Explaining Morality Naturally: Humans as Arbiters of Fairness
In Current Biology, Marc Hauser of Harvard University and his colleagues compare chimpanzees and humans directly. Both, it turns out, can be patient to a high degree. In fact chimps are more patient than people. ...When it comes to fairness, though, it is a different story. ...
To find out if chimpanzees share this sense of fairness, Keith Jensen and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, designed a way for chimps to play the ultimatum game. Their version started with a pair of trays far from the players' cages. Each tray had ten raisins divided in different ways between two pots—say eight and two, or five and five.
One chimp was allotted the role of proposer. He could choose one of the trays, pulling it by way of a rope just halfway to the cage. The other, the responder, could then choose to pull on a rod, bringing the tray close enough for both to get the raisins, one pot for each. If the responder chose not to pull the tray closer within a minute, the offer was considered rejected, and the game concluded.
The result, which Dr Jensen reports in Science, is that chimps are simply rational maximisers—Pan economicus, if you like. Though proposers consistently chose the highest possible number of raisins for themselves, responders rarely rejected even the stingiest offers.
Source: The Economist
These results should be contrasted with those typically found among humans. If basic economic theory were true, humans would be rational maximizers like the chimpanzees, taking whatever they can get. In reality, tests consistently show that humans would rather take nothing than take an unfair portion — especially if it means that the person being unfair also gets none. Punishing the greediness of the unfair person is more important than getting something, however small.
This is not an insignificant difference between humans and chimpanzees:
A number of researchers in the field of human evolution think that a sense of fairness—and a willingness to punish the unfair even at some cost to oneself—is humanity's “killer app”. It is what allows large social groups to form. Without it, free-riders would ruin such groups, because playing fair would cease to have any value. Dr Jensen's previous experiments have shown that chimpanzees are willing to punish actual thieves. But his new data add weight to the theory that the more sophisticated idea of fair shares, which underpins collaborative behaviour, appeared in the hominid line only after the ancestors of the two species split from one another.
I've long argued that since morality is a collection of rules which allow social groups to survive, then it's only to be expected that the more developed a social group becomes, the more developed the morality will have to be. There would be no need for morality if humans were loners like some species; as it is, though, morality is a necessary ingredient that allows our large social groups to exist and thrive. Human groups with an insufficiently developed sense of morality simply would not have survived to pass along their genes to later generations.
This is genetic, not cultural. Bjorn Wallace of the Stockholm School of Economics and his colleagues report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about their own studies on twins. Using the ultimatum game, they found that the sense of fairness was very similar between identical twins, but not between fraternal twins. Fairness — not just a desire to behave fairly, but a need to only interact with others who behave fairly — has its foundation in our very genetic code, having evolved naturally over the course of millions of years.
Comments
“Humans ass Arbiters of Fairness”
I sure hope thats a typo…
Humans definitely are asses. Especially many of those among the religious, from whom so many of the world’s woes doth springeth.
Hmmm…ass…
or maybe 
Austin’s version of “Trick or Treat”?
What do humans do to the arbiters of fairness?
This article shows atheism at it brightest. Atheist are the fairest people in the world. History would justify this… hahahahaha! I needed a good laugh for today. Keep them coming. Joy is a gift from God. Foolish things can make you laugh.
Grow up, Alex! (Pssst, Alex…there’s nothing after death! No life, no heaven, no hell, no joy, no reward or punishment, nothingness…HAHAHA how’s that for a laugh! Feel free, though, to email us from the great beyond if it exists…we would LOVE to hear about it.)
Alex, as Austin is fond of saying, please provide evidence to support your contentions.
There is an armchair sociological theory to which I have held for some time (a lot of people have probably beaten me to this line of thinking). I think it makes further sense if you examine the sorts of things that are considered immoral in all cultures. There is no culture that considers killing random people morally acceptable. No culture considers stealing from other people within the social unit acceptable (stealing from outside groups, like the tribe next door, might be another story). I could go on, but there seems to be a core set of moral rules that exist in every society, and each of them connects in some way with humanity’s social nature. If people stole and murdered all the time, humans would be unable to collect into social groups. The moral rules that not all cultures share, such as sexual taboos which differ widely from culture to culture, are those without which humans can still live socially. I would call this “ancillary morality.” The nature of human moral rules seems to reflect morality as an evolutionary tool that permits social existence.
This can account for why people like C.S. Lewis think that human morality is universal - they’re noticing the core morality that all cultures share, creating the illusion that deep down, all people have the same ideas about morality and from that jumping to the conclusion that it must come from a divine source. The universally shared human moral infrastructure is limited to those elements that are necessary for social existence.
Eric,
And the “shared human moral infrastructure” continues to evolve.
I recently saw a documentary that described somewhat similar experiments with bonobos and chimpanzees. In many cases bonobos cooperated with each other to achieve an equitable outcome where the chimpanzees did not.
If you are interested in the differences between Chimps and bonobos check out the video at this link.
It’s interesting that because of habit differences in the past they evolved along different paths related to the social structure of their populations.
If humans were like bonobos, females would be in charge of everything and sex would with strangers would be as common as a handshake.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/07/3/l_073_03.html
“I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey without very mortifying reflections.”
–William Congreve
Being a Bonobo sounds like fun!
DaveTheWave, Remember the story of Lazarus in heaven. He could not cross over to hell to the rich man. If you don’t know the story, read it.
P.S. Just because you jumped off a cliff doesn’t mean I’m a fool too.
Eric, you’re not informed. God does not work using sociological predictions…. Oops, I mean theories. Next, you don’t know what you are saying about what God did. God did not wrongfully take anything. You should read again Genesis. God promised the land to His people. The moral rules that all cultures share or the majority share means nothing. God has a standard of holiness, righteous and justice that supersedes man morality. Man idea of good is not God’s idea of good. If man compares his righteous to God’s, man’s righteous is like filthy rags.
Alex,
“God has a standard of holiness, righteous and justice that supersedes man (sic) morality.”
How is genocide superior to a morality of tolerance?
That’s easy, John. Whenever Xians do good things, god gets the credit. When humans do bad things, it’s either free will or the devil. Neat deal, huh? Any Xian who does bad things is not a true Scottsman, i mean, Xian.