Jim Menegay  wrote:

> For a young person growing up in bourgeois Western society,
> one of the vicissitudes of the process of socialization is
> that perfectly natural self-serving behaviors will be met
> with the query: "What if everyone did that?".
> 
> It is a difficult question to even understand, let alone
> answer.  I have always been partial to Dunbar's response
> in Heller's "Catch 22": "Well, if everyone did it, then
> I would be a damned fool to do any differently!"
> 
> I have heard that this query can be blamed, ultimately,
> on Emmanuel Kant.  (If I have heard wrong, don't expect me
> to actually READ Kant to educate myself - I have recently
> gone thru the ordeal of reading Hamilton, and that was bad
> enough.)

Kant' proposed a "rational test" of a moral claim - did it match what he
called the categorical imperative? That is, could it be said that you
acted this way in the knowledge that if all acted that way, the result
would be good. Your precis is good enough.
> 
> It has recently occurred to me that in Darwin's Natural
> Selection, Nature never asks Kant's question.  Organisms
> are expected to behave self-servingly, even though "if
> everyone did that" the self is ill-served.  Ironically,
> Nature sees to it that everyone does do that, though She
> doesn't take the inevitable consequences of Her own actions
> into account.  As a result, every individual may suffer
> from an evolutionary change that was to the benefit of each
> individual.  To claim that this is paradoxical is to commit
> the fallacy of composition, as that fallacy is defined by
> economists.
> 
> I has also recently occurred to me that in Hamilton's kin
> selection model, Nature DOES ask a watered down version of
> Kant's question.  In Hamilton's model, Nature asks the
> question: "What if everyone whose genome is correlated with
> yours did that?".  Or better, "What if everyone did that to
> the extent that their genome is correlated with yours?".
> 
> Please note the use of the words "correlated with", rather 
> than "similar to".  I have just been thru this issue with
> Hoelzer and McGinn.  If everyone is similar, then no one
> is correlated.
> 
> Food for thought, even if Dr. Wilkins will disapprove of the 
> anthropomorphism.

I'm reading _The Narrow Roads of Gene Land vol I_ right now, and the way
WDH tells it, there is no danger of anthropomorphising at all :-) He
even discusses the use of words like "altruism" and the
misunderstandings this cas caused, and so realises that without scare
quotes they are dangerous words...

Nice metaphor/analogy. I'll steal it at an appropriate time, of course.
-- 
Dr John Wilkins
john_SPAM{at}wilkins.id.au   http://wilkins.id.au
"Men mark it when they hit, but do not mark it when they miss" 
                                               - Francis Bacon
---
þ RIMEGate(tm)/RGXPost V1.14 at BBSWORLD * Info{at}bbsworld.com

---
 * RIMEGate(tm)V10.2áÿ* RelayNet(tm) NNTP Gateway * MoonDog BBS
 * RgateImp.MoonDog.BBS at 6/26/04 6:51:52 AM