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values must be finite in number is unintentionally comic. Given recursion, one can have
potentially infinite productivity given finite means. To admit unbounded productivity is not to
deny that there is a finite biologically innate nature common to us all. Nor is it to deny that there
are limits on the range of human values. “Infinite” does not mean all possible. The set of even
numbers is infinite, but it is not the set of all numbers.
That was an attempt to clarify a point about pluralism by appealing to recursion.
However, recursion is not proprietary to pluralist approaches, since it is not proprietary to P&P
approaches. It is also a property of the absolutist approach to understanding moral diversity, the
approach minimally limned by Kropotkin, which I want to turn back to now.
The suggestion I propose, as the second, or absolutist, account of moral diversity, is that
the de-specialization of recursion (at least recursive embedding, but perhaps any sort of recursion
at all), or its emergence without precedent, also made moral progress possible. This is meant as
an absolutist alternative to Fiske’s pluralist approach. On this absolutist approach, we have an
innate social intelligence that we largely share with non-human primates (Katz, 2001). However,
non-human primate social intelligence is highly restricted in its applications, perhaps due to the
fact that embedding operations, or at least the more complex ones, cannot be socially applied by
other species. However, once recursive embedding became socially available, we, or our
humanish ancestors, developed the ability to apply principles of social intelligence to a
potentially unlimited range of situation types. Our social intelligence became creative; we could
apply innate moral knowledge to novel problems. This made it possible for us to create forms of
society beyond that of foraging, and it also made possible moral progress in all its forms:
religious teachings, moral philosophy, and literary meditations on social and interpersonal issues.
When one considers that higher-level recursion is an important tool of reason, one can
begin to see what it might mean to say, as Kropotkin did, that reason operates on the rudiments of