Within groups there are formalized retributions, which can be effected
when anyone secures “too much” (“too many” resources, too much power) and
there are also formalized charities for those who become unusually “needy”
(i.e., so needy that their plight, if not attended to, may directly or
indirectly affect society, and each of us, in adverse fashions).” (Alexander,
1987, p. 125)

“(1) are acceptances of “natural laws” of human behavior justifiable if one
uses scientific knowledge rather than “unaided intuition,” and (2) if
homosexuality cannot be shown to have evolved by natural selection then would
suppression of homosexuals be justified? Moreover, the assertion that the
reason incest is evil is that it results in a higher level of (i.e., sometimes
causes) developmental abnormalities in offspring leaves us with several
questions. “Incest” usually refers to sexual relations not the production of
offspring. Means are available for preventing absolutely the production of
offspring as a result of sexual relations. Would such prevention render incest
moral? Alternatively, if two persons marry who happen to carry genes that
would cause their offspring to have abnormalities comparable to those Wilson
believes (without references) to result from incest in humans, is the marriage
then evil? And, one must add, whether or not the couple has or plans to have
children? If an incestuous union results in normal children is it then no
longer evil? It is not the case that all incestuous marriages result in
abnormal offspring, nor is there a magic line with respect to degree of
relatedness of marriage partners that makes a marriage “incestuous,” Wilson’s
argument would identify as “evil” all marriages involving likelihoods of
abnormal offspring” (Alexander, 1987, p. 180)

conservative caring is somewhat different—it is aimed not at animals or at
people in other countries but at those who’ve sacrificed for the group. It is
not universalist; it is more local, and blended with loyalty. 154

“Humphrey (1976) and Alexander (1979a,b) hypothesized that consciousness is a
vehicle for building and testing alternative scenarios in regard to future
aspects of, particularly, social life. I speculated that selfawareness is a
way of seeing ourselves as others see us so that we can cause them to see us
as we would like them to rather than as they would like to, and as opposed to
ways that will not serve our own interests. I proposed that free will does not
really involve the question of physical causation but represents our ability
to act upon whichever of the scenarios that we draw up seems to us most likely
to serve our own interests. And I described conscience as the still, small
voice that tells us how far we can go without incurring intolerable risks or
costs to our own interests.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 124)

“if early and late effects of genes should happen to be opposed, deleterious
late effects will accumulate, because alleles will be saved as a result of
their early effects and in spite of their later ones. This will lead to
deteriorative effects that can be identified as the process of senescence. […]
all genes are simultaneously pleiotropic (have multiple effects) and epistatic
(affect one another’s effects).” (Alexander, 1987, p. 67)

The Tea Party emerged as if from nowhere in the early months of the Obama
presidency to reshape the American political landscape and realign the
American culture war. The movement began in earnest on February 19, 2009, when
Rick Santelli, a correspondent for a business news network, launched a tirade
against a new $75 billion program to help homeowners who had borrowed more
money than they could now repay. Santelli, who was broadcasting live from the
floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, said, “The government is promoting
bad behavior.” He then urged President Obama to put up a website to hold a
national referendum […]. Santelli then announced that he was thinking of
hosting a “Chicago Tea Party” in July. 198

“Complex sociality should be expected to arise only when confluences of
interest produce benefits that override the costs of conflicting interests”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 83)

“1. Gods are inventions originally developed to extend the notion that some
have greater rights than others to design and enforce rules, and that some are
more destined to be leaders, others to be followers. This notion, in turn,
arose out of prior asymmetries in both power and judgment (e.g., parents
manipulating children, husbands manipulating wives, the strong manipulating
the weak). It works when (because) leaders are (have been) valuable,
especially in the context of intergroup competition. 2. The efforts of
moralizers to use gods to serve their own interests caused them to create the
concept of a single, just God of all people.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 217)

In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich
describes how European explorers reacted to these dances: with disgust. The
masks, body paints, and guttural shrieks made the dancers seem like animals.
The rhythmically undulating bodies and occasional sexual pantomimes were, to
most Europeans, degrading, grotesque, and thoroughly “savage.” The Europeans
were unprepared to understand what they were seeing. As Ehrenreich argues,
collective and ecstatic dancing is a nearly universal “biotechnology” for
binding groups together. She agrees with McNeill that it is a form of muscular
bonding. It fosters love, trust, and equality. It was common in ancient Greece
(think of Dionysus and his cult) and in early Christianity (which she says was
a “danced” religion until dancing in church was suppressed in the Middle
Ages). But if ecstatic dancing is so beneficial and so widespread, then why
did Europeans give it up? Ehrenreich’s historical explanation is too nuanced
to summarize here, but the last part of the story is the rise of individualism
and more refined notions of the self in Europe, beginning in the sixteenth
century. These cultural changes accelerated during the Enlightenment and the
Industrial Revolution. It is the same historical process that gave rise to
WEIRD culture in the nineteenth century (that is, Western, educated,
industrialized, rich, and democratic). […] the WEIRDer you are, the more you
perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships. The
WEIRDer you are, the harder it is to understand what those “savages” were
doing. 248

John Stuart Mill said that liberals and conservatives are like this: “A party
of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary
elements of a healthy state of political life.” […] The philosopher Bertrand
Russell saw this same dynamic at work throughout Western intellectual history:
“From 600 BC to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who
wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them.” Russell
then explained why both sides are partially right, using terms that are about
as close a match to moral capital as I could ever hope to find: It is clear
that each party to this dispute—as to all that persist through long periods of
time—is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and
mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational
arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification
through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on
the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the
growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation
impossible. 327

“sainthood may be awarded to individuals who spend their lives on explicitly
antireproductive behavior. The prevalence among saints of asceticism,
selfdenial, celibacy, isolation from relatives, devotion to the welfare of
strangers, and otherwise indiscriminate tendencies to be altruistic supports
this hypothesis. So does the fact that sainthood is generally awarded (long)
after the death of the awardee (thus, the awardee cannot personally gain from
this heroic designation). The long-term existence of complex patterns of
indirect reciprocity, then, seems to favor the evolution of keen abilities to
(1) make one’s self seem more beneficent than is the case; and (2) influence
others to be beneficent in such fashions as to be deleterious to themselves
and beneficial to the moralizer, e.g., to lead others to (a) invest too much,
(b) invest wrongly in the moralizer or his relatives and friends, or (c)
invest indiscriminately on a larger scale than would otherwise be the case.
According to this view, individuals are expected to parade the idea of much
beneficence, and even of indiscriminate altruism as beneficial, so as to
encourage people in general to engage in increasing amounts of social
investment whether or not it is beneficial to their interests. They may be
expected to locate and exploit social interactions mimicking genetic
relatedness leading to nepotistic flows of benefits (e.g., to insinuate
themselves deceptively into the role of relative or reciprocator so as to
receive the benefits therefrom). They may also be expected to depress the
fitness of competitors by identifying them, deceptively or not, as reciprocity
cheaters (in other words, to moralize and gossip); to internalize rules or
evolve the ability to acquire a conscience, interpreted (Alexander, 1979a) as
the ability to use our own judgment to serve our own interests; and to self-
deceive and display false sincerity as defenses against detection of cheating
and attributions of deliberateness in cheating” (Alexander, 1987, p. 120)

Gods (like maypoles) are tools that let people bind themselves together as a
community by circling around them. Once bound together by circling, these
communities can function more effectively. As Wilson puts it: “Religions exist
primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their
own.” 290

I disagree. Human beings are the giraffes of altruism. We’re one-of-a-kind
freaks of nature who occasionally—even if rarely—can be as selfless and team-
spirited as bees. 219

“giving blood is a fine way of suggesting that one is so altruistic that he is
willing to give up a most dear possession for a perfect stranger. On that
basis it might be viewed as, rather than unreciprocatable altruism, a social
investment with a very special and high likelihood of paying off handsomely.
Who among us is not a little humble in the presence of someone who has
casually noted that he just came back from “giving blood”?” (Alexander, 1987,
p. 171)

