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Recent trends in evolutionary ethics: greenbeards!

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Abstract

In recent years, there has been growing awareness among evolutionary ethicists that systems of cooperation based upon “weak” reciprocity mechanisms (such as tit-for-tat) lack scalability, and are therefore inadequate to explain human ultrasociality. This has produced a shift toward models that strengthen the cooperative mechanism, by adding various forms of commitment or punishment. Unfortunately, the most prominent versions of this hypothesis wind up positing a discredited mechanism as the basis of human ultrasociality, viz. a “greenbeard.” This paper begins by explaining what a greenbeard is, and why evolutionary theorists are doubtful that such a mechanism could play a significant role in explaining human prosociality. It goes on to analyze several recent philosophical works in evolutionary ethics, in order to show how the suggestion that morality acts as a commitment device tacitly relies upon a greenbeard mechanism to explain human cooperation. It concludes by showing how some early scientific models in the “evolution of cooperation” literature, which introduced punishment as a device to enhance cooperation, also tacitly relied upon a greenbeard mechanism.

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Notes

  1. This motivation is explicit in Joyce (2006), 40–41. See also Randolph Nesse (2001, 5).

  2. This is, I should note, tacitly acknowledged by Joyce, when he describes his account as “supplementing Frank’s own account rather than disagreeing with the heart of it” (2006, 122).

  3. Some models “stack the deck” against falsebeards by assuming that their signals are costly, or more costly than those of greenbeards (e.g. Sober 1994, 78). This is unmotivated.

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Heath, J., Rioux, C. Recent trends in evolutionary ethics: greenbeards!. Biol Philos 33, 16 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-018-9627-1

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