Abstract
Modern democratic and capitalist (i.e. classically liberal) societies are constructed and justified on a foundational assumption that human action conforms to a rationalist logic, approximating, if not identical to, that of instrumental rationality. This chapter argues that because human behavior has evolved to be adaptive, it adheres to a very different, biological, logic. After establishing the multi-layered reasons that human beings could not, and did not, evolve to be rational, it outlines the thoroughly social behavioral capacities and dispositions that could and did evolve, which together constitute the actual adaptive logic of human action. In a nutshell, the resultant model replaces the rationalist model of individualist, single-minded, amoral, materially maximizing, informed, and calculating human actors with an empirically and theoretically substantiable model of groupish, distractible, moral, Satisfycing, epistemologically conforming, and habitual actors. The chapter concludes with a consideration of several significant implications of the improved model for individuals, for social science, and for social policy/governance.
This chapter is distilled from a longer, unpublished, manuscript, which interested readers can soon find, along with a comprehensive bibliography, at the author’s Academia.edu page.
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Marshall, D.A. (2020). The Biological Logic of Human Action: On the (Considerable) Difference Between “Rational” and “Adaptive”. In: Giovagnoli, R., Lowe, R. (eds) The Logic of Social Practices. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 52. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37305-4_4
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