What makes humans moral beings? This question can be understood either as a proximate "how" question or as an ultimate "why" question. The "how" question is about the mental and social mechanisms that produce moral judgments and interactions, and has been investigated by psychologists and social scientists. The "why" question is about the fitness consequences that explain why humans have morality, and has been discussed by evolutionary biologists in the context of the evolution of cooperation. Our goal here is to contribute to a fruitful articulation of such proximate and ultimate explanations of human morality. We develop an approach to morality as an adaptation to an environment in which individuals were in competition to be chosen and recruited in mutually advantageous cooperative interactions. In this environment, the best strategy is to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation equally. Those who offer less than others will be left out of cooperation; conversely, those who offer more will be exploited by their partners. In line with this mutualistic approach, the study of a range of economic games involving property rights, collective actions, mutual help and punishment shows that participants' distributions aim at sharing the costs and benefits of interactions in an impartial way. In particular, the distribution of resources is influenced by effort and talent, and the perception of each participant's rights on the resources to be distributed.

/pdf/a-mutualistic-approach-to-morality-the-evolution-of-fairness-2llxnirh7q.pdf

A mutualistic approach to morality: The evolution of fairness by partner choice

The CuPS (Culture × Person × Situation) approach attempts to jointly consider culture and individual differences, without treating either as noise and without reducing one to the other. Culture is important because it helps define psychological situations and create meaningful clusters of behavior according to particular logics. Individual differences are important because individuals vary in the extent to which they endorse or reject a culture's ideals. Further, because different cultures are organized by different logics, individual differences mean something different in each. Central to these studies are concepts of honor-related violence and individual worth as being inalienable versus socially conferred. We illustrate our argument with 2 experiments involving participants from honor, face, and dignity cultures. The studies showed that the same "type" of person who was most helpful, honest, and likely to behave with integrity in one culture was the "type" of person least likely to do so in another culture. We discuss how CuPS can provide a rudimentary but integrated approach to understanding both within- and between-culture variation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved). Language: en

https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2282&context=soss_research

Within- and between-culture variation: Individual differences and the cultural logics of honor, face, and dignity cultures.

Economists and biologists have proposed a distinction between two mechanisms - "strong" and "weak" reciprocity - that may explain the evolution of human sociality. Weak reciprocity theorists emphasize the benefits of long-term cooperation and the use of low-cost strategies to deter free-riders. Strong reciprocity theorists, in contrast, claim that cooperation in social dilemma games can be sustained by costly punishment mechanisms, even in one-shot and finitely repeated games. To support this claim, they have generated a large body of evidence concerning the willingness of experimental subjects to punish uncooperative free- riders at a cost to themselves. In this article, I distinguish between a "narrow" and a "wide" reading of the experimental evidence. Under the narrow reading, punishment experiments are just useful devices to measure psychological propensities in controlled laboratory conditions. Under the wide reading, they replicate a mechanism that supports cooperation also in "real-world" situations outside the laboratory. I argue that the wide interpretation must be tested using a combination of laboratory data and evidence about cooperation "in the wild." In spite of some often-repeated claims, there is no evidence that cooperation in the small egalitarian societies studied by anthropologists is enforced by means of costly punishment. Moreover, studies by economic and social historians show that social dilemmas in the wild are typically solved by institutions that coordinate punishment, reduce its cost, and extend the horizon of cooperation. The lack of field evidence for costly punishment suggests important constraints about what forms of cooperation can or cannot be sustained by means of decentralised policing.

/pdf/reciprocity-weak-or-strong-what-punishment-experiments-do-1dc3a4zk57.pdf

Reciprocity: Weak or strong? What punishment experiments do (and do not) demonstrate

Most conceptions of public and private life within political and social theory do not adequately consider the networks or fluidities involved in contemporary social relations. The distinction of public and private is often conceived of as statically `regional' in character. This article, following an extensive analysis of the multiple meanings of the `public' and `private', criticizes such a static conception and maintains that massive changes are occurring in the nature of both public and private life and especially of the relations between them. We consider flows and networks that enable mobility between and across apparent publics and privates. These mobilities are both physical (in the form of mobile people, objects and hybrids of humans-in-machines) and informational (in the form of electronic communication via data, visual images and texts). We consider the transformations of public and private life that have arisen from `complex' configurations of place and space: the dominant system of car-centred automobility whose spatial fluidities are simultaneously private and public; and various globalizations through the exposure of `private' lives on public screens and the public screening of mediatized events. These mobile, machinic examples demonstrate the limitations of the static, regional conceptualizations of public and private life developed within much social and political theory, and suggest that this divide may need relegation to the dustbin of history.

