Quotes from Joseph Heath

Unfortunately, the dominant inclination among economists has not been to expand the model of rational action, but rather to drop the rationality postulate entirely, in favor of evolutionary or behavioral models of action. Thus cooperation often gets mentioned in the same breath as cognitive biases, framing effects, bounded rationality, and other well-known instances in which individuals are clearly violating the canons of ideal rationality.

if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system."18

The search for a new type of rationality became just another form of antirationalism.

that, when it comes to humanity, "the perfection of our nature and capability of happiness, must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue, and knowledge, that distinguish the individual, and direct the laws which bind society.

As individuals, we have enormous difficulty thinking the negative. We see patterns all around us, and each new day brings new evidence that confirms our belief in them. Thinking through the hypothetical "What if I am wrong?" is not something that comes naturally. Having other people around whose sole interest lies in doing just that not only serves as an external corrective, it also pushes us to think in a way that our thoughts do not naturally go.

our ability to enter into cooperative relations with one another is based upon the rational insight that we can all be better off if we follow some mutually agreed-upon rules.22

The grouper could wait until the gobie was finished removing ectoparasites, then eat it, yet refrains from doing so.

while reciprocal altruism does require a higher level of cognitive sophistication and behavioral flexibility than kin selection altruism, insofar as the altruist must be able to recognize free riders and discontinue interactions with them, too much cognitive sophistication may in the end undermine the altruistic impulse.

One of the downsides of working in philosophy is that it attracts a lot of people with mental-health problems.

it is unfair to characterize the work of postmodernists as "bad writing," despite the fact that a lot of it is actually bad writing.

As Hobbes saw clearly, people don't have to be evil to get into collective action problems. They just have to be human.

The question is, if we already know what the right and the wrong answers are to moral questions, prior to the formulation of an abstract principle, what is the point of formulating the principle?

The idea that people could get along fine with just markets, and no government, turned out to rest upon a version of what economists call the "compositional fallacy.

The environments that are the most hostile from the standpoint of rationality are those that are the most commercial.

When altruistic behavior benefits individuals belonging to another species, it is impossible for the gene to be benefiting some other copy of itself.

The Hobbesian state of nature is really just a state of total market failure. Out of this state of nature, we have been able to build up a set of institutions that promote co-operation and therefore improve efficiency. Markets are one institution of this type. But they are extremely limited in their range, since property rights apply only to a tiny fraction of the ingredients we require for successful living.

There are a variety of traits that set humans apart from our closest primate relatives. The "big four" are language, rationality, culture, and morality (or in more precise terms, "syntacticized language," "domain-general intelligence," "cumulative cultural inheritance," and "ultrasociality").

Here the rule-utilitarian believes that the only justifiable rules are ones that will promote the greatest happiness, when generally adhered to in a deontic fashion. Thus the rule-utilitarian rejects "deontology" as a theory of moral justification, but accepts deontic constraints as an essential element of moral action.

If you had to give a child just one piece of advice upon entering a shopping mall, a good suggestion might be "Remember that everything—and by that I mean everything—is a trick to take your money.

More and more frequently, we will find ourselves in the position of the lower animals—with a mental apparatus that is unequipped to deal thoroughly with the intricacy and richness of the outside environment." The irony is that, "unlike the animals, whose cognitive powers have always been relatively deficient, we have created our own deficiency by constructing a radically more complex world.