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THE EGALITARIAN SPECIES*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2015

Gerald Gaus
Gerald Gaus*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Arizona
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Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , Spring 2015 , pp. 1 - 27
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Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2015 

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Footnotes

*

My special thanks to Elizabeth Anderson, Mark LeBar, Deirdre McCloskey, George Sher, Piers Turner, and Chad Van Schoelandt for helpful discussions.

References

1 See, e.g., Wilson, E. O., On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978)Google ScholarPubMed, chap. 7; Smith, John Maynard, The Theory of Evolution, 3rd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1975)Google Scholar, chap. 12; Hamilton, W. D., “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour I,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964): 1–16CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Trivers, Robert L., “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 66 (1971): 35–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Axelrod, Robert, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).Google Scholar I do not wish to suggest that direct reciprocity approaches (such as exemplified by tit-for-tat) have been abandoned; Ken Binmore continues to champion them. See his Natural Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

2 Many eusocial insects, such as ants, bees, and wasps are haplodiploid — a female has two alleles but a male only one; insect groups composed largely of such sisters have a degree of genetic relatedness approaching .75, whereas human siblings have a .5 relatedness.

3 For a general analysis of multilevel selection, see Okasha, Samir, Evolution and the Levels of Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For direct applications to the evolution of human altruism, see Sober, Elliot and Wilson, David Sloan, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).Google Scholar For a radical endorsement of the group selection hypothesis, which advances the controversial claim that kin selection should be largely discounted, see Wilson, E. O., The Social Conquest of the Earth (New York: Liveright, 2012).Google Scholar

4 Social selection can be understood as a form of sexual selection. It has been stressed by Boehm, Christopher, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism and Shame (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 166ff.Google Scholar

5 For an easily accessible version of their work, see their Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); their ground–breaking modeling of cultural evolution was presented in Boyd, Robert and Richerson, Peter J., Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).Google Scholar For an overview, see Mesoudi, Alex, Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), chap. 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 For an overview, see Gaus, Gerald and Thrasher, John, “Social Evolution,” in Gaus, Gerald and D’Agostino, Fred, eds., The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy (New York: Taylor Francis, 2013), 643–55.Google Scholar

7 See in particular Hayek's “Notes on the Evolution of Systems of Rules of Conduct,” in his Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 66–68. I examine Hayek's social evolutionary account in some depth in “The Evolution of Society and Mind: Hayek’s System of Ideas,” in Ed Feser, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 232–58.

8 This quoted phrase is not, as political philosophers might expect, from G. A. Cohen, but from the ethnographer-primatologist Christopher Boehm in Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 66. See, by way of comparison, Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), esp. chap. 8.

9 In Gaus, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), I insist that the account of a justified social morality presented there does not depend on naturalistic foundations; the point there is that moral rules can be embraced from a variety of perspectives, including religious and realist metaethical ones. I am in no way retracting any of that here; I am simply giving, as it were, what I believe is the soundest perspective, and how it makes sense of our evolved moral nature.

10 Kitcher, Philip, The Ethical Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), esp. chaps. 2 and 6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 “To declare that our ancestors invented ethics is to deny that they discovered it or that it was revealed to them.” (Ibid., 7.)

12 Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 2004 [1879]), 120.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., 122.

14 Including Henry Sidgwick: “a superior bee, we may be sure, would aspire to a more moderate solution to the population problems” (quoted at ibid.). Cohen insists that the infeasibility of a vision of justice — e.g., that given our evolved capacities we could not conform to it — does not “defeat the claim of a principle” (Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, 20). David Estlund also defends the relative independence of the demands of justice from our natures (“Human Nature and the Limits [if Any] of Political Philosophy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 39 [2011]: 207–235).

15 Kitcher, The Ethical Project, 213.

16 I have stressed this point, and considered how such distance can be achieved, in “The Evolution, Evaluation and Reform of Social Morality,” in David Levy and Sandra Peart, eds., Hayek and the Modern Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 59–88; and in “Why the Conventionalist Needs the Social Contract (and Vice Versa),” RMM (Rationality, Morality, and Markets) 4 (2013): 71–87.