The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental
contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be
literally addictive. 107

„Offenbar konnte bei Beginn unserer industriellen Epoche auch für lange Zeit
eine schon alte hochgespannte Moral als Ideal mitgeführt werden, weil sie
ihren Gegenhalt und die gestaltgebende Vernünftigkeit in der Natur und den
von daher knappen wirtschaftlichen Erträgen fand. Heute dagegen ist die Natur
durchschaut und plastisch, ihre Umformung eine Sache der Ausbildung, des
Fleißes und der Kosten, und die Menschenzahlen steigen in ebenso steiler Kurve
wie Warenmassen. Da die Menschheit nichts Größeres mehr außer sich sieht, muß
sie sich selbst umarmen und ihr immer schon wahnhaftes Glücksverlangen von
sich selber erwarten. Die dazu gehörende Moral kann alles hinwegschwemmen und
auflösen, was dem Triumph über die entleerte Natur und über die mühsame,
verblendete und prachtvolle Geschichte entgegenstehen würde. Der unsterbliche
Gott wohnt heute in einem anderen Winkel des Universums; der sterbliche Gott
ist nicht einmal mehr der Staat, am wenigsten bei uns, sondern die addierte,
vorhandene Menschheit, deren Forderungen nunmehr als ein schwer erträgliches
Gewicht auf der einzelnen Seele liegen, die keine Sprache mehr findet, um die
gefühlte Unmöglichkeit einer „absoluten" Moral zu begründen. Seit Gott der
„Geschichte" Platz machte, und diese dem post-histoire mit seiner
Bevölkerungsexplosion, muß der Mensch sich selbst alles das zurechnen, was in
den großen Ereigniswolken aus Politik, Wirtschaft und Aggression passierte,
bei denen jeder beteiligt war und niemand mehr etwas deutlich erkennen konnte.
Die Moralforderung wird umgekehrt um so unerbittlicher, die Alten konnten sich
noch mit dem Walten der Tyche, der Zufallsgöttin entschuldigen, die Christen
der überzeugten Zeit mit dem „unerforschlichen Ratschluß Gottes", wir haben
keine Entlastungen.“ 138f

misbelief: it is a normal part of the functioning of every human individual now and then to assist someone else

“Maybe we resist finding out about the genes and their mission not only
because bringing genes into our consciousness makes them seem like alien
manipulators (which we are evolved to resist), but also because talking
directly about our evolutionary background and the mission of our genes and
our phenotypes is like making public our most importantly secret secret.
Accepting the arguments of evolutionary biologists is like admitting that one
is, after all, an egoist” (Alexander, 1987, p. 137)

“Just as the recognition that the doing of our duty often vitally interferes
with the satisfaction of our inclinations leads us to wonder whether we really
ought to do what we usually call our duty, so the recognition that we and
others are liable to mistakes in knowledge generally leads us, as it did
Descartes, to wonder whether hitherto we may not have been always mistaken.
And just as we try to find a proof, based on the general consideration of
action and of human life, that we ought to act in the ways usually called
moral, so we, like Descartes, propose by a process of reflexion on our
thinking to find a test of knowledge, i.e. a principle by applying which we
can show that a certain condition of mind was really knowledge, a condition
which ex hypothesi existed independently of the process of reflexion.” 21

“Moral systems are systems of indirect reciprocity. They exist because
confluences of interest within groups are used to deal with conflicts of
interest between groups. Indirect reciprocity develops because interactions
are repeated, or flow among a society’s members, and because information about
subsequent interactions can be gleaned from observing the reciprocal
interactions of others. To establish moral rules is to impose rewards and
punishment (typically assistance and ostracism, respectively) to control
social acts that, respectively, help or hurt others. To be regarded as moral,
a rule typically must represent widespread opinion, reflecting the fact that
it must apply with a certain degree of indiscriminateness. Moral rules are
established and maintained primarily by application of the concepts of right
and wrong.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 94)

“General encouragement of indiscriminate beneficence, and general acceptance
of its beneficial effects, results in a society with high social unity. […]
Good Samaritan acts seem likely to be most profitable to the actor if his
responsibility for the act is discovered accidentally, and most importantly
through no effort of his own. […] The value of self-serving beneficence, it
seems to me, is what sets the stage for the evolution of the ability and
tendency to develop a conscience, which I have interpreted (Alexander, 1979a)
as the “still small voice that tells us how far we can go in serving our own
interests without incurring intolerable risks,”” (Alexander, 1987, p. 119)

“grief functions to place the grieving person in the role of receiving
reassurances that associates will indeed honor obligations and continue
reciprocal interactions begun with or previously involving the person over
whose demise grief is being expressed. […] the part of religion that deals
with the afterlife utilizes the desire of each person to continue his or her
influence and to provide for and help relatives. The concept of hereafter as
“Heaven” (i.e., as idealized) is also a logical outcome of the use of
scenario-building to adjust the future so as to serve one’s own interests.”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 216)

Darwin proposed a series of “probable steps” by which humans evolved to the
point where there could be groups of team players in the first place. The
first step was the “social instincts.” In ancient times, loners were more
likely to get picked off by predators than were their more gregarious
siblings, who felt a strong need to stay close to the group. The second step
was reciprocity. People who helped others were more likely to get help when
they needed it most. But the most important “stimulus to the development of
the social virtues” was the fact that people are passionately concerned with
“the praise and blame of our fellow-men.” Darwin, writing in Victorian
England, shared Glaucon’s view (from aristocratic Athens) that people are
obsessed with their reputations. Darwin believed that the emotions that drive
this obsession were acquired by natural selection acting at the individual
level: those who lacked a sense of shame or a love of glory were less likely
to attract friends and mates. Darwin also added a final step: the capacity to
treat duties and principles as sacred, which he saw as part of our religious
nature. 214

“Hypothesis 1. Consciousness, foresight, self-awareness, conscience, and
related aspects of the human psyche have evolved as a set of “overrides”;
of more widespread (and not necessarily solely human), generalized
indicators of immediate costs and benefits. The most prominent and perhaps
most general of such indicators of immediate costs and benefits are pain
and pleasure. Pleasure is here thought of as having evolved because it
causes organisms to seek events and repeat acts that tend to increase
reproductive success, pain because it causes organisms to avoid events and
not repeat acts that tend to decrease reproductive success. Presumably,
generalized indicators of immediate costs and benefits, such as pain and
pleasure, evolve because there are consistencies between such costs and
benefits and eventual reproductive success (that is, later costs and
benefits). Presumably, also, overrides would only evolve when there are
otherwise unpredictable reversals in the relationship between immediate
costs and benefits and later ones. Even if what is (currently) seen as an
immediate cost (for example, risking or giving one’s life) comes to be
related consistently to an ultimate benefit (for example, survival of
one’s offspring and their eventual reproduction), pain and pleasure can
evolve to indicate appropriately with respect to reproductive deficits and
benefits. […]
Hypothesis 2. The above situation arose as reciprocity became the binding
cement of human social life. The changes in cost-benefit relations that
caused the rise of consciousness and related phenomena were human
manipulations,and as such represent a part of the manner by which
competing humans became the principal hostile force influencing the
evolution of humans. Reciprocity involves social investment, which
represents a short-term cost that may (but never certainly does) yield a
long-term benefit. Something similar occurs with nepotism, but in its
simpler forms nepotism does not require (is not improved by)
consciousness, since the long-term genetic return can be made reliable
simply by differential behavior toward individuals with whom one has had
certain specific and different social experiences. This mechanism will
work when the number and diversity of relatives do not vary greatly and
the reproductive likelihood of relatives does not fluctuate widely in
different circumstances. It will not work (well enough, or be the best
mechanism) when relatives are very numerous, vary widely in their
relatedness to an,actor, and also vary widely or fluctuate in their
reproductive probability. This last situation, which has evidently been
typical for humans for a very long time, places a high premium on
nepotistic investment strategizing that is essentially the same as in
reciprocity. […]
Hypothesis 3. Reciprocity arises out of nepotism (becomes prominent) when
large numbers of long-lived individuals related in differing degrees live
together in social groups within which there is more or less constant
directional selection favoring facilitators of (a) complex cooperation and
(b) ability to move back and forth between complete cooperation (in the
presence of threats to the whole group) and advantage-taking (in the
absence of such threats). […]
Hypothesis 4. Intergroup competition and aggression—that is, social
situations in which other human groups are the principal extrinsic
threats—represent the only circumstance that can maintain the situation in
Hypothesis 3 and account for the large groups whose social behavior is
guided principally by reciprocity in which indefinitely numerous and
complex manipulations of costs and benefits can create selection leading
to the human kind and degree of consciousness and its related overrides of
other proximate indicators.
Hypothesis 5. Group hunters of mammals (themselves evidently always
mammals)—whether canines, felines, or primates—tend to become so fearsome
(such ecological dominants, such powerful manipulators of their own
environments) that they approach becoming, incidentally, their own main
competitors. Thus, cooperativeness, of whatever origin, sets the stage for
“ganging up” two on one (and upward) in within-species competitions.
Chimpanzees evidently gang up to murder” (Alexander, 1987, p. 128)

