On Capital Punishment and Good Behavior

Richard Wrangham embraces controversy, and appears to enjoy munching apples from carts he upsets himself. While his new book seems to be the history of an amalgam of moral and political virtues and vices, its thesis is actually the large claim that these have evolved; and he has no compunction about writing that the foundation stone of good behavior is the possibility of capital punishment (against it though he is in today's world).

It's not just that the logic of his argument requires this hypothesis; he has found examples of premeditated (‘proactive'), co-operative (‘coalitionary') killing in the Pleistocene record, providing an empirical basis for his claims about our evolution. Chimpanzees have (reactive) murderous rages. There are also many attested examples of male chimpanzees bullying their most frequent sex partner, and of them committing infanticide, enough to cause us to look for the adaptive value of such behavior (in both cases such proactive aggression increases the male's chances of perpetuating his own genes). Proactive aggression, Wrangham argues, provides a necessary evolutionary curb on the reactive sort.