Moral Origins by Christopher Boehm

Author:Christopher Boehm
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780465029198
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-10-07T21:07:03+00:00

IS THERE A SECOND-ORDER FLY IN THE OINTMENT?

Group punishment is a crucial part of this suppression-of-free-riding scenario, and especially in evolutionary economics some scholars have raised the specter of “second-order free riders”36 as a theoretical obstacle to groups being evolved to punish predatory deviants as I have shown human foragers in fact do today—and surely did yesterday.

The insights have come from experiments in which subjects who make unusually greedy offers to others may be punished even though the punisher, in refusing their low offer, comes out behind and therefore is paying a cost to punish. The second-order free-rider problem arises when one person abstains from punishing in order to let others pay the costs, a behavior that in real life would gain this free rider a genetic advantage. These insights are derived from formal game theory experiments that are explored mainly with college students,37 but also at times out in the field with tribesmen and a few foragers,38 all of whom have the opportunity to give up money in order to punish others who seem unduly selfish.

As these scholars define things, participation in group punishment itself is genetically altruistic because costs are paid to do so, which means that if free riders can hold back from punishment and thereby avoid investing the time and energy, and sometimes the risk, they can avoid paying costs that others are investing for the common good. This means that even as the group is punishing would-be aggressive free riders like malicious sorcerers or other bullies, or deceptive free riders like meat-cheaters, yet another type of free rider emerges: the one who stands aside to let others do the punishing—and thus cashes in on the rewards without paying any costs.39 In theory, this should result in the advance of the genes of these free-riding nonpunishers and the decline of the genes of cost-paying punishers—to the point that genetic dispositions to join in group punishment would seriously decline and free-rider suppression as I have just described it might, in theory, just fade away.

However, if we move from mathematical models and experimental subjects to the kind of people who’ve evolved our genes for us, my database shows that everywhere hunter-gatherers do in fact readily punish their deviants—and that at any given time some individuals will be much more active than others in doing so and that some may refrain entirely. Furthermore, my colleague Polly Wiessner, who has been doing fieldwork with the LPA !Kung Bushmen for thirty years, has never seen or heard of punishment of those who fail to join with the group in sanctioning deviants. And so far in my survey of group punishment among fifty LPA hunter-gatherers (see Tables I and IV), the punishment of nonpunishers is never mentioned in the hundreds of ethnographies even though punishment does take place so regularly—and even though there are plenty of abstentions.

My own opinion is that these abstentions need have no relation to free-rider genes. For instance, in dealing with the Mbuti Pygmy Cephu’s arrogant cheating, most

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