Frans de Waal, Good Natured

de Waal takes a look at aspects of human morality that can be found in the animal kingdom. The book contains a large number of interesting moral vignettes starring various animals; in this post I'll just write up a very broad outline of the "big questions."

There can be little doubt that in many species the strong can annihilate the weak. In a world of mutual dependency, however, such a move would not be very smart. The real problem is not why aggression is tempered -- it needs to be -- but how cooperation and competition coexist. How do individuals strike a balance between serving their own interests and operating as a team? How are conflicts resolved without damage to social ties?

Sympathy

[T]he question at the heart of this chapter is not so much whether any creatures other than ourselves can feel sympathy based on empathy (too much an all-or-nothing phenomenon), but which elements of human sympathy are recognizable in other animals.

[Sympathy] is easily aroused but quickly forgotten; when remembered but not acted upon, its failure to produce action is easily rationalized. We are softened by the sight of a hungry child, but hardened by the sight of thousands. (John Q Wilson in The Moral Sense.)

Rank and Order

According to socioecologists, who look at the natural environment to explain social dispositions, the optimal condition for evolution of egalitarianism is dependency on cooperation combined with the option to leave the group... The reverse, of course, is equally true.

In short, the dismantling of despotic hierarchies in the course of hominoid evolution brought an emphasis on leadership rather than dominance, and made the privileges of high status contingent upon services to the community.

Quid Pro Quo

Early human evolution, before the advent of agriculture, must have been marked by a gradual loosening of the hierarchy. Food sharing was a milestone in this development: it both marked the reduced significance of social dominance and provided a launching pad for further leveling. In a straightforward rank order, in which dominants take food from subordinates, the food flow is unidirectional. In a sharing system, food flows in all directions, including downward. The result is the relatively equitable distribution of resources that our sense of justice and fairness requires.

Getting Along

Community concern can be defined, then, as the stake each individual has in promoting those characteristics of the community or group that increase the benefits derived from living in it by that individual and its kin... The higher a species' level of social awareness, the more completely its members realize how events around them ricochet through the community until they land at their own doorstep... Conscious community concern is at the heart of human morality.

Viviana Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy

I'll try to come back to the issues explored in this book from a different angle soon, but here goes a brief summary.

People often worry about the mingling of social and economic transactions. They feel that the market erodes moral values and personal relationships; putting a dollar value on something renders it not sacred and essentially cheap (hence the inappropriateness of paying friends for small favors, and the taboo against prostitution). They also feel that personal relationships can contaminate professional settings -- for example, it is improper for certain personal boundaries to be crossed by doctors and lawyers with regards to their clients. As a result people intuitively arrive at a "hostile worlds, separate spheres" doctrine -- economic and social transactions are best left separate, and only trouble comes from mixing them.

Zelizer's book is an effort to move past this dichotomy. She notes that it is simply not the case that money and intimacy never go together -- in fact, "no household lasts long without extensive economic interaction among its members... money cohabits regularly with intimacy, and even sustains it."

The thrust of her argument is as follows:

People engage routinely in the process of differentiating meaningful social relations, including their most intimate ties. They undertake relational work. Among other markers, they use different payment systems -- media -- to create, define, affirm, challenge, or overturn such distinctions... Such distinctions apply to intimate social relations... relational work becomes even more delicate and consequential when intimacy comes into play.., people manage to integrate money transfers into larger webs of mutual obligations without destroying the social ties involved.

She argues that hostile worlds arguments are popular because:

People regularly invoke hostile worlds doctrines when they are trying to establish or maintain boundaries between intimate relations that might easily be confused... participants often employ hostile worlds practices, using forms of speech, body language, clothing, uniforms, and spatial locations to signify whether the relationship between this man and this woman is boss-secretary, husband-wife, patron-prostitute... They thus prevent confusion with the wrong relationship.

I'll come back to the general themes of the book much more soon.

Alan Fiske, Structures of Social Life

This book is a rather long and dry review of academic research in anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and so on. But I think it provides a useful framework for understanding social relations.

