Commerce and Community

Ecologies of Social Cooperation

Robert Garnett Jr., Paul Lewis, Lenore T. Ealy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317569268
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

Since the end of the Cold War, the human face of economics has gained renewed visibility and generated new conversations among economists and other social theorists. The monistic, mechanical "economic systems" that characterized the capitalism vs. socialism debates of the mid-twentieth century have given way to pluralistic ecologies of economic provisioning in which complexly constituted agents cooperate via heterogeneous forms of production and exchange. Through the lenses of multiple disciplines, this book examines how this pluralistic turn in economic thinking bears upon the venerable social–theoretical division of cooperative activity into separate spheres of impersonal Gesellschaft (commerce) and ethically thick Gemeinschaft (community).

Drawing resources from diverse disciplinary and philosophical traditions, these essays offer fresh, critical appraisals of the Gemeinschaft / Gesellschaft segregation of face-to-face community from impersonal commerce. Some authors issue urgent calls to transcend this dualism, whilst others propose to recast it in more nuanced ways or affirm the importance of treating impersonal and personal cooperation as ethically, epistemically, and economically separate worlds. Yet even in their disagreements, our contributors paint the process of voluntary cooperation – the space commerce and community – with uncommon color and nuance by traversing the boundaries that once separated the thin sociality of economics (as science of commerce) from the thick sociality of sociology and anthropology (as sciences of community).

This book facilitates critical exchange among economists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social theorists by exploring the overlapping notions of cooperation, rationality, identity, reciprocity, trust, and exchange that emerge from multiple analytic traditions within and across their respective disciplines.

Part ISocial cooperation

1 The evolution of human cooperation

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis

DOI: 10.4324/9781315737171-2

Theories of cooperation

Cooperation was prominent among the suite of behaviors that marked the emergence of behaviorally modern humans in Africa. Those living 75,000–90,000 years ago at the mouth of what is now the Klasies River near Port Elizabeth, South Africa, for example, consumed eland, hippopotamus, and other large game (Singer and Wymer 1982). Among the slaughtered remains found, there is a now-extinct giant buffalo Pelovoris antiquus, which weighed almost 2,000 kilograms and whose modern-day (smaller) descendant is one of the most dangerous game animals in Africa (Milo 1998). The Klasies River inhabitants, and their contemporaries in other parts of Africa, almost certainly cooperated in the hunt and shared the prey among the members of their group. Even earlier evidence of trade in exotic obsidians extending over 300 kilometers in East Africa is another unmistakable footprint of early human cooperation.

Like those living at the Klasies River mouth, other “hunting apes” quite likely cooperated in the common projects of pursuing large game, sharing the prey, and maintaining group defense. Both Homo neanderthalensis and the recently discovered Homo floresiensis survived well into the Late Pleistocene (meaning the period from between about 126,000 and 12,000 years before the present) and hunted large game, the latter targeting the pygmy (but nonetheless substantial) elephants that had evolved on the island environment of Flores, off the coast of Indonesia.

Other primates engage in common projects. Chimpanzees, for example, join boundary patrols and some hunt cooperatively. Male Hamadryas baboons respect proximity-based property rights in food and mates. Many species breed cooperatively, with helpers and baby sitters devoting substantial energetic costs to the feeding, protection, and other care of non-kin (Hrdy 2009). Social insects, including many species of bees and termites, maintain high levels of cooperation, often among very large numbers of individuals. Other common forms of cooperation among non-human animals, summarized by Kappeler and van Schaik (2006), are “grooming and other forms of body care, alarm calling, predator inspection, protection against attacks by predators or conspecifics, supporting injured group members … [and] egg-trading among hermaphrodites.”

While cooperation is common in many species, Homo sapiens is exceptional in that in human cooperation extends beyond close genealogical kin to include even total strangers, and occurs on a much larger scale than other species except for the social insects.

What is cooperation?

By cooperation we mean engaging with others in a mutually beneficial activity. Examples include the joint pursuit of political and military objectives as well as the more prosaic foundations of everyday life: collaboration among employees in a firm, exchanges between buyers and sellers, and the maintenance of local amenities among neighbors.

Cooperative behavior may confer benefits net of costs on the individual cooperator, and thus could be motivated entirely by self-interest. Market exchange is an example. In this case, cooperation is a form of mutualism, namely an activity that confers net benefits both on the actor and on others. But cooperation may also impose net costs upon individuals in the sense that not cooperating would increase their fitness or other material payoffs. In this case, cooperative behavior constitutes a form of altruism.

The evolution of cooperation that is mutualistic or that involves only close family relatives is easily explained. Cooperation among close family members could have evolved by natural selection because the benefits of cooperative actions are conferred on the close genetic relatives of the cooperator, thereby helping to proliferate alleles (“genes”) associated with the cooperative behavior. Cooperation could also have evolved because one individual’s costly contribution to the welfare of another individual is reliably reciprocated at a future date, thereby making cooperation mutualistic. Models of altruism toward close family members and reciprocal altruism (which really should be called “enlightened self-interest”) are popular among biologists and economists alike and explain many forms of human cooperation, particularly those occurring in families or in frequently repeated dyadic (two-person) or other very small group interactions.

