I think the reason humans care about other people’s interests, and aren’t power-seeking ruthless consequentialists, is because of evolution.
Evolutionary “group selection” meant each human cared about her tribe’s survival a tiny bit: not enough to make sacrifices herself, but enough to reward/punish other humans to make sacrifices for the tribe (which was far more cost effective).
Evolution thus optimized our ability to evaluate other people’s behaviour by how beneficial to the tribe (virtuous) or beneficial to themselves (evil) they were. Evolution also optimized our ability to appear more beneficial to the tribe than we truly are.
It’s very hard for humans to get away with lying and pretending over many years—evidenced by the fact psychopaths (usually) go to jail instead of corporate boardrooms—so the best way to appear beneficial to the tribe (virtuous) is to genuinely seek goals society considers it virtuous to seek. So evolution made humans internalize approval reward.
Some of that seems true. Hard to get away with lying seems to apply only in very good circumstances. I don’t know why you’re saying psychopaths usually go to jail. We don’t know about the ones that don’t screw up and get found out.
I agree that evolution has had some really good effects on cooperative behavior, but it’s also designed us to be brutally selfish when that seems necessary. Our perspective would be way different if we lived in the Congo or a tribal society where strangers might be friendly or might come up with excuses to kill us and take our stuff.
We know that psychopathy has high heritability. We also know that the great majority of psychopaths who end up in jail were also abused as children. While psychopathy might well be correlated will poor parenting, there have to be a significant number of psychopaths who were not abused as children, and did not end up in jail. We do indeed observe quite a few of these — enough to know some professions they tend to end up in (surgery, special forces, the law, management). They’re also pretty strongly motivated to not let the general public figure out that they’re psychopaths, so I agree: I strongly suspect a lot of them are managing to pass as non-psychopathic. Indeed, I’m reasonably sure I’ve met some.
I think the reason humans care about other people’s interests, and aren’t power-seeking ruthless consequentialists, is because of evolution.
This is kinda a weird way to phrase it since if I’m modelling the causal chain right:
(evolution)->(approval reward)->(not ruthless)
So yeah, evolution is causally upstream of not ruthless, but approval reward is the thing directly before it. Evolution caused all human behaviour, so if you observe any behaviour any human ever exhibits you can validly say “this is because of evolution”.
I think the reason humans care about other people’s interests, and aren’t power-seeking ruthless consequentialists, is because of evolution.
Evolutionary “group selection” meant each human cared about her tribe’s survival a tiny bit: not enough to make sacrifices herself, but enough to reward/punish other humans to make sacrifices for the tribe (which was far more cost effective).
Evolution thus optimized our ability to evaluate other people’s behaviour by how beneficial to the tribe (virtuous) or beneficial to themselves (evil) they were. Evolution also optimized our ability to appear more beneficial to the tribe than we truly are.
It’s very hard for humans to get away with lying and pretending over many years—evidenced by the fact psychopaths (usually) go to jail instead of corporate boardrooms—so the best way to appear beneficial to the tribe (virtuous) is to genuinely seek goals society considers it virtuous to seek. So evolution made humans internalize approval reward.
Some of that seems true. Hard to get away with lying seems to apply only in very good circumstances. I don’t know why you’re saying psychopaths usually go to jail. We don’t know about the ones that don’t screw up and get found out.
I agree that evolution has had some really good effects on cooperative behavior, but it’s also designed us to be brutally selfish when that seems necessary. Our perspective would be way different if we lived in the Congo or a tribal society where strangers might be friendly or might come up with excuses to kill us and take our stuff.
We know that psychopathy has high heritability. We also know that the great majority of psychopaths who end up in jail were also abused as children. While psychopathy might well be correlated will poor parenting, there have to be a significant number of psychopaths who were not abused as children, and did not end up in jail. We do indeed observe quite a few of these — enough to know some professions they tend to end up in (surgery, special forces, the law, management). They’re also pretty strongly motivated to not let the general public figure out that they’re psychopaths, so I agree: I strongly suspect a lot of them are managing to pass as non-psychopathic. Indeed, I’m reasonably sure I’ve met some.
This is kinda a weird way to phrase it since if I’m modelling the causal chain right:
(evolution)->(approval reward)->(not ruthless)
So yeah, evolution is causally upstream of not ruthless, but approval reward is the thing directly before it. Evolution caused all human behaviour, so if you observe any behaviour any human ever exhibits you can validly say “this is because of evolution”.