17 Kitcher, The Ethical Project, chaps. 1 and 2.

18 Rawls, John, “The Independence of Moral Theory,” in Freeman, S., ed., John Rawls: Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 286–88Google Scholar, 296. I consider Rawls's understanding of moral theory in some depth in “On the Appropriate Mode of Justifying a Public Moral Constitution,” The Harvard Review of Philosophy, vol. 19 (2013): 4–22.

19 I leave aside here the complicated issue of just how moral sentiments are to be distinguished from other emotions; in the present context, I do not believe this will lead to difficulties. For a powerful statement of moral sentimentalism based on recent research, see Nichols, Shaun, Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 On the importance of internalization, see Gaus, The Order of Public Reason, chap. 4. See also Section IV.C, below.

21 F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 3: The Political Order of a Free People (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 156.

22 Ibid., 160.

23 Wilson, On Human Nature, 157. It manifests itself in nepotism.

24 Hayek, The Political Order of a Free People, 169–73.

25 See Henrich, Natalie and Henrich, Joseph, Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 31–32Google Scholar; Richerson and Boyd, Not by Genes Alone, 191–92.

26 See Boyd, Robert and Richerson, Peter J., The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), chap. 11.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., chap. 12. See also Richerson and Boyd, Not By Genes Alone, 203ff.

28 Boehm, Moral Origins, 162–63.

29 Hayek, F. A., The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, edited by Bartley, W. W. III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 9, 11–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar His misgivings about social justice are, of course, presented in volume two of Law, Legislation and Liberty, The Mirage of Social Justice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), esp. chap. 9.

30 In his Ethical Project, Kitcher has a short discussion of cultural evolution, and acknowledges that biological and cultural success need not have any tie (109). But overwhelmingly, the story is about the egalitarian nature of the ethical project, an egalitarianism that has its roots in the period from 200,000 to 40,000 years ago. Richard Joyce follows the same pattern; with an occasional nod to cultural evolution, the evolution of morality is essentially about natural selection. See Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

31 See, e.g., O'Hear, Anthony, Beyond Evolution: Human Nature and the Limits of Evolutionary Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 74.Google Scholar Hayek's own account was the target of rather extreme reactions, depicting him as a Social Darwinist — the ultimate term of disrepute for an account of moral evolution. See, for example, Miller, David, “The Fatalistic Conceit,” Critical Review 3 (1989): 310–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Because Hayek is so concerned with distancing his analysis of the evolution of morality from natural selection, this description is strikingly malapropos, as Hayek himself stresses. See Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, 23.

32 This is the title of chapter 5 of Richerson and Boyd, Not By Genes Alone.

33 I owe this observation to Robert Boyd.

34 On the contrast between micro and macro social evolution, see Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution, chaps. 3–5.

35 Hayek, “Notes on the Evolution of Systems of Rules of Conduct,” 71. On Hayek's notion of the order of actions, see Eric Mack “Hayek on Justice and the Order of Actions” in Ed Feser, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hayek, 259–86.

36 Hayek, “Notes on the Evolution of Systems of Rules of Conduct,” 72.

37 F. A. Hayek, “The Theory of Complex Phenomena,” in his Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, 22–42, at 23–24.

38 I have analyzed this thesis in Gaus, “Hayek on the Evolution of Society and Mind.”

39 F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. 1: Rules and Order (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 18; Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, 25. Sewall Wright, an advocate of group selection, participated in Hayek's evolution seminar at Chicago. See Caldwell, Bruce, Hayek’s Challenge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 299.Google Scholar Hayek advances what might be called a genuine multilevel selectionist account, in which the success of a group affects the selection of individual traits within it, allowing traits that have an in-group disadvantage to be selected. “Although the existence and preservation of the order of actions of a group can be accounted for only from the rules of conduct which individuals obey, these rules of conduct have developed because the individuals have been living in groups whose structures have gradually changed. In other words, the properties of the individuals which are significant for the existence and preservation of the group, and through this also for the existence and preservation of the individuals themselves, have been shaped by the selection of those individuals from the individuals living in groups which at each stage of evolution of the group tended to act according to such rules as made the group more efficient” (Hayek, “Notes on the Evolution of Systems of Rules of Conduct,” 72).

40 While the importance of forms of multilevel selection in biological evolution is still hotly disputed, I think there is conclusive reason to view multilevel selection as fundamental in cultural evolution.

