Oliver Bateman Does the WorkVerified account

Yo @MoustacheClubUS, happy Sunday and a good day to your wife and little Cleo Rose. Hope you are grilling. I have a gripe with what you expose in the latest What’s Left upload on the foundations of law & the problem of self-interest.

I have this same gripe with many different ontologies and that is trying to deduce constants of human behavior from first principles rather than observation and description.

We should start with what actually happens and goes on before abstractly debating the reality of self-interest. The best place to start is with animal societies, how they handle and regulate transgression with particular attention paid to hormonal regulation of status & social...

bonding. This gives us an idea of what is possible for animals, what the variables are, the contribution of different kinds of environments and the constraints on the evolution of individual and group behaviors. Then move on to investigating human societies in the same way.

Once we know what we’re dealing with and what we don’t know, then we can start asking questions about incentives to follow laws or not. To proceed otherwise is Rouseaian idealism, humans never came together to form societies, we were in societies before we were human.

Hobbes says as much. That is to say, we were pre-political and then became political. My argument tries to focus somewhat more narrowly on the failures of both collective self interest and the “pious pretense” variant as undermined by actual “cheating” observed currently

Walter Scheidel adds a bit more meat on the bones in The Great Leveler, which deals a bit with social formation as such from a biological standpoint, but I generally avoid stuff like the book Sapiens, which apparently does more of that. S Pinker of course does too

Usually my approach, particularly on the team shows and even the standalone eps, is discussing specifics and proceeding inductively, but some have said they missed the “prior” approach of exactly the stuff you have a gripe with, so I dusted off an old lecture of mine