From Tufts to a New "Truth"
Have you ever wondered where the concept of fairness comes from? It’s tempting to assume that primitive human societies developed rules for promoting fairness — including punishments for bad behavior — because we are fair and just by nature.
But what if the exact opposite is true?
“A lot of people think that we evolved these norms of fairness because we’re cooperative individuals and we want to maintain a cooperative society,” says Patrick Forber, associate professor of philosophy at Tufts University. “Well, it could be we evolved those norms of fairness because we’re spiteful jerks and we had to find some way to mitigate the damage that we were inflicting on each other.”
Spite — in which one party pays a cost to inflict harm on another — is usually considered an ugly, if all-too-human trait, but Forber and his colleagues put a new twist on the standard story: fairness and spite may need each other.