41 On modeling group conflict as fundamental to social evolution, see Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species.

42 Hayek, The Political Order of a Free People, 26, 159; Hayek, Rules and Order, 3, 17–18; Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, 6, 25, 43.

43 “[C]ultural evolution operates largely through group selection” (The Fatal Conceit, 23, emphasis added).

44 Hayek, , The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 63.Google Scholar

45 On page 161 of the Epilogue to The Political Order of a Free Society, Hayek argues that the steps in cultural evolution toward large-scale coordination “were made possible by some individuals breaking some traditional rules and practising new forms of conduct — not because they understood them to be better, but because the groups which acted on them prospered more and grew.” For a general analysis of the role of conscious deliberation and choice of rules in Hayek, see Pert, Sandra J. and Levy, David M., “Discussion, Construction and Evolution: Mill, Buchanan and Hayek on Constitutional Order,” Constitutional Political Economy 19 (2008): 3–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 See Richerson and Boyd, Not by Genes Alone, chap. 3.

47 See Section V.A below.

48 See, e.g., Richerson and Boyd, Not by Genes Alone, 224ff.

49 Mithen, Steven, “Did Farming Arise from a Misapplication of Social Intelligence?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362 (2007): 705–718, at 708.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

50 Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, 88. We shall see that this move did cohere with some, distinctly nonegalitarian, sentiments.

51 See Wilson, The Social Conquest of the Earth, 98.

52 See ibid., 75ff.

53 Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, 23.

54 Stiner, Mary C., “Carnivory, Coevolution, and the Geographic Spread of the Genus Homo,” Journal of Archaeological Research 10, no. 1 (2002): 1–63, at 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55 Stiner, Mary C., Barkai, Ran, Gopher, Avi, and O'Connell, James F., “Cooperative Hunting and Meat Sharing 400–200 KYA at Qesem Cave, Israel,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106, no. 32 (2009): 13207–13212, at 13211.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

56 Daniel Friedman points to one hundred fifty, with much larger numbers when groups fused. Morals and Markets: An Evolutionary Account of the Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2008), 16. See also David C. Rose, who mentions two hundred as the typical size of the groups in which humans evolved; The Moral Foundations of Economic Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), chap. 3. Closer examination shows that group size may be understood differently: average band size may differ from typical group size. See Bowles and Gintis, The Cooperative Species, 95.

57 Boehm, Moral Origins, 78–82.

58 Ibid., 274ff. On the other hand, it could well have been such instability that increased the benefits of cooperation. See Bowles and Gintis, The Cooperative Species, 93ff.

59 This is on the low end of many estimates (see note 56), but band size of thirty is compatible with larger groups who, for example, share bride networks and trade. See also Bowles and Gintis's discussion of problems with inferences from average group size. The Cooperative Species, 95–96.

60 See Kaplan, Hillard and Gurvan, Michael, “The Natural History of Food Sharing: A Review and a New Multi-Individual Approach to the Negotiation of Norms,” in Gintis, Herbert, Bowles, Samuel, Boyd, Robert, and Fehr, Ernst, eds., Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 75–113, at 102–3.Google Scholar

61 Boehm, Moral Origins, 142–43.

62 Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, 68.

63 Boehm, Moral Origins, 109.

64 Lee, Richard Borshay, The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 244–46.Google Scholar

65 Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, 87.

66 Ibid., 77.

67 For data on the frequency of various forms of sanctioning, see Boehm, Moral Origins, 198.

68 See, for example, Kitcher, The Ethical Project, chap. 2; Boehm, Moral Origins, chaps. 1 and 2.

69 See Joyce, The Evolution of Morality, 101–5.

70 Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, 64.

71 Lee, The !Kung San, 457.

72 Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, 65.

73 Gardner, Peter M., “Foragers' Pursuit of Individual Autonomy,” Current Anthropology 32 (1991): 543.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

74 Ibid., 547–48.

75 Diamond Jenness, The Life of the Copper Eskimos, Volume 12 of Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913–18 (Ottawa: F. A. Ackland, 1922), 94. The quotation can be found in Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, 68.

76 Cohen, G. A., Why Not Socialism? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 3–5, 39.Google ScholarPubMed

77 See Boehm, Moral Origins, 68.

78 Ibid., 270–73. Boehm reports that the joys of meat eating are such that the quarrels rarely get severe enough to disrupt it.

