On 7/21/2012 5:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Le 19-juil.-12, à 06:47, meekerdb a écrit :
This may be of interest to those recently discussing free-riders.
Brent
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Unto Others
BY MICHAEL SHERMER
It is the oldest and most universally recognized moral principle
that was codified over two millennia ago by the Jewish sage Hillel
the Elder: “Whatsoever thou wouldst that men should not do to
thee, do not do that to them. This is the whole Law. The rest is
only explanation.”
With comp this does not work. We are too much different, and we can
never judge for another. The principle becomes: "Don't do to others
what others does not want to be done on them, unless you need to
defend your life". Put in another way: respect the meaning of the word
"no" when said by others.
Bruno
Hi Bruno,
I disagree. You are over thinking the meaning of this. It is just
the "tit-for-tat" strategy. Do not do to others what you would not have
them do to you. It assumes sanity on your part, but it does not tell you
what to do in a elaborative sense. One is supposed to use one's reason
and not depend on some a priori rules.
That explanation has been the subject of intense theological and
philosophical disputation for millennia, and recently scientists
are weighing in with naturalistic accounts of morality, such as
the two books under review here.
Paul J. Zak is an economist and pioneer in the new science of
neuroeconomics who built his reputation on research that
identified the hormone oxytocin as a biological proxy for trust.
As Zak documents, countries whose citizens trust one another have
higher average GDPs, and trust is built through
mutually-beneficial exchanges that result in higher levels of
oxytocin as measured in blood draws of subjects in economic
exchange games as well as real-world /in situ/ encounters. /The
Moral Molecule/ is an engaging and enlightening popular account of
Zak’s decade of intense research into how this molecule evolved
for one purpose—pair bonding and attachment in social mammals—and
was co-opted for trust between strangers.
The problem to be solved here is why strangers would be nice to
one another. Evolutionary “selfish gene” theory well accounts for
why we would be nice to our kin and kind—they share our genes so
being altruistic and moral has an evolutionary payoff in our genes
being indirectly propagated into future generations. The theory of
kin selection explains how this works, and the theory of
reciprocal altruism—I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch
mine—goes a long way toward explaining why unrelated people in a
social group would be kind to one another: my generosity to you
today when my fortunes are sound will pay off down the road when
life is good to you and my luck has run out. What Zak has so
brilliantly done is to identify the precise biological pathways
that explain the mechanics of how this system evolved and operates
today.
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Order the hardcover from Amazon
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/The Moral Molecule/ is loaded with first-person accounts of how
Zak got his data, starting with a wedding he attended in the
English countryside to draw the blood and measure the oxytocin
levels of the bride, groom, and accompanying parents before and
after the vows. The half-life of oxytocin is measured in minutes,
so Zak had to draw 24 blood samples in under ten minutes that then
had to be frozen and shipped back to his lab for analysis, the
results of which “could be mapped out like the solar system, with
the bride as the sun,” he vividly recalls. The bride’s oxytocin
level shot up by 28 percent after vows were spoken, “and for each
of the other people tested, the increase in oxytocin was in direct
proportion to the likely intensity of emotional engagement in the
event.” Bride’s mother: up 24 percent. Groom’s father: up 19
percent. The groom: up only 13 percent. Why? It turns out that
testosterone interferes with the release of oxytocin, and Zak
measured a 100 percent increase in the groom’s testosterone level
after his vows were pronounced! How far will Zak go to get his
data? In the western highlands of Papua New Guinea he set up a
make-shift lab to draw the blood from tribal warriors before and
after they performed a ritual dance, discovering that the “band of
brothers” phenomena has a molecular basis in oxytocin.
/The Moral Molecule/ aims to explain “the source of love and
prosperity,” which Zak identifies in a causal chain from oxytocin
to empathy to morality to trust to prosperity. Numerous
experiments he has conducted in this lab that are detailed in the
book demonstrate that subjects who are cooperative and generous in
a trust game have higher levels of oxytocin, and infusing subjects
with oxytocin through a nose spray causes their generosity and
cooperativeness to increase. Zak concludes his book with a
thoughtful discussion of how liberal democracies and free markets
produce the types of social systems that best enable people to
interact in a way that puts them on the
oxytocin-empathy-morality-trust-prosperity positive feedback loop.
Every corporate CEO and congressman should read this book before
making important decisions.
In /Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and
Shame/ the USC evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm
tackles head-on the “free-rider” problem in explaining the origins
of morality. Kin selection and reciprocal altruism only go so far
in explaining why we would have evolved the propensity to be nice
to our fellow group members, because big bullies and Machiavellian
manipulators could easily take advantage of naively engendered
trust. Before long, free-riders operating on the goodwill of other
groups members would gain an evolutionary reproductive advantage
and swamp the gene pool with psychopaths lacking any pretense of
real morality and thereby reduce humanity to an inhumane /Lord of
the Flies/. But that did not happen and Boehm explains why: we
evolved the social technology of shaming and shunning free riders
who violated social norms, along with the desire to punish those
who attempted to unfairly gain an upper hand against naïve group
members or those who could be exploited by powerful alpha-male
bullies. This explains why we not only practice but often even
enjoy “moralistic punishment” against those who cheated or bullied
us. It’s a powerful emotion based in evolutionary logic that I
felt the full visceral effect of during the revenge scene from the
film /The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo /that followed the
pornographically brutal rape scene of the central character
Lisbeth Salander. There’s a deep emotional satisfaction that comes
from seeing a bully get his comeuppance. It’s an evolved moral
emotion necessary to deal with the realities of a social life that
includes bullies and cheaters.
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Order the hardcover from Amazon
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Boehm’s data comes from his direct observations of primate groups
and indigenous populations over many decades, which he
extrapolates back into our Paleolithic past of hunter-gatherers on
the plains of Africa. Hunting wild game is a dangerous enterprise
for a puny bipedal primate, so collaborative hunting through
social bonding evolved. The free-rider problem of individuals
shirking their responsibilities, laying back during risky moments,
or taking more than their fair share of the hunt, were vigorously
punished through shame and shunning, and even expulsion and
capital punishment. Knowing that there are consequences to
cheating the system, humans evolved a moral emotion of guilt and
shame that enabled our ancestors to learn to control their
impulses to do the wrong thing and to be reinforced for and feel
good about doing the right thing.
Boehm estimates that this system evolved over the last 50,000
years as human groups became vigilantly egalitarian, and yet our
psychology contains much older selfish moral emotions that are
often in conflict with these newer sentiments. This goes a long
way toward explaining why we often feel selfish and strongly
desire to first take care of ourselves and our kin, while also
feeling tribal and bonded with our fellow group members,
especially when we are collectively threatened by other tribes. As
Boehm notes in a moving epilogue reflection on humanity’s moral
future, “people in a band are basically economic equals, whereas
our world of nations is very far from being egalitarian in this
way. This economic inequality can be seen as a special engine that
helps to drive international conflict, and it stands in the way of
creating a more effective international order.” We can’t go back,
but we can go forward armed with the knowledge that deep-thinking
scientists such as Christopher Boehm provide in such important
contributions to humanity’s prospects as /Moral Origins/.
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"We have geared the machines and locked all together into
interdependence; we have built the great cities; now there is no
escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free
survival, insulated From the strong earth, each person in himself
helpless, on all dependent. The circle is closed, and the net Is
being hauled in."
~ From The Purse Seine, Robinson Jeffers, 1937
--
Onward!
Stephen
"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
~ Francis Bacon
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