| | Mike,
According to my understanding of this model, Michael Milken was punished specifically and only because his earnings were deemed "unfair." The technical violation of the law was irrelevant according to this model: anthropologically, Milken's punishment was a consequence of the world religions that make large communities possible. Made. The world religions that made large communities possible. Because of moral (philosophical) progress, world religions are no longer needed in order to make large communities possible. For instance, if you cloned me (or others here) thousands of times and put us all on an island together (and if ideas got transferred genetically), then I would get along with myselves -- like I would get along with a bunch of "you"s, though I'd feel more apprehension disagreeing with you, because that would mean that I disagree with everybody (if it was thousands of clones of you).
:-)
Don't get me wrong, I'd still disagree with you from time to time, but we are people who have learned that disagreement can be done agreeably. Now, admittedly, the people of Earth are on different points along a continuum of moral or philosophical progress -- so it's not like world religions could just disappear overnight and everything would be hunky-dory. If you try too hard to fix something, then you will break it even more (imagine slamming 2 broken pieces of a brittle porcelain vase together).
I add that the largess distributed by Bill and Melinda Gates, George Soros, and others (following in the tradition of Rockefellar, Carnegie, W. T Grant, and many many more), is exactly the behavior predicted by this model. The very wealthy are giving away "fair shares" to anonymous others in order to not be punished by Third Parties. At least, that is one way to look at it... This is akin to the "just throw them a bone" meat-sharing noted in primates.
While it sounds compelling and easy to accept I question whether fairness in cash transactions really do attempt to mimic the trust of a small group society. In these studies are tribes whose ethos is that you never have to share what comes to you by good fortune. Also in these studies are tribes whose members learn "perfect self interest" in being willing to accept any gift no matter how small, rather than decline an "unfair" gift. So, given those two, I have to question the premise because it is not clear that small group local tribe society is inherently "fair." This reminds me of something I read in either Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, Steel, or in Pinker's The Blank Slate, or in Michael Shermer's The Science of Good and Evil (paraphrased): Every person on the planet thinks that murder is wrong, but people have differing definitions of murder -- so that some "murders" aren't wrong in some societies, because they aren't considered to be murders in those societies.
:-)
Also, I do nod to their claim that "world religions" - Islam and Christianity - may indeed impel toward "fairness" with their promise of a Judgment in the afterlife. But that would have to be compared and contrasted, say with Buddhism and Confucianism, especially in China, which in its long history had several notable periods of mercantile expansion and explosions in literacy. And today, such families both at "home" and here in the USA, have other attributes of stability that seem important to successful commercial society.
And finally we have no centuries-long tradition of an Objectivist society to which to compare all of those.
Great points.
Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 9/24, 8:29pm)
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