The Evolution of a Sense of Justice
Everyone possesses a sense of justice, however misguided it may be. This chapter argues that to account for the acquisition of a sense of justice, we must identify the mental mechanisms that produce it, and explain how they originated and became refined in the course of human evolution. Explaining how a sense of justice originated in the human species helps us understand what it is, what it is for, how it is designed, what activates it, and why it sometimes fails to give rise to fair judgments and behaviors.
Keywords: sense of justice, evolutionary psychology, mental mechanisms
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