But these models fail to explain two facts about human cooperation: that it takes place in groups far larger than the immediate family, and that both in real life and in laboratory experiments, it occurs in interactions that are unlikely to be repeated, and where it is impossible to obtain reputational gains from cooperating.

The most parsimonious proximal explanation of cooperation, one that is supported by extensive experimental and other evidence, is that people gain pleasure from or feel morally obligated to cooperate with like-minded people. People also enjoy punishing those who exploit the cooperation of others, or feel morally obligated to do so. Free riders frequently feel guilty, and if they are sanctioned by others, they may feel ashamed. We term these feelings social preferences. Social preferences include a concern, positive or negative, for the well-being of others, as well as a desire to uphold ethical norms.

In many human groups, these motives are sufficiently common to sustain social norms that support contributions to projects of common benefit, even when cooperators bear costs in order to benefit others. The forms of cooperation and the behaviors that elicit punishment by peers differ from society to society, but the critical role of social preferences in sustaining altruistic cooperation is ubiquitous.

The roots of human cooperation

Because we are convinced that most people enjoy cooperating at least in some situations and dislike people who do not, the task we will set for ourselves is not that typically addressed by biologists and economists, namely to explain why people cooperate despite being selfish. Rather, we seek to explain why we are not purely selfish – why the social preferences that sustain altruistic cooperation are so common. Proximate answers to this question are to be found in the way that our brains process information and induce the behavioral responses that we term cooperation. But how did we come to have brains that function in this manner?

Early human environments are part of our answer. Our Late Pleistocene ancestors inhabited the large-mammal-rich African savannah and other environments in which cooperation in acquiring and sharing food yielded substantial benefits at relatively low cost. The slow human life history with prolonged periods of dependency of the young also made the cooperation of non-kin in child rearing and provisioning beneficial. As a result, members of groups that sustained cooperative strategies for provisioning, child rearing, punishing non-cooperators, defending against hostile neighbors, and truthfully sharing information had significant advantages over members of non-cooperative groups.

In the course of our subsequent history we created novel social and physical environments exhibiting similar, or even greater, benefits of cooperation, among them the division of labor coordinated by market exchange and respect of rights of property, systems of production characterized by increasing returns to scale (irrigated agriculture, modern industry, information systems with network externalities), and warfare. The impressive scope of these modern forms of cooperation was facilitated by the emergence in the last seven millennia of governments capable of enforcing property rights and providing incentives for the self-interested to contribute to common projects.

But prior to the emergence of governments and since, cooperation has been sustained also by motives that led some people to bear costs on behalf of others, contributing to common projects, punishing transgressors, and excluding outsiders. We advance three reasons why these altruistic social preferences supporting cooperation confer competitive advantage over unmitigated and amoral self-interest.

First, human groups have devised ways to protect their altruistic members from exploitation by the self-interested. Prominent among these is the public-spirited shunning, ostracism, and even execution of free riders and others who violate cooperative norms. Other group activities protecting altruists from exploitation are leveling practices that limit hierarchy and inequality, including sharing food and information.

Second, humans adopted prolonged and elaborate systems of socialization that led individuals to internalize the norms that induce cooperation, so that contributing to common projects and punishing defectors became objectives in their own right rather than constraints on behavior. Together, the internalization of norms and the protection of the altruists from exploitation served to offset, at least partially, the competitive handicaps borne by those who were motivated to bear personal costs to benefit others.

Third, between-group competition for resources and survival was and remains a decisive force in human evolutionary dynamics. Groups with many cooperative members tended to survive these challenges and to encroach upon the territory of the less cooperative groups, thereby both gaining reproductive advantages and proliferating cooperative behaviors through cultural transmission. The extraordinarily high stakes of intergroup competition and the contribution of altruistic cooperators to success in these contests meant that sacrifice on behalf of others, extending beyond the immediate family and even to virtual strangers, could proliferate. Modern-day nationalism is an example.

This is part of the reason why humans became extraordinarily group-minded, favoring cooperation with insiders and often expressing hostility toward outsiders. Boundary maintenance supported within-group cooperation and exchange by limiting group size and within-group linguistic, normative, and other forms of heterogeneity. Insider favoritism also sustained the between-group conflicts and differences in behavior that made group competition a powerful evolutionary force.

In short, humans became the cooperative species that we are because cooperation was highly beneficial to the members of groups that practiced it, and we were able to construct social institutions that minimized the disadvantages of those with social preferences in competition with fellow group members, while heightening the group-level advantages associated with the high levels of cooperation that these social preferences allowed. These institutions proliferated because the groups that adopted them secured high levels of within-group cooperation, which in turn favored the groups’ survival as a biological and cultural entity in the face of environmental, military, and other challenges.

Early humans were not alone in occupying territory and a feeding niche that made cooperat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Epigraph
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Social cooperation
• Part II Identity and association
• Part III Human(e) economics
• Part IV Entangled spheres
• Part V Not by commerce alone
• Envoi The Apologia of Mercurius
• Index