The evolution of fairness norms: an essay on Ken Binmore's Natural Justice

Paul Seabright

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2006, vol. 5, issue 1, 33-50

Abstract: This article sets out and comments on the arguments of Binmore's Natural Justice , and specifically on the empirical hypotheses that underpin his social contract view of the foundations of justice. It argues that Binmore's dependence on the hypothesis that individuals have purely self-regarding preferences forces him to claim that mutual monitoring of free-riding behavior was sufficiently reliable to enforce cooperation in hunter-gatherer societies, and that this makes it hard to explain why intuitions about justice could have evolved, since in such a society intuitions about justice would have had no adaptive advantage. I argue that it is empirically plausible that human beings display systematic other-regarding preferences (even if these are not always very strong). These could be incorporated into Binmore's general framework in a way that would enrich it and make it more useful for solving practical problems about justice.

Keywords: natural justice; fairness; norms; evolution; self-regarding preferences; Rawls; social contract (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470594X06060618 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:pophec:v:5:y:2006:i:1:p:33-50

DOI: 10.1177/1470594X06060618

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics, Philosophy & Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().