A historical survey of the inheritance practices of farming families in North America and elsewhere indicates that resource allocations among children differed through time and space with regard to sex bias and equality. Tensions between provisioning all children and maintaining a productive economic entity (the farm) were resolved in various ways, depending on population pressures, the family’s relative resource level, and the number and sex of children.Against a backdrop of generalized son preference, parents responded to ecological circumstances by investing in (...) offspring differentially within and between the sexes. Vesting the preponderance of family resources in one heir increased the likelihood of at least one line surviving across several generations, whereas varying degrees of parental investment in emigrating sons or out-marrying daughters might yield boom or bust harvests of grandchildren according to circumstances in more remote locales. Primogeniture (eldest son as primary heir) allowed early identification of heirs and appropriate socialization, as well as more time for parents to contribute to the heir’s reproductive success. Son bias and unigeniture decreased as numbers of children per family declined, as land became less critical to economic success, and as legal changes improved the resource-holding potential of females. We suggest that changing ecological conditions affected parental decisions regarding resource allocation among children at least as much as did changing ideologies of parent-child relations. (shrink)

For Foucault, Hobbes is important for the transition from sovereignty to governmentality, but he does not always go into great detail how. In “Society Must Be Defended”, Hobbes’s reactions against the political historicism of his time lead him to an ahistorical foundation to the state. In Security, Territory, Population, his contract is emblematic of the art of government still caught in the logic of sovereignty. Management techniques, one of which being inheritance laws like primogeniture, inducing changes in a population’s (...) milieu so that its interest is properly directed allow the art of government to escape this logic. Hobbes supports primogeniture, but its historical position in the common law makes this support unexpected. This article examines the historical context of primogeniture and the reasoning for Hobbes’s support of it in light of Foucault’s claims about him in order to give more precision to those claims. The result is that primogeniture as a law of nature produces the family as an interested unit of the population. Yet this interest is itself historicized, so Hobbes’s attempt to de-historicize politics did not fully succeed. (shrink)

