I think you go too far by also postulating that (in the evolutionary past) it would be natural to assume that every game is zero-sum. There are clearly a lot of cooperative interactions in that kind of environment. Every interaction has a ‘winner’ and a ‘loser’ because of the focus on egalitarianism: the ‘loser’ is the one who got the worse end of the deal (according to the partly-understood, partly-hypothetical ideal of fairness). Ganging up on whoever keeps getting the best side of deals is a natural way to enforce fair splits.
Which seems different from the involvement heuristic you mention. The involvement heuristic (EG, blame the CEO for anything the company does) has no obvious reason to be asymmetric. It seems dumb. If we’re not sure how to assign credit, punishing everyone involved seems to go hand in hand with rewarding everyone involved.
So I would still think the main reason for asymmetric justice is coordination around norms (such as fairness norms) that should almost always be followed. It doesn’t make sense to reward people for fairness if almost everyone is supposed to be fair almost all of the time. It makes far more sense to punish the unfair.
So, yeah, then when you couple that with the involvement heuristic… you get copenhagen-ethics.
I think you go too far by also postulating that (in the evolutionary past) it would be natural to assume that every game is zero-sum. There are clearly a lot of cooperative interactions in that kind of environment. Every interaction has a ‘winner’ and a ‘loser’ because of the focus on egalitarianism: the ‘loser’ is the one who got the worse end of the deal (according to the partly-understood, partly-hypothetical ideal of fairness). Ganging up on whoever keeps getting the best side of deals is a natural way to enforce fair splits.
Which seems different from the involvement heuristic you mention. The involvement heuristic (EG, blame the CEO for anything the company does) has no obvious reason to be asymmetric. It seems dumb. If we’re not sure how to assign credit, punishing everyone involved seems to go hand in hand with rewarding everyone involved.
So I would still think the main reason for asymmetric justice is coordination around norms (such as fairness norms) that should almost always be followed. It doesn’t make sense to reward people for fairness if almost everyone is supposed to be fair almost all of the time. It makes far more sense to punish the unfair.
So, yeah, then when you couple that with the involvement heuristic… you get copenhagen-ethics.
Sucks.