“An act, to be virtuous, must, as Aristotle saw, be done willingly or with
pleasure; as such it is” 27

„Die moderne Technik reagiert auf diese Fatalität in Richtung der
Kassenergiebigkeit, so schickt uns der ausschweifende und doch oberflächliche
Weltverkehr der Informationsdienste stündlich Manifeste, Staatserdbe ben,
rätselhafte Kongresse, Putsche und Dementis ins Haus, da kann man nur
abstumpfen oder sich entrüsten. Mit einem Bewußtsein, das von den
Abziehbildern weltweiter Ereignisse gefüllt ist, aber die nähere Umgebung mit
ihren Vorgängen nicht versteht; leidenschaftlich gefühlsgereizt, aber tatenarm
— was bleibt dem Meinungsträger übrig, als der große ethische
Papieraufschwung, der doch wieder nur als Angriff auf das Bestehende
Glaubwürdigkeit erreichen könnte? Und wo soll er die Kategorien dazu hemehmen,
als aus der Familie? Dann wird er privatus — das ist der zugleich Befreite und
Beraubte.“ 159f

moral behavior is "not cheating" - group evolution theory

„Der entschieden Schlaue wiederum weiß auch nicht, was er tut. Als er seinen
Vorbehalt machte, berechnete er die Risiken, doch das ist absurd, im Zeitalter
der Weltbürgerkriege, der inkalkulablen Schon zeiten, der Schattenkabinette
und der Ordnungen, die auf zwei Augen stehen, gibt es keinen Durchblick.
Politische Information im Vollsinne ist ihrer Natur nach nicht erreichbar.
Folglich kommt die begrenzte Loyalität auf ein Würfeln hinaus, dann kann man
aber ebensogut gleich um den großen Einsatz würfeln und sich voll exponieren.
Hobbes glaubte daher, es sei für den Privatmann viel zu gefährlich zu
entscheiden, auf welcher Seite Recht und Moral seien. So ist das Gewissen
weder eine halbwegs zuverlässige Brücke zum Überleben, noch ein brauchbares
Erkenntnisorgan da, wo es keine Er kenntnis geben kann; schließlich hat es
für die ganz großen Ereignismas sen ebensowenig Kapazität wie das Gehirn.
Seit die Staatsmänner unter den Regeln bürgerlicher Moral regieren wollen,
behalten sie weder die Kriege noch ihre Folgen in der Hand und bringen keinen
Frieden mehr zustande, wie Woodrow Wilson und Johnson. So kann man denn auch
einmal das Gewissen selbst kritisch befragen. Kein geringerer als Max Scheler
(Der Formalismus in der Ethik, 1954) hat behauptet, es sei selbst noch ein
Träger sittlicher Werte, keineswegs aber deren letzte Quelle (335). Die
Deutung, daß im Gewissen die Stimme Gottes vernehmbar sei, mache es erst zu
jenem vermeintlich unverletzlichen, unbeirrbaren Organ, in diesem Sinne
gehöre es durchaus zu dem mannigfaltigen Abendrot der untergegangenen Sonne
eines religiösen Glaubens (337). In dieser Sache dachte Scheler
außerordentlich rigoros. Das Prinzip der Gewissensfreiheit, nach dem jeder
Beliebige das Recht haben solle zu sagen und zu bestimmen, was gut und böse
sei, könne nur als Ausdruck der inneren moralischen Anarchie des (nach Comte)
metaphyschen kritischen Zeitalters angesehen werden (334). Das weist doch in
un sere Richtung, wenn wir sagen, das Gewissen sei entweder ein Zeichen
versäumter sozialer, eindeutiger Pflichten — und in diesem Falle würde es kein
besonderes Problem aufwerfen — oder ein Index kollidierender, in sich
unversöhnlicher und gleichberechtigter Sozialregulationen, die im Krisenfall
auseinandertreten — dann ist es in keinem Sinne mehr „Richtschnur", sondern
das Erlebnis der Ausweglosigkeit. Dann ist sogar der Gedanke möglich, den man
in deutscher Sprache nicht denken sollte und der die Gewissensvirtuosen
betrifft: „Hobbes criticized the scruples of intellectuals because he was
forced by his experience of the political consequences of their soul -
searching to wonder whether it were not possible to be too afraid of doing
wrong and whether this fear did not ultimately spring from a pride more
dangerous to society than any aristocrat's. They were the new aristocracy:
their's the new pride" (I. Coltman 147).“ 171f

The “omnivore’s dilemma” (a term coined by Paul Rozin) is that omnivores must
seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until
they are proven safe. Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing
motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new
things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation
will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures
of neophilia (also known as “openness to experience”), not just for new foods
but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on
neophobia; they prefer to stick with what’s tried and true, and they care a
lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions. The emotion of
disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore’s dilemma. 167

“to feel an obligation to act courageously would involve a contradiction. For,
as I have urged before, we can only feel an obligation to act; we cannot feel
an obligation to act from a certain desire” 28


“if the motive in respect of which we think an action good is some
intrinsically good desire, such as the desire to help a friend, the
recognition of the goodness of the act will equally fail to give rise to the
sense of obligation to do it. For we cannot feel that we ought to do that the
doing of which is ex hypothesi prompted solely by the desire to do it.” 24

“As young men become more and more crucial for defense, older men become less
and less able to control the women and prevent access to them by young men.
Thus, perhaps, polygyny begins to disappear, and monogamy becomes the rule.
Men are able to marry younger. The extended family (in the anthropological
sense of a cohesive, controlling influence on the lives of individuals)
weakens or disappears as vengeance is forbidden to clans and enforcement of
the rules passes to government. To a greater degree, then, young people begin
to choose their own mates. Socially imposed monogamy may have been a pivotal
issue, because of its involvement with the crucial resource of mates, its
great effects on the young men of military age, its role in reducing conflicts
of interest at the family level (by inducing symmetries of genetic relatedness
among the central core of social interactants), and its close relationship to
the general concept of justice as equality of opportunity in all matters […]
Formal law reduces the power of local bullies and moralizers, and it is
resented by them. […] freeing of slaves, women’s suffrage, social welfare,
desegregation, affirmative-action programs, equal rights efforts, and
provision in public places to accommodate the physically disadvantaged are all
evidence of increased interest in indiscriminateness in social beneficence.”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 197)

“The philosopher, Hans Kelsen (1957), is another example, and in his book What
is Justice? he stated what is meant by conflicts of interests (pp. 2-4):

by the 1990s lead had been completely removed from gasoline. This simple
public health intervention worked miracles: lead levels in children’s blood
dropped in lockstep with declining levels of lead in gasoline, and the decline
has been credited with some of the rise in IQ that has been measured in recent
decades. Even more amazingly, several studies have demonstrated that the
phaseout, which began in the late 1970s, may have been responsible for up to
half of the extraordinary and otherwise unexplained drop in crime that
occurred in the 1990s. 332

