Evolution and Democracy: Political Ecology and its Scientific Justification of Democracy

Persistent URL of this record https://hdl.handle.net/1887/87125

In Collections

This item can be found in the following collections:

Philosophy (MA) (60 EC)

Dillen, Erik Jan (2020)

Evolution and Democracy: Political Ecology and its Scientific Justification of Democracy

Master thesis | Philosophy (MA) (60 EC)

An introduction to the main concepts of evolution and cultural evolution, followed by a normative argument that provides a naturalistic justification to the democratic system in an open society. The main line of argument can be summarized as follows: democracy as a system has internalized the main dynamics of the evolutionary process (being variation and selection) but then transposed to the context of cultural evolution through memes (instead of genes). Politics can be understood as the arena in which memes compete for the attention of brains, and copy themselves in the process and in which they are subsequently selected against the memetic background. The democratic system provides a stable system in which this can happen, which is most conducive to the original function of ethics (which is the avoidance/resolution of altruism failures), which in turn provides a justification for its adoption from a naturalistic point of view.

Naturalistic Justification

Evolutionary Stable Strategy

Dawkins

Dennett

Popper