The 'Evolution of Cooperation' addresses a simple yet age-old question; If living things evolve through competition, how can cooperation ever emerge? Despite the abundant evidence of cooperation all around us, there existed no purely naturalistic answer to this question until 1979, when Robert Axelrod famously ran a computer tournament featuring a standard game-theory exercise called The Prisoner's Dilemma. To everyone's surprise, the program that won the tournament, named Tit for Tat, was not only the simplest but the most "cooperative" entrant. (...) This unexpected victory proved that cooperation - one might even say altruism - is mathematically possible and therefore needs no hidden hand or divine agent to create and sustain it. A great roadblock to the understanding of all sorts of behavior was at last removed. The updated edition includes an extensive new chapter on cooperation in cancer cells and among terrorist organizations. (shrink)

Darwin's inner voice -- Living the virtuous life -- Of altruism and free riders -- Knowing our immediate predecessors -- Resurrecting some venerable ancestors -- A natural Garden of Eden -- The positive side of social selection -- Learning morals across the generations -- Work of the moral majority -- Pleistocene ups, downs, and crashes -- Testing the selection-by-reputation hypothesis -- The evolution of morals -- Epilogue: humanity's moral future.

Part I. An introduction to honor: introduction; honor and value; honor and identity -- Part II. External honor: prestige; shame; face; esteem; affiliated honor; glory -- Part III. Internal honor: honorableness; dignity -- Part IV. The politics of honor: rebellion and revolution; lessons from honor -- Appendix I: key concepts.

K. Anthony Appiah, the author of the internationally best-selling Cosmopolitanism, analyzes what causes societies to end cruelty and injustices - such as slavery, foot binding, or honor killing. Can a government through its laws halt egregious violations of human decency and can mere moral instruction bring an end to human suffering? No, says Appiah, demonstrating how reform succeeds only when it enlists the primal human sense of honor. When it comes to morality, honor is the lever arm that connects what (...) we know to what we do. (shrink)

The word euboulia, which means excellence in counsel or sound judgement, occurs in only three places in the authentic writings of Plato. The sophist Protagoras makes euboulia the focus of his whole enterprise : What I teach a person is good judgement about his own affairs — how best he may manage his own household; and about the affairs of the city — how he may be most able to handle the business of the city both in action and in (...) speech. Thrasymachus, too, thinks well of euboulia. Invited by Socrates to call injustice kakoetheia ’, i.e. as simple-mindedness), he declines the sophistry and says : ‘No, I call it good judgement’. But Plato finds little occasion to introduce the concept in developing his own ethical and political philosophy. The one place where he mentions euboulia is in his defence of the thesis that his ideal city possesses the four cardinal virtues. He begins with wisdom, and justifies the ascription of wisdom to the city on the ground that it has euboulia — which he goes on to identify with the knowledge required by the guardians: ‘with this a person does not deliberate on behalf of any of the elements in the city, but for the whole city itself — how it may best have dealings with itself and with the other cities’ . It is normally rather dangerous to draw an inference from the absence or rarity of a word to the absence or rarity of the idea expressed by the word. (shrink)

Introduction; Aidos in Homer; From Hesiod to the Fifth Century; Aeschylus; Sophocles; Euripides; The Sophists, Plato, and Aristotle; References; Glossary; Index of Principal Passages; General Index.

What is honor? Has its meaning changed since ancient times? Is it an outmoded notion? Does it still have the power to direct our behavior? In this provocative book Alexander Welsh considers the history and meaning of honor and dismisses the idea that we live in a post-honor culture. He notes that we have words other than _honor_, such as _respect_, _self-respect_, and personal _identity_, that show we do indeed care deeply about honor. Honor, he argues, is a continuing process (...) of respect that motivates or constrains members of a peer group. Honor’s dictates function as moral imperatives. Surprisingly, little systematic study of the history of honor in Western culture has been attempted. Offering a welcome remedy, Welsh provides a genealogy of approaches to the subject, mining some of the most influential texts of the Western tradition. He rereads with fascinating results the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Shakespeare, Mandeville, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant, Adam Smith, and others. With a sharp focus on the intersection of honor and ethics in both literature and philosophy, Welsh invites new and constructive debate on a topic of vital interest. (shrink)

To most people it seems obvious that there are major mental differences between ourselves and other species, but there is considerable debate over exactly how special our minds are, in what respects, and which were the critical evolutionary events that have shaped us. Some researchers claimlanguage as a solely human, even defining, attribute, while others claim that only humans are truly conscious. These questions have been explored mainly by archaeologists and anthropologists until recently, but this volume aims to show what (...) psychologists have to say on the evolution of mind. The book begins with a thorough overview of what is known of the non-primate mind and its evolution. Following this, an international range of experts discuss in temporal sequence the human mind at various stages of evolution, beginning with the pre-hominids of 20 million years ago and ending withcontemporary human behaviour. Accessible to students and researchers alike in psychology, anthropology, evolution, archaeology, and ethology, The Descent of Mind provides a range of provocative answers to the timeless question of what it means to be human. (shrink)

This article challenges the commonly held belief that atimia in its earliest Greek usage meant exile, arguing instead that atimia and outlawry were always two entirely distinct, though not mutually exclusive, concepts. It is often claimed that atimia originated as a penalty of death or exile, but that over time its harshness became modified so that those who suffered under its restrictions could not be killed or assaulted with impunity. A careful study of the evidence will show that atimia never (...) meant outlawry, and moreover, its archaic cognates do not imply that in early times to lose timê was the same as losing membership in a political community. Rather, atimazesthai entailed the loss of social honour and status which was an all-encompassing value in the aristocratic societies of archaic Greece. Atimia in the Classical period is similarly a loss of rights, and because penalties and conditions such as exile and outlawry can be easily described, in Greek, as involving the loss of prerogatives, they are conceptually forms of atimia. However, in the legal language of democratic Athens atimia is and always was something distinct from exile, and this legal distinction went back to the very earliest times. (shrink)

One of the most striking and controversial features of Aristotle's moral exemplar, the megalopsychos, is his tendency to be contemptuous. Not surprisingly, modern scholarship has found this attribute of the megalopsychos particularly unappealing. This article probes the question about the targets of the contempt of the Aristotelian megalopsychos and explores the forms that this contempt might take. I argue that the primary targets of the megalopsychos are people who claim superiority on the wrong grounds (their external prosperity and social status). (...) The megalopsychos, who prioritizes virtue over external goods as a criterion of individual worth ( axia), rejects the self-image these people claim for themselves and refuses to grant them the appraisal respect they are accustomed to receiving, and think they deserve. (shrink)

This book examines the notion of honor with an eye to dissecting its intellectual demise and with the aim of making a case for honor’s rehabilitation. Western intellectuals acknowledge honor’s influence, but they lament its authority. For Western democratic societies to embrace honor, it must be compatible with social ideals like liberty, equality, and fraternity. Cunningham details a conception of honor that can do justice to these ideals. This vision revolves around three elements—character , relationships , and activities and accomplishment (...) . Taken together, these elements articulate a shared aspiration for excellence. We can turn the tables on traditional ills of honor—serious problems of gender, race, and class—by forging a vision of honor that rejects lives predicated on power and oppression. (shrink)