Justice

Justice

Filed under: Justice, Uncategorized

The species of our Genus Homo eventually became predominant hunters because they refined instincts for justice as an “immune system” against individual dominance, which is a pathology for organic teamwork. Modern hunter-gatherers are egalitarian (Pringle, 2014), and justice (punishing dominance) has been observed in far-flung hunter-gatherers,not influenced by wealth-creating agricultural practices (Boehm, 1999). There have been …

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So What;s the Book Aboutbelief in justice

Belief in Justice

Filed under: Belief, Faith, Justice

The proposal in this book that I am most adamant about is that justice is a collective human instinct (in addition to our individual ape instincts to dominate). Justice is not just something we dreamed up as Yuval Harari would have us believe in his book, Sapiens. Justice has been naturally selected over millions of …

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Robert Bellah

Robert Bellah

Filed under: God, Justice

I have been running this blog since 2012 with one blog/week until last Spring when I took a “leave of absence” to complete the final summary of the blog’s thinking in a short book, which is to bepublished soon. The central thesis is that justice is a collective human instinct that has evolved over the …

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Michael Tomasello and Collective Consciousness

Filed under: Belief, cognitive capacities, Evolution of Emotion, Evolution of human motivation, Justice | 2 Comments

Psychologist Michael Tomasello recognizes that, because all the minds of our ancestral species have gone extinct, the only way we can scientifically approach how the mind of apes evolved into our own is to comparatively study the minds of apes and developing children to ascertain what is exclusively human in human nature. In Becoming Human: …

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Brain scient reveals that trust is our "default state"

Robert Sapolsky on Trust, Morality, and Justice

Filed under: Evolution of Emotion, Evolutionary psychology, Justice

THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE and up-to-date lay book on the science of behavior is Stanford neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017). The book is an encyclopedic compendium of behavioral science, written with folksy, down-home idiom. Here he lays out evidence that the fundamental “default” of human social behavior …

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A Liberal Theory of Human Nature

Haidt on Us-vs-Them

Filed under: Evolutionary psychology, Group Selection, Human Nature, Justice | 2 Comments

Below is a TED talk by Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist who wrote The Righteous Mind, in which he introduced six belief categories: important issues to Democrats are care/harm, liberty/oppression, and fairness/cheating, whereas for Republicans the most important issues are loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/ degradation. In this video he tells us that openness to new …

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Anti-Trump for Dummies

Anti-Trumpitude for Dummies

Filed under: Ancient human migration, Belief, Evolution of Emotion, Justice, Self domestication

. . . Justice is The Human Instinct Anthropologist Christopher Boehm has been a pioneer in documenting in nomadic hunter-gatherers their “deliberate use of social sanctioning to enforce political equality among fully adult males including ridicule, shunning, and even killing those with persistently selfish dominance behavior,” giving detailed examples from tribes on every continent. Why …

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