300184 Natural Justice. The Evolution and Function of Fairness-Norms. Reading Binmore (S) (SoSe 2017)

Natural Justice. The Evolution and Function of Fairness-Norms

Though a concern for justice has often been considered an important motive of sociological thinking, research, and going public, theories of justice have only attracted very little interest among sociologists. Despite the attempts of Rawls and Habermas almost half a century ago, the quest for a just society nowadays seems too big to tackle and people from cultural studies and the humanities have repeatedly taught us, that it is all a question of culture anyway. But still, we have a certain notion of how far to give way when walking on one of the university´s corridors facing someone approaching, aiming for the opposite direction. We also know how to adapt, should this person be carrying a heavy load of books or a baby on his arms. We have a more or less precise feeling about how long a friend will expect us to wait for her and also know, should we be late, that our superiors would most certainly be less patient. To put this into more general terms: We intuitively know how to coordinate our behaviors when there is no time or opportunity to bargain and, so we will argue in this seminar, we do coordinate on something closely resembling an egalitarian fairness norm readjusted by some concern for social status, need, effort made etc. Though we might have only small inklings about what a just society might look like, we have quite specific feelings about fairness on the level of street-level interactions.
In this seminar we will read Ken Binmore´s book Natural Justice (OUP 2005) in order to find out why this should be so, how fairness norms did evolve, how interpersonal comparisons are made and how the game of morals is played. Binmore´s argument uses a number of concepts and techniques from game theory. These will be explained as we go along and there are no special requirements for attending this course.

Literature:

Ken Binmore, Natural Justice, Oxford U.P. 2005.