The evolution of fairness norms: An essay on Ken Binmore's Natural Justice

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 5, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 33-50

  Seabright, Paul ^a  

^a UNIVERSITÉ DE TOULOUSE   (France)

Author keywords

evolution; fairness; natural justice; norms; Rawls; self regarding preferences; social contract

Indexed keywords

EID: 33847189758     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X06060618     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Ken Binmore, Natural Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
2. For more on the evolutionary origins of music, see Norman M. Weinberger, ‘Music and the Brain’, Scientific American, November (2004): 66-73, and the references cited therein.
3. Binmore, Natural Justice, p. 14.
4. Herbert Gintis, ‘Behavioral Ethics Meets Natural Justice’, Politics, Philosophy and Economics 5(1): 5-32, in this issue.
5. I have explored this theme in much greater detail in Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Some of the arguments below draw on passages in that book.
6. Binmore, Natural Justice, p. 87.
7. The evidence suggests that prior to the adoption of agriculture interaction with strangers was rare, and where it took place, was far more often violent than peaceful, let alone cooperative. Seabright, The Company of Strangers, pp. 48–53 especially.
8. Some have done just this: see David Wilson and Elliott Sober, ‘Re-Introducing Group Selection to the Human Behavioral Sciences’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1994): 585-654.
9. Herbert Gintis, ‘Strong Reciprocity and Human Sociality’, Journal of Theoretical Biology 213 (2000): 103-19.
10. This argument is due originally to Robert Frank, Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (New York: Norton, 1988).
11. Michael Owren and Jo-Anne Bachorowski, ‘The Evolution of Emotional Expression: A “Selfish-Gene” Account of Smiling and Laughter in Early Hominids and Humans’, in Emotions, edited by Tracy Mayne and George Bonnano (New York: The Guilford Press, 2001), Ch. 5.
12. There are other theories of the evolution of laughter, not necessarily incompatible with the one outlined here. For instance, V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain (New York: Harper Collins, 1999) propose that laughter evolved to signal to other members of a social group that a feared threat (from a predator, for instance) is in fact not serious; this could explain why we laugh in relief. This could in turn account for the use of laughter to signal to a listener that the person laughing is not himself a threat.
13. J.A. Gray and Neil McNaughton, The Neuropsychology of Anxiety: An Enquiry into the Functions of the Septo-Hippocampal System, 2nd edn., Oxford Psychology Series No. 33 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Ch. 4.
14. Ken Binmore, Game Theory and the Social Contract, Volume 1: Playing Fair (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Ken Binmore, Game Theory and the Social Contract, Volume 2: Just Playing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
15. Binmore, Natural Justice, p. 9.
16. ‘What theory of morals can ever serve any useful purpose unless it can show. that all the duties which it recommends, are also the true interest of each individual?’ See David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 280. Cited by Binmore, Game Theory and the Social Contract, Volume 1: Playing Fair, p. 30, fn. 28.
17. Binmore, Game Theory and the Social Contract, Volume 2: Just Playing, p. 277.
18. Ross also writes that ‘People are modeled as coordinating their behavior in repeated-game equilibria around these norms.’ See Don Ross, ‘Evolutionary Game Theory and the Normative Theory of Institutional Design: Binmore and Behavioral Economics’, Politics, Philosophy and Economics 1 (2006): 51-79, in this issue.
19. Kim Sterelny, Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
20. See Dan Kahan, ‘The Logic of Reciprocity: Trust, Collective Action and Law’, Working Paper No. 281 (New Haven, CT: John M. Olin Centre for Studies in Public Policy, Yale Law School, 2002).
21. I have developed economic models of incentive mechanisms involving otherregarding preferences in two recent papers: Paul Seabright, ‘Continuous Preferences can Cause Discontinuous Choices: An Application to the Impact of Incentives on Altruism’, Discussion Paper No. 4322 (London: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2004); Paul Seabright and Colin Rowat, ‘Intermediation by Aid Agencies’, Journal of Development Economics (forthcoming).