The book, Against Fairness, by philosopher Stephen T. Asma is reviewed. Concepts of favoritism and justice are explored.

Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were (...) hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel. Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings. The Emotional Mind reveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human—art, mythology, religion—can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more. From prehistoric cave art to the songs of Hank Williams, Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species’ cultural expression in all its rich variety. Bringing together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology, The Emotional Mind offers a new paradigm for understanding what it is that makes us so unique. (shrink)

Standard evolutionary explanations seem unable to account for inclusivist shifts that expand the circle of moral concern beyond strategically relevant cooperators. Recently, Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell have argued that this shows that that evolutionary conservatism – the view that our inherited psychology imposes significant feasibility constraints on how much inclusivist moral progress can be achieved – is unjustified. Secondly, they hold that inclusivist gains can be sustained, and exclusivist tendencies curbed, under certain favorable socio-economic conditions. I argue that Buchanan (...) and Powell concede too much to the evolutionary conservative, because their second point shows that conservatives are right about the first: inclusivist shifts are unrealistic where it matters most, namely under harsh social, political and economic conditions. I suggest two promising strategies for solving this problem. One is to focus on different forms of moral progress to secure the same moral gains. The other is to look beyond possible extensions of our psychological capacities altogether, by providing institutional support that renders them irrelevant. We should bypass, rather than further stretch, the constraints of our evolved psychology to make moral progress possible. (shrink)

The Implications of BelongingThe efforts to explain the evolution of social and moral behaviour often focus exclusively on the positive social and moral traits, or the prosocial traits. The standard practice under extant evolutionary modeling has been to represent all social behaviour by the term altruism and all non-social or counter-social behaviour by the contrasting term - selfishness. Such a modeling scheme leaves the negative social/moral behaviours such has bigotry, racism, homophobia, patriarchy, bullying etc. unaccounted for or worse still, they (...) are presumed erroneously to be on the selfishness side of the dichotomy. In this discussion, I put forward a hypothesis on social bigotry that appears at first to be counterintuitive, but which is supported by a very simple and compelling analysis. The analysis will show that bigotry and other negative social behaviours such as racism, homophobia, bullying etc., are driven by the same inherent human passion that makes the formation of social groups possible. The virtue or vice of that passion is therefore dependent upon the circumstance of its expression. Here is the conundrum: the idea of forming a group within a population or species involves the dual process of inclusion and exclusion. For, there is really no group if there is no distinction between who is in and who is out. This necessarily entails some criterion for picking out those within, from those without. Sensitivity to the most effective criteria for discriminating between group members and non-members would correlate positively with the formation of durable groups, and will therefore tend to be favoured by natural selection. Thus, as my research will show, members of every social group are necessarily inherently bigoted, nepotistic and in fact, hostile towards the outsider. It seems then that the social instinct necessarily has to be discriminatory, for the formation of social groups to be possible. In fact, Kurzban et al have cited numerous studies, in addition to their own, that suggest the existence of a cognitive machinery that has evolved to detect coalitional alliances. Prior to this research, evolutionary biologists had postulated the need for some detectible features to help social organisms distinguish between fellow altruists and non-altruists. It is the basis of the so-called “Greenbeard Hypothesis”. The capacity to discriminate is in fact, a very prevalent feature of modern revolutionary models of sociality, and most successful models today invariable feature what is called “conditional altruism.” This involves the selective dispensation of altruism or social cooperation on the basis of reciprocity, kinship and group affiliation. Thus, without this concomitant discriminatory feature of the sociality trait, the evolution of social groups is quite impossible. We yearn to belong and we value special relationships. But that virtue necessarily excludes. The paragons of patriotism are those who go out and kill others on our behalf. I explore how we minimize the negative consequences of belonging. (shrink)

Current suggestions for capacities that should be targeted for moral enhancement has centered on traits like empathy, fairness or aggression. The literature, however, lacks a proper model for understanding the interplay and complexity of moral capacities, which limits the practicability of proposed interventions. In this paper, I integrate some existing knowledge on the nature of human moral behavior and present a formal model of prosocial motivation. The model provides two important results regarding the most friction-free route to moral enhancement. First, (...) we should consider decreasing self-interested motivation rather than increasing prosociality directly. Second, this should be complemented with cognitive enhancement. These suggestions are tested against existing and emerging evidence on cognitive capacity, mindfulness meditation and the effects of psychedelic drugs and are found to have sufficient grounding for further theoretical and empirical exploration. Furthermore, moral effects of the latter two are hypothesized to result from a diminished sense of self with subsequent reductions in self-interest. (shrink)