The name is absent

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morality to achieve moral progress: Innate universals of social intelligence take the form in the
individual of a grammar which can be applied to a potentially unlimited number of different types
of social situation due to the potentially inexhaustible nature of recursion. This need not assume
a P&P approach, which would imply a potential proliferation of distinct internal grammars. The
number sense and the cultural evolution of mathematics, for example, do not appear to exhibit
this sort of diversity. Moral diversity would instead be explained in the way that mathematical
diversity among different cultures is explained: At various points in history, some cultures have
discovered subtle and ingenious ways of applying recursive and compositional embedding to the
rudiments provided by the innate sense, ways which other cultures had not yet devised. And that
point can be made whether “innate sense” refers to the number sense or the moral sense. In other
words, as suggested by Kropotkin, different moral conceptions in different cultures would be due
to different degrees of moral progress. This is not to say that later is always better; the possibility
of moral decline remains open, just as there can be any sort of cultural decline, including a
decline in mathematical knowledge.

A system of rules with recursive properties need not include P&P, as reflected in the fact
that recognition of the importance of recursion to linguistic intelligence long predated any
discussion of P&P. Mathematical intelligence clearly involves recursion, but there seems to be
nothing akin to P&P in the internalized representations which make mathematical reasoning
possible, as seen in the fact that mathematical diversity among cultures does not rest on
irresolvable disputes. Hence, the appeal to recursion in the absence of P&P represents a distinct
approach to moral diversity, one seeing moral diversity as akin to mathematical diversity rather
than to linguistic diversity. The point is that absolute, unconditional principles can be applied
recursively.

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