Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Lewis & Clark College

Reciprocal Altruism and Commitment Problems

Added on by jay odenbaugh.
 Prisoner's Dilemma

Prisoner's Dilemma

We have explored both Robert Triver's account of reciprocal altruism and Robert Frank's account of commitment problems and devices. Both are attempts to explain how something like Humean "sympathy" could have evolved by natural selection with regard to non-kin.

Questions: How do their approaches differ? Is one approach better than the other how-possibly explanation for the evolution of the emotions? Why?