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By Root 1648 0

Frans de Waal has studied extensively the behavior of capuchin monkeys and other primates. De Waal makes the point that reasoned decisions have a basis in our emotional nature: “People can reason and deliberate as much as they want, but, as neuroscientists have found, if there are no emotions attached to the various options in front of them, they will never reach a decision or conviction.”10 In a large number of studies, he and coauthors have documented the evidence of fairness and cooperation in other primates. De Waal concludes from this work: “A solitary person would have no need for morality, nor would a person who lives with others without moral dependency. Under such circumstances each individual would just go its own way. There would be no pressure to evolve social constraints or moral tendencies.”11

However, as we are social and do depend on each other, we have evolved to be moral. Moral views vary greatly for different people—in any conflict each party thinks it has right on its side, and in some conflicts the contenders have entirely different worldviews about right and wrong—but there are also a few moral universals. Prominent among these is a sense of fairness. Moral sentiments such as fairness and reciprocity are common to all primates; some add to these fundamental instincts the social pressures that favor a cooperative group life through punishment and reward. Humans apply judgment and reasoning on top of these two levels of morality, in particular the notion that objectivity or impartiality is an important part of morality. All in all, evolutionary science points firmly to the basis of a sense of fairness in the fundamentals of human nature.12

ECONOMICS AND FAIR PLAY

The importance of these basic evolutionary instincts has long been recognized in economics, although only recently in these scientific terms. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations built on his earlier work, A Theory of Moral Sentiments. His near-contemporary David Hume had coined the term moral sentiments in his 1739 Treatise on Human Nature.13 He argued that people who carried out virtuous acts were often not motivated by specifically moral considerations but rather were acting “naturally” or instinctively. Notoriously, however, economics moved steadily away from this rich concept of self-interest in a social creature being manifested in strong moral instincts, including fairness and altruism, and toward the idea that people’s behavior is to be explained by a narrower individual selfishness. Although the former perspective never vanished entirely from the subject, by about 1980 conventional economics did take a reductionist view of human nature—rationally calculating, individualistic, selfish—often not out of any strong conviction but rather as a matter of convenience. The mathematics of modeling the behavior of many individuals and working out the collective result was much easier if people could be assumed to make their decisions independently of each other and according to the rules of logic and algebra.

Figure 7. Social animals.

However, the assumption of narrow individualism in economics has been in retreat for the past twenty years or so (there is much more on this in my book The Soulful Science [2008]). Not only in behavioral economics but also in the study of growth, economic institutions, social capital, innovation, and other economic topics, not to mention in the widespread use of game theory as a tool, there is a richer version of how people behave and what motivates them. In fact, the parallels and crossovers between economics and evolutionary science are becoming ever more apparent. The two subjects have always influenced each other in both content and methods of analysis. “Selfishness” is an important assumption in economics, but in the same non-literal sense it applies in the process of evolution. People make “selfish” choices in the sense that they are acting, often according to rules of thumb or instincts rather than an explicit rational calculation, in ways that tend to serve their self-interest on an evolutionary