I just thought that maybe the video shared something with the notion of a gift in the community that we have been discussing.
sorry video might not work all the time so this is the link:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAFQ5kUHPkY/r:f
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This is very sweet. Many such demonstrations strongly suggest that something meaningfully akin to a sense of fairness runs quite deep in the evolutionary history of social animals. Conceptually, this is unsurprising, as something like it would seem indispensable for being a social animal at all. Utilitarians may try to parse it as a "gene for barter," but I think the example makes it clear that there's more than quid pro quo here -- or rather that quid pro quo is a special case of a more general underlying sense of sharing or gift.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this; it is touching, and funny. Sweet monkeys. I agree with Matt that there is something innate happening here, fairness seems to be hard-wired in these animals.
ReplyDeleteI showed this to my roommate, who exclaimed, "humans wouldn't do this!" I wonder if this is true; as Matt and Keane wrote, there seems to be something innate here that perhaps humans would override for the sake of greed.
ReplyDeleteSome humans would, some wouldn't. Same goes for monkeys. A hard-wired tendency is still just a tendency, and many contingencies can override it. Some monkeys, for example, are just jerks. (--;
ReplyDelete