Is there a flaw in the moral psychology of modern social cooperation? Does this flaw condemn social groups the size of nations to eternal cycles of political and economic conflict? Is it inevitable that fairness in social cooperation will disproportionately favor the well-being of the more talented and capable?

How else can we explain the impact of a behavioral bias unfit for modern times, yet essential to the origins of social cooperation--the desire to harm violators of norms and standards accepted as right or good even at the cost of harming oneself or others.¹ How else are we to explain why human rights and economic equality remain fragile and uncertain some 5500 years since the story of civilizations began. What other explanation is there as to why the most powerful military and economic nation on earth has income, wealth and healthcare inequalities on a par with undeveloped nations.

Therefore, Rational Well Being begins:

Any principle or rule of conduct accepted as right or good that has a significant affect upon personal freedom or economic distribution can also function as a harm.

The Ethical World Of Justified Harms

Over the course of human evolution, social cooperation between unrelated individuals became dependent upon a form of altruistic punishment I call harms that function as social and moral goods.²

When we left the darkness of our hominid past, we entered the grey worlds of a paradox, and just as there is no escape from our genetic history, there is no exit from the paradox of the right and the good. All ethical theories that deny the moral legitimacy of harm allow exceptions peppered with parochial, culture-based posits and biases. The ethical system of common morality is a good example. Common morality promotes the virtue of harm-avoidance yet for every moral rule prohibiting harm there can be justifiable exceptions.

Although some interpersonal comparisons of harm are obvious such as killing and torture, Rational Well Being is concerned with more subtle and controversial social and economic harms that, when multiplied, destroy social cohesion, civility, optimism and trust.

The ethical problems of justified harms are the single most important factor in the problem of distributive fairness. From the very first complex human societies, to the global arena of nations that populate the world today, the justified harms of those in power have regulated the distribution of benefits and advantages within and between cooperating groups.

Between any two societies, differences in conceptions of fairness, and consequently the meaning of justice and welfare, can be evaluated in terms of differences in the justified harms each employs to produce its political and economic outcomes. The more income, wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few, the more these justified harms will reflect monistic biases that support the benefits of such concentrations over pluralistic alternatives to individual well-being.

The Biology Of Justified Harms

Research in cognitive-neuroscience has demonstrated that everything the brain produces should be understood as a biological process, culture being no exception.³ This means every thought, idea and feeling, or private or public action, is part of a web of biological processes that constantly shape our genes, behaviors and social reality. It also means that…

Normative moral behavior emerges from a social interplay between our individual biological similarities and differences. Small yet significant alterations in key biological processes that produce these behavioral similarities and differences can alter normative and non-normative standards of moral conduct.

While our individual biological similarities ensure proportional physiological needs, social aspirations and moral attitudes, our individual differences assure variation and disagreement. For this reason, any principle, rule or act with important political, economic, religious or moral consequences can function as either a harm or a good.

Reciprocal altruism is a key biological similarity essential to social cooperation. This form of altruism ensures benefits individual cooperators would not otherwise acquire while altruistic punishment assures compliance to distributive rules accepted as legitimate. However, distributive rules and assessments of legitimacy will vary between individuals and social groups. And when these variations clash, similar altruistic motives and behaviors can function as egoistic differences.

If the neurobiological processes that produce the colors, tones, tastes and smells that sustain social reality are altered in any significant way, our view of the world changes, and decision-making with it. For example, it is not commonly understood that our shared perceptual representations of a particular color are created in our brains.⁴ External to the brain, these representations exist as electromagnetic waves. Yet, despite the fact that our individual genetic similarities produce similar mental representations, it is also a fact that the meaning of these representations is not uniform. Dissimilarities in the synaptic processing of neurohormones and neurotransmitters, or the functional integrity of the hippocampus or caudate nucleus, offer greater explanatory power as to why there are individual differences in decision-making than explanations based in philosophical or theological theories that fail to incorporate these biological factors.

Fairness

Is motivating people to improve their individual well-being by learning how to improve the well-being of others a senseless, impractical way of life?

Only a predatory brain could explain and defend human rights in terms that concentrate income, wealth and power into the hands of a few. And only a predatory brain could disguise and defend the benefits of economic systems that produce income and wealth inequalities while devouring the last remaining scarce resources on Earth.

Will the predatory brain always win out? Are the economic machines we build mirrors of our raptorial motives?