“the expense of investing in expectations, and the possibility of doing so
with less expense if certain kinds of interruptions are forestalled, are the
essential reasons for the invention and maintenance of rules. Rules are
aspects of indirect reciprocity beneficial to those who propose and perpetuate
them, not only because they force others to behave in ways explicitly
beneficial to the proposers and perpetuators but because they also make the
future more predictable so that plans can be carried out.” (Alexander, 1987,
p. 114)

2. Indirect (Socially Mediated) Somatic Effort may involve social
investments (initial costs, beneficent acts) in direct and indirect
reciprocity. […] Examples are purchases of goods to be used by one’s self
(which may represent reciprocity in the form of mutually beneficial exchanges
of resources between buyer and seller) and all social and other benefits given
to others as investments in reciprocity when the returns are realized through
assistance to one’s self. There are two kinds of mediation of somatic effort:
(a) direct assistance to Ego (i) by a relative (repayment to the relative’s
phenotype is likely not necessarily to be expected or required) and (n) by a
nonrelative (eventual repayment is likely to be expected, to either the
benevolent individual or its relatives) and (b) assistance to Ego as a return
on an investment made by Ego as a part of somatic effort (i.e., direct
reciprocity, such as, Ego helps a nonrelative, expecting return assistance
from the helped person at some later date). We can predict that infants and
very young children, especially, are evolved to exhibit effort that elicits
the (a) (i) kind of assistance above. What Trivers (1971) called “reciprocal
altruism” would include both the nepotistic and somatic (egoistic) effects of
investments in both direct and indirect reciprocity (thus, while beneficent,
or initially costly, it would be only temporarily phenotypically altruistic
and not genetically altruistic or costly at all) […]. Although also egoistic
in its consequences, socially mediated somatic effort that involves initial
costly investments (beneficence) may often be misinterpreted as altruistic
(that is, as genetically costly). Because of divisions of labor and social
interdependency in the modern world, this kind of egoism is also more
commonplace than direct somatic effort.

„Wenn diese Analyse der Grundströmungen richtig ist, dann erklären sich leicht
die hohen Grade von Weltfremdheit, Urteilsdünkel und Daseinsgefräßigkeit,
denen man überall begegnet. […] Wer jeden Menschen schlechthin in seiner
bloßen Menschlichkeit akzeptiert und ihm schon in dieser Daseinsqualität den
höchsten Wertrang zuspricht, kann die Ausbreitung dieses Akzeptierens nicht
mehr begrenzen, denn auf dieser Bahn gibt es keinen Halt. Die Handlungen und
Gedanken der Menschen, ihre Bosheiten, Tugenden und Laster, Künste und Spiele,
Klugheiten und Narrheiten — nichts wird von der Geltung ausgenommen, außer
allein die Behauptung und Haltung, die erkennen läßt, daß irgendetwas nicht
gelten soll — wer das sagt, hat „Vorurteile" und kommt nicht in Betracht. Der
politische Nutzen dieses Ethos ist eklatant, er besteht in der Chance, vom
künftigen Sieger verschont zu werden, wenn man es ihm beibringen kann; über
den unmittelbaren Kassennutzen braucht man kein Wort zu verlieren.“ 140f

“the rules of morality and law alike seem not to be designed explicitly to
allow people to live in harmony within societies but to enable societies to be
sufficiently united to deter their enemies. Within-society harmony is the
means not the end.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 185)

„Der Entfaltungsraum des Ausgleichs - Glück liegt ganz in der Öffent lichkeit,
in dem agitatorisch beherrschbaren Gelände, in dem eine wache redaktionelle
Presse - und Rundfunkpolizei mit allen Vorbehalten auf räumt. Dort setzt man
außer Kurs oder wenigstens unter Druck, was nicht im großen Nivellementsstrom
liegt, bis schließlich als unleugbare Unterschiede nur noch die bezifferbaren
bleiben. Da scharfe Profilierun gen, vor allem geistige, eo ipso Distanz
schaffen, und da man das nicht will, so wird das Aussprechbare randunscharf
und man muß sich in vagen Ideen aufhalten: Demokratisierung, repressive
Strukturen, Hochschulreform usw. Die Institutionen öffnen sich den
Interventionisten, Pianisten und Vorrednern. Wie angedeutet, erweisen sich
die Unterschiede des Besitzes und Einkommens noch als unterscheidbar, offenbar
deswegen, weil der Kapitalismus zu den Funktionsbedingungen einer so
verrückten Steigerung der Lebensansprüche gehört. So gelten in der
Öffentlichkeit um den Erdball herum dieselben Wertungen, wer ihnen dort
widerspräche, erwiese sich als Reaktionär, Faschist, Rhodesier, Ibo oder sonst
etwas Geächtetes und Abgebuchtes. Indem nun die öffentliche Sprache fast aller
Sender und Zeitungen dieser Welthälfte auf dieselben Begriffe einschwenkt,
zieht sich die Wirklichkeit in den Schatten zurück, sie kann dem Gesetz nicht
entgehen, daß jede Bestimmtheit Verneinungen enthält. So entstehen unter dem
Tisch stumme und intolerante Sensibilisierungen, eine Welt kleinteiliger
Sondertatsachen, der Haß greift auf die ältesten Rückstellungen zurück und
bricht bisweilen überraschend aus, die Jura-Berner, die Quebec-Kanadier, die
Bretonen und Katalanen schwingen ihre Fahnen. Im „Spiegel" vom 29. 4. 1968
wurde gefragt, wo die Analyse eines möglichen Guerillakampfes in Großstädten
bleibe.“ 144

„Pareto sagte im Trattato di sociologica generale § 229, es sei das
einzigartige Glück Venedigs gewesen, daß dort die Intellektuellen von der
Herrschaft ferngehalten wurden.“ 30

“in the analogous case of revenge, the desire to return the injury and the
sense that we ought not to do so, leading, as they do, in opposite directions,
are plainly distinct; and the obviousness of the distinction here seems to
remove any difficulty in admitting the existence of a parallel distinction
between the desire to return a benefit and the sense that we ought to return
it.” 28

Future liberals were described as being more curious, verbal, and self-
reliant, but also more assertive and aggressive, less obedient and neat. 311

Jews and Muslims excelled in long-distance trade in part because their
religions helped them create trustworthy relationships and enforceable
contracts. Even today, markets that require very high trust to function
efficiently (such as a diamond market) are often dominated by religiously
bound ethnic groups (such as ultra-Orthodox Jews), who have lower transaction
and monitoring costs than their secular competitors. 295

“the view that, by emphasizing and holding out an ideal model of morality, we
can teach people to behave as though they had been group-selected in one large
group, even though such selection is evidently a logical impossibility.”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 242)

“Because between-group competition and aggression are major concomitants of
within-group cooperativeness, moreover, I will also argue that moral
“advances” are not necessarily related to the philosophical ideal of morality
as either indiscriminate or self-sacrificing beneficence or producing the
greatest good for the greatest number.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 22)

there are two radically different approaches to the challenge of creating a
society in which unrelated people can live together peacefully. One approach
was exemplified by John Stuart Mill, the other by the great French sociologist
Emile Durkheim. I described Mill’s vision like this: First, imagine society as
a social contract invented for our mutual benefit. All individuals are equal,
and all should be left as free as possible to move, develop talents, and form
relationships as they please. […] Durkheim’s: Now imagine society not as an
agreement among individuals but as something that emerged organically over
time as people found ways of living together, binding themselves to each
other, suppressing each other’s selfishness, and punishing the deviants and
free riders who eternally threaten to undermine cooperative groups. The basic
social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family,
which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals in such societies
are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit
their autonomy. The patron saint of this more binding moral system is the
sociologist Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness)
and wrote, in 1897, that “man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit
to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself
from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him.” A
Durkheimian society at its best would be a stable network composed of many
nested and overlapping groups that socialize, reshape, and care for
individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow, carnal,
and selfish pleasures. 185

