Out of spite? On the evolutionary origins of punishment

There is a consensus about the evolutionary origins of punishment. The consensus is not about the exact historical sequences that led to the evolution of punishment, for there could be a diversity of factors potentially responsible and which factors are present in human evolutionary history is a matter of ongoing investigation and debate. Instead, the consensus is about the primary functional role and the specific evolutionary challenge associated with punishment. Punishment evolved to stabilize cooperation and fair social behavior. The act of punishing itself is a kind of altruistic behavior, and therefore it faces a special sort of "second order" free-rider problem that needs to be overcome via some constellation of evolutionary factors, such as group selection, kin selection, spatial or network structure, reputation tracking, or some combination (see, for instance, Fehr and Gächter 2002 or Boyd, et al. 2003). We suspect that there is an alternative account that deserves a hearing, an account where punishment does not face a free-rider problem and may emerge without association with cooperation or fairness. To present that account, we need to take a circuitous approach, starting with a review of the consensus in order to identify its strengths and flaws. Then we need to take a detour, exploring some of the factors that promote the evolution of harmful social behavior, often called spite, and how this harmful behavior can interact with other, more cooperative social behaviors (Jensen 2010). With those resources we can show how conditional harmful behavior can emerge and be harnessed (or exapted) as enforcement of other behavioral patterns. In short: punishment-like behavior may have evolved first, paving the way for cooperation and fairness to evolve later.

Yet that very formulation may strike many as containing a conceptual error: individuals cannot punish deviations from cooperative norms or behavioral patterns that have not yet evolved. This response makes the hypothesis that the evolution of punishment occurred after cooperation or in response to stresses to established cooperative patterns almost a definitional matter. We will argue that the potential evolutionary scenarios may be more complex, and that we should not exclude the possibility that conditional harmful behavior evolved before and independently from cooperative behavior. This calls for philosophical analysis of our concept of punishment and the relationship between punishment and the broader category of harmful social behavior. We opt for a minimal and inclusive definition of punishment. Such an approach allows us to unify relevant work on social behavior in both human and non-human animals. In addition, it helps us make clear how harmful behavior can evolve, and subsequently become connected to cooperation, effectively coopted as punishment.

Once we sharpen our concept of punishment and take seriously the "punishment first" hypothesis, we will show that the classification of punishment as "altruistic" obscures some genuine puzzles surrounding the purported fitness costs and benefits often associated with punishment. We suspect that genuinely altruistic punishment is much rarer than supposed. Our alternative hypothesis is able to avoid the puzzles faced by the consensus view and provides a kind of dissolution to the second order free-rider problem. However, this is not to say the alternative does not have its distinct evolutionary hurdles. In particular, the origin and spread harmful behavior requires precise conditions (West and Gardner 2010). We conclude by recasting the evolutionary challenge facing punishment as a dilemma between two potential origins, each presenting their unique difficulties.

Boyd, R., H. Gintis, S. Bowles, and P. Richerson. 2003. "The evolution of altruistic punishment." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100(6):3531-3535.

Fehr, E. and S. Gächter. 2002. "Altruistic punishment in humans." Nature 415:137-140.

Jensen, K. 2010. "Punishment and spite, the dark side of cooperation." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 365:2635-2650.

West, S. A. and A. Gardner. 2010. "Altruism, spite, and greenbeards." Science 327:1341-1344.