I agree with your criticism. A camper that didn’t contribute anything of value (not even excellent conversation for example) would not be invited again. However, I disagree with you in equal measure - you’re making the mirror image mistake. People have sex because it feels good and take care of their children and relatives because they love them (as well as more practical and selfish reasons.) Infanticide and literal self sacrifice for one’s kids are BOTH well within normal human behavior depending on the circumstances and culture (AND the individual!). People certainly can and do love others outside their own family - and so will help them even if it hurts themselves! Some don’t seem capable of this, others for only one person while others still have a very strong instinct to help pretty much any human being they come across. This isn’t to slight that MOST people have self interest playing a role in most interactions but that’s not all and not all the time. People living in Nazi occupied territory hiding Jews aren’t acting self interested in any way, risking themselves and their families. And because humans are so diverse and malleable we can steer between the two natural extremes a fair amount - where a solid majority will act in a more selfish or more prosocial way. But ignoring out of existence one of the real extreme instincts will not give us a well functioning society.
Good comment. My only objection is that I don't think we disagree. You write:
"People have sex because it feels good and take care of their children and relatives because they love them (as well as more practical and selfish reasons.) Infanticide and literal self sacrifice for one’s kids are BOTH well within normal human behavior depending on the circumstances and culture (AND the individual!). People certainly can and do love others outside their own family - and so will help them even if it hurts themselves!"
Completely agree - never meant to deny the existence of such things as love and sef-sacrifice, only to understand them. Part of the problem is that traits that evolved to maximise inclusive fitness are "self-interested" in one sense but often not self-interested in a more commonsense understanding of that term. I think both senses are important for understanding human behaviour. For example, you can't understand, say, romantic love and its characteristics without understanding its underlying Darwinian rationale, but that doesn't make it any the less real.
I read your column to be heavily implying that love doesn’t exist outside of familial relationships. And I disagree that the evolutionary process by which we evolved to love others (and sometimes self sacrifice) makes our actual actions out of that love self interested in anyway. We act because of how we feel and that has nothing to do with self interest. We evolved to feel love (probably) because it was evolutionarily advantageous.
I slightly misread your paragraph, but have an interesting insight regardless. It relates to kinship bonds and reciprocity. There used to be an old congressional summary report of childhood abuse and neglect named NIS-4. It was temporarily withdrawn, with the raw data still available to researchers, but has since reappeared- although I would necessarily trust the new summary, given that the original version was explosively controversial, given it contradicted some pretty hardwired assumptions held throughout feminisms broad tent.
Specifically, it found that biological mothers were significantly more likely to be responsible for the hospitalisation or death of children than biological fathers. There are doubtless many reasons for this- access, the expectation of getting caught or accused by gender, post-partum, etc. However, incidences of criminal behaviour equalised by gender for the simply reason that childhood abuse and neglect was often committed by a biological mother working in tandem with a male intimate partner. The figures were striking- for every 100 victims, roughly 120 offenders (if memory serves).
My other point would be this- you're probably aware of the fact that those who hid Jews were a tiny exception. Few are aware of the reality that there was a far darker side of the equation- in Nazi Germany the numbers of police and Gestapo were nowhere near those required to maintain an all-encompassing totalitarian state. Instead, Germans informing on their only slightly different and nonconforming neighbours rapidly became the new norm. This excellent and dated episode from a BBC documentary series shows the true horror of societies encouraged to think of themselves as a group, with group interests- especially those who predicative their group identity upon a Manichean mindset:
My point would be this- it would seem to me that the overwhelming majority of people only possess innate positive morality as a weak force. Most people can be good, provided they have benign community influences surrounding them. But most people are extraordinarily susceptible to having their sense of morality hacked by group dynamics- social enforcement, fear of reputation damage, etc. Perhaps 3% of people exist as exceptions on either side of spectrum. At one end, the pathologically evil and selfish- at the other, those who can resist the group urge and remain true to morality in an almost spiritual sense.
It was also considerable easier for people in Nazi occupied territories to hide and conceal Jews. They weren't any less rampantly anti-Semitic. It was just that they weren't going against the wishes of their own neighbours and friends- they stood in opposition to the wishes of a hostile and aggressive outgroup...
Some good insights here - thanks for the comment. The point about distinguishing the norm from the exceptions is a very important one. (I'll be writing about those exceptions in future posts).
Bio fathers are far more likely to just abandon kids so I imagine that would be a strong factor.
I think your 3% might be close to true but it’s the 10% that are also important. That is I would estimate that 10% of any population has very strong moral principals - but most of them aren’t going to let them override their own survival instincts and/or their desire for their most loved ones to survive. So if 10% wanted to help Jews but only 3% risked their/their family’s life that seems reasonable enough. And similarly, maybe 3% are psychopaths but a solid 10% are so intensely selfish they will happily lie and cheat and do anything at all as long as it benefits themselves and care truly only about themselves, often with sadistic inclinations. So any socialist type group needs a way to deal with the 10% selfish ones or it ruins the whole thing even if the culture brings out the most cooperative side of the malleable 80%. I’ll leave my theory about the necessity of a shared morality to restrain the selfishness inherent in capitalism for a different place and time.
It's not the selfish 10% that are the problem for socialism. The problem is seeking to apply enforced pressure for societal improvement, as well as refusing to acknowledge when ideas fail or a model of reality is inaccurate. One of the things which drives me to distraction is the fact so many socialists fail to understand the need to appropriate market mechanisms.
The kulaks were not greedy or selfish. They were simply way, way more effective than their neighbours, using a number of mechanisms- so this necessarily meant they made great scapegoats when collectivisation proved so disastrous, as it always has (Deng Xiaoping famously argued that it didn't matter whether a cat was black or white, just so long as it caught mice- meant to symbolise the fact that the economic framework matters less than the control of the aims of a nations leaders in focusing on the improvement of the lives of one's citizens). He knew that small scale entrepreneurialism would work in revitalising China's agriculture.
Here's the thing. Capitalism achieves a sorting mechanism where people are forced into choosing options which make them seek maximum utility to others. It allows many people to fail, so that an workable percentage are pushed into jobs and vocations that they are naturally great at. Socialism could achieve the same aims through a different means- something like a more humane form of duty-directed aspiration, where talented individuals are encouraged to employ their talents where they are of the greatest service to their community.
A good example of this is Mondragon, the Basque worker owner cooperative. It has 81,000 worker owners. It's economic framework is best described as community capitalism. The CEO and the senior finance get paid five times as much as the average worker, but they are also absolute heroes to their communities, to their mini-nation, within a nation. Tellingly, when Mondragon was forced to shutter its electrical goods division due to fierce competition, particularly from China, 3,000 worker owners were temporarily made redundant. But the leadership were ultimately able to reemploy all bar 60 workers- likely the very old, the sick and the dead. That's quite an achievement, especially when compared to the callousness of the large corporate model which makes a habit of stealing workers pensions.
Another thing to consider is that ordinary people are much, much happier working for small businesses- nearly 80% of British workers employed in the small business sector reported being very or extremely happy with their work and workplace. A part of it is because one of the criteria for success in small businesses is reciprocity between worker and boss.
