Status Updates From Natural Justice

Part way into chapter 4. If Binmore hadn't written "Playing for Real," a brilliant introduction to game theory a couple of years after this book, I'd have given up 3 chapters ago. The first 3 chapters consist of witless rants against caricatures of other approaches to ethics. As of section 4.3, he seems to have sobered up and switched to expounding his own views. Hope the trend continues.

I've read a couple of his other books, but so far, this one is disappointing. The first 3 chapters are a crazy quilt of random abuse, name-calling, scarecrows, and loaded language as a substitute for arguments. If he ever gets around to it, he seems to be using game theory to make an original contribution to social contract theory.

I'm well on the second camp for a while now, but one of the book's virtue is that it offers logical resources to try to persuade those on the other camp to pay more attention to earthly, sustainable movements along social equilibria paths, at least when they want to put their moral/political concepts to do some work in the real societies as they are currently structured.

Second half is paying off beautifully. For ppl used to thinking in terms of analytical political philosophy, Binmore's approach will certainly seem either an evasion of the "foundational moral issues", or an innovative, productive way of re-framing the discussion.

And his tone is wildly arrogant too, especially when contrasting his views with those of his opponents. He even resorts to some moronic name-calling at times. With all of that being said, the building of the book's main project is also very fascinating and has a lot to recommend it, especially with the benefit of hindsight, and so it's worth pushing through the annoyance.

Binmore's active meta-ethical moments are extremely off-putting. He makes a lot of conceptual confusion in the realism x anti-realism debate, with maybe the crassest mistake being conflating prescriptive with descriptive objectivism. But another very strong contender for top rubbish is his assertion that ethical naturalists are logically required to be relativists.

It is sometimes argued that the state of nature in a social contract problem should be identified with a game. The Prisoners' Dilemma is popular in this role with political philosophers who are influenced by the misanthropy of Thomas Hobbes.
[And this is the moment I will stop reading this garbage. Totally non-coherent ramblings. Calls Hobbes a misanthrope because he doesn't like his reasoning. Ridiculous!]

The naturalistic views expressed in this book are often attacked as dehumanizing or dispiriting. Do our lives really have no meaning? Are we no more than soulless beasts, like apes or robots? People often refuse to believe that anyone could really hold such supposedly bleak views on the nature of human existence. What would be the point of going on with life if such things were true?

Gods were once popular as skyhooks, but history has exposed this particular fraud by showing that each culture somehow ends up with whatever divine ordinances happen to support the social contract currently being operated. ... In England, where many babies are now born out of wedlock, the Archbishop of York recently reassured us that even living in sin is no longer sinful!

The idea that utopia is beyond our reach comes very hard to some people, but I am by no means the first to suggest that such utopian do-gooders represent a far greater threat to the stability of our social contracts than those of us who try to be realistic about human nature.

Wow, totally disappointed with this book and author. He started well, but after the initial presentation of the topic things went south. I expected a book purely on morals and ethics from a game theory and/or evolutionary perspective, but half the worlds he has written are pure gibberish. He reprimands some thinkers (and I tend to agree on that), but then himself does the same error. Masking his preference as science

Rational reciprocity can't work unless people interact repeatedly, without a definite end to their relationship in sight. If the reason I scratch your back today is that I expect you will then scratch my back tomorrow, then our cooperative arrangement will unravel if we know that there will eventually be no tomorrow.

So how did our unique style of cooperation evolve?
Because relatives share genes, ...any of my genes has half a chance of being present in the body of my sister. If I were genetically programmed to maximize the average number of copies of my genes that are transmitted to the next generation, I would therefore count each of
my sister's children as being worth half of one of my own.

Cosmides and Tooby find that people are very much better at solving logical problems when they arise in the course of tracking down cheaters in social contract problems than elsewhere.

Whether leaders know what they are doing better than their followers or not, they can be very useful to a society as a coordinating device for solving the equilibrium selection problem in games for which the traditional methods are too slow or uncertain. On a sailing ship in a storm one can't afford to wait for due process to generate a compromise acceptable to all.

Perhaps we will one day develop adequate theories of bounded rationality, but current efforts in this direction have made little progress—and are only hindered by those behavioral economists who fail to see that the problem isn't that boundedly rational people maximize something unusual (not utility), but that they don't maximize anything at all

Moral subjectivism is absurd because it overlooks the fact that moral rules evolved to help coordinate human behaviour. If everybody in a society made up their own standards, there wouldn't be any point in having moral rules at all. Individuals who talk of having moral values that transcend those of their society are dramatising the fact that they would prefer to live under a different social contract.

In seeking an appropriate successor to the gods of old, many people favour one of the innumerable varieties of an absolute Good or Right that have been invented to capture the one-and-only universal moral truth. A popular new contender is an idealised notion of Community, to which appeal is made to counter the social collapse that would follow if the myopic selfishness were actually consistent with human nature.

Sense of fairness evolved for solving everyday problems. Who goes through the door first? How long does A get to speak before it is B's turn? Whose turn is it to wash the dishes tonight? When interacting with people from our own culture, we solve such problems so effortlessly that we don't think of them as problems. We notice moral rules only when trying to apply them in pathological circumstances or on a grand scale

The moral rules that really govern our behaviour consist of a mixture of instincts, customs, and conventions that are simultaneously more mundane and more complex than traditionally believed. They are shaped largely by evolutionary forces—social as well as biological. One must ask how they evolved and why they survive → morality should be a science.