Fiske writes: "It is my hypothesis that people actually generate most kinds of social relationships out of only four basic models: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. These implicit models are the psychological foundations of social relations and society."

Communal Sharing is "a relationship of equivalence in which people are merged... so that the boundaries of individual selves are indistinct."

Authority Ranking is a hierarchical relationship (a "transitive asymmetrical relationship," says Fiske. Heh.)

Equality Matching is "an egalitarian relationship among peers who are distinct but coequal individuals."

Market Pricing is a "relationship mediated by values determined by a market system." Quid pro quo and all that.

(Fiske says that American ideology tends to confuse Equality Matching with Market Pricing, but the latter takes into account market values instead of strict equality.)

These models of social relations determine norms for both contributing to and withdrawing from group resources, as well as exchange between group individuals. They can also be used to describe how people determine the meaning of (physical) things. For example, it may be family policy for every child to have the same possessions (each person with one bicycle) -- the bicycle is then a token representing equal status for its owner (in addition to having other uses and meanings). But a bicycle may also represent high status or a particular group affiliation. The relational models can also be used to categorize the ways in which people:

• try to influence others
• think about land
• understand morality
• interpret misfortune
• justify aggression

and so on.

I'm not sure how particularly useful this arrangement is, although I hope that it would help provide a language for talking about the intersection of economic and social domains. It is not clear that you can describe societies as being committed to some models more than others; it looks like all models are used in different times and contexts.

William Stoczkowksi, "Explaining Human Origins"

Stoczkowski begins by noting "what every schoolchild knows" -- elements of human origin stories repeatedly found in French and Russian textbooks. The prehistoric environment was cold and harsh, "teeming with savage animals." People led a difficult existence, constantly suffering and afraid. But then they learned to use tools, to control fire, to live in groups, and to build shelters. This allowed them to triumph over the hostile environment despite their physical weaknesses. He further notes that Enlightenment philosophers had essentially the same view of human origins. The origin stories are characterized by some crucial assumptions:

• Environmental determinism (harsh environment directly stimulates learning and development)
• Materialism (culture is determined by material conditions)
• Utilitarianism (human activity is based on achieving practical ends)
• Individualism (culture exists to benefit individuals)

A very different account of human origins was presented by Marshall Sahlins in 1968. He argued that the original humans lived in a state of well-being, very different from the "decadence" of contemporary civilization. They had plenty of food, were content with little, had plenty of leisure time, felt happy and unworried, and enjoyed freedom and equality. Sahlins' pessimism about the present and future was strikingly matched by his optimism about the past. His account works as a simple reversal of the more common story of human progress and triumph over nature.

Stoczkowski analyzes 24 "scenarios of hominisation" published between 1820 and 1986. Common themes include tools, bipedalism, free hands, langauge, social life, large brain, superior smarts, reduced canine teeth, cooperation, sexual division of labor, food-sharing, and hunting. This list has not changed significantly over the course of the sample; when features such as bipedalism, large brains, and social cooperation are considered carefully (birds and dinosaurs are bipedal; whales and elephants have large brains; many apes cooperate with each other, and even use and make tools), it becomes apparent that they are included not necessarily because they objectively distinguish humans from animals.

On the other hand, there are a number of possibilities for why there would be recurring themes in origins stories (beyond Stoczkowski's obvious pick, that powerful hidden "common-sense" assumptions have dominated a diverse range of Western anthropological thinking in the past couple of centuries):

• Empirical evidence
• Logic (nothing else is thinkable)
• Theory (for example, natural selection theory imposes certain constraints)
• Ideological concerns

In general, these are all rejected -- the scenarios are from a variety of ideological and theoretical schools, and constraints of evidence and logic are specifically checked for each. For example, nine of Stoczkowski's scenarios discuss sexual division of labor and food-sharing as arising from the advent of hunting. The authors of the scenarios generally stress that men would be better suited to hunting -- because men were predisposed to it, because women were hampered by child-rearing. But women are not always excluded from hunting; hunting does not always require great mobility; women are not necessarily immobilized by child-rearing duties; and women are sometimes included in hunting but barred from using the same tools as men, casting doubt on theories that emphasize economic efficiency. Furthermore, it is also quite logically possible to conceive of "sexual division of labor" as being essentially a taboo that prohibits women from certain activities (due to hunter-gatherer beliefs about animal and menstrual blood, for instance).

