Competition

  • Gregory Hanlon
Chapter
Part of the Italian and Italian American Studies book series (IIAS)

Abstract

Humans, like primates, expect their fellows to cooperate and react with outrage when others do not conform to the rules. Is the desire for justice not another human universal? Anthropologists recognize an amazing diversity in laws and customs around the world, but they have good reason to think that an individual sense of justice emerges in early childhood, rooted in the same reciprocity that underpins daily collaboration.1 Notions of right and wrong are rooted in our emotions. Virtually universal are rules forbidding killing members of one’s group, stealing objects in others’ possession, raping virgins, or seeking adulterous relations with married women. Universal, too, is the notion that individuals are responsible for many of their actions. We know that people everywhere deliberately lie, dissimulate, and otherwise cheat their superiors, their peers and their subordinates.2 Cheating and deception come naturally, and everybody practices them to some degree. These tricks are held in check only by virtue of a universal vigilance against them, and by the implicit threat of vengeance. Not only do we resent the people who cheat us, we can also empathize with victims of violence or duplicity and feel delight in teaching the perpetrators a lesson.3 This sense of rules and the order that results from it certainly predates the elaboration of law, which is principally a codification of the informal rules humans and primates live by.4

Keywords

Human Nature Criminal Procedure Civil Litigation Attempted Murder Capital Sentence 
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Notes

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© Gregory Hanlon 2007

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