Announcements

Hi all - As most of you know, classes have been cancelled for Thursday, Feb. 3rd on account of faculty meetings. We will therefore reconvene next Tuesday and discuss the readings which were originally assigned for 2/3: Ethics Reader, pp. 179-197.

For those of you who missed class on Tuesday 2/1, we discussed the readings on reciprocity. The readings we focused on in class were Frans de Waal's Chimpanzee Justice, Tony Ashworth's Live and Let Live, Bruno Malinowski's The Kula Ring, and Robert Trivers', The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism.

Some notes on the significance of reciprocity for ethics as discussed in class

1. Reciprocity is a key phenomenon for ethics. If ethics is largely about cooperative behavior between people which mutually benefits them, reciprocity seems to be key to ethics and at the foundation of what we mean by equality, fairness, and recognition. Make sure you understand what reciprocity is, can define it and can explain its significance for understanding the origins of ethics.

2. Ethical relativism vs. evidence of the universal appearance of reciprocity in the biological world - If we focus on the differences between how different peoples live, we can easily reach the conclusion that there are no objective ethical standards shared by human beings generally (consider the example of different burial practices described by Singer on p. 57). On the other hand, examples of reciprocity can be found not only in many different human societies but even in other non-human primate societies such as Chimpanzees. You should be able to identify some of these examples (as described in the papers mentioned above).

3. Darwinian/evolutionary explanation of reciprocity - As discussed in the first class, Darwin argued that ethics evolves in nature, is part of the natural world, not something imposed on it somehow from above. All creatures are benefited from cooperating with each other as much as they can unless it interferes or threatens their survival. On Tuesday, we looked at Robert Trivers' paper on the evolution of reciprocity as a more detailed explanation of how natural selection may have evolved reciprocal behaviors in human beings and other primates. You should be able to explain in outline (without all the technical details) the basic argument for why reciprocity evolved in the human struggle for survival.