So it seems that modern anthropological theories of human origins enjoy credibility that is largely based on conformity to "common-sense" anthropology, rather than conformity to evidence or logical constraints. This illustrates "the weakness of our imagination" and that common-sense ideas can persist for centuries without significant change, creating links between different historical and cultural contexts.

The Market System, by Charles Lindblom

Lindblom's book explores the "market system -- how it works and what to make of it."

To place the market system in context, he urges the reader to "think society, not economy." Human beings engage in massive amounts of social coordination to feed, clothe, and entertain themselves. To educate a child requires buildings, books, teachers, people who educated the teachers, raw materials to build the buildings, and so on -- a nearly unfathomable number of people. The market system is one method by which society achieves coordination -- others include the state, the family, the corporation (a command structure in a market milieu), and "civil society" (including political parties, lobbying organizations, museums, charities, and research laboratories).

For an object or service to potentially fall under the domain of the market system, it needs to (a) be controllable (i.e., respond to an on/off switch); (b) be scarce; and (c) be obtainable without compulsion. The market system relies on the principle of "quid pro quo" -- an individual can make claims based on voluntary transactions he makes with others.

But not everything that could fall in the domain of the market system actually does. There are a number of objections to the application of the market system, particularly that the process of the market is immoral, unethical, or simply inappropriate in some areas.

For example, consider the following ideas:

• Blood should be donated, not sold
• Family members should not engage in financial transactions with one another
• Social solidarity is undercut by the very process of buying and selling
• Buying insurance reveals a lack of faith in God's care [a bit non-mainstream]
• Some people oppose shopping as a matter of principle
• Some activities are only enjoyable if done for free
• High culture needs to be subsidized by the government
  
• Drugs and prostitution are often illegal
• People should not be able to buy guns (or have private armies for that matter)
  
• Education should be provided universally, without regard to ability to pay for it
• People with nothing should still be taken care of, not frozen out
  
• Government officials need to be isolated from the market -- corruption is bad
• It may be cheaper to bypass the market (for example, to collect trash)
• Entrepreneurs seek state protection and privileges
• People doubt the competence and motives of individual choice, and want deliberating collective authority over some decisions (such as food regulation, environmental issues)

So the actual domain of the market system is somewhat less than its theoretical maximum reach, for a number of reasons -- which may be good or bad.

In the spirit of placing the market system in a larger context, it should be pointed out that quid pro quo is not the only basis on which a society can justify individual claims to resources. There can also be claims based on birth, ancestry, group membership, good conduct, prowess, and simple human status. Furthermore, the market system places a particular value on certain kinds of contributions, but it neglects to value non-market contributions (raising one's own children) and does not even necessarily value market contributions appropriately (no way to take into account dependencies on existing infrastructure; there are also spillover and monopoly issues).

I've neglected to mention the pro-market arugment in this summary, because that is best left to the discussion of the economics textbooks. In contrast to the pro-market argument, there are leftist concerns with inequality, the poor, and elite manipulation of the masses. (Lindblom mentions some other worries about the market -- namely, that work is degrading, that the market encourages people to view each other as means rather than ends, and that the market ethic corrupts moral values by glorifying greed and naked self-interest, but thinks these worries are misplaced.)

Lindblom also discusses whether the market system adds to or subtracts from human freedom (it's complicated), and whether the market system enhances or obstructs democracy (it's complicated). A key question is the extent to which elites are able to manipulate the masses (via advertising, in both the market and political contexts). [His suggested story seems to go as follows: democracy got its start with the rise of merchant/entrepreneurial elites who curbed the state's powers before launching an informational assault to obstruct fuller democracy.]

In the end, the take-away message is: Think society, not economy. Lindblom concludes: "What kind of society do you want?"