Brains evaluate instantly and constantly (as Wundt and Zajonc said). Social
and political judgments depend heavily on quick intuitive flashes (as Todorov
and work with the IAT have shown). Our bodily states sometimes influence our
moral judgments. Bad smells and tastes can make people more judgmental (as can
anything that makes people think about purity and cleanliness). Psychopaths
reason but don’t feel (and are severely deficient morally). Babies feel but
don’t reason (and have the beginnings of morality). Affective reactions are in
the right place at the right time in the brain (as shown by Damasio, Greene,
and a wave of more recent studies). Putting all six together gives us a pretty
clear portrait of the rider and the elephant, and the roles they play in our
righteous minds. The elephant (automatic processes) is where most of the
action is in moral psychology. Reasoning matters, of course, particularly
between people, and particularly when reasons trigger new intuitions.
Elephants rule, but they are neither dumb nor despotic. Intuitions can be
shaped by reasoning, especially when reasons are embedded in a friendly
conversation or an emotionally compelling novel, movie, or news story. 87

“the ideal state of morality postulated by philosophers, theologians, and
social scientists, and to Darwin’s “universalism” and Adam Smith’s “universal
benevolence,” If so, biology supports the view of Perry (1954) and numerous
other philosophers that morality (at least as expressed in the behavior of
individuals) is in fact only an ideal or a pursuit, and never actually
realized.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 201)

As you watch the surgery, you notice two nurses assisting in the operation—one
older, one younger. Both are fully attentive to the procedure, but the older
nurse occasionally strokes your son’s head, as though trying to comfort him.
[…] If you are a utilitarian, you should have no preference. The older nurse’s
actions did nothing to reduce suffering or improve the surgical outcome. If
you are a Kantian, you’d also give the older nurse no extra credit. She seems
to have acted absentmindedly, or (even worse, for Kant) she acted on her
feelings. She did not act out of commitment to a universalizable principle.
But if you are a Humean, then it is perfectly proper for you to like and
praise the older nurse. She has so fully acquired the virtue of caring that
she does it automatically and effortlessly, even when it has no effect. 147

“Moral systems are societies with rules. Rules are agreements or
understandings about what is permitted and what is not, about what rewards and
punishments are likely for specific acts, about what is right and wrong. […]
Moral behavior, in general, consists of following the rules—of not “cheating.”
[…] the concepts of moral and ethical arise because of conflicts of interest,
and that—at least up to now—moral systems have been designed to assist group
members” (Alexander, 1987, p. 21)

“Consciousness and related aspects of the human psyche (self-awareness, self-
reflection, foresight, planning, purpose, conscience, free will, etc.) are
here hypothesized to represent a system for competing with other humans for
status, resources, and eventually reproductive success. More specifically, the
collection of these attributes is viewed as a means of seeing ourselves and
our life situations as others see us and our life situations, so as to
outguess, outmaneuver, outdo those others—most particularly in ways that will
cause (the most and the most important of) them to continue to interact with
us in fashions that will benefit us and seem to benefit them. Consciousness,
then, is a game of life in which the participants are trying to comprehend
what is in one another’s minds before, and more effectively than, it can be
done in reverse. This is the reason for the great significance of time,
foresight, and planning in human activities, and for the bringing of
timerelated and -sequenced activities into consciousness. […] The impulse
factor is a combination of (1) previous learning about both costs and benefits
and (2) restraints on capabilities affected by evolutionary history (which can
be translated as individual differences in ease of acquiring abilities to
carry out specific acts, at least in comparison with others—hence, in ease of
likelihood of realizing proximate rewards or punishments such as,
respectively, pleasure and pain).” (Alexander, 1987, p. 129)

“The compulsive truth-teller is as pathological and unhappy as the compulsive
liar. Moreover, we do not always want to be told the truth. In the courtroom,
presumably, somebody’s life, career, or good name is at stake, and there is a
sharp conflict of interest that requires special effort by parties external to
the dispute to bring about society’s version of justice.” (Alexander, 1987, p.
207)

“Some saints, at least, really do appear to act contrarily to their own
interests, at least in the short run, and that is why they are singled out. It
would seem that they are the models we embrace in our moralizing efforts to
get others to carry their temporarily self-sacrificing behavior in the
continuous game of social reciprocity a shade farther than we do. To coerce
someone into helping all group members indiscriminately rather than his own
relatives preferentially is to cause him to help all of the rest of us, even
if ever so slightly; and one reason this is so is that reproductive success is
always relative.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 189)

“Without the pressure of between-group competition, within-group competition
would have been mild or nonexistent—or else dramatically different—because
groups would have been smaller and would have required less unity and
cooperativeness. […] in no other species do social groups have as their main
jeopardy other social groups of the same species—therefore, the unending
selective race toward greater social complexity, intelligence, and cleverness
in dealing with one another” (Alexander, 1987, p. 97)

“five major “atoms” of sociality. The overlays of reciprocity and
pseudoreciprocity, with the possibility of immediate or delayed returns,
brings the number of such “atoms” to 21 […] Human sociality seems composed of
countless such units, and I think we are constantly separating the flow of our
social interactions into units (acts, interactions, transactions) that we can
use for our own purposes (e.g., investments intended to test the readiness of
another to repay social debts with interest).” (Alexander, 1987, p. 105)

„Diese Lehren sind heutzutage nicht recht brauchbar, sie rechneten mit
grundsätzlich übersehbaren Situationen. Den zutraulichen kleinen
Meinungsträger der Gegenwart sollte man in den Labyrinthen der
Indoktrination, der Auf- und Zuklärung und des Imstichlassens nicht an sein
Gewissen verweisen.“ 125

“Some aspects of religion and law and ethics contribute to deception of others
by self-deception; Donald T. Campbell (1975) calls it “sincere hypocrisy” […]
Righteousness is a source of motivation.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 139)

Perkins found that IQ was by far the biggest predictor of how well people
argued, but it predicted only the number of my-side arguments. Smart people
make really good lawyers and press secretaries, but they are no better than
others at finding reasons on the other side. Perkins concluded that “people
invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the
entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.” 99

“Both evolutionary and cultural history indicate that the attitude of the
public can be reversed quickly and decisively by either facts or propaganda
about gains by the other side.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 258)

“But this is not to imply that the badness of error is the reason why it is
wrong to lie, or the badness of pain the reason why we ought not to inflict it
without special cause. It is, I think, just because this form of the view is
so plainly at variance with our moral consciousness, that we become driven to
adopt the other form of the view, viz., that the act is good in itself and
that its intrinsic goodness is the reason why it ought to be done. It is this
form which has always made the most serious appeal; for the goodness of the
act itself seems more closely related to the obligation to do it than that of
its mere consequences or results, and therefore, if obligation is to be based
on the goodness of something, it would seem that this goodness should be that
of the act itself.” 24

„Das Ethos des Wohlstands-Humanitarismus, mit oder ohne Religion, fügt sich
wie von selbst in die Lebensbedürfnisse privatisierter Menschen ein, nämlich
solcher, die mit Selbstverständlichkeit von den nächsten Interessen her
empfinden, und das sind ihre und die ihrer Familie. Jenes Ethos kehrt da mit
in seinen natürlichen Ursprung zurück, denn zwischen dem Familienglück und
dem daraus entstandenen Menschheitsglück gibt es keinen qualitativen
Unterschied. [...] Er übersieht nur noch kleine Ausschnitte riesiger und
unerratbarer Ereignismassen, er befindet sich sozusagen chronisch auf der
Talsohle der Wirklichkeit, und wenn er über die Wohnung, den Arbeitsplatz
hinausdenken will, muß er sich auf die gewerbsmäßigen Meinungsverbreiter oder
das Zimmerkino verlassen. Folglich sucht der Industriebürger die echte
Nahrung des Lebens im privaten Bereich, an dessen Wert und Würde niemand
zweifeln kann, er kehrt heim, geistig und seelisch. Das beschriebene
hypertrophe Ethos fügt sich ohne Schwierigkeiten in diese Voraussetzung ein,
ja es wirkt, umgekehrt gesehen, wie eine Verlängerung des Familienlebens ins
Weltweite.“ 153

