Beyond Homo Economicus: New Developments in Theories of Social Norms

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72076/1/j.1088-4963.2000.00170.x.pd

On benevolence and love of others

Hobbes is famous for his insights into the impact of man’s fear, glory and greed on war and peace, not for his views on the bearing of men’s benevolence on the commonwealth. Are Hobbesian people even capable of love of others? In the literature, we find two main answers: one view is that Hobbes ruled out the possibility of disinterested benevolence among men; the other is that Hobbes considered actions driven by genuine benevolence possible but uncommon. After reviewing in broad outlines the two above positions, this chapter seeks to demonstrate the claim that Hobbes did not consider relevant to establish if men are capable of genuine benevolence or not, because he maintained that benevolent men can be as inept as egoists in differentiating apparent and real good for themselves and their loved ones and the effect of misguided altruism on the commonwealth is as damaging as the effect of ill-advised egoism.Postprin

Reply to critics

I reply to commentaries by Justin Bruner, Robert Sugden and Gerald Gaus. My response to Bruner focuses on conventions of bargaining problems and arguments for characterizing the just conventions of these problems as monotone path solutions. My response to Sugden focuses on how the laws of humanity present in Hume's discussion of vulnerable individuals might be incorporated into my own proposed account of justice as mutual advantage. My response to Gaus focuses on whether or not my account of justice as mutual advantage can incorporate deep differences in values across subgroups of a larger society.12 month embargo; published online: 30 June 2020This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

The Invisible Foole

I review the classic skeptical challenges of Foole in Leviathan and the Lydian Shepherd in Republic against the prudential rationality of justice. Attempts to meet these challenges contribute to the reconciliation project (Kavka in Hobbesian moral and political theory, 1986) that tries to establish that morality is compatible with rational prudence. I present a new Invisible Foole challenge against the prudential rationality of justice. Like the Lydian Shepherd, the Invisible Foole can violate justice offensively (Kavka, Hobbesian moral and political theory, 1986; Law and Philosophy, 14:5–34, 1995) without harming his reputation for justice. And like the Foole, the Invisible Foole dismisses the possibility that being just preserves goods intrinsic to justice, and will be just only if he fears that others will punish his injustice by withholding the external goods like labor and material goods that he would otherwise receive for their performance in covenants. I argue that given a plausible folk-theorem interpretation, Hobbes’ response to the Foole’s challenge is inconclusive, and depends crucially upon common knowledge assumptions that may or may not obtain in actual societies. I present two analogous folk-theorem arguments in response to the Invisible Foole’s challenge, one using the idea that the Invisible Foole’s power of concealment might be transitory, and the other using the idea that members of society might stop performing in covenants with anyone, thus punishing the Invisible Foole indirectly, if the Invisible Foole commits sufficiently many injustices

Intersubjective Belief

This paper proposes a new model of shared belief amongst individual subjects based on a new approach to theorising individual subjects in social context. In this approach, which I term the intersubjective approach, individual subjects are modelled in terms of the standpoint of each of us, thereby incorporating the phenomenological standpoint of an individual subject's inclusion of herself within the plurality, ‘us’ (a class in the distributive sense). This provides resources for a new model of shared belief, including common belief, in terms of intersubjective belief, which is an individual subject's belief that ‘each of us has the same belief that p’. The paper argues that the intersubjective model of shared belief provides a non-reductive alternative to the standard interactive model of mutual belief and common belief, and so provides a non-individualistic framework for analysing shared belief in social contexts. As an illustration, the intersubjective model of common belief is applied to the Hi-Lo game; the solution is (High, High)