In a world of scarce resources and unequal capabilities, some individual preferences will be rejected based upon socioeconomic codes of conduct and procedural definitions of fairness. Yet, from the perspective of those whose preferences have been rejected or denied, some of these codes of conduct and definitions of fairness will be unfair. Although it is easy to deny a burglar the right to burgle, when is it unfair to deny a person adequate income, social self-worth, nutrition, health care, housing and community support? And even when it is necessary to separate certain people from society to protect potential victims, is retribution or prevention the goal? Does being civilized mean harming those who harm, or does it mean learning how to take the harm out of punishment?

The dominant market economic systems of our day propose the logic that being more efficient improves everyone’s state of well-being, but when income and wealth are concentrated, improved efficiency does not reduce income inequality. The United States since World War II is an example. In 2005 we were significantly more efficient than in 1947, yet income inequality in 2005 is worse.⁵ When the benefits of improved market efficiencies are not evenly distributed, the social problems created by scarce resources and unequal capabilities reinforce inequalities that mock democratic values. Negative human rights are half-rights that breed income inequality while negative and positive rights combined allow for long overdue market innovations. Resolving this conflict between human rights and income/wealth inequality is a key social goal of Rational Well Being.

Living a life of Rational Well Being means creating a lifestyle that rejects income inequality dependent value systems, retribution-based forms of corrective justice, unequal access to affordable and effective health care outcomes, misdirected educational goals and unequal distributions of essential social technologies that separate societies into eternal camps of haves and have-nots.

Notes

1. Below you will find a sampling of sources that discuss the role of altruistic punishment (strong reciprocity) in social cooperation. According to de Quervain et al, “Altruistic punishment is probably a key element in explaining the unprecedented level of cooperation in human societies.” See “The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment” below.
   
   Although many authors see altruistic punishment from a positive social perspective, I take a perspective that Herbert Gintis discusses when reviewing Paul Seabright’s book: The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life in Nature (volume 431, 16 September 2004). The following makes my point:
   
   Seabright also analyses the dark side of strong reciprocity, which is the tendency to exhibit hostility to “outsiders” in the name of “insider” cooperation. “Cooperation within a group,” he observes, “can make the group more lethally aggressive in its dealing with outsiders.” “The systematic killing of unrelated individuals is so common among humans, he adds, that it “cannot be described as exceptional, pathological, or disturbed”. He concludes that “what Adam Smith famously described as the human propensity to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ has always coexisted uneasily with a rival temptation to take, bully, and extort.”
   
   Dominique J.-F. de Quervain, Urs Fischbacher, Valerie Treyer, Melanie Schellhammer, Ulrich Schnyder, Alfred Buck, Ernst Fehr, “The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment,” Science Vol. 305 27 August 2004: 1254-1258; Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter, “Altruistic punishment in humans,” Nature 415, 2002: 137-140; Ernst Fehr & Bettina Rockenbach, “Detrimental effects of sanctions on human altruism,” Nature 422, 13 March 2003: 137-140; Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher, “Social norms and human cooperation,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol. 8 No. 4 April 2004: 185-190; Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher, “The nature of human altruism,” Nature 425 23 October 2003: 785-791. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “Behavioural science: Homo reciprocans”, Nature 415; Robert M. Sapolsky, “Cheaters and Chumps,” Natural History 6/02: 20-24.
2. I coined the terms “harms that function as social and moral goods,” “justified harmful actions” and “justified harms” based upon the work of Fehr, Gachter, Sapolsky, Seabright, and Beauchamp and Childress in Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 5^th Edition.
3. Eric Kandel et al, “Cellular Mechanisms of Learning and the Biological Basis of Individuality,” Principles of Neural Science 4^th edition, (McGraw-Hill, 2000), 1277.
4. Esther P. Gardner and John H. Martin, “Coding of Sensory Information,” The Principles of Neural Science, 4^th edition, ed. Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, Thomas M. Jessel, (McGraw-Hill Companies, 2000) 412-429.
5. According to the US Census Bureau report, “The Changing Shape of the Nation’s Income Distribution, 1947-1998” income inequality ( a standard measure of income inequality) decreased 7.5%, but since 1968 the trend has reversed. In the same report, the Gini coefficient was .397 in 1975, .419 in 1985 and .450 in 1995 (the higher the coefficient the greater the income inequality). In a subsequent report by the Census Bureau (Selected Measures Of Household Income Dispersion 1967-2005), the Gini coefficient was .469 in 2005.