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Strategic Altruism
Nice Nazis, friendly factory farmers, and the evolution of sincere but selective moral instincts
His advice was directed at rulers navigating the city-states of Renaissance Italy, but the insight applies whenever reputation management is the driver of friendly and fair-minded behaviour, which is the case with human beings. Indeed, the very idea of caring about strangers seems to be strongly linked to reputational incentives that emerge in highly individualistic, fluid social ecologies in which people benefit from signalling “ impersonal prosociality ”. For now, though, I will merely note that competitive altruism and virtue signalling seem to play a major role: For complex and contingent reasons, it became reputationally profitable within specific societies over the past several centuries to expand the domain of moral considerations to encompass all humans.
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