„Die Gleichheit und Freiheit, alte Ideale, werden selbst zu Glückspostulaten.
Störende Hemmungen des Genusses am Ich-Sein müssen ebenso verschwinden wie
Überragungen durch Andere, die dieses Vergnügen beeinträchtigen könnten. Man
sieht, wie kraft vitaler Expansion solche Einstellungen sich zu
Ausschließlichkeiten entwickeln, bis die Radikalisierung die dazugehörige
Aggressivität freisetzt. Übrigens gab man in Europa jenem Ethos nur zögernd
nach, die altchristlichen Traditionen, mit staatlichen Inpflichtnahmen und
wachsamer Sicherheits-Politik verschmolzen, waren auf Dauer und
Standhaftigkeit hin entworfen. Tocqueville (gest. 1859) ahnte das Labyrinth,
das aus dem Sichkreuzen verschiedener Moralen entstehen würde, denn er nannte
„diese Sorte von Hang zum Wohlsein, die die Mutter der Knechtschaft ist, eine
weiche Passion, die zäh und unablenkbar auftritt", und doch fand er zu seiner
Verwunderung, daß sie sich „mit gewissen privaten Tugenden verflicht: dem
Familiensinn, der Ordentlichkeit, dem Respekt vor dem Glauben". Damit war die
Ableitung der Ethisierung des Wohllebens aus den Kreisen des liberalen
Bürgertums schon geleistet, und Tocqueville sah voraus, wie sich die privaten
Tugenden in den Vordergrund schieben wür den; auch wenn ihm noch verborgen
blieb, daß dann die Privatisierung auch der Laster folgen müsse, und man an
ihnen nicht mehr Anstoß nähme, worauf sie wiederum öffentlichkeitsfähig wären.
Das zu entwikkeln, blieb unserem Jahrhundert Vorbehalten: die Moral, nämlich
die humanitäre des ethisierten Wohlstandes, in großartigem Siegeszug, und die
Sitten in vollem Verfall. Es mag uns schwerfallen wirklich zu akzeptieren, daß
die Lehre vom Glücksvorrang, der Eudaimonismus, eine Ethik hergeben kann, aber
ohne diese Einsicht verstünde man nicht einmal den Sinn des Wortes ,»sozial",
das eben diese Zugänglichkeit der materiellen und geistigen Lebensgüter für
Alle als ethisches Postulat meint. Im antiken Eudaimonismus des Epikur
handelte es sich um eine private, ichbezogene Technik der Leidesvermeidung und
Überlistung der Unlust, um eine Kur und quietistische Gemütsdiät.“ 59

When subjects are told that an intelligence test gave them a low score, they
choose to read articles criticizing (rather than supporting) the validity of
IQ tests. 103

“The “How?” or partial causes approach is most likely to evoke criticism (1)
because understanding is sometimes better achieved by dealing with the
original whole (e.g., the effort to assuage hunger rather than the underlying
morphological and physiological components of the effort), (2) because it is
noticeable that similar ends may be achieved by many different kinds of
subordinate or contributing mechanisms (causing the individual mechanisms to
be less important), and (3) because of the likelihood that something important
may be missing when reconstitution of the dissected phenomenon is attempted.
All three realizations cause us to regard even essential contributing
proximate phenomena as usually more trivial than the functional results of
their collective and cooperative interactions. In contrast, the “How come?” or
ultimate cause approach seeks to simplify, explain, or “reduce” complex
phenomena such as human activities by hypothesizing directly that they are
parts of even grander sets or combinations of actions. Thus, merely to
identify a complex set of activities by a hungry human as an effort to eat is
a step in this kind of reduction; another step is to see that effort as part
of a lifelong effort to build (as a juvenile) and maintain (as an adult) a
soma (phenotype, self) in the further interest of using it in the reproduction
of one’s genetic materials. This reduction by generalizing, because it seeks
the adaptive significance of acts, also tends to identify the larger contexts
within which specific acts or functions are carried out, and as a result
identifies likelihoods of compromise or adjustment in the act that would not
be obvious from any other approach. Without knowledge of food or ingestion,
for example, we might be puzzled about failures to optimize other observed
uses of lips and teeth like kissing, biting, or speaking.” (Alexander, 1987,
p. 35)


“Organisms that live in environments containing deadly snakes evolve to
acquire avoidance responses to the snakes before they are ever encountered. As
individuals they do not rely upon trial and error learning to react to the
danger of the snake’s strike; if they did they would be dead. Because we
usually do not know how such preprogrammed responses appear in individuals, or
even the context of their development, they are commonly given the convenient
(but uninformative) label of “innate.” […] For the first time in our history
as a species we have, in our consciousness as individuals, the knowledge of a
novel threat that, without efforts on our part that to some extent go against
the grain of our history, will extinguish us. There are no moral problems
greater than this one.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 265)

“Senescence, defined as increasing susceptibility to environmental insults, is
a central aspect of the patterning of lifetimes. It has evolved as an
incidental, pleiotropic effect of the evolution of lifetimes as efforts to
maximize success in genetic reproduction.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 157)

“Those who agree cooperate; those who disagree conflict or compete; and those
who cooperate also use their enhanced abilities from cooperation to compete
with those with whom they have conflicts of interest. […] That people are in
general following what they perceive to be their own interests is, I believe,
the most general principle of human behavior.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 53)

Edmund Burke said it in 1790: To be attached to the subdivision, to love the
little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it
were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we
proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind. Adam Smith argued
similarly that patriotism and parochialism are good things because they lead
people to exert themselves to improve the things they can improve: That wisdom
which contrived the system of human affections … seems to have judged that the
interest of the great society of mankind would be best promoted by directing
the principal attention of each individual to that particular portion of it,
which was most within the sphere both of his abilities and of his
understanding. Now that’s Durkheimian utilitarianism. It’s utilitarianism done
by somebody who understands human groupishness. Robert Putnam has provided a
wealth of evidence that Burke and Smith were right. In the previous chapter I
told you about his finding that religions make Americans into “better
neighbors and better citizens.” 342

“the child is at first selfish, because he is still wholly a bundle of somatic
effort.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 154)

we can define moral capital as the resources that sustain a moral community.
More specifically, moral capital refers to the degree to which a community
possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities,
institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological
mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate
selfishness and make cooperation possible. 325

“first, that lifetimes are divisible into somatic and reproductive effort,
and, second, that reproductive effort can be subdivided, at least in humans,
into mating effort (on behalf of gametes), parental effort (on behalf of
offspring), and extraparental nepotistic effort (on behalf of collateral or
nondescendant relatives and descendants other than offspring). Next it is
useful to emphasize that humans are unusual among organisms in that all of
their life effort that is social in nature is permeated with reciprocity. The
possibility of mutually beneficial reciprocal interactions can cause both
somatic and reproductive effort to be socially mediated (nepotism, for
example, can involve reciprocity in which the return benefit goes to a
relative of the originally beneficent individual).” (Alexander, 1987, p. 98)

Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson summarize the recent finding that
ultrasociality (also called “eusociality”) is found among a few species of
shrimp, aphids, thrips, and beetles, as well as among wasps, bees, ants, and
termites: In all the known [species that] display the earliest stages of
eusociality, their behavior protects a persistent, defensible resource from
predators, parasites, or competitors. The resource is invariably a nest plus
dependable food within foraging range of the nest inhabitants. Hölldobler and
Wilson give supporting roles to two other factors: the need to feed offspring
over an extended period (which gives an advantage to species that can recruit
siblings or males to help out Mom) and intergroup conflict. 225

“just not done from a sense of obligation but from some desire which is
intrinsically good, as arising from some intrinsically good emotion. Thus in
an act of generosity the motive is the desire to help another arising from
sympathy with that other” 28

“The rightness of an action consists in its being the origination of something
of a certain kind A in a situation of a certain kind, a situation in a certain
relation B of the agent to others or to his own nature.” 25

Where there is no conflict of interests, there is no need for justice. A
conflict of interest exists when one interest can be satisfied only at the
expense of the other; or what amounts to the same, when there is a conflict
between two values, and when it is not possible to realize both at the same
time; when the one can be realized only if the other is neglected; when it
is necessary to prefer the realization of the one to that of the other; to
decide which one is more important, or in other terms, to decide which is
the higher value, and finally; which is the highest value.