Mobile Transformations of 'Public' and 'Private' Life.

This paper introduces an informal model of contracting where courts are assumed to be radically incompetent, that is, they are unable to determine whether a party in a contract dispute has engaged in opportunistic behavior (breach), although they can determine whether parties intended to enter a legally enforceable contract. Under this assumption courts cannot perform their normal function in standard economic analysis of contract law, where they deter opportunistic breach because they can verify the promisor's behavior. Nonetheless, the model shows that despite judicial incompetence people will voluntarily enter legally enforceable, jointly valuable contracts. The reason is that when parties care about their reputations, and are engaged in repeated interaction, they can deter certain forms of otherwise profitable opportunism by credibly threatening a mutually destructive lawsuit. The law, on this theory, generates value not by directly deterring bad behavior, but by supplying parties with the ability to retaliate when they are harmed. The paper explores the model's implications for understanding contracting and contract law.

/pdf/a-theory-of-contract-law-under-conditions-of-radical-50vrkeyeui.pdf

A Theory of Contract Law Under Conditions of Radical Judicial Error

(1990). A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 86-87.

A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance

(1991). The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 120-121.

The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250

(1992). Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 165-165.

Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries

In their introduction the editors claim that this volume’s ten studies constitute “some of the most forward-looking, cvcn cutting-edge, work i n the field of medieval history” (1). The first thrce chapters involve rereadings of texts in such ii manner that traditionally received narrativcs bcconic morc complicated. In other words. traditional historical methodologies yield ncw paradigms. Patrick Geary illustrates how the current scholarly debate regarding the “turn” of the rriillennitrm has ;I precursor dating lrom that very period. He reinvestigates a monastic cartulary i n such a way as to illustrate how earlyto-mid-eleventh-century monks used the excuhe o l recent violent discontinuity to justify thc rcstoration of monastic property ;illegedly occupied hy laymen in the earlier, violcncc-fillcd years of the tenth ccntury. In the second chapter Barbara Rosenwein disputes thc traditional vicw that thc practice of‘ perpetual liturgical prayer at the alpine inomstcry of St. Maurice of Agaune was derived from Byzantine monastic practice of the “Slcepless Ones” (Akoimrtoi). She identilies several more likely sources in traditions of the local upper RhGne valley and in the ideology of the local episcopate. Alison Beach studies the scriptcrrici of two Bavarian tlouhle monasteries to gauge the collaboration of monks and nuns in thc writing of manuscripts. In light of the data, our understanding of thc strict claustration of nuns in those religious houses must accept some modification. The second series of three studies illustrates how historians can transcend the texts that attempt to represent an external reality. Robert Brcntano investigates two distinct biographical texts regarding Peter of Morronc, the later Pope Celestine V, and conclutles that a considerable distance could exist between the text and the actuality it purported to describe. Luigi Pellegrini explores female religious experience in thirteenth-century Italy to eliminate the male “filters” imposed by religious patrons who channeled female spirituality into approved patterns or by male writers who controlled the description of that spirituality so as to alter its content. Lisa Bitel investigates the practicc of clerical cursing in pre-Norman Ireland and notes its ubiquity in oral tradition, its importance i n political culture, and i f \\ signiticance in hagiography. The writers of saints’ lives not only ranked Irish saints according to the efficacy of their solemn curses, but even edified their readers with a veritable typology of maledictions. The final series of four chapters represents a rethinking of hitherto accepted binary social constructs. Sharon Farmcr attacks such constructs as oversimplifications. Her study of medieval Parisian beggars indicates that contemporary elites associated laboring poor of both genders with bodies and appetites, that beggars of both genders were suspected of deceitful play-acting to secure more alms, and that the testimony of poor people regarding miracles was more likely to be tested by bodily manifestations. Catherine Peyroux analyzes six pious tales wherein a saint or devout person kissed a leper, an action clearly transgressive of contemporary social values. In several stories the leper functioned merely as the passive recipient of caritative attention, but in others he represented a substitute for Christ and thus a means of personal salvation. In any event, the didactic or symbolic strategies of those tales either downplayed or negated the leper’s individual worth. Amy Remensnyder describes the many levels of meaning in the ubiquitous Iberian Christian practice-in Spain of the Keconquistu and America of the conquistadors-of converting mosques and Amerindian temples into churches dedicated to Mary. In the final chapter Thomas Head discusses how the ordeal of fire was used during the tenth through twelfth centuries to authenticate whether certain human bones were saints’ relics. That practice underscored the link between true relics, which did not burn when placed on consecrated coals, and the saints’ bodies, which would suffer neither purgatorial nor hellfire at the Last Judgment. With a few exceptions the volume’s essays are important, original contributions; the book is suitable for advanced undergraduate, graduate, and scholarly audiences.

Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society. Essays in Honor of Lester K. Little: Farmer, Sharon and Barbara H. Rosenwein, eds.: Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 249 pp., Publication Date: May 2000

The Huguenot saga of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is one of the most arresting in European history. The meteoric rise of an austere and determined religious faction, with noble and even regal champions in the sixteenth century, and the vitiation and eclipse of its power scarcely a century later are the stutf of historical drama for scholars of any school. This collection of essays adds commendably to the body of work on early modern French Protestantism by examining various confessional distinctives of the Huguenots. Moreover, the discussions of Huguenot education, poor relief, bureaucratic careerism, architecture, diplomacy, and militancy contribute to the broader study of “confessionalization.” The latter term refers, among other things, to the development of self-conscious, doctrinally definite religious groups out of the soup of enthusiasms that characterized the sixteenth century. As Philip Benedict shows in his chapter, a “weak theory” of confessionalization ciin apply to France, where the walls between Catholics and Protestants were heightened, hardened, and reinforced in the seventeenth century. Benedict’s is the most sophisticated of the dozen essays which are bracketed by Raymond A. Mentzner and Andrew Spicer’s introduction and their particularly uaeful epilogue. The paradoxes that run throughout the various studies in Society and Culrure in fhe Hugeunot World, 1559-1685 are the ones in which French Protestants continually found t pains to prove their loyalty to the crown and yet preserve their nonconformity, struggling to attain success and respectability in a larger society that increasingly restricted their participation in its institutions and even went so far as dishonor the corpses of their dead loved ones, and hoping to remain a “righteous remnant” of God’s chosen while accepting the compromises of survival. The conclusion of their struggle, the razing of Huguenot temples, was a sort of baroque, triumphal crescendo. Louis XIV might well have said “aprbs moi le DCsert,” the latter a term used by Protestants to describe their world after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The fascination for historians, of course, lies not simply in the final extinction of Huguenot power but in its remarkable progress toward extinction. As Huguenots became a community, they also became a clearer target, as is shown in microcosm in Timothy Watson’s essay on sixteenth-century Lyon. Moreover, as Luc Racout demonstrates in his discussion of Huguenot polemic, their eclectic identity-antipapal, royalist, and prophetically martyred-could hardly justify them to their enemies. Benedict’s masterly chapter then provides both a historiography and new archival evidence of confessionalization in marriage contracts. The constant effort to preserve a community and its rights followed the examples both of Paul appealing to Rome and to the secret republic of apostolic epistles. Mark Greengrass discusses the latter in his study of informal networks among Huguenots. Penny Roberts and Mentzner respectively examine the phenomenon of Huguenot petitioning to the crown and the uses of that double-edged sword, the Edict of Nantes. The ephemeral heyday of Huguenot institutions and of Huguenot power in other French institutions provides historians with a glimpse of the attempts to establish a sufficiency of Protestant instruction (discussed by Karin Maag) and to forestall the seductions of Catholic charity by building a system of Huguenot poor relief (Martin Dinges). Amanda Eurich’s essay on the Huguenot magistrates of Pau and Castres stands out, along with Benedict’s, as one of the strongest in the collection. Eurich’s and Benedict’s contributions can be taken together as a fine portrait of Calvinism’s brief hegemony and rapid social impoverishment in parts of France. They are admirably complemented by Allan James’s work on the perilous intricacies of Huguenot militancy in the seventeenth century. Also worthwhile is the epilogue in which Mentzner and Spicer discuss the later incarnation of the faith. When the captains and the kings had departed from the Huguenot leadership, the remaining faithful turned to the “chiliasms of despair” (as E. P. Thompson used to say), and the maintenance of true religion became the task of women prophets and men outside the necessarily conformist elites. As in all such collections, the essays here are uneven, but they are generally informative and together present a highly instructive portrait of Huguenot society and culture. Society and Culture in the Hugeunot World, 1559-1685 should be of interest not only to specialists but also to advanced students of French history.

Court Culture in Dresden: From Renaissance to Baroque

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