Mandevillian Virtues

Mandevillian intelligence

Mandevillian intelligence is a specific form of collective intelligence in which individual cognitive vices (i.e., shortcomings, limitations, constraints and biases) are seen to play a positive functional role in yielding collective forms of cognitive success. The present paper introduces the concept of mandevillian intelligence and reviews a number of strands of empirical research that help to...

Our Virtues

This paper offers a reading of the seventh chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, and in particular, a solution to its puzzle.Nietzsche titled that chapter “Our Virtues,” and this immediately generates a puzzle because the opening words of the chapter comprise the question, “Our virtues?” The puzzle, then, is that there might not be any subject matter for this chapter—unlike, say, “On the Prejudices ...

The Virtues of Hesitation‡

In many economic, political and social situations, circumstances change at random points in time, reacting is costly, and changes appropriate to present circumstances may be inappropriate after later changes, requiring further costly change. Waiting is informative if the hazard rate for the arrival of the next change is non-constant. In a broad range of contexts we show that hesitation or delay...

Mandevillian Intelligence: From Individual Vice to Collective Virtue

1 Studying virtues

This book is a prolegomenon to a study of human virtues in their connections with emotions and related affective / motivational states. Accordingly, it is a contribution to the broad and diverse field of “ethics,” in particular to the subfield sometimes known as “moral psychology.” Initiated (or rather, revived) fifty years ago by Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) and given ...