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.