Abstract
In this essay I argue that vanity is a Janus-faced feature of social cooperation: as Hobbes stresses, it certainly can lead to conflict, yet it can also motivate enforcing norms of fairness. What Hobbes call “vain glorious” individuals will walk away from “vile and contemptible” Pareto gains. A society composed of both egoists and glory-seekers is thus more likely to stabilize fair terms of cooperation than even the most enlightened society of self-interested agents. Rather than, as in many economically-inspired analyses of social order such as James Buchanan’s in The Limits of Liberty, modeling a society of self-interested agents, we would do better to model polymorphic populations, containing multiple agent types.
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- 1.
Buchanan (1975, p. 118) sometimes pursues this possibility.
- 2.
On Buchanan ’s (1975: Chaps. 2 and 5) account, if the slaves would be enslaved in the state of nature they are rational to accept this offer; if they believe they could successfully rebel and obtain another deal, they have a threat advantage in changing the contract.
- 3.
- 4.
Data from Henrich and Smith (2004). The Machiguenga and the Mapuche are small-scale societies; the other results are from urban university students in the United States, Israel, and Indonesia.
- 5.
Gauthier (1994) recognizes that threats pose special problems.
- 6.
For learning in Ultimatum Games , see Eric van Damme et al. (2014, p. 296ff).
- 7.
Reported by Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society, pp. 121–122.
- 8.
- 9.
Cf. Brennan et al. (2013, pp. 1–14).
- 10.
For an experiment focusing on the role of moral anger in trust games, see Thulin and Bicchieri (2016).
- 11.
We can add positive value that would arise because of pleasure or happiness due to a high offer, treating this as a negative in the second term. As we shall see positive emotions have been measured in Ultimatum-like games, but our real concern is why one would reject an offer where the value of the monetary is above zero, and so what negative (emotional) valuation could drive total value below zero.
- 12.
The norm regulates the relation between the X and n.
- 13.
For simplicity, I leave aside decreasing marginal utility of money.
- 14.
This is not to say that stakes have no effect, as stakes rose, “responders (pooled over all rounds) rejected offers less often” (Slonim and Roth 1998, p. 591), thus supporting a prediction of the Reactive Emotions View.
- 15.
The variability of destruction is meant to uncover the relation of degree of emotional response to degree of punishment; I discuss presently a version of Power-to-Take that gives only limited punishment options which, not too surprisingly, considerably blunts the importance of emotions .
- 16.
This is typical of takings in Power-to-Take Games; see Reuben and van Winden (2010).
- 17.
“In both conditions, the sequence of actions was as follows. Before subjects played the one-shot PTT-game, they were randomly divided into two groups. One group was referred to as participants A (the take authorities) and the other as participants B (the responders). Subsequently, random pairs of a responder and a take authority were formed by letting take authorities draw a coded envelope from a box. The envelope contained a form on which the endowment of both participant A and participant B was stated. The take authorities then had to fill in a take rate and put the form back in the envelope again. After the envelopes were collected, we asked the take authorities to report their emotions as well as their expectation of what the responder would do. The envelopes were brought to the matched responders who filled in the part of their endowments to be destroyed. The envelopes containing the forms were then returned to the take authorities for their information. Meanwhile, responders were asked to indicate which take rate they had expected and how intensely they had experienced several emotions after having learned about the take rate. After completing the questionnaires and collecting all envelopes, subjects were privately paid outside the laboratory by the cashier who was not present during the experiment. Experimenters were not able to see what decisions subjects made in the game and how much they earned” (Reuben and van Winden 2010, p. 415).
- 18.
Experiments by Thulin and Bicchieri (2016) have shown that “moral outrage”—which is closely related to anger—also seems to underlie third-party compensation behavior, when norm violation has occurred. This is important: we should not suppose that negative emotions must be attached to a preference to punish violators, as opposed to compensating victims. It is important, however, that Thulin and Bicchieri’s target emotion appear distinctly moral; in one study emotions were measured, for example, on a 7-pount scale from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree” with statements such as “I feel angry when I learn about people suffering from unfairness” and “I think it’s shameful when injustice is allowed to occur.” These emotions are thus clearly moral emotions , presupposing a normative content.
- 19.
Amour-propre must not be confused with love of self: for they differ both in themselves and in their effects. Love of self is a natural feeling which leads every animal to look to its own preservation, and which, guided in man by reason and modified by compassion, creates humanity and virtue. Amour-propre is a purely relative and factitious feeling, which arises in the state of society, leads each individual to make more of himself than of any other, causes all the mutual damage men inflict one on another, and is the real source of the “sense of honour” (Rousseau 1975, p. 66).
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Acknowledgements
My thanks to Chad Van Schoelandt for comments and suggestions; thanks too to fellow participants at the Workshop on Sharing, University of Manchester and the Workshop on Exploitation , University of San Diego. My special thanks to David Wiens for his comments.
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Gaus, G. (2018). In Defense of (Some) Vainglory: The Advantages of Polymorphic Hobbesianism. In: Wagner, R. (eds) James M. Buchanan. Remaking Economics: Eminent Post-War Economists. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03080-3_33
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