What is morality? How many moral values are there? And what are they? According to the theory of morality-as-cooperation, morality is a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. This theory predicts that there will be as many different types of morality as there are different types of cooperation. Previous research, drawing on evolutionary game theory, has identified at least seven different types of cooperation, and used them to explain seven different (...) types of morality: family values, group loyalty, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness and property rights. Here we explore the conjecture that these simple moral ‘elements’ combine to form a much larger number of more complex moral ‘molecules’, and that as such morality is a combinatorial system. For each combination of two elements, we hypothesise a candidate moral molecule, and successfully locate an example of it in the professional and popular literature. These molecules include: fraternity, blood revenge, family pride, filial piety, gavelkind, primogeniture, friendship, patriotism, tribute, diplomacy, common ownership, honour, confession, turn taking, restitution, modesty, mercy, munificence, arbitration, mendicancy, and queuing. These findings indicate that morality – like many other physical, biological, psychological and cultural systems – is indeed a combinatorial system. Thus morality-as-cooperation provides a principled and powerful theory, that explains why there are many moral values, and successfully predicts what they will be; and it generates a systematic framework that has the potential to explain all moral ideas, possible and actual. Pursuing the many implications of this theory will help to place the study of morality on a more secure scientific footing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sense and Sensibility: IARPT’s Four Existential OrientationsWilliam David Hart (bio)I. Introduction: IARPT’s Liberal HorizonThe concerns of the Institute of American Religious and Philosophical Thought are worlds apart from the preoccupations that animate the characters in Jane Austen’s novels. This is not to say that IARPT is disinterested in romance, love, and heartbreak. It is to say, rather, that Sense and Sensibility, the title of Austen’s 1811 novel, is a (...) good cover term for the matters that I wish to address. I say this despite the fact that many characters in the novel, especially Fanny Dashwood, are insufferable members of a British ruling class that, along with its wealth-hording, patriarchy-sustaining institution of primogeniture, needed to be expropriated by the working class. I say this despite the fact that the sensibility of the British aristocracy, as is true of all aristocracies, is off-putting. With this proviso, it is precisely the sense and sensibility of the Institute (the love, romance and, perhaps, tragedy) that I wish to survey through a focus on what I take to be its animating existential concerns. I call these orientations existential rather than merely intellectual because they go beyond ideas, professional commitments, and implicate the entire range of life dispositions. These orientations are habit-forming.Constitutive of these orientations are anxieties regarding the meaning and significance of those things for which we live and die. The sheer fact of consciousness, of conscious matter, of matter conscious of its consciousness and the wonder and awe this inspires as we consider the very existence of things is part of our existential ensemble too. For some of us wonder and awe before the groundless gratuity of existence, let’s call this ontological curiosity, compete with death anxiety and its intimations for preeminence in how we imagine the meaning and significance of our life. This is not a binary matter. For some people, perhaps for most, the joy of existence larded as it is with terrible things exceeds, as the case make be, the quiet desperation, sorrow, or terror, and the emptiness at the center of all things. My exploration focuses on the anxieties rather than the curiosity. I take it for granted that the deep source of anxiety is mortality and its various intimations. Our quest for lives of meaning and significance is threatened by the “horrid d’s”1 of death, disease, dread, despair, [End Page 5] and disappointment. Various thinkers have theorized how we cope with this anxiety. Some argue that denial is a dominant way of dealing with death, which they take to be foundational to the other meaning and significance-threatening phenomena.2 Where the answers to these threats provided by traditional religions are found lacking or otherwise no longer credible, denial expresses itself in the form of various immortality projects: typically, the puritanical, maniacal, and methodical pursuit of health and wealth, in consumerism of all kinds, from the hottest new diet, to a Peloton exercise bike, to a Tesla. And then there is the pursuit of fame and celebrity, which many people can no longer distinguish, the hope, captured so well in the theme song for the television series, Fame. “Fame / I’m going to live forever / Baby, remember my name.”3 We want to be remembered. Whether by future generations or, inside the digital clouds of Instagram or TikTok, or, as some would have it, within the consequent nature of God. Of course, for some populations, death is not so easily denied. Death has an in their face immediacy, insistence, and oppugnancy that rips through flesh and leaves its subject not merely anxious but dead. I speak, for example, of the mind-numbing repetitiveness with which police kill Black people. Or the myriad ways, including environmental racism, in which Blacks are subject to premature death. Some thinkers even theorize that death is the existential horizon for Black people in an ontologically distinctive way.4 Thus the March 2020 police-raid killing of Breonna Taylor in her home may be a statistical anomaly but is experienced as a monstrous revelation of the nature of things, of Black social life as social death. This is not a... (shrink)

Namesaking can be viewed as a mechanism to increase perceived parent-child similarity and, consequently, parental investment. Male and, to a lesser extent, firstborn children are more frequently namesakes than female and later-born children, respectively. However, a direct link between namesaking and parental investment has not been examined. In the present study, 632 participants from Central Europe indicated their first name, sex, birth order, number of siblings, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, paternal and maternal first names, as well as relationship quality with, (...) and time and financial investment they received from, both parents during childhood. Mixed-effects models revealed associations between namesaking and parental investment. However, the effect of namesaking often appeared significant only in interaction with specific predictors, such as sex and primogeniture. It suggests instead that namesaking has an additive effect—it enhances the effect of biological factors on parental investment. In general, we found evidence for the bias in parental investment linked to name similarity among both parents, and support for the hypothesis that namesaking serves as a mechanism to increase paternity confidence and, thus, paternal investment. The effect of namesaking influences only certain types of parental investment—namely, those at the level of relationship quality. In addition, nonheterosexual orientation was the strongest negative predictor of paternal investment. Our study extends the research on parental investment by showing that cultural mechanisms, such as namesaking, can also exert some influence on parental rearing behavior. (shrink)

The act of discrimination against the female sex is an undeniable phenomenon in virtually all human societies, though the severity varies from one society to another. It is against this backdrop that this paper is aimed at exposing the inadequate nature of the primogeniture rule of inheritance towards the female, as practised by the Esan people. The paper tests the validity of the logic on which the disinheritance of females rests, and discovers that it is invalid as it violates (...) such moral principles as the categorical imperative and utilitarianism, among others. It therefore advocates for possessive right for females for the sake of justice and equity. (shrink)