Large organisations have a natural weakness when it comes to responsibility vs. authority. One can delegate authority, but one cannot delegate responsibility- an axiom despised by politicians and corporate CEOs alike. The natural instincts of any large organisation is to push responsibility down the hierarchy, whilst reserving authority in decision-making for the upper echelons. It's dehumanising to the point of actually posing a health hazard to lower tier workers. There is a Whitehall civil service study which shows that workers were most likely to suffer negative health impacts and death not from demanding workloads and important, difficult jobs, but rather from bearing a tonne of responsibility with none of the authority to perform their core work functions effectively. By contrast, small businesses naturally default authority to the level of retail human interaction. You know your boss. You can see how hard he/she works. You are able to negotiate with them in good faith, without deference to a distant superior, or the demands of financial and HR departments.
Funnily enough, Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Finance Minister, prominent socialist and recently de-banked (his money stolen) for having the gall to support Julian Assange, recently talked about this problem. He argued that his fellow socialists needed to accept a new type of socialism, one which refrained from kneejerk applications of force and coercion to solve problems. A more libertarian, ground-up form of market socialism, one imagines....
Behaviour is a function of value and belief. Much of what I call non-reciprocal altruism is based on false beliefs: Mother Theresa was highly altruistic, but that's because she was acting on the basis of false beliefs regarding the afterlife, the purpose of the earthly life, etc. In general, the function of religion (and its modern secular substitutes) is to instill false beliefs that are believed to produce socially beneficial outcomes. To the extent that they are functional, false beliefs are sustained because of their beneficial outcomes. If what we want is a morality that does not rely on false belief systems, then reciprocity has to be the underlying mechanism.
Thanks for the post Dan. Naturally I agreed with its thrust, but then it did land some easy blows on a large target ;) At least as you describe him, Cohen is a classic of the kind mentioned by James Burnham where he says in The Machiavellians that more than nine tenths of political talk (from the academy to Tammany Hall) is little more than wish fulfilment.
It's quite obvious that we need the dialectic of mutuality to build a great deal of what works in human society. But the problem I have with your post is that it remains in the world in which we ask ourselves "how do we design social institutions to guide self-interest toward social good". As Elinor Ostrom said in her Nobel lecture:
"Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans."
I'd argue that a huge part of our current predicament is systems that are simply predicated on playing to people's self-interest — and that they are becoming more and more inhospitable to other kinds of motives — of which there are many.
There are existing traditions that appeal to people's (Aristotelian) better sides — most particularly the professions. They would run at a very degraded level if those within them did not value the pleasure they can gain from doing a good job. Your profession is one such. As is teaching generally, medicine and so on. Even the architects of the Toyota Production System understood that.
And while it's no utopia of selflessness in any of these professions, they are havens of happy folk who gain pleasure from doing good things — things that give them some aesthetic pleasure, the practical pleasure of excellence and come with a social dividend. Oh — and academia isn't like this any more, precisely because the kind of thinking that Ostrom laments in that passage has become so totalised. Totalised into spiritually vacuous managerialism. And that leads people to be miserable and to do bad work — all at the same time. As if led by an invisible hand ;)
Thanks Nicholas - great comment. (The reference to Burnham's "The Machiavellians" is interesting as well - I came across this book recently and feel like I should read it).
I agree with what you say here, mostly, although I think a lot depends on what one means by "self-interest". If it is interpreted narrowly, I agree with you and with Ostrom. There are forms of cynicism that are simply wrong about human motives and have terrible effects in society when it comes to institution design and politics. At the same time, I take a central lesson of Ostrom's work to be that even though human beings are spontaneously cooperative, achieving large-scale cooperation does in fact depend on things perceived mutual interest, monitoring, norm enforcement, status economies in which people are socially rewarded for doing the right thing, etc. - in other words, incentives that align people's interests (construed broadly) with good outcomes. This lesson can be (and no doubt frequently has been) misapplied, but interpreted the right way, I think it's very important.
Maybe this is a minor point in the larger scheme of things but norm enforcement in Ostrom’s framework can be extremely risky and costly in material terms and cannot usefully be described as self-interested. This is especially so with decentralized and uncoordinated sanctions, as for example described in Acheson’s Lobster Gangs of Maine or in the many case studies in the Bromley edited volume (links below).
Indeed, almost by definition, 'norm enforcement' is NOT about 'me' but about 'us', or if you want to dig down a little the 'me' is present (because I am seeking to assert the norm), but it is not some bilateral trade of expectations and favours (me and you) because it is an appeal to something beyond this simple relationship.
Every human institution — including this interaction — comprises an ecology of private and shared purposes. Those purposes are partly complementary, and partly in tension. I tried to intimate this here
Interesting. Costly in material terms, definitely, but I vaguely remember - perhaps misremember - that one of Ostrom's observations is that norm enforcers are often socially rewarded. And that aligns with other research on costly enforcement. However, I will have to re-read.
There are many cases in the Bromley volume and the Acheson book of *anonymous* sanctions (necessary because the behavior often violates formal laws). One could argue that actions can be selectively and credibly revealed to those who would approve, but internal motivation seems more likely to me.
The Bromley volume and Ostrom's work inspired this paper:
I doubt you need to read the whole of The Machiavellians, though I found it pretty informative throughout.
But the first part ending in the passage I quote in this blog post is one of the most brilliant (and true) pieces of political writing I've ever come across.
The stories are not any less realistic just because they are stories because that's precisely how they are supposed to work and operate in our world, giving rise to value systems that have real currency. But understanding the mechanics is important to know how best to foster this kind of exchange. I agree with the analysis but want to highlight that these stories we tell ourselves are not something less than simply because they are stories.
There was a good article on this topic (Epistemic Import of Narratives) that just came out in Social Epistemology. Influenced by the work of Lisa Bortolotti, among others:
I have yet to meet a Marxist who has even the remotest grasp on reality. On things like evolution, trade-offs, selfishness, social organization, or even the basics of human nature. It's all idealism, all the way down.
You cannot "educate" the entire species into being wholesome any more than you can lecture a man into being attracted to a woman he doesn't find attractive. You have to work with what you've got.
To ignore that fundamental truth is not noble or philosophically interesting - it is, as you said, culpably naive. Comically unhelpful.
Yes, and the problem of evolutionary stability is at the heart of it. Start with universal socialist cooperation, and allow for mutations and imperfections, and pretty soon the whole thing devolves into a game of grift and parasitism. Cheating pays handsomely when everyone else is so altruistic that norm-enforcement is no longer practiced...
Re: "Smith’s insight about capitalism's incentive structure generalises to all modes of social organisation and most collective achievements outside the immediate family."
Your fine essay establishes the great role of reciprocity motivated by self-interest in society.
I would like to note another form of reciprocity, besides family and reciprocity motivated by self-interest.
I have in mind *friendship*. Friendship has distinctive motivations and some local empirical importance in social cooperation. Philosophers from Aristotle to Adam Smith have conceptualized friendship in social theory.
