder of an-
noying persons, or useless and possibly dangerous strangers, lying for personal
gain, and the stealing of valued resources from persons helpless to defend them.
Enhancement norms, by contrast, have a quasi-aesthetic character. They elevate
observed tendencies to the status of obligations, or demand that actions be prac-
ticed with special intensity, or that attributes be exaggerated for effect. Men’s
wristwatches, for example, are standardly twice the size of women’s, though men
do not have wrists twice as thick, but only somewhat thicker.
Both the ideal of monogamous marriage and the special exemptions offered by
the double standard qualify as enhancement norms, for they transform tenden-
cies — the pair-bonding instinct, women’s greater and men’s lesser selectivity —
into obligations and permissions. They also function as control norms, proscrib-
ing behaviour that would occur more frequently in the absence of the norm and
its mechanisms of enforcement. The norm that mandates that mothers abandon
economic activity outside the household to care for their own children is an en-
hancement norm, since all primate females are somewhat encumbered by their
young and by maternal care. But it is also a control norm in human societies,
for the primate mother does not experience such severe restrictions on her mobil-
ity, and may receive considerable help from her relatives and from young females
desiring practice with infants, while she engages in foraging or socializing [Hrdy,
1999, 497ff.]
To evaluate the claim that the division of labour, social roles, and entitlements
by sex is morally legitimate, we would have to know how to determine, measure,
and compare the morally relevant gains and losses of various possible systems. The
suppression or alteration of psychological tendencies, such as women’s diffidence
and modesty, or men’s general inability to feel seriously intimidated by women, the
additional educational resources needed to develop women’s interests in the most
“inhuman” branches of science and technology, the large social investment that
would be required to provide child care equivalent to that historically provided by
mothers, all represent large social costs. The gains, however, measured in terms
of the overall appearance and functioning of the present world and the realization
of ideals such as development of autonomy in individuals and the elimination of
all residual forms of slavery are also considerable. The vernacular possibilities of
parasitism and obsolescence, understood in a sense analogous to Dawkins’s, make
it implausible to suppose that women’s more restricted lives are in the interests
of the persons living them. Like the addictive behaviour of the cuckoo’s foster-
parent, some typical-seeming aspects of women’s behaviour may be triggered by
irresistible stimuli without stemming from their more authentic drives and inter-