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- Paul Seabright (2006). The Evolution of Fairness Norms: An Essay on Ken Binmore's Natural Justice. Politics, Philosophy and Economics 5 (1):33-50.This article sets out and comments on the arguments of Binmore's Natural Justice , and specifically on the empirical hypotheses that underpin his social contract view of the foundations of justice. It argues that Binmore's dependence on the hypothesis that individuals have purely self-regarding preferences forces him to claim that mutual monitoring of free-riding behavior was sufficiently reliable to enforce cooperation in hunter-gatherer societies, and that this makes it hard to explain why intuitions about justice could have evolved, since in such a society intuitions about justice would have had no adaptive advantage. I argue that it is empirically plausible that human beings display systematic other-regarding preferences (even if these are not always very strong). These could be incorporated into Binmore's general framework in a way that would enrich it and make it more useful for solving practical problems about justice. Key Words: natural justice • fairness • norms • evolution • self-regarding preferences • Rawls • social contract.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... What is to be “protected†is US power and the interests it represents, not the world, which vigorously opposed the conception. Within a few months, studies revealed that fear of the United States had reached remarkable heights, along with distrust of the political leadership. An international Gallup poll in December, barely noted in the <
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| | Scholar | More options ... I argue that to be compelled to do routine work is to be gravely harmed. Indeed, that pink-collar work is a more serious harm to women than rape. My purpose is to urge politically active feminists and feminist organizations to arrange their priorities accordingly and devote most of their resources to working for the elimination
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... This article is my latest attempt to come up with a minimal version of my evolutionary theory of fairness (Binmore [11, 10, 8, 9]). The naturalism that I espouse is currently unpopular, but Figure 1 shows that the scientific tradition in moral philosophy nevertheless has a long and distinguished history. John Mackie [27] has been its most eloquent spokesman in modern times. His demolition of the claims made for a priori reasoning in moral philosophy seem unanswerable to me. In Mackie’s view, human morality is an artefact of our evolutionary history. To study it, he tells us to look at the anthropological facts presented in such pioneering studies as Westermarck’s [49] Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. And for a framework within which to make sense of such anthropological data, he directs our attention to Von Neumann’s theory of games.
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| | Scholar | More options ... In several recent issues of this journal, I argued for an account of property possession as strict, numerical identity. While this account has stuck some as being highly idiosyncratic in nature, it is not entirely something new under the sun, since as I will argue in this paper, it turns out to have a historic precedentPlato in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org springerlink.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In Natural Justice Binmore offers a game-theoretic map to the landscape of human morality. Following a long tradition of such accounts, Binmore’s argument concerns the forces of biological and cultural evolution that have shaped our judgments about the appropriate distribution of resources. In this sense, Binmore focuses on the morality of outcomes. This is a valuable perspective to which we add a friendly amendment from our own research: moral judgments appear to depend on process just as much as outcome. What matters is not just that the butler is dead, but who killed him, how, and for what reason. Thus, a complete understanding of ‘natural justice’ will entail an account not only of evolutionary pressures, but also of the psychological mechanisms upon which they act.
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| | Scholar | More options ... Natural Justice is a bold attempt to lay the foundations for a genuine science of morals using the theory of games. Since human morality is no less a product of evolution than any other human characteristic, the book takes the view that we need to explore its origins in the food-sharing social contracts of our prehuman ancestors. It is argued that the deep structure of our current fairness norms continues to reflect the logic of these primeval social contracts, but the particular fairness norm a society operates is largely a product of cultural evolution. In pursuing this point, the book proposes a naturalistic reinterpretation of John Rawls' original position that reconciles his egalitarian theory of justice with John Harsanyi's utilitarian theory by identifying the environment appropriate to each.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In this article, I critically respond to Herbert Gintis's criticisms of the behavioral-economic foundations of Ken Binmore's game-theoretic theory of justice. Gintis, I argue, fails to take full account of the normative requirements Binmore sets for his account, and also ignores what I call the ‘scale-relativity’ considerations built into Binmore's approach to modeling human evolution. Paul Seabright's criticism of Binmore, I note, repeats these oversights. In the course of answering Gintis's and Seabright's objections, I clarify and extend Binmore's theory in a number of respects, integrating it with Kim Sterelny's and Don Ross's recent (respective) work on the evolution of people as cultural entities. The account also yields a novel basis for choosing between socialism (broadly conceived) and what Binmore calls ‘whiggery’ as normative political programs. Key Words: theory of justice • bargaining theory • evolutionary game theory • human evolution • Ken Binmore • Herbert Gintis • Kim Sterelny.
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| | Other links: ppe.sagepub.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In Natural Justice Binmore offers a game-theoretic map to the landscape of human morality. Following a long tradition of such accounts, Binmore’s argument concerns the forces of biological and cultural evolution that have shaped our judgments about the appropriate distribution of resources. In this sense, Binmore focuses on the morality of outcomes. This is a valuable perspective to which we add a friendly amendment from our own research: moral judgments appear to depend on process just as much as outcome. What matters is not just that the butler is dead, but who killed him, how, and for what reason. Thus, a complete understanding of ‘natural justice’ will entail an account not only of evolutionary pressures, but also of the psychological mechanisms upon which they act.
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| | Other links: wjh.harvard.edu | Scholar | More options ... Discussion of Paul Seabright, The evolution of fairness norms: An essay on Ken Binmore's natural justice
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