My intuition is that the distinctive features of friendship are as follows. I list the features as steps in an idealized narrative explanation.
a) Friendship springs from joint experience—*a history* of going through things together.
b) Friends make a leap of faith and lower their guard. They *choose to trust* each other.
c) Friends develop heightened *sympathy* (moral sentiments) for each other.
d) Thanks to mutual trust and sympathy, friends achieve *intimacy* and come to understand and appreciate each other's *individuality*.
e) Friends then *deeply wish each other well*.
f) Friends establish respectful, reciprocal, general *commitment* that doesn't keep close mental accounts of who owes what.
g) Friends *know* that they are friends.
To be clear, my point is at the second decimal, so to speak. And I readily acknowledge that in some languages — for example, in traditional Sicilian proverbs and sayings — the word "friendship" (for example, "amicizia" in Sicilian) also covers what sociologists call "instrumental friendship," which may be hierarchical and transparently motivated by self-interest. But I am focusing on an Aristotelean lineage of friendship, which plays a distinctive, local role in reciprocity in some cultures.
OK, but the whole point of political philosophy is to understand how societies can be organized among *strangers*. Societies are not clubs, families, choirs, hives - or camping trips. Friendship might work as an organizing principle in smallish clans in the Pleistocene; but we can't easily go back to that state. Understanding friendship relationships doesn't help much in developing a political philosophy for the modern age.
“What is impossible, however, is dispensing with the role of self-love and status competition in understanding—and attempting to improve—human societies.” If this is true then human progress as I understand it- which is progress towards every human becoming a fully enlightened being (and thus humanity as a whole progressing to a higher plane of consciousness)- then what IS a reasonable expectation of human progress, or are you envisioning a humanity that exists outside of constant progress (ie that the natural state of humanity is not progress as I have been lead to believe by…. Everything?)
Thanks for reading and for the comment. I don't think the natural state of humanity is progress, but I think progress can occur - and does occur - primarily when social conditions channel human's pursuit of their goals into beneficial social outcomes.
Very interesting essay that I will share more of my thoughts on later but I have to ask a question about this comment. If you don’t think the natural state of humanity is progress then you must not think that progress requires intention. You think it’s an accident?
I think progress requires consciousness first, a level of intelligence second and then an ability to use tools to alter an environment. The ability to assess an environment and also an ability to alter/manipulate an environment for a certain benefit separate us from other intelligent creatures. We are the only animal able to do this to an extent which can actually end our own existence. Which is why unbridled selfishness is so dangerous within our species.
I agree with this. But "selfishness" can have multiple meanings. For example, human societies - when they function well - are often configured in such a way that being selfless is, in a deep sense, in people's self-interest. I agree progress often requires consciousness and intentionality. However, I would argue that the desire to bring about social progress is often rooted in reputation management reasons, even if not consciously so.
You are right about selfishness. My use of it was more of a pejorative, the hyper,antisocial almost sociopathic form we see in the modern world. Biological selfishness doesn’t take that form usually and is more about self preservation instincts, a very necessary tool for species propagation. As you point out too, our self as self conscious beings is really about reputation management which can make us appear shallow or act performative. In the end though I’m not sure it matters whether acts which are pro social come from a place of selfish reputation management or pure benevolence as long as there is an overall bias at the group level towards pro social actions. We don’t survive without those actions.
To me it’s a little like the free will arguments. Obviously we don’t have absolute free will but I fully agree with the late Daniel Dennett that we have enough of a type of free will worth defending and developing social norms around its existence. It’s not all or none. Same with selfless ness. We just need enough of it, driven by something (even driven by selfish reputation mgmt) for our species to survive and advance.
“I think progress can occur - and does occur - primarily when social conditions channel human's pursuit of their goals into beneficial social outcomes.”
Would love to read more about this because it really does seem that community is a quality that is beneficial to societies and should be encouraged. I saw a post earlier today contrasting the US and Europe along these lines. Whether or not that holds empirically it would be a good launching pad for that discussion.
First of all, I am a little bit surprised of having this discussion without a reference to Herbert Gintis, and the strong reciprocity view of human cooperation. His paper on genes and norm
To some extent people can run on very different norm systems; the great problem of socialism is not so much “cheating”, but that naturally people settles for low effort/low reward, become apathetic, and the entire culture ends in stagnation and zero sum status games. In fact I find socialism sustainable, which is precisely what makes it dangerous…
G.A. Cohen was my DPhil supervisor at Oxford in the 1990s. My thesis, "Functional Libertarianism" (1997) covers many of the themes in this essay (among other things, of course). I like to think that "Why Not Socialism?" might have been to some extent his reaction against my thesis, which I believe he found challenging to his world view. He passed away before we had a chance to discuss the book...
One of the main reasons egalitarian moral sentiments / intuitions were so prevalent in hunter-gatherer societies of the Pleistocene is that there was little ability to store value. If you killed a deer, the best thing you could do with it was share it among your tribe, because you couldn't eat the whole thing and you couldn't butcher, freeze, and store it for later consumption. Sharing it created obligations of reciprocity, so it was a kind of insurance policy against times when you failed to acquire enough food on your own. Value was converted to reputation, which is a kind of store of value.
I dropped out of academia shortly after completing my DPhil, so never had the time or motivation to pursue and refine the ideas in there. But I have continued to develop them in my spare time. I now believe that libertarianism is not a political philosophy for all ages; and in that respect I agree with Marx that the political "superstructure" must align with the material conditions. While freedom is the pre-eminent functional political value in technologically advanced, pluralistic societies, egalitarianism is functional in technologically primitive and genetically homogeneous clans.
People wonder, if freedom is so functional as an organizational principle, why do so many people, including most political philosophers, theologians, authors and bien pensants over the ages. tend to idealize equality? My "error theory" is that these people are merely rationalizing a powerful, innate moral predisposition which they have inherited from our Pleistocene ancestors. Humans have a "taste" for equality because our moral psychology evolved to suit the conditions of the Pleistocene. Our taste for sweetness evolved to guide us into eating ripe fruit; not now that sugar is plentiful and cheap, that taste preference is largely dysfunctional and leads to all manner of ill health. It has to be curbed. (Hints of "false consciousness" in Marxist terms.) Likewise, equality was ingrained in our psyche over hundreds of thousands of years when we lived in competing clans, but it has become dysfunctional due to technological advances. There is a type of moral relativism here: morality is relative to the technology and knowledge base more generally in a society. I have come to recognize that there is even perhaps an element of historical materialism in my error theory, without the determinism that derives from an exclusive focus on the mode of production as the driver of historical development.
Very interesting - and plausible - comments. Thanks for sharing. Have you written about these ideas anywhere? My understanding is that people don't have strong egalitarian impulses so much as strong "fairness* intuitions (here I'm thinking of Nicholas Baumard's work, and some stuff by Paul Bloom), which might manifest as egalitarianism but is different inasmuch as it doesn't require (and indeed weighs against) equality of outcome under inequality of inputs.
Unfortunately, the only thing I have published in the field of political philosophy since my thesis is, “Morality as an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy,” in Liberty, Games and Contracts: Jan Narveson and the Defence of Libertarianism, Malcolm Murray and Jan Narveson, eds., (Ashgate Books, 2007), pp. 179-196. (Jan Narveson was my M.A. thesis supervisor.) That essay doesn't really advance beyond what is in the thesis. You can, or course, find my thesis at the Bodleian. But now that I'm retired, I have been toying with the idea of revising and updating the thesis. It's a daunting task, because nearly nearly all of my references are from 1990 or earlier and a lot has happened in the field since then, which I haven't kept up with.
