Modern Social Science Concepts, Proportionate Reciprocity, Modesty, and Democracy

Abstract

Proportionate Reciprocity, Modesty, and Democracy, are the key concepts in Aristotle’s economics of exchange. The following correspondence of these concepts with modern social science may be contemplated: (a) Ideally, reciprocal justice in bilateral bargaining to minimize expenditure given utility levels results in Pareto-efficient, envy-free, equitable outcomes. (b) Practically, bargaining under the threat or actual recontracting may act as a surrogate of reciprocal justice, leading to an N-person contract topology. (c) But, recontracting is subject to practical limitations too, in which case near-reciprocal justice/general equilibrium outcomes may be fostered if, as a surrogate of recontracting, modesty in interaction is exhibited in an evolutionarily-stable-strategy fashion. (d) That is, incomplete recontracting amounts to asymmetric agent-type information, which in turn lays the ground for injustices; the same lack of information prevents rectificatory justice from being efficient and hence, modesty can be efficient only if it operates as a social norm and hence, only in a modest polity, which can be no other than democracy.

Keywords

• reciprocal justice
• reciprocal figures
• general equilibrium
• modesty