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Evolutionary Explanations of Distributive Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

J. McKenzie Alexander
J. McKenzie Alexander*
Affiliation:
Logic & Philosophy of Science, University of California, Irvine
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author, Logic & Philosophy of Science, School of Social Sciences, 3151 Social Sciences Plaza, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-5100; email: jalex@uci.edu.
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Abstract

Evolutionary game theoretic accounts of justice attempt to explain our willingness to follow certain principles of justice by appealing to robustness properties possessed by those principles. Skyrms (1996) offers one sketch of how such an account might go for divide-the-dollar, the simplest version of the Nash bargaining game, using the replicator dynamics of Taylor and Jonker (1978). In a recent article, D'Arms et al. (1998) criticize his account and describe a model which, they allege, undermines his theory. I sketch a theory of evolutionary explanations of justice which avoids their methodological criticisms, and develop a spatial model of divide-the-dollar with more robust convergence properties than the models of Skyrms (1996) and D'Arms et al. (1998).

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , September 2000 , pp. 490 - 516
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I would like to thank Brian Skyrms, Penelope Maddy, and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions regarding an earlier draft of this paper.

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