I never heard of Sugden until now; thanks for the name-drop. Binmore and Hume are the most frequently mentioned here, and now Sugden is a new economist to study his work on game-theoretic moral cooperation.
Robert Sugden came a bit earlier than Binmore and influenced him. He builds on the Humean view of morality as conventions and sees them as equilibria of games. The key addition from Binmore to this literature is that the selection between equilibria reflects an underlying bargaining problem. You can find Sugden's views in his 1986 and 2018 books.
Throughout this series my understanding of morality evolved much like my understanding of natural selection evolved over the years (only a bit quicker).
The way you set out the argument has a remarkable inevitability and simplicity to it, it g has been a kind of massive Aha!-Erlebnis, in which you keep thinking for a while, “surely it cannot be that simple?” until eventually all the pieces drop into place.
The parallel is strong to me: life in all its incredible complexity and intricacy, all of it, emerged from one simple process, natural selection, and morality evolved in much the same way, with selection pressures for certain choices over others, and with multiple solutions to the same problems.
Just like there is no “right” number of legs, method of propulsion, mechanism for spreading seed etc, so there is nothing unconditionally “right” about whether/how we ought to cooperate, raise offspring, honour the dead, keep secrets, exploit others for our own benefit etc.
Haven't finished reading through, but this part caught my eye "Absent such conventions, society would fall into the kind of chaos seen in catastrophe movies, where the fabric of social life is torn down and expectations of common decency have disappeared". Despite lacking prescriptive norms or a sense of fairness, non-human primates seem to have expectations of others (e.g., based on dominance hierarchies), and across mammals mothers readily cooperate with their offspring. That doesn't seem like social chaos to me. Norms are important to build up cooperation with strangers, but their absence needn't imply a complete lack of structure.
Wouldn't that mean that social order collapses to immediate kin-based groups/tribes, the basic levels of social cooperation, while large-scale cooperation with strangers (nation-states, kingdoms, organizations not based on blood relations, etc.) becomes difficult if not impossible without norms?
Yes, my point exactly. I just thought the "no norms = chaos" claim a bit of an overreach. Humans are exceptionally prosocial, but non-human animals are also quite cooperative in many ways.
Many thanks for your comments. The breakdown of shared social conventions would indeed not mean the disappearance of all cooperation. A residual basis of cooperation would remain, especially around kinship: family, clan, close allies, and small groups with repeated interactions.
This is actually what catastrophe movies often show. Families or small groups remain as nuclei of cooperation, while the wider world is transformed into something closer to a jungle. So I think the word “chaos” is still fair if it is understood at the level of society as we know it. What disappears is the shared expectations that allow strangers to interact peacefully and trust each other. In that sense, the absence of moral conventions would tear down the social fabric of large-scale society.
I never heard of Sugden until now; thanks for the name-drop. Binmore and Hume are the most frequently mentioned here, and now Sugden is a new economist to study his work on game-theoretic moral cooperation.
Robert Sugden came a bit earlier than Binmore and influenced him. He builds on the Humean view of morality as conventions and sees them as equilibria of games. The key addition from Binmore to this literature is that the selection between equilibria reflects an underlying bargaining problem. You can find Sugden's views in his 1986 and 2018 books.
Throughout this series my understanding of morality evolved much like my understanding of natural selection evolved over the years (only a bit quicker).
The way you set out the argument has a remarkable inevitability and simplicity to it, it g has been a kind of massive Aha!-Erlebnis, in which you keep thinking for a while, “surely it cannot be that simple?” until eventually all the pieces drop into place.
The parallel is strong to me: life in all its incredible complexity and intricacy, all of it, emerged from one simple process, natural selection, and morality evolved in much the same way, with selection pressures for certain choices over others, and with multiple solutions to the same problems.
Just like there is no “right” number of legs, method of propulsion, mechanism for spreading seed etc, so there is nothing unconditionally “right” about whether/how we ought to cooperate, raise offspring, honour the dead, keep secrets, exploit others for our own benefit etc.
Fantastic stuff, Lionel. Bravo!👏
Haven't finished reading through, but this part caught my eye "Absent such conventions, society would fall into the kind of chaos seen in catastrophe movies, where the fabric of social life is torn down and expectations of common decency have disappeared". Despite lacking prescriptive norms or a sense of fairness, non-human primates seem to have expectations of others (e.g., based on dominance hierarchies), and across mammals mothers readily cooperate with their offspring. That doesn't seem like social chaos to me. Norms are important to build up cooperation with strangers, but their absence needn't imply a complete lack of structure.
Wouldn't that mean that social order collapses to immediate kin-based groups/tribes, the basic levels of social cooperation, while large-scale cooperation with strangers (nation-states, kingdoms, organizations not based on blood relations, etc.) becomes difficult if not impossible without norms?
Yes, my point exactly. I just thought the "no norms = chaos" claim a bit of an overreach. Humans are exceptionally prosocial, but non-human animals are also quite cooperative in many ways.
Many thanks for your comments. The breakdown of shared social conventions would indeed not mean the disappearance of all cooperation. A residual basis of cooperation would remain, especially around kinship: family, clan, close allies, and small groups with repeated interactions.
This is actually what catastrophe movies often show. Families or small groups remain as nuclei of cooperation, while the wider world is transformed into something closer to a jungle. So I think the word “chaos” is still fair if it is understood at the level of society as we know it. What disappears is the shared expectations that allow strangers to interact peacefully and trust each other. In that sense, the absence of moral conventions would tear down the social fabric of large-scale society.