TO THE EDITOR:
In a letter to the editor on Tuesday, Daniel Cole writes that a world without a strong government could not function because people do not have an “innate moral sense.”
Evolutionary psychology tells us that as a matter of fact we do — although it may only apply to members of our own “clan.” Our ancestors who didn’t cooperate with their tribe weren’t likely to find mates within it.
As a result, today few people’s utility functions include acts of meaningless destruction, like Cole’s hyperbolic example of “firebombing schools.”
Studies of kindergarten students show that they think stealing from their classmates’ backpacks is wrong even if their teacher tells them they are allowed to do so, which suggests people have a basic moral compass before they can understand Hobbes or Locke.
Granted, a world free of all possible restraints may be worse than ours now, but that is not the world advocated by either libertarians or anarchists.
Eric Boyers ’16
Physics
Mathematics
