RECONCILING GROUP SELECTION AND METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM

Methodological individualism underpins economic analysis. In his paper in this volume, however, Douglas Glen Whitman demonstrates that group selection can be reconciled with methodological individualism. This essay extends Whitman’s analysis in two ways. First, it summarizes and restates the necessary conditions for group selection to play a role in the evolution of human preferences and societies. Second, it discusses the role of group selection in Hayek’s thought, with a particular focus on the role of group selection in the evolution of legal rules and the rule of law. The viability of group selection is demonstrated to be an empirical question. Individuals exist as parts of groups – families, tribes, firms, clubs. Given this observable fact, it is plausible that under at least some evolutionary conditions, individual tastes and preferences might evolve so as to contain sympathy for other members of a larger group in which the individual exists. As Whitman observes in the core paper of this discussion, “MI (methodological individualism) dictates that individual choices lead to social outcomes; GS (group selection) is one force (among many) that determines what sort of individuals are present in the system.