Nicolas Baumard, Jean-Baptiste André, Dan Sperber (2013), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36(1), 59–78; open peer commentary and authors’ Response, 78–122 — DOI-10.1017/S0140525X11002202
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 in the morality-as-cooperation batch (ADR-018). No anthology topic holds it. It carries no instruction for machine-learning practice; its economic games are human experiments.
The record already holds the later work of two of its authors: Fitouchi, André and Baumard’s moral disciplining (LIT-101, read in NOTE-132), which extends the same mutualistic programme to puritanical norms. The Response here (R4.4) is the first sketch of that move. It answers the Haidt, Koller and Dias chicken case by arguing that sexual restraint is a contribution to a monogamous arrangement, so promiscuity is free-riding. NOTE-132 reports how far LIT-101 took the argument.
Its bearing on morality-as-cooperation, set out in NOTE-407:
- Same premise, opposite cut. Both theories place morality in the evolution of cooperation and both use game theory. Morality-as- cooperation (LIT-047, read in NOTE-034) counts seven kinds of cooperation as moral domains, including helping kin and helping one’s group. This paper counts one, fair distribution, and says kin altruism and friendship are “not intrinsically moral” because they rest on favouritism (p. 60). LIT-047’s seven are, on this view, mostly non-moral dispositions that are moralized by fairness where they are moralized at all.
- Fairness is LIT-047’s rarest domain. In LIT-047’s sixty societies, “dividing disputed resources” was observed in 9 (15%), against 47 for kin and 54 for property. That is awkward for this paper, whose whole of morality it is. LIT-047’s narrow coding of fairness may explain it, as NOTE-034 notes.
- Property. The Response says mere possession is not moral and becomes a right only by mutual advantage (R3.4). Tummolini, Scorolli and Borghi’s commentary argues the opposite, the view LIT-047 takes: respect for possession is a separate adaptation.
- Purity and harm. The commentaries put the objections Bloom later put to LIT-047. The Response answers in two voices, because André and Baumard favour a broad view (fairness regulates every moralized norm) and Sperber a narrow one (purity and in-group norms rest on other evolved dispositions and are not moral proper) (R4).
Graham et al. 2013 (LIT-499) and the MFQ-2 paper (LIT-500) cite it as fairness monism.
NOTE-407 is the close reading of 2026-10-02, and it placed the work: Active. With its commentaries it is the most complete debate in this batch on whether cooperation exhausts morality. Its own evidence fits the theory without discriminating it from rivals, as Kirkby, Hinzen and Mikhail argue, and its key formal result lives in another paper.