Rinstinkt’s Reviews > Natural Justice > Status Update

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

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.