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This chapter presents an account of how the primitive moral sense possessed by early humans and other primates evolved into the complex sense of morality possessed by modern humans. Mental mechanisms that endow people with a sense of morality evolved in ancestral environments as tools in strategic social interactions. Although people use these tools to advance their adaptive interests, the self-serving biases inherent in them are constrained in a variety of ways, including the reactions of others. Perspective-taking, which originally evolved to enable people to advance their interests in strategic social interactions by anticipating how others would respond to their behaviors, mediated the expansion and refinement of the human conscience. Research that has mapped the brain regions that are activated by moral problems has demonstrated that people may derive moral judgments from “old brain” and from “new brain” structures, and that these structures may interact in a variety of ways.

This chapter discusses law’s capacity to fulfil its conduct-guiding function within different frameworks of practical reasoning. A functional argument of Raz is initially presented: according to this argument, authorities—including legal authorities—would not be able to fulfil their intended function if their directives operated as reasons for action that compete with opposing reasons in terms of their weight, rather than as pre-emptive reasons (Section 6.1). Several grounds for this argument are considered and found to be inadequate (Section 6.2). The spotlight is then directed onto another relevant consideration: law’s structural suitability to counteract several situational biases operative in contexts of individual and collective action (Sections 6.3.1–6.3.5). It is argued that law’s pivotal role in addressing practical problems linked with those biases strongly militate against the weighing model (Sections 6.3.6). Finally, the implications of those biases for the pre-emption thesis are discussed (Sections 6.3.7).

American students aspireto getgood grades and succeed in college (Rosenbaum, Deil-Amen, & Person 2006; Trusty, 2000). This is true across the socioeconomic spectrum (for a review, see Oyserman, 2013). American parents share these goals. They have high educational aspirations and expectations for their children even if their own educational and economic attainments are low (Entwisle et al., 2005; Kim, Sherraden, & Clancy, 2012; Madeira, 2009). Parental. In this paper I do not distinguish between aspirations and expectations. This is in contrast to other researchers who find it useful to make that distinction, with an aspiration involving hopes and dreams (e.g., “if you could be anything at all, what would you most hope and want to be?”) and an expectation involving subjective estimation of what is actually possible (e.g., “if you had to bet money on it, what will you be?”). Logically, the two are different. Hopes will be higher than expectations, since expectations imply that one could really do it and hopes imply only that one would want it to transpire. Researchers also assume that expectations are more likely to be linked to behavior than hopes, in part because expectations involve predictions of one’s own competence. An expectation is something one believes one has the skills and competence to attain; in that sense it is akin to how the term efficacy, or self-efficacy, is used. In education, expectancy-value theories (e.g., Wigfield & Eccles, 2000) predict that people will take action to attain valued school outcomes if they expect that they have the skills to attain these outcomes. Because aspirations are not defined as being linked to skills, within a value-expectancy framework, they are less central. Although all of these arguments are compelling, as I outline next, the parents and children who respond to surveys and are of interest to us here do not seem to be following this logic. The way that data on aspirations and expectations are collected in survey research is typically to ask children and their parents, first, how far they would ideally like to go in school and, second, how far they realistically expect to go in school.

This chapter discusses one of the most fundamental issues that every legal system must address: the form of protection that should be given to legal entitlements, including property rights. The chapter summarizes the debate regarding the choice between property rules and liability rules, and its underlying assumptions. It then shows how behavioral studies offer important considerations that should influence the legal discussion. Generally speaking, psychological studies invite more optimism about people's ability to reach mutual agreement under property rules and suggest that miscalculations of damages under liability rules may be a graver danger than presently realized. These studies caution us against increasing the use of liability rules and lend additional support to the use of property rules when transaction costs are low.