Origins of virtue - Chapters 2 and 10
2. Division of labor
- Hutterites example: community that actually cares for each other. Ridley says that our society is not like that, we tend to favor relatives over everyone else.
- Selfishness is almost the definition of vice
- We are all huterites at heart, we all share a belief in pursuing the greater good.
- We praise selflessness.
- Humans are dependent on each other.
- It is specialization that makes human society greater than the sum of its parts.
Groupishness
- If a creature puts the greater good ahead of its individual interests, it is because its fate is inextricably tied to that of the group: it shares the group's fate.
- Human beings cooperate at a level other than the family.
- This makes benevolence harder to explain.
- Nepotism is seen as a bad thing. Favoring relatives is seen as corruption.
The parable of the pin-maker
- The advantages of society are those provided by the division of labor.
- Because each person is a specialist of some sort, the sums of all our efforts are greater than they would be if each of us had to be a jack of all trades.
- An example of this is the human body, each organ, each cell, plays a separate part in the functioning of the body.
- Adam Smith was the first to recognize that the division of labor is what makes human society more than the sum of its parts.
- The reasons for this advantage lay in three consequences:
- Improving dexterity at one activity through practice
- Save time that would otherwise be spent switching from task to task
- It pays off to invent machinery that speeds up the task
- He also said that the division of labor increased with:
- The size of the market
- With the improvement in transport and communication
- By specializing at the level of the individual, the species can generalize at the level of the colony
- Smith made the paradoxical argument that social benefits derive from individual vices
- Self ambition leads to industry, resentment discourages aggression, vanity causes acts of kindness
- "It is not from the benevolece of the butcher that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest"
- This also does not mean that the butcher is malevolent
- It allows for trade
- The customer gets tbe product cheaper
- The producer makes enough to exchange for all the other goods he needs
- It is not a zero-sum game
- Between strangers, the invisible hand of the market, distributing selfish ambitions, is fairer
The technological stone age
- Economists conclude that this specialization is modern invention.
- Ridley disagrees
- It is hard to imagine any group of grown men working together as a team for a fairly long period of time without some similar sort of specializations emerging.
- Husband and wife have divided chores
10. Gains from trade
- Example: Yir Yoront
- Australian tribe that had a sophisticated system of trade
- Trade is the beneficient side of human groupishness
- We segregate into territorial groups, which allows for trade
- The glue of alliances is trade
- Example: Yanomano villages
- Each village could supply its own wants, but they choose not to to keep trade open
- When they fell out with their allies, they quickly remembered the skill to produce their own stuff
The merchant law
- Trade predeced law
- Modern commercial law was invented and enforced not by governments, but by merchants themselves
- As markets grew, merchants wanted to exploit the law of comparative advantage between countries
- But commercing in a foreign country meant that the rules were different and they had no assurance that theywouldn't be cheated
- So merchants got together to form a universal set of rules of the game
- It was voluntarily places and voluntarily enforced
- Good customs that worked drove out bad by natural selection and so the law evolved
- Then middlemen and bankers emerged
- Finally, the government enacted into national law these merchant customs, and took the credit for it
Silver and gold
- Arabs and Crusades changed the value of silver and gold in their regions