I'm sure you are right that "fairness" rather than egalitarianism is the human impulse, in part because "fairness" is vague and flexible enough to serve many masters depending on context and which side of the distribution you occupy. I don't think the concept of egalitarianism is even as well-defined as utility maximization in the utilitarian literature. I employ it (idiosyncratically) merely to designate a tendency to redistribute by leveling.
Excellent post. I am making a related argument in my PhD, where I argue for indispensability of game theory for political philosophy precisely for those reasons - we need it to understand the rules of cooperation explicitly to avoid self-deception.
Yes, an evolutionarily stable morality is one which cannot depend upon self-deception, or false consciousness.
“Morality as an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy,” in Liberty, Games and Contracts: Jan Narveson and the Defence of Libertarianism, Malcolm Murray and Jan Narveson, eds., (Ashgate Books, 2007), pp. 179-196.
Thank you, a bit late response, but I just got around to reading your article and I'm going to quote it my PhD and use in criticizing egalitarian uses of game theory, but now I think - we have some reasons to expect that morality should be an ESS, but this is dependent on the time-frame we have in mind, no? There are obviously many moralities that did depend on self-deception and saying that they cannot function in the long term and be stable depends on just how long is the long-term. If it's sufficiently long, a believer in a non-ess system of norms might just not care.
Mostly, I agree with the analysis here, but there are a couple of things that I would challenge:
1. I think that you overstate our level of self-deception about why we cooperate. Most people know that free-riders tend to get shunned and why. We are mostly playing tit for tat in our social relationships ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat ) and I think that we pretty much know what we are doing (and feel morally justified in not cooperating with those who don't "deserve" it).
2. This is more speculative, but if cooperation is beneficial for human survival, it seems possible that we've evolved a "non-instrumental" urge to cooperate like we've evolved a sex drive. Any of our non-instrumental drives can be overridden by rational calculations of self-interest. For example, if I know that the girl that I'm hanging out with tonight has a boyfriend who is much stronger than I am, I probably will refrain from having sex with her even if it would make me feel good right now because I don't want to get killed tomorrow. Similarly, I think that helping others often just kind of makes us feel good in the moment (even before we get anything in return), but we pass up that pleasure when we think that it will be too expensive (b/c the help that they need requires too much work, too many resources, or we know that the person asking help is just a moocher who will bleed us dry).
Both great points. 1 is completely correct. I need to think more about 2. I am inclined to think there is genuine spillover of prosocial/cooperative motives that emerge for instrumental reasons (i.e, we cultivate habits of friendliness, generosity, etc. that then spillover into contexts where we don’t have anything to gain), but that this is different from things like the desire for sex. However, I will need to think more about this…
> On such camping trips, “most people would strongly favour a socialist form of life over feasible alternatives”. For example, things (pots, oil, fishing rods, decks of cards, etc.) would be collectively owned, and “mutual understandings, and the spirit of the enterprise, [would] ensure that there are no inequalities to which anyone could mount a principled objection.” If anyone tried to assert ownership of equipment or charge others for their labour, “most people would hate that,” which shows that “most people are drawn to the socialist ideal, at least in certain restricted settings.”
Why does Cohen seem like the kind of camper who shows up unprepared and expects the others to provide his provisions.
He didn't. Cohen believed in "From each according to his abilities..." He thought it was possible to structure society in such a way that the able-bodied would simply not show up unprepared and expect others to provision him. He was a utopian.
If socialism does spring from spontaneous human nature, one would expect to find many examples of highly functional socialist societies in the historical record. This does not appear to be the case.
I read this book a bit ago and, despite not being a socialist, I actually thought Cohen made some excellent points. Although I liked this post, I have few points on your critiques:
1) The point that we are actually fully self interested with all altruism being signaling seems quite silly (I'm sure some of it is). I can bring many cases and you can probably give a non falsifiable way to call it selfish, and I get that, but I do think things like martyrdom prove these wrong. It does seem from an evolutionary lens that we actually would have cooperative intuitions like we do on introspection.
2) On the mutualistic point, it does indeed seem that we are actually altruistic. Think about people who do things for strangers or effective altruists who don't discriminate against people just because they're closer. It seems like people in general (and I'm sure you can give many examples of you doing this yourself) are altruistic beyond cooperation or self help. When one donates to a charity anonymously, true altruism seems to be taking place.
3) On the point of human limitation, I agree with Cohen that, if human nature cannot be altruistic, it would be a critique of human nature and not socialism. We can made a distinction when talking about ideal hypothetical societies and really good scenarios within current human limitations. We can move within limitations to to the society of limitations, but the ideal is still the goal. I think the situation does really well if we are in a Friendly AGI scenario where we just wanna know how the AI would distribute goods or other things across people.
Good comments and pushback. Re. (1) and (2), I think a lot depends on what one means by "self-interest". In terms of our proximate psychology, of course we do many things in a way that is not calculating and doesn't involve explicitly determining whether it will benefit oneself. As I note in the piece and elsewhere, we have genuine and robust prosocial instincts and motives. However, for the reasons I detail in the piece, it requires a lot of incentives and social scaffolding for these to be applied in the real world - hence why cooperation is so challenging.
Just briefly, I'd add that, to me, it's pretty obvious that effective altruism is a kind of community that functions as an internal status game, and that much of the behaviour is ultimately pinned by reputational incentives.
The point about strangers and anonymous donations is interesting and important. Will be writing about this in the future.
You have to appreciate that for hundreds of thousands of years, the *only* way to store value was to convert consumables into reputation via sharing. If you kill a deer, you can't eat the whole thing and freezing it for later consumption was not technologically possible. Your best bet was to share the kill with your clan, in the expectation that the favour would be returned one day when you needed it. Being a generous person with your food resources earned you a reputation that paid dividends. As with most things, a behaviour which was at first instrumentally justified became fixed in our psychology, becoming intrinsically motivating. People derived a psychological benefit - a satisfied glow - when sharing, when helping others. But only up to a point...
I agree with your criticism. A camper that didn’t contribute anything of value (not even excellent conversation for example) would not be invited again. However, I disagree with you in equal measure - you’re making the mirror image mistake. People have sex because it feels good and take care of their children and relatives because they love them (as well as more practical and selfish reasons.) Infanticide and literal self sacrifice for one’s kids are BOTH well within normal human behavior depending on the circumstances and culture (AND the individual!). People certainly can and do love others outside their own family - and so will help them even if it hurts themselves! Some don’t seem capable of this, others for only one person while others still have a very strong instinct to help pretty much any human being they come across. This isn’t to slight that MOST people have self interest playing a role in most interactions but that’s not all and not all the time. People living in Nazi occupied territory hiding Jews aren’t acting self interested in any way, risking themselves and their families. And because humans are so diverse and malleable we can steer between the two natural extremes a fair amount - where a solid majority will act in a more selfish or more prosocial way. But ignoring out of existence one of the real extreme instincts will not give us a well functioning society.