79 Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, 70.

80 Hayek neither denies nor criticizes this: “There is no reason why in a free society government should not assure to all protection against severe deprivation in the form of an assured minimal income, or a floor below which nobody need to descend [sic]. To enter into such an insurance [i.e., variance reduction] against severe deprivations may well be in the interest of all; or it may be felt to be a clear moral duty of all to assist, within the organized community, those who cannot help themselves” (The Mirage of Social Justice, 87, emphasis added).

81 See Nichols, Shaun and Freiman, Christopher, “Is Desert in the Details?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (January 2011): 121–33.Google Scholar

82 Bicchieri, Cristina, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Norms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 105.Google Scholar For a classic study, see Thaler, Richard H., “The Ultimatum Game,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 2 (1988): 195–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

83 See Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society, 121–22.

84 Henrich, Joseph and Smith, Natalie. “Comparative Evidence from Machiguenga, Mapuche, and American Populations,” in Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., et al., eds., Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 125–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The Machiguenga and the Mapuche are small-scale societies; the others results are from urban university students in the United States, Israel and Indonesia.

85 Machiguengan Responders seem to simply view it as bad luck that they were not chosen as Proposers. The Mapuche do see “selfish” offers as unfair, but do not seem to think there is a norm that they should enforce.

86 In “The Evolution, Evaluation and Reform of Social Morality,” I have considered more precisely the conditions under which this will be the case.

87 Cohen, Why Not Socialism? 51.

88 See, e.g., Cosmides, Leda and Tooby, John, “Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, Part II. Case Study: A Computational Theory of Social Exchange,” Ethology and Sociobiology 10 (1989): 51–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cummins, Denise Dellarosa, “Evidence for the Innateness of Deontic Reasoning,” Mind and Language 11 (June 1996): 160–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

89 Schwab, David and Ostrom, Elinor, “The Vital Role of Norms and Rules in Maintaining Open Public and Private Economies,” in Zak, Paul, ed., Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 204–27.Google Scholar

90 As we saw (Section IV.E), LPA forgers are sensitive to shirkers and have in place mechanisms to control them.

91 Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, “The Evolution of Free Enterprise Values,” in Moral Markets, 107–41, at 116. For experimental evidence, see Bicchieri, Cristina and Xiao, Erte, “Do the Right Thing: But Only if Others Do So,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 22 (2009): 191–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

92 Richerson and Boyd, “The Evolution of Free Enterprise Values,” 114.

93 See Storr, Virgil Henry, Understanding the Culture of Markets (New York: Routledge, 2013).Google Scholar

94 See Elizabeth Anderson’s contribution in this volume.

95 And, of course, the state — the original tool of the bosses that destroyed the egalitarian ethos as agriculture took root. It is worth inquiring to what extent the contemporary democratic constitutional state is more in tune with the ethos.

96 Coase, R. M., “The Nature of the Firm,” in The Firm, the Market and the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar, chap. 2. See also Williamson, Oliver E., The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1985).Google Scholar

97 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. 3, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), bk. 4, chap. 7, sec. 4.

98 I consider this idea more fully in “The Idea and Ideal of Capitalism,” in George G. Brenkert and Tom L. Beauchamp, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Business Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): 73–99, at 91–93. Early communists were often impressed by such organization of production. “In these [i.e., post-capitalist] circumstances society will be transformed into a huge working organization for cooperative production. There will then be neither disintegration of production nor anarchy of production. In such a social order, production will be organized.” Society was to become one huge factory. Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism (New York: Penguin Books, 1969 [1922]), chap. 3, sec. 19.

99 As innovative corporations begin to copy the more collegial organization of traditional universities, universities throughout the world strive to copy often outdated hierarchical models. Given that universities tend to select as administrators those whose careers have disappointed but who have (in the university population) higher than average alpha traits, this regrettable development is, perhaps, not terribly surprising.

100 As did my advisor, John W. Chapman, though, it was a point that I did not then appreciate. See his beautiful essay, “Toward a General Theory of Human Nature and Dynamics,” in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, eds., NOMOS XVII:Human Nature in Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 292–319.