I was awarded my Ph.D. from Queen’s University in 2020 and since then have been working on a project which stems from my doctoral dissertation. My project involves using data from the field of evolutionary psychology to assess the validity of the cooperation assumptions which underlie Thomas Hobbes’s and Peter Kropotkin’s theories of governance. Hobbes’s and Kropotkin’s assumptions are divisive in so far as they promote opposing views on the nature of human cooperation. While Hobbes holds that cooperation is driven by self-interest, Kropotkin highlights the other-regarding motivations that underlie cooperation. Thus, examining such assumption…
I was awarded my Ph.D. from Queen’s University in 2020 and since then have been working on a project which stems from my doctoral dissertation. My project involves using data from the field of evolutionary psychology to assess the validity of the cooperation assumptions which underlie Thomas Hobbes’s and Peter Kropotkin’s theories of governance. Hobbes’s and Kropotkin’s assumptions are divisive in so far as they promote opposing views on the nature of human cooperation. While Hobbes holds that cooperation is driven by self-interest, Kropotkin highlights the other-regarding motivations that underlie cooperation. Thus, examining such assumptions can aid in understanding how and when state authority interacts with agents’ natural propensities to produce the optimal conditions for cooperation. Such an understanding can shed light on critical real-world scenarios, for example, the degree to which cooperation in stopping the spread of COVID-19 had to be enforced through political coercion (through stay-at-home orders, vaccine mandates, etc.). I am currently developing this project into a book.