Dans les Deux traites du gouvernement, Locke poursuit des fins polemiques, politiques et philosophiques. Le Premier traite s'oppose a la theorie du droit divin des rois lie a la primogeniture, theorie dont Filmer s'etait fait le protagoniste. Les arguments du Deuxieme traite doivent leur validite a l'effort dont ils procedent: l'effort de progres de la raison politique en general. Locke y defend son appui a la cause de la religion constitutionnelle de religion reformee. Il affirme que le gouvernement legitime (...) ne peut se fonder ni sur la conquete, ni sur l'usurpation pas plus que sur la tyrannie. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern InterpretationIan ReaderImagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation. By Robert N. Bellah. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. 254.While Robert Bellah is probably best known for his work on religion in America, his earlier work focused on Japanese intellectual history, culture, and religion, and it is to these subjects that he has returned (...) in this latest book, Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation, almost five decades after publishing his seminal work Tokugawa Religion. In returning to Japan, Bellah brings to this broad overview of dominant themes within Japanese tradition, social structure, and intellectual and cultural history the grasp of a historical sociologist deeply rooted and [End Page 351] well versed in mainstream sociological theory. He also reminds us that although his reputation is as a sociologist of American religion, his intellectual roots are in the study of Japan, and he makes clear in his comments on one of his earlier essays (p. 3) that it was through the study of Japan that his eyes were opened to new possibilities, which he then applied to his study of the sociology of religion in the United States.Imagining Japan is not so much a new book as essentially a collection of essays written in the 1960s and 1970s that are now wedded to a new and extensive Introduction, in which Bellah develops an overarching theoretical framework through which to interpret and analyze Japan and to situate the materials addressed in these essays. That the book can be read without any apparent disjuncture between essays written in the 1960s and an Introduction produced at the start of a new century indicates how consistent Bellah's thinking has been over the last four decades, and how deeply his early understanding of Japanese thought, religion, society, and culture has penetrated and framed his subsequent thinking.Essentially Bellah is concerned with problems that have challenged scholars and Japanese thinkers for decades: how is it that, in Bellah's view, this society more than any other has retained such a strong sense of what is native and what is foreign (p. 188) and managed to preserve and emphasize its own cultural identity while engaging with, absorbing, and utilizing foreign (i.e., external) cultural influences. And, in the final essay of the book, Bellah asks how it is that a nation so economically and technologically advanced has continued, in the twenty-first century, to maintain an archaic, Bronze Age monarchical system (p. 184). Japan may not be quite as unique in some of these aspects as Bellah suggests (Britain, after all, is also modern, complex, and wedded to a monarchical system grounded in archaic notions of heredity, primogeniture, and privilege), but it remains perhaps the most striking case of how archaic notions can persist and form the basic framework of a society even as that society functions within a different framework, namely of modernity. In focusing on such issues, Bellah takes in-especially in the Introduction-the great sweep of Japanese history from the seventh century to the late twentieth, displaying a masterful ability to combine historical insight and sociological analysis.The basis of his framework, expressed overtly in the Introduction but implicit in many of the chapters, is the application of theories that developed initially out of Max Weber's thesis that religion (in Weberian terms, Protestantism), with its focus on a universalizing ethic, is an essential factor in the emergence of modernity and of societies founded on capitalism. Following in this tradition, S. N. Eisenstadt described world religions as "axial" ("world religions"-particularly Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam-being those that have engaged in missionary activities across borders and that have posed a transcendent reality that supersedes or goes beyond the parameters of localized societies and states). Bellah, too, is convinced of the critical importance of the notion of axial religions and asserts that they are the "indispensable precondition" of modernity (p. 6). Yet, for Bellah, as for Eisenstadt (who also was fascinated with and wrote about Japanese society), Japan has been non-axial in that its primary orientation has remained focused on the... (shrink)