I’ve been doing some reading on political philosophy recently, with a focus on the works that influenced the founding fathers of the United States, and one of the ideas that comes up a lot is the idea of the social contract. One of the assumptions that drives this theory is that humans are *not *fundamentally good. Are humans not fundamentally good? In real live examples of anarchy, does society devolve because humans are not fundamentally good or because of some other reason? I am an absolute newcomer to political philosophy so forgive me if I am misrepresenting social contract theory.
My favorite treatment of this question (as a question of philosophy) comes from Xunzi, who wrote an essay called "Human Nature Is Bad," which begins:
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This is pretty much all I needed to know. Thanks so much for the response, I’ll check out the essay you mentioned in the beginning.
Humans aren’t fundamentally anything. We’re highly variable, complex calculators, without much input validation on what we learn about or how we react to novel stimulus.
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Exactly this. Studying behaviours and averaging it has reduced us into easily categorisable beings. The complexity just goes out of the window when the question itself has a design constraint that the answer is expected to meet. My idea is that even if there is an irreducible unit to which you can be reduced to—which I don’t think there is—the temporally emergent aspect of interactions with a larger whole such as the society that are combinatorially so large as to be intractable just do not allow for a siloed theory/inquiry to explain it all.
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Well said. I was caught up in the "what is good" trap and didn’t think to question how valid being fundamentally anything was.
I like your take on the question. It’s different than anything I’ve ever seen discussed about this topic, thank you! Also, is that a Lovecraft reference in your username?
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Your friend is an absolute legend. My username on Reddit is Yogge Sothothe. Dagon is without out a doubt the best. You too, are a legend.
It’s complicated:
most people are capable of feeling empathy towards other humans, but some are psychopaths;
empathy can be turned on/off depending on whether the other person is perceived as "in my group" or "outside my group", which happens for various reasons;
care for other people is balanced against care for myself;
there may be strategic reasons to appear better/worse than one would be otherwise, e.g. one can help others to signal wealth, or hurt others to signal they are not to be messed with;
even when people agree on what is good, it is often difficult to coordinate on sharing the costs;
people with good intentions may do bad things, e.g. because they have mistaken beliefs. I probably forgot a few important things here. My personal approach is that most people are good, but the few bad ones can do disproportionate damage—it is much easier to hurt other people than to help them, easier to lie than to find out truth, easier to break things than to fix them.
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This makes a lot of sense. It also still supports social contract theory in a way. I like that you started off by stating that it’s complicated. That is pretty much the best thing you could do when approaching something that is, well, complicated, because all too often people will try to offer a very simple answer to a very complicated question.
Often the problem isn’t inherent goodness or badness, but the incentive structure that an environment creates, and whether people’s natural tendencies to want to be high status results in benefit for everyone or not. In an environment with no one who has the exclusive right to the use of force, violence becomes a means of acquiring resources and status. If you set up the rules correctly (and people view you as a legitimate source of laws), people are incentivized to work towards the common good.
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I’m vaguely pointing at the role of game theory and the resulting mechanism design in shaping what actions are viable. The tragedy of the commons is a classic example where some mechanism is needed to prevent a common loss. It can be easy to portray people in such a situation as greedy, but the mechanism works for altruistic people too. Escape without oversight requires everyone to be selfless, which is a totally unreasonable bar.
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Game theory is something that I see mentioned quite often, but I am totally unfamiliar with it. Do you have any suggested books, papers, or videos you believe may give me a entry-level understanding of the subject?
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This may not be entry-level, but Axelrod’s The Evolution of Co-operation might be an enlightening deep/broad dive.
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Thank you for the recommendation, I’ll add it to my reading list.
So for something interactive which helps build intuition, this is a great game about the prisoner’s dilemma (goes in the same direction as what greylag linked actually, but with much cuter animations, and can serve as intro). If you want something with more substance, I don’t think I can beat a thorough reading of the wikipedia page followed by choosing a book from their further reading section which matches what you’re comfortable with.
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This game looks really interesting. Thank you! I often hear people say that wikipedia is not a reliable source of information. In your opinion, is the true?
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not at all, and especially not for subjects with intro textbooks. That said, it’s just a starting place, and it’s almost worth as much as a source of references as an actual overview.
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Gotcha, thanks :)