Good comment. My only objection is that I don't think we disagree. You write:
"People have sex because it feels good and take care of their children and relatives because they love them (as well as more practical and selfish reasons.) Infanticide and literal self sacrifice for one’s kids are BOTH well within normal human behavior depending on the circumstances and culture (AND the individual!). People certainly can and do love others outside their own family - and so will help them even if it hurts themselves!"
Completely agree - never meant to deny the existence of such things as love and sef-sacrifice, only to understand them. Part of the problem is that traits that evolved to maximise inclusive fitness are "self-interested" in one sense but often not self-interested in a more commonsense understanding of that term. I think both senses are important for understanding human behaviour. For example, you can't understand, say, romantic love and its characteristics without understanding its underlying Darwinian rationale, but that doesn't make it any the less real.
I read your column to be heavily implying that love doesn’t exist outside of familial relationships. And I disagree that the evolutionary process by which we evolved to love others (and sometimes self sacrifice) makes our actual actions out of that love self interested in anyway. We act because of how we feel and that has nothing to do with self interest. We evolved to feel love (probably) because it was evolutionarily advantageous.
I slightly misread your paragraph, but have an interesting insight regardless. It relates to kinship bonds and reciprocity. There used to be an old congressional summary report of childhood abuse and neglect named NIS-4. It was temporarily withdrawn, with the raw data still available to researchers, but has since reappeared- although I would necessarily trust the new summary, given that the original version was explosively controversial, given it contradicted some pretty hardwired assumptions held throughout feminisms broad tent.
Specifically, it found that biological mothers were significantly more likely to be responsible for the hospitalisation or death of children than biological fathers. There are doubtless many reasons for this- access, the expectation of getting caught or accused by gender, post-partum, etc. However, incidences of criminal behaviour equalised by gender for the simply reason that childhood abuse and neglect was often committed by a biological mother working in tandem with a male intimate partner. The figures were striking- for every 100 victims, roughly 120 offenders (if memory serves).
My other point would be this- you're probably aware of the fact that those who hid Jews were a tiny exception. Few are aware of the reality that there was a far darker side of the equation- in Nazi Germany the numbers of police and Gestapo were nowhere near those required to maintain an all-encompassing totalitarian state. Instead, Germans informing on their only slightly different and nonconforming neighbours rapidly became the new norm. This excellent and dated episode from a BBC documentary series shows the true horror of societies encouraged to think of themselves as a group, with group interests- especially those who predicative their group identity upon a Manichean mindset:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074knp
The episode is available on YouTube.
My point would be this- it would seem to me that the overwhelming majority of people only possess innate positive morality as a weak force. Most people can be good, provided they have benign community influences surrounding them. But most people are extraordinarily susceptible to having their sense of morality hacked by group dynamics- social enforcement, fear of reputation damage, etc. Perhaps 3% of people exist as exceptions on either side of spectrum. At one end, the pathologically evil and selfish- at the other, those who can resist the group urge and remain true to morality in an almost spiritual sense.
It was also considerable easier for people in Nazi occupied territories to hide and conceal Jews. They weren't any less rampantly anti-Semitic. It was just that they weren't going against the wishes of their own neighbours and friends- they stood in opposition to the wishes of a hostile and aggressive outgroup...
Some good insights here - thanks for the comment. The point about distinguishing the norm from the exceptions is a very important one. (I'll be writing about those exceptions in future posts).
Bio fathers are far more likely to just abandon kids so I imagine that would be a strong factor.
I think your 3% might be close to true but it’s the 10% that are also important. That is I would estimate that 10% of any population has very strong moral principals - but most of them aren’t going to let them override their own survival instincts and/or their desire for their most loved ones to survive. So if 10% wanted to help Jews but only 3% risked their/their family’s life that seems reasonable enough. And similarly, maybe 3% are psychopaths but a solid 10% are so intensely selfish they will happily lie and cheat and do anything at all as long as it benefits themselves and care truly only about themselves, often with sadistic inclinations. So any socialist type group needs a way to deal with the 10% selfish ones or it ruins the whole thing even if the culture brings out the most cooperative side of the malleable 80%. I’ll leave my theory about the necessity of a shared morality to restrain the selfishness inherent in capitalism for a different place and time.
It's not the selfish 10% that are the problem for socialism. The problem is seeking to apply enforced pressure for societal improvement, as well as refusing to acknowledge when ideas fail or a model of reality is inaccurate. One of the things which drives me to distraction is the fact so many socialists fail to understand the need to appropriate market mechanisms.
The kulaks were not greedy or selfish. They were simply way, way more effective than their neighbours, using a number of mechanisms- so this necessarily meant they made great scapegoats when collectivisation proved so disastrous, as it always has (Deng Xiaoping famously argued that it didn't matter whether a cat was black or white, just so long as it caught mice- meant to symbolise the fact that the economic framework matters less than the control of the aims of a nations leaders in focusing on the improvement of the lives of one's citizens). He knew that small scale entrepreneurialism would work in revitalising China's agriculture.
Here's the thing. Capitalism achieves a sorting mechanism where people are forced into choosing options which make them seek maximum utility to others. It allows many people to fail, so that an workable percentage are pushed into jobs and vocations that they are naturally great at. Socialism could achieve the same aims through a different means- something like a more humane form of duty-directed aspiration, where talented individuals are encouraged to employ their talents where they are of the greatest service to their community.
A good example of this is Mondragon, the Basque worker owner cooperative. It has 81,000 worker owners. It's economic framework is best described as community capitalism. The CEO and the senior finance get paid five times as much as the average worker, but they are also absolute heroes to their communities, to their mini-nation, within a nation. Tellingly, when Mondragon was forced to shutter its electrical goods division due to fierce competition, particularly from China, 3,000 worker owners were temporarily made redundant. But the leadership were ultimately able to reemploy all bar 60 workers- likely the very old, the sick and the dead. That's quite an achievement, especially when compared to the callousness of the large corporate model which makes a habit of stealing workers pensions.
Another thing to consider is that ordinary people are much, much happier working for small businesses- nearly 80% of British workers employed in the small business sector reported being very or extremely happy with their work and workplace. A part of it is because one of the criteria for success in small businesses is reciprocity between worker and boss.
Large organisations have a natural weakness when it comes to responsibility vs. authority. One can delegate authority, but one cannot delegate responsibility- an axiom despised by politicians and corporate CEOs alike. The natural instincts of any large organisation is to push responsibility down the hierarchy, whilst reserving authority in decision-making for the upper echelons. It's dehumanising to the point of actually posing a health hazard to lower tier workers. There is a Whitehall civil service study which shows that workers were most likely to suffer negative health impacts and death not from demanding workloads and important, difficult jobs, but rather from bearing a tonne of responsibility with none of the authority to perform their core work functions effectively. By contrast, small businesses naturally default authority to the level of retail human interaction. You know your boss. You can see how hard he/she works. You are able to negotiate with them in good faith, without deference to a distant superior, or the demands of financial and HR departments.
Funnily enough, Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Finance Minister, prominent socialist and recently de-banked (his money stolen) for having the gall to support Julian Assange, recently talked about this problem. He argued that his fellow socialists needed to accept a new type of socialism, one which refrained from kneejerk applications of force and coercion to solve problems. A more libertarian, ground-up form of market socialism, one imagines....
