Sociopaths rarely seem to do well for long…which will require another just so story in search of some evolutionary reason why they never totally disappear.ġ. Remember that there always have been a few genuine sociopaths who want all the benefits but couldn’t care less about being worthy. Of course this can’t be proven or disproven but the problem doesn’t seem more difficult to me than many others. Getting that genuine instinctual desire to be worthy might be the most efficient way get a better evolutionary result. Evolution normally settles for a cheap but efficient heuristic over some costlier but much more accurate process.Īlmost everyone who has thought seriously about free will and determinism has soon realized that we seem to have a lot more freedom to do what we want than to change what we desire. If pro-social behavior usually has an evolutionary benefit then some genetic installation of an instinct to really be a good person might well be the most resource efficient way to evoke the behavior. This is why Tolstoy pointed out that happy families are all alike in many ways but there are a much, much larger number of ways to make a family unhappy. Probably because more paths to the good outcome come along with lots more paths to a bad outcome. How could more evolutionary paths to a good result be bad?

If I understood you correctly, your point was that getting the evolutionary benefits of being thought of as a good person can’t be more – and could be less – beneficial for survival than getting all the benefits and not needing to necessarily really be worthy.

Late in the podcast you indicated that you were skeptical that evolutionary processes alone could account for a genuine desire to be actually worthy of being thought of as a good person by others.

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