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How cooperation became the norm

Kim Sterelny, Richard Joyce, Brett Calcott, and Ben Fraser (eds): Cooperation and Its Evolution. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2013, 608 pp, $55, ISBN: 978-0-262-01853-1

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Abstract

Most of the contributions to Cooperation and Its Evolution grapple with the distinctive challenges presented by the project of explaining human sociality. Many of these puzzles have a ‘chicken and egg’ character: our virtually unparalleled capacity for large-scale cooperation is the product of psychological, behavioural, and demographic changes in our recent evolutionary history, and these changes are linked by complex patterns of reciprocal dependence. There is much we do not yet understand about the timing of these changes, and about the order in which different aspects of human social psychology (co-)evolved. In this review essay, I discuss four such puzzles the volume raises. These concern punishment and norm-psychology, moral judgement and the moral emotions, hierarchy and top-down coercion, and property rights and legal systems.

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Notes

  1. The chicken is technically a domesticated subspecies of the red jungle fowl (Gallus gallus). Readers of a pedantic disposition are welcome to substitute ‘G. gallus’ for ‘chicken’ here and elsewhere in the essay.

  2. See, for example, the curious debate in the pages of Mind between Teichmann (1991), Sorensen (1992), Waller (1998). The debate turns out to hinge on the meaning of ‘egg’.

  3. Kitcher (2011, Ch 2) tells a story not too dissimilar to this. Undoubtedly, many gaps in the story are yet to be filled in. One important challenge is to explain why a social environment characterized by violent retaliation would have selected for a cognitive capacity to grasp and implement social norms, rather than for a suite of innate aversions to behaviours which elicited retaliation. But for current purposes, I leave this and other issues aside.

  4. This is a point of disagreement between Nichols (who sees the relationship between moral emotions and moral judgement as one of causal relevance) and Prinz (who sees the relationship as one of constitutive relevance). See Prinz 2007, Prinz and Nichols 2010 for discussion.

  5. Prinz, for example, characterizes guilt as a variety of sadness—a claim Joyce explicitly criticizes in his contribution.

  6. Gintis points to the ‘endowment effect’, the well-documented psychological tendency of experimental subjects to value a good they currently possess more highly than a materially equivalent good they do not possess (Kahneman et al. 1990). This effect has been recorded in young children and even in non-human primates, suggesting it may have deep evolutionary roots (though see Apicella et al. forthcoming). Even granting this, however, I am sceptical that this tendency indicates recognition of and respect for the possessions of others, as opposed to mere reluctance to part with one’s own.

  7. Stake (2004), Krier (2009) have also made proposals along these lines.

References

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  1. Christ’s College, St Andrew’s Street, Cambridge, CB2 3BU, UK

    Jonathan Birch

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Birch, J. How cooperation became the norm. Biol Philos 29, 433–444 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-013-9409-8

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