Behaviour is a function of value and belief. Much of what I call non-reciprocal altruism is based on false beliefs: Mother Theresa was highly altruistic, but that's because she was acting on the basis of false beliefs regarding the afterlife, the purpose of the earthly life, etc. In general, the function of religion (and its modern secular substitutes) is to instill false beliefs that are believed to produce socially beneficial outcomes. To the extent that they are functional, false beliefs are sustained because of their beneficial outcomes. If what we want is a morality that does not rely on false belief systems, then reciprocity has to be the underlying mechanism.
Thanks for the post Dan. Naturally I agreed with its thrust, but then it did land some easy blows on a large target ;) At least as you describe him, Cohen is a classic of the kind mentioned by James Burnham where he says in The Machiavellians that more than nine tenths of political talk (from the academy to Tammany Hall) is little more than wish fulfilment.
It's quite obvious that we need the dialectic of mutuality to build a great deal of what works in human society. But the problem I have with your post is that it remains in the world in which we ask ourselves "how do we design social institutions to guide self-interest toward social good". As Elinor Ostrom said in her Nobel lecture:
"Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans."
I'd argue that a huge part of our current predicament is systems that are simply predicated on playing to people's self-interest — and that they are becoming more and more inhospitable to other kinds of motives — of which there are many.
There are existing traditions that appeal to people's (Aristotelian) better sides — most particularly the professions. They would run at a very degraded level if those within them did not value the pleasure they can gain from doing a good job. Your profession is one such. As is teaching generally, medicine and so on. Even the architects of the Toyota Production System understood that.
And while it's no utopia of selflessness in any of these professions, they are havens of happy folk who gain pleasure from doing good things — things that give them some aesthetic pleasure, the practical pleasure of excellence and come with a social dividend. Oh — and academia isn't like this any more, precisely because the kind of thinking that Ostrom laments in that passage has become so totalised. Totalised into spiritually vacuous managerialism. And that leads people to be miserable and to do bad work — all at the same time. As if led by an invisible hand ;)
Thanks Nicholas - great comment. (The reference to Burnham's "The Machiavellians" is interesting as well - I came across this book recently and feel like I should read it).
I agree with what you say here, mostly, although I think a lot depends on what one means by "self-interest". If it is interpreted narrowly, I agree with you and with Ostrom. There are forms of cynicism that are simply wrong about human motives and have terrible effects in society when it comes to institution design and politics. At the same time, I take a central lesson of Ostrom's work to be that even though human beings are spontaneously cooperative, achieving large-scale cooperation does in fact depend on things perceived mutual interest, monitoring, norm enforcement, status economies in which people are socially rewarded for doing the right thing, etc. - in other words, incentives that align people's interests (construed broadly) with good outcomes. This lesson can be (and no doubt frequently has been) misapplied, but interpreted the right way, I think it's very important.
Maybe this is a minor point in the larger scheme of things but norm enforcement in Ostrom’s framework can be extremely risky and costly in material terms and cannot usefully be described as self-interested. This is especially so with decentralized and uncoordinated sanctions, as for example described in Acheson’s Lobster Gangs of Maine or in the many case studies in the Bromley edited volume (links below).
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Lobster_Gangs_of_Maine.html
https://books.google.com/books/about/Making_the_Commons_Work.html
Indeed, almost by definition, 'norm enforcement' is NOT about 'me' but about 'us', or if you want to dig down a little the 'me' is present (because I am seeking to assert the norm), but it is not some bilateral trade of expectations and favours (me and you) because it is an appeal to something beyond this simple relationship.
Every human institution — including this interaction — comprises an ecology of private and shared purposes. Those purposes are partly complementary, and partly in tension. I tried to intimate this here
http://evonomics.com/success-means-competing-cooperating-adam-smith-youve-never-seen/
Interesting. Costly in material terms, definitely, but I vaguely remember - perhaps misremember - that one of Ostrom's observations is that norm enforcers are often socially rewarded. And that aligns with other research on costly enforcement. However, I will have to re-read.
There are many cases in the Bromley volume and the Acheson book of *anonymous* sanctions (necessary because the behavior often violates formal laws). One could argue that actions can be selectively and credibly revealed to those who would approve, but internal motivation seems more likely to me.
The Bromley volume and Ostrom's work inspired this paper:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2118304
Interesting. Thanks - will check this out.
Thanks Dan
I doubt you need to read the whole of The Machiavellians, though I found it pretty informative throughout.
But the first part ending in the passage I quote in this blog post is one of the most brilliant (and true) pieces of political writing I've ever come across.
https://clubtroppo.com.au/2022/03/06/will-you-join-me-in-the-alt-centre/
The stories are not any less realistic just because they are stories because that's precisely how they are supposed to work and operate in our world, giving rise to value systems that have real currency. But understanding the mechanics is important to know how best to foster this kind of exchange. I agree with the analysis but want to highlight that these stories we tell ourselves are not something less than simply because they are stories.
Good point - I agree. I don't want to dismiss the value of the stories but I think for certain purposes they can obscure understanding.
There was a good article on this topic (Epistemic Import of Narratives) that just came out in Social Epistemology. Influenced by the work of Lisa Bortolotti, among others:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02691728.2024.2356518
I have yet to meet a Marxist who has even the remotest grasp on reality. On things like evolution, trade-offs, selfishness, social organization, or even the basics of human nature. It's all idealism, all the way down.
You cannot "educate" the entire species into being wholesome any more than you can lecture a man into being attracted to a woman he doesn't find attractive. You have to work with what you've got.
To ignore that fundamental truth is not noble or philosophically interesting - it is, as you said, culpably naive. Comically unhelpful.
Yes - and I think all the more troubling because unlike other toxic ideologies (e.g., fascism), it presents as virtuous.
Yes, and the problem of evolutionary stability is at the heart of it. Start with universal socialist cooperation, and allow for mutations and imperfections, and pretty soon the whole thing devolves into a game of grift and parasitism. Cheating pays handsomely when everyone else is so altruistic that norm-enforcement is no longer practiced...
Re: "Smith’s insight about capitalism's incentive structure generalises to all modes of social organisation and most collective achievements outside the immediate family."
Your fine essay establishes the great role of reciprocity motivated by self-interest in society.
I would like to note another form of reciprocity, besides family and reciprocity motivated by self-interest.
I have in mind *friendship*. Friendship has distinctive motivations and some local empirical importance in social cooperation. Philosophers from Aristotle to Adam Smith have conceptualized friendship in social theory.
My intuition is that the distinctive features of friendship are as follows. I list the features as steps in an idealized narrative explanation.
a) Friendship springs from joint experience—*a history* of going through things together.
b) Friends make a leap of faith and lower their guard. They *choose to trust* each other.
c) Friends develop heightened *sympathy* (moral sentiments) for each other.
d) Thanks to mutual trust and sympathy, friends achieve *intimacy* and come to understand and appreciate each other's *individuality*.
e) Friends then *deeply wish each other well*.
f) Friends establish respectful, reciprocal, general *commitment* that doesn't keep close mental accounts of who owes what.
g) Friends *know* that they are friends.