„R. Ingrim (Von Talleyrand bis Molotow, 1949, 148) sagt: „Die Intellektuellen
glauben, daß die Redefreiheit und Pressefreiheit wichtiger sind als Brot, weil
sie nämlich ihr Brot sind". Selbst eine vorbehaltslose Meinungsfreiheit
schließt allerdings die Verfestigung und Verstopfung der Verhältnisse nicht
aus. Der ungeplante, endgültige und schweigsame Verlust der Freiheit im
Realsinne kann sich in vielen Formen vollziehen, aber ebenso vielseitig ist
die Erfindungskraft der Philosophen, ihre Freizügigkeit zu verteidigen,“ 26

4. Indirect (Socially Mediated) Nepotism […] includes investments in
reciprocity in which returns from one’s beneficence may reasonably be expected
to be realized by relatives rather than one’s self […] if carried out
appropriately in evolutionary terms, all of the above four kinds of behavior
are genetically selfish, even those which are phenotypically self-sacrificing
or (temporarily) altruistic (or beneficent)

Cultures differ in their attitudes toward immigrants, and there is some
evidence that liberal and welcoming attitudes are more common in times and
places where disease risks are lower. 168

“I expect collective interests to be better served when decisions are made
with more information and by a larger proportion of the people involved, and
partly that I expect deception to be more difficult as knowledge about
morality is enhanced.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 33)

““taking” (selfish, spiteful) behavior, has been programmed to develop
(ontogenetically, by learning or whatever mechanisms) in the individual as
follows: (i) Take from relatives whenever the benefit to one’s own
reproduction is greater than the effect of the same benefit on reproduction of
relatives otherwise likely to receive it, devalued by the fractional
relationship of the relative to the taker, (ii) Take from nonrelatives
whenever the act is likely to be undetected, the cost of being detected is
likely to be lower than the benefit of taking, or the taking is part of a
reciprocal interaction that the benefit-giver anticipates being to his own
ultimate benefit. […] I expect any and all aspects of these strategies to be
concealedsometimes via self-deception as a means of deceiving others”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 126)

I’ll show that Glaucon was right [and Plato wrong]: people care a great deal
more about appearance and reputation than about reality. In fact, I’ll praise
Glaucon for the rest of the book as the guy who got it right—the guy who
realized that the most important principle for designing an ethical society is
to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that
bad behavior will always bring bad consequences. 90

The result is a fragile state of political egalitarianism achieved by
cooperation among creatures who are innately predisposed to hierarchical
arrangements. […] Those who could navigate this new world skillfully and
maintain good reputations were rewarded by gaining the trust, cooperation, and
political support of others. Those who could not respect group norms, or who
acted like bullies, were removed from the gene pool by being shunned,
expelled, or killed. Genes and cultural practices (such as the collective
killing of deviants) coevolved. The end result, says Boehm, was a process
sometimes called “self-domestication.” 193

“Plato, Butler, Hutcheson, Paley, Mill, each in his own way seeks at bottom to
convince the individual that he ought to act in so-called moral ways by
showing that to do so will really be for his happiness.” 22

“The concept of a single, just God for all people everywhere, for example, has
always failed. Brotherly love of the most sincere and intense varieties often,
if not universally, correlates with the presence of an enemy. […] the concept
of brotherly love has all too frequently had its greatest potency in war or
its equivalents. In arms race debates I have listened to American peace
activists who argue for some form of universal brotherly love yet seem to
differ from others chiefly in having designated as their enemy the current
administration of the United States government; and I have heard others whose
acceptance of their own view of how to resolve the arms race has become so
precious to them that anyone with a different view is automatically vilified.”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 243)

“reciprocity may have arisen as a modification of direct nepotism in which
flows of benefits began to pass in both directions successively rather than
just one direction from one relative to another. Benefits can be returned to a
social investor as a part of the egoistic behavior of the individual returning
it—i.e., at no cost to that individual. In such instances, possibilities for
cheating are essentially nonexistent and the overall complexity of the mental
activities accompanying evolution of the act will be reduced in comparison to
reciprocity per se. […] most discussions of “reciprocity” in nonhuman species
probably involve pseudoreciprocity instead.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 104)

“Two major assumptions, made universally or most of the time by philosophers,
are counter to the arguments presented here from biological considerations,
and I believe they are responsible for the confusion that prevents
philosophers from making sense out of morality or even being able to resolve
the paradoxes. These assumptions are the following: 1. That proximate and
ultimate mechanisms or causes have the same kind of significance and can be
considered together as if they were members of the same class of causes: this
is a failure to understand that proximate causes are evolved because of
ultimate causes, and therefore may be expected to serve them, while the
reverse is not true. Thus, pleasure is a proximate mechanism that in the usual
environments of history is expected to impel us toward behavior that will
contribute to our reproductive success. Contrarily, acts leading to
reproductive success are not proximate mechanisms that evolved because they
served the ultimate function of bringing us pleasure. 2. That morality
inevitably involves some self-sacrifice. This assumption involves at least
three elements: a. Failure to consider altruism to relatives as benefits to
the actor. Two consequences are that (i) self-interest is sometimes defined as
survival of the individual (which is instantly recognizable as insufficient)
and (ii) when selfinterest is defined so as to include pleasure, and all
similar proximate sensations or rewards, no procedure can be given to account
for the differences between pleasurable and nonpleasurable social actions. b.
Failure to comprehend all avenues of indirect reciprocity within groups. c.
Failure to take into account both within-group and between-group benefits.”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 175)

“origination of something, an origination which on different occasions or in
different people may be prompted by different motives.” 25

“tendencies toward moral behavior, and the establishment of moral systems, are
vehicles for promoting the goals of society as a whole […] the degrees of
beneficence that are actually reproductively appropriate will vary
dramatically as societies move between periods of extreme danger and relative
security” (Alexander, 1987, p. 121)

“the whole problem of care for the aged has arisen, not so much because lives
have been prolonged, but because familial bonds have been fractured,
explicitly in ways that have made confluences of interest between aged parents
and their children much less likely. Self-interested reasons for children to
care for aged parents have all but disappeared, and I suggest that this is why
their care is being thrust upon “society” and why it has become so expensive.
This expense to society is, in turn, why “society” has become concerned to
discuss the question of children’s moral and ethical obligations to their
parents.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 108)

“if I were going to try to establish a society in which everyone came as close
as possible to the philosophers’ ideal of indiscriminate altruism—and to do
this independent of external threats or world events—then I would also begin
by trying to minimize the individual’s “circle of secrecy.” Is this not what
Thomas Huxley was referring to when he said that the foundation of morality is
to have done, once and for all, with lying? Whether or not this is a desirable
goal is a question that I am not prepared to resolve, although I believe that
the answer given by people involved will depend heavily upon circumstances,
such as resource shortages, population pressure, extrinsic enemies, and the
specific values they have been taught or learned to revere throughout their
lives. Although there are reasons and situations in which it seems innocuous
and even desirable to argue for an effort to eliminate deception, the
consequences of attempting this in all situations— as Huxley and some moral
philosophers seem to have been suggesting should be the object of efforts
toward morality—may be somewhat different from what is at first imagined.”
(Alexander, 1987, p. 210)

„„Das Glück für alle, gleichmäßig verteilt unter alle". Nur die lenkbarsten,
d. h. hautnächsten Glücksquellen können unter alle gleichmäßig verteilt
werden.“ 63

