Igor Razvodovsky’s Reviews > Natural Justice > Status Update

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

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.