To be clear, my point is at the second decimal, so to speak. And I readily acknowledge that in some languages — for example, in traditional Sicilian proverbs and sayings — the word "friendship" (for example, "amicizia" in Sicilian) also covers what sociologists call "instrumental friendship," which may be hierarchical and transparently motivated by self-interest. But I am focusing on an Aristotelean lineage of friendship, which plays a distinctive, local role in reciprocity in some cultures.
OK, but the whole point of political philosophy is to understand how societies can be organized among *strangers*. Societies are not clubs, families, choirs, hives - or camping trips. Friendship might work as an organizing principle in smallish clans in the Pleistocene; but we can't easily go back to that state. Understanding friendship relationships doesn't help much in developing a political philosophy for the modern age.
Great point and observation. I agree friendship is central to understanding human sociality and culture.
And was at the heart of Aristotle's understanding of ethics and politics
I think all narratives that class a particular ideology as the purest possible expression of human nature are harmful.
They rely on the speaker assuming they have the power to determine what (and often who) does and doesn't fit into being human.
Cohen obviously didn’t have any hobbies involving nice stuff you don’t want anyone else to mess with.
“What is impossible, however, is dispensing with the role of self-love and status competition in understanding—and attempting to improve—human societies.” If this is true then human progress as I understand it- which is progress towards every human becoming a fully enlightened being (and thus humanity as a whole progressing to a higher plane of consciousness)- then what IS a reasonable expectation of human progress, or are you envisioning a humanity that exists outside of constant progress (ie that the natural state of humanity is not progress as I have been lead to believe by…. Everything?)
Thanks for reading and for the comment. I don't think the natural state of humanity is progress, but I think progress can occur - and does occur - primarily when social conditions channel human's pursuit of their goals into beneficial social outcomes.
Very interesting essay that I will share more of my thoughts on later but I have to ask a question about this comment. If you don’t think the natural state of humanity is progress then you must not think that progress requires intention. You think it’s an accident?
I think progress requires consciousness first, a level of intelligence second and then an ability to use tools to alter an environment. The ability to assess an environment and also an ability to alter/manipulate an environment for a certain benefit separate us from other intelligent creatures. We are the only animal able to do this to an extent which can actually end our own existence. Which is why unbridled selfishness is so dangerous within our species.
I agree with this. But "selfishness" can have multiple meanings. For example, human societies - when they function well - are often configured in such a way that being selfless is, in a deep sense, in people's self-interest. I agree progress often requires consciousness and intentionality. However, I would argue that the desire to bring about social progress is often rooted in reputation management reasons, even if not consciously so.
You are right about selfishness. My use of it was more of a pejorative, the hyper,antisocial almost sociopathic form we see in the modern world. Biological selfishness doesn’t take that form usually and is more about self preservation instincts, a very necessary tool for species propagation. As you point out too, our self as self conscious beings is really about reputation management which can make us appear shallow or act performative. In the end though I’m not sure it matters whether acts which are pro social come from a place of selfish reputation management or pure benevolence as long as there is an overall bias at the group level towards pro social actions. We don’t survive without those actions.
To me it’s a little like the free will arguments. Obviously we don’t have absolute free will but I fully agree with the late Daniel Dennett that we have enough of a type of free will worth defending and developing social norms around its existence. It’s not all or none. Same with selfless ness. We just need enough of it, driven by something (even driven by selfish reputation mgmt) for our species to survive and advance.
“I think progress can occur - and does occur - primarily when social conditions channel human's pursuit of their goals into beneficial social outcomes.”
Would love to read more about this because it really does seem that community is a quality that is beneficial to societies and should be encouraged. I saw a post earlier today contrasting the US and Europe along these lines. Whether or not that holds empirically it would be a good launching pad for that discussion.
First of all, I am a little bit surprised of having this discussion without a reference to Herbert Gintis, and the strong reciprocity view of human cooperation. His paper on genes and norm
Internalization is incredible:
https://santafe.edu/research/results/working-papers/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-altruism-gene-culture-coe
To some extent people can run on very different norm systems; the great problem of socialism is not so much “cheating”, but that naturally people settles for low effort/low reward, become apathetic, and the entire culture ends in stagnation and zero sum status games. In fact I find socialism sustainable, which is precisely what makes it dangerous…
Like his work but disagree with it - will write about this one day! Thanks for reading.
Can we have a quick taste of what you disagree with Gintis about?
Several things but most importantly the group selectionism. See, e.g., https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230571147_Group_selection_theories_are_now_more_sophisticated_but_are_they_more_predictive_A_review_of_Samuel_Bowles_and_Herbert_Gintis_A_Cooperative_Species_Human_Reciprocity_and_its_Evolution
Thanks
G.A. Cohen was my DPhil supervisor at Oxford in the 1990s. My thesis, "Functional Libertarianism" (1997) covers many of the themes in this essay (among other things, of course). I like to think that "Why Not Socialism?" might have been to some extent his reaction against my thesis, which I believe he found challenging to his world view. He passed away before we had a chance to discuss the book...
One of the main reasons egalitarian moral sentiments / intuitions were so prevalent in hunter-gatherer societies of the Pleistocene is that there was little ability to store value. If you killed a deer, the best thing you could do with it was share it among your tribe, because you couldn't eat the whole thing and you couldn't butcher, freeze, and store it for later consumption. Sharing it created obligations of reciprocity, so it was a kind of insurance policy against times when you failed to acquire enough food on your own. Value was converted to reputation, which is a kind of store of value.
I dropped out of academia shortly after completing my DPhil, so never had the time or motivation to pursue and refine the ideas in there. But I have continued to develop them in my spare time. I now believe that libertarianism is not a political philosophy for all ages; and in that respect I agree with Marx that the political "superstructure" must align with the material conditions. While freedom is the pre-eminent functional political value in technologically advanced, pluralistic societies, egalitarianism is functional in technologically primitive and genetically homogeneous clans.
People wonder, if freedom is so functional as an organizational principle, why do so many people, including most political philosophers, theologians, authors and bien pensants over the ages. tend to idealize equality? My "error theory" is that these people are merely rationalizing a powerful, innate moral predisposition which they have inherited from our Pleistocene ancestors. Humans have a "taste" for equality because our moral psychology evolved to suit the conditions of the Pleistocene. Our taste for sweetness evolved to guide us into eating ripe fruit; not now that sugar is plentiful and cheap, that taste preference is largely dysfunctional and leads to all manner of ill health. It has to be curbed. (Hints of "false consciousness" in Marxist terms.) Likewise, equality was ingrained in our psyche over hundreds of thousands of years when we lived in competing clans, but it has become dysfunctional due to technological advances. There is a type of moral relativism here: morality is relative to the technology and knowledge base more generally in a society. I have come to recognize that there is even perhaps an element of historical materialism in my error theory, without the determinism that derives from an exclusive focus on the mode of production as the driver of historical development.
Very interesting - and plausible - comments. Thanks for sharing. Have you written about these ideas anywhere? My understanding is that people don't have strong egalitarian impulses so much as strong "fairness* intuitions (here I'm thinking of Nicholas Baumard's work, and some stuff by Paul Bloom), which might manifest as egalitarianism but is different inasmuch as it doesn't require (and indeed weighs against) equality of outcome under inequality of inputs.
