ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Adam Smith and the Evolutionary Psychology: the sentiment of justice reconsidered.
Author: Blanco Maria
In this paper, an effort is made in order to analyse the economic and philosophical ideas of Adam Smith from a new perspective: the Evolutionary Psychology (E.P.). This discipline is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind. It is not an area of study, like reasoning, or social behaviour. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it. The human mind is best understood not as a general purpose computer but as a set of specialized software modules, each designed to deal with a particular subset of problems. Those programs have been designed by Darwinian evolution to produce reproductive success in our environment of evolutionary adaptiveness—the hunter-gatherer environment in which our species spent most of its species history. Taking Cosmides and Tooby work as a point of depart, I try to compare Adam Smith’s view of invisible hand, exchange, and especially the sentiment of justice –as stated in the Theory of Moral Sentiments- with the conclusions that E.P. researchers draw from their studies.
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