Moral Minds by Marc Hauser

Author:Marc Hauser
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

1—small costs to giving and large benefits to receiving

2—a delay between the initial and reciprocated act of giving

3—multiple opportunities for interacting, with giving contingent upon receiving

Although Trivers’s theory of reciprocity looked as though it would provide a solution to altruism among non-kin, almost thirty-five years of research has failed to provide more than a few suggestive examples from the animal kingdom—a conclusion I will flesh out in chapter 7. I suggest that this conclusion is unsurprising once one begins to unpack the psychological mechanisms required for reciprocity. These include, most important, the capacity to quantify the costs and benefits of an exchange, compute the contingencies, inhibit the temptation to defect, and punish those who fail to play fair. Although we are almost completely in the dark with respect to when these different psychological ingredients evolved and became available to members of our species, we do have some understanding of how such ingredients develop within our species. The critical question then is: Once these pieces evolved, did they enable a speciation event, from Homo economicus to Homo reciprocans? Said differently, although our greedy fetus looks like the ultimate outcome-maximizer (economicus), has this same fetus also been handed an innate sense of fairness that eventually motivates an interest in the processes underlying an outcome, be they good for the individual or some highly selective group (reciprocans)?8 How we answer this question is significant, because it forms the foundation for many theoretical and practical issues in the fields of economics and law, disciplines that pride themselves on lending clarity to the prescriptive side of morality.

One answer is that both species coexist in some stable state, neither liking the other but simply tolerating each other’s presence. Independently of this dynamic, both species rely on a computational logic that develops in all humans, independent of religion, sex, race, and education. To set the stage for how we acquired this logic, both in development and in evolution, I return here to some of the evidence amassed in part I describing the mature state of moral competence and attempt to account for its acquisition. The goal is to understand how we acquire the capacity to engage in stable rounds of cooperation (moving beyond the parent-offspring dance), fend off temptation, detect cheaters and punish them. In brief, I will explain how the arena of cooperation provides the psychological foundation for understanding our moral sense, its anatomy and function. Breaking a cooperative relationship is minimally a violation of social norms and maximally an immoral act that represents a breach of a legally binding agreement. The remaining part of this chapter therefore explains other aspects of our moral psychology, including capacities that may be specific to it as well as shared with other faculties of the mind.

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