Unfortunately, the only thing I have published in the field of political philosophy since my thesis is, “Morality as an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy,” in Liberty, Games and Contracts: Jan Narveson and the Defence of Libertarianism, Malcolm Murray and Jan Narveson, eds., (Ashgate Books, 2007), pp. 179-196. (Jan Narveson was my M.A. thesis supervisor.) That essay doesn't really advance beyond what is in the thesis. You can, or course, find my thesis at the Bodleian. But now that I'm retired, I have been toying with the idea of revising and updating the thesis. It's a daunting task, because nearly nearly all of my references are from 1990 or earlier and a lot has happened in the field since then, which I haven't kept up with.
I'm sure you are right that "fairness" rather than egalitarianism is the human impulse, in part because "fairness" is vague and flexible enough to serve many masters depending on context and which side of the distribution you occupy. I don't think the concept of egalitarianism is even as well-defined as utility maximization in the utilitarian literature. I employ it (idiosyncratically) merely to designate a tendency to redistribute by leveling.
Excellent post. I am making a related argument in my PhD, where I argue for indispensability of game theory for political philosophy precisely for those reasons - we need it to understand the rules of cooperation explicitly to avoid self-deception.
That sounds great - I’d be interested in reading the thesis once it’s finished.
Yes, an evolutionarily stable morality is one which cannot depend upon self-deception, or false consciousness.
“Morality as an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy,” in Liberty, Games and Contracts: Jan Narveson and the Defence of Libertarianism, Malcolm Murray and Jan Narveson, eds., (Ashgate Books, 2007), pp. 179-196.
Thank you, a bit late response, but I just got around to reading your article and I'm going to quote it my PhD and use in criticizing egalitarian uses of game theory, but now I think - we have some reasons to expect that morality should be an ESS, but this is dependent on the time-frame we have in mind, no? There are obviously many moralities that did depend on self-deception and saying that they cannot function in the long term and be stable depends on just how long is the long-term. If it's sufficiently long, a believer in a non-ess system of norms might just not care.
Any chance you ever read Martin Hägglund's "This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom"? Would love to hear your opinion.
No - just googled it and it seems very interesting though. Thanks for the recommendation - I'll add it to the (already too long) reading list.
Funny, Jaros, I only heard of that book (and its author) just yesterday in the first chapter of this intriguing new book, in which Hägglund is invoked to help elucidate Kierkegaard's conception of anxiety: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-danger-which-we-do-not-know-9780197767245
You are an extremely wide-ranging reader - I'm always impressed to hear of the sheer volume and range of what you read.
Mostly, I agree with the analysis here, but there are a couple of things that I would challenge:
1. I think that you overstate our level of self-deception about why we cooperate. Most people know that free-riders tend to get shunned and why. We are mostly playing tit for tat in our social relationships ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat ) and I think that we pretty much know what we are doing (and feel morally justified in not cooperating with those who don't "deserve" it).
2. This is more speculative, but if cooperation is beneficial for human survival, it seems possible that we've evolved a "non-instrumental" urge to cooperate like we've evolved a sex drive. Any of our non-instrumental drives can be overridden by rational calculations of self-interest. For example, if I know that the girl that I'm hanging out with tonight has a boyfriend who is much stronger than I am, I probably will refrain from having sex with her even if it would make me feel good right now because I don't want to get killed tomorrow. Similarly, I think that helping others often just kind of makes us feel good in the moment (even before we get anything in return), but we pass up that pleasure when we think that it will be too expensive (b/c the help that they need requires too much work, too many resources, or we know that the person asking help is just a moocher who will bleed us dry).
Both great points. 1 is completely correct. I need to think more about 2. I am inclined to think there is genuine spillover of prosocial/cooperative motives that emerge for instrumental reasons (i.e, we cultivate habits of friendliness, generosity, etc. that then spillover into contexts where we don’t have anything to gain), but that this is different from things like the desire for sex. However, I will need to think more about this…
> On such camping trips, “most people would strongly favour a socialist form of life over feasible alternatives”. For example, things (pots, oil, fishing rods, decks of cards, etc.) would be collectively owned, and “mutual understandings, and the spirit of the enterprise, [would] ensure that there are no inequalities to which anyone could mount a principled objection.” If anyone tried to assert ownership of equipment or charge others for their labour, “most people would hate that,” which shows that “most people are drawn to the socialist ideal, at least in certain restricted settings.”
Why does Cohen seem like the kind of camper who shows up unprepared and expects the others to provide his provisions.
He didn't. Cohen believed in "From each according to his abilities..." He thought it was possible to structure society in such a way that the able-bodied would simply not show up unprepared and expect others to provision him. He was a utopian.
If socialism does spring from spontaneous human nature, one would expect to find many examples of highly functional socialist societies in the historical record. This does not appear to be the case.
I read this book a bit ago and, despite not being a socialist, I actually thought Cohen made some excellent points. Although I liked this post, I have few points on your critiques:
1) The point that we are actually fully self interested with all altruism being signaling seems quite silly (I'm sure some of it is). I can bring many cases and you can probably give a non falsifiable way to call it selfish, and I get that, but I do think things like martyrdom prove these wrong. It does seem from an evolutionary lens that we actually would have cooperative intuitions like we do on introspection.
2) On the mutualistic point, it does indeed seem that we are actually altruistic. Think about people who do things for strangers or effective altruists who don't discriminate against people just because they're closer. It seems like people in general (and I'm sure you can give many examples of you doing this yourself) are altruistic beyond cooperation or self help. When one donates to a charity anonymously, true altruism seems to be taking place.
3) On the point of human limitation, I agree with Cohen that, if human nature cannot be altruistic, it would be a critique of human nature and not socialism. We can made a distinction when talking about ideal hypothetical societies and really good scenarios within current human limitations. We can move within limitations to to the society of limitations, but the ideal is still the goal. I think the situation does really well if we are in a Friendly AGI scenario where we just wanna know how the AI would distribute goods or other things across people.
Good comments and pushback. Re. (1) and (2), I think a lot depends on what one means by "self-interest". In terms of our proximate psychology, of course we do many things in a way that is not calculating and doesn't involve explicitly determining whether it will benefit oneself. As I note in the piece and elsewhere, we have genuine and robust prosocial instincts and motives. However, for the reasons I detail in the piece, it requires a lot of incentives and social scaffolding for these to be applied in the real world - hence why cooperation is so challenging.
Just briefly, I'd add that, to me, it's pretty obvious that effective altruism is a kind of community that functions as an internal status game, and that much of the behaviour is ultimately pinned by reputational incentives.
The point about strangers and anonymous donations is interesting and important. Will be writing about this in the future.
Thanks again.
You have to appreciate that for hundreds of thousands of years, the *only* way to store value was to convert consumables into reputation via sharing. If you kill a deer, you can't eat the whole thing and freezing it for later consumption was not technologically possible. Your best bet was to share the kill with your clan, in the expectation that the favour would be returned one day when you needed it. Being a generous person with your food resources earned you a reputation that paid dividends. As with most things, a behaviour which was at first instrumentally justified became fixed in our psychology, becoming intrinsically motivating. People derived a psychological benefit - a satisfied glow - when sharing, when helping others. But only up to a point...