“the forcing apart of physicians’ and their patients’ interests by the
impersonality and nonrepetitiveness of physician-patient interactions in
modern urban society is a principal reason for the rises in dissatisfaction,
litigation, and the expenses of medical care. For example, excessive use of
diagnostic procedures (that are often risky to the patient) are carried out to
protect the interests of physicians and hospitals because, I believe,
physicians and hospitals have lost the ability to convince patients that they
have indeed assumed the medical interests of the patient as if they were their
own.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 110)

“if we eventually pay our bills from fear of the county court, we shall still
have done what we ought, even though we shall not have done it as we ought.
The attempt to bring in the motive involves a mistake similar to that involved
in supposing that we can will to will. To feel that I ought to pay my bills is
to be moved towards paying them. But what I can be moved towards must always
be an action and not an action in which I am moved in a particular way, i.e.
an action from a particular motive; otherwise I should be moved towards being
moved, which is impossible.” 25

„Doch ist dieser Satz unvollständig, denn bekanntlich korrumpiert
Machtlosigkeit auch, und absolute Machtlosigkeit korrumpiert absolut. Jacob
Burckhardt scheint übrigens zu seinem oft angestrengten Aus spruch, nach dem
die Macht „an sich böse" sei, aus lokalem Grunde gekommen zu sein, erschreckt
durch die Brutalitäten der schweizerischen demokratischen Entwicklung seiner
Zeit. [...] Damit verkörperte er die sehr spezifische angelsächsische,
puritanische Synthese von verschärfter Religiosität und aggressiver
Weltdurchdringung auf politischen und wirtschaftlichen Wegen. Wahrscheinlich
kann man die von dem reinen Ethos freigesetzte Aggression auch als
„Angriffsenergie" in Arbeit und Kampf gegen die „Feinde Gottes" (der
„Zivilisation" usw.) umsetzen, weil den Protestanten die Wendung der
Aggression gegen sich selbst, als Askese im Sinne der mortificatio, versperrt
ist.“ 111

“As a consequence of the general ignorance of biology, many discussants of
human behavior fail to realize that nearly all traits of organisms are
variable or plastic. Those traits that in usual environments are not so
plastic, and that still reflect genetic variation within the human species
(like eye color, nose shape, ear lobe attachment, and hair patterns on the
back of the hand), are actually rare and probably will require special
explanations. Many such traits in humans are involved in individual and kin
recognition” (Alexander, 1987, p. 28)

Anything that binds people together into a moral matrix that glorifies the in-
group while at the same time demonizing another group can lead to moralistic
killing, and many religions are well suited for that task. Religion is
therefore often an accessory to atrocity, rather than the driving force of the
atrocity. 298

„Aus diesem Durcheinander ergab sich eine „Politologie", und hier hatte
zunächst Plato, am Volk wie an der Adelsherrschaft verzweifelt, jene abstrakte
und literarische Politik erfunden, die darin besteht, den Idealstaat zu
entwerfen, um den Haß gegen das Vorhandene ins Allgemeine und Mitteilbare zu
erheben. Seine mißglückten Unternehmungen in Sizilien bewiesen die
Weltfremdheit, die mit der ethisierenden Ausschweifung zusammenhängt; so sah
er nicht den herankommenden nächsten Feind, nämlich den Makedonen.“ 10

The moral domain varies by culture. It is unusually narrow in Western,
educated, and individualistic cultures. Sociocentric cultures broaden the
moral domain to encompass and regulate more aspects of life. People sometimes
have gut feelings—particularly about disgust and disrespect—that can drive
their reasoning. Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication. Morality
can’t be entirely self-constructed by children based on their growing
understanding of harm. Cultural learning or guidance must play a larger role
than rationalist theories had given it. If morality doesn’t come primarily
from reasoning, then that leaves some combination of innateness and social
learning as the most likely candidates. In the rest of this book I’ll try to
explain how morality can be innate (as a set of evolved intuitions) and
learned (as children learn to apply those intuitions within a particular
culture). We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly,
people like us should be righteous about. 38

“One indicator of the degree to which conflicts of interests among social
individuals have been minimized is the size of the group: only when conflicts
are minimal should very large group sizes be reached. The reason is that there
are automatic costs to group living, mainly involving access to resources […]
Conflicts of interest are not expected when all group members are genetically
identical. This is the case in clones of aphids, rotifers, or any other
organisms in which reproduction occurs through parthenogenesis or fission
without sexual recombination of the genetic materials” (Alexander, 1987, p.
83)

“Happiness and its anticipation are thus proximate mechanisms that lead us to
perform and repeat acts that in the environments of history, at least, would
have led to greater reproductive success. This is a central hypothesis in
evolutionary biology. Paralleling it in importance is the hypothesis that
control of resources is the most appropriate route to reproductive success
(the juvenile lives of all organisms represent a process of increasing control
of resources up to the point—through growth and development—that reproduction
becomes possible). Similarly, I presume that status is typically a vehicle
toward resource control and an outcome of it. If these ideas are correct, then
humans should always experience pleasure when they gain in status or increase
their control of resources (unless they do so at large expense to close
relatives or spouses), and they should experience some converse feeling when
they lose status or resource control (except, sometimes, when they transfer it
to relatives or spouses).” (Alexander, 1987, p. 45)

„Max Scheler sah hier die geistigen Folgen einer weltweit sich verbreitenden
Industriekultur voraus, er sah deren Tendenz zum Abbau der Profile, Spannungen
und Unterschiede, die Einebnung ausgrenzender in stitutioneller Normen und
der zugeordneten Gefühlsschranken. Diese Tendenzen haben gewaltige Fallkräfte,
und in der Zeit, da man das neue Europa zusammenzustecken sucht, hat man seine
alten Gehalte schon weithin preisgegeben, man ist des quälenden Insichtragens
von Gegensätzen müde und schnallt ab. Der Humanitarismus, der
Masseneudaimonismus und das, was noch Disraeli als die „verderbliche Lehre von
der natürlichen Gleichheit der Menschen" empfand, deren Übergang in Anarchie
ihm wohl vorschwebte, vereinigen sich zu einem Chor der Bejahung, der sich
gegen eine zögernde Zustimmung immer intoleranter zeigt, so daß allmählich auf
jeder geistigen und ungeistigen, moralischen und unmoralischen Landschaft die
Flagge „Auch hier ist Arkadien" weht. Man ahnt, daß der Idealismus, der in
dieser Übersteigerung des Ethischen doch zweifellos mitschwingt, eine
tiefgreifende Funktion haben könnte — wahrscheinlich wirkt er als
gegenresignativer Halt und verbirgt das Nichts.“ 143f

“The second brake comes into effect only when the threat of massive
destruction becomes so great that individuals begin to see the original source
of their security—their own government and its efforts to achieve “national
security”—as, rather, the greatest threat to the safety of themselves, their
relatives, and their friends. We have recently witnessed an extraordinary rise
of just this feeling.” (Alexander, 1987, p. 250)

„So hat ein Fritz Stern ein Buch über den „Kulturpessimismus als politische
Gefahr" (1963) geschrieben, und dort heißt es: „Lange vor Hitler, lange vor
Versailles hatten sich national gesinnte Menschen in Deutschland zutiefst
enttäuscht gefühlt, hatte ein quälendes kulturelles Unbehagen bestanden, und
dies hatte zu nationalistischen Phantasien und Utopien geführt, denen die
Elite der Deutschen bereitwillig zustimmte."“ 176

Richard Sosis, who examined the history of two hundred communes founded in the
United States in the nineteenth century. […] Sosis argues that rituals, laws,
and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. He quotes the
anthropologist Roy Rappaport: “To invest social conventions with sanctity is
to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.” But when secular
organizations demand sacrifice, every member has a right to ask for a cost-
benefit analysis, and many refuse to do things that don’t make logical sense.
In other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as
costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the
hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs
can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those
beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation. Sacredness binds people together,
and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice. […] Gods really do
help groups cohere, succeed, and outcompete other groups. 284f