Social Order: Old Problems, New Challenges, and Reusable Solutions

Abstract

This book is about the role of reputation in the achievement of social order. In the writers’ view, reputation is an agent property that results from transmission of beliefs about how the agents are evaluated with regard to a socially desirable conduct. This desirable conduct represents one or another of the solutions to the problem of social order and may consist of cooperation or altruism, reciprocity, or norm obedience.

“I have stood back amazed, especially in the last ten or fifteen years, as things that were once simply the preserve of poets, philosophers and fiction writers, have been drawn into the great maws of experimental science. Things like reputation, gratitude, cheating, and on a grander level, human beauty and beyond that to mind, consciousness and human nature. These were once not respectable subjects for scientific enquiry, but in twenty years this has all changed.” (Ian McEwan, opening talk at public debate between John Dupré and Dylan Evans at Borders Bookshop, Oxford Street, London, 1999¹)

“But the most frequent reason why men desire to hurt each other, ariseth hence, that many men at the same time have an Appetite to the same thing; which yet very often they can neither enjoy in common, nor yet divide it; whence it follows that the strongest must have it, and who is strongest must be decided by the Sword.” Thomas Hobbes, De Cive ([1651] 1983, 46)

See www.philosophers.co.uk/science/evolutionary_explanations.htm.