On mutual benefit and sacrifice. A comment on Bruni and Sugden's "Fraternity".

In a recent paper (2008) Bruni and Sugden—unhappy about the usual identification of morality with self-sacrifice—proposed a way to reconcile what they call ‘fraternity’ with the intention to obtain legitimate benefits in market relationships. The key, they believe, is to view a market contract as a joint commitment to cooperate for mutual benefit, which activates ‘team reasoning’. In this paper, after briefly summarising their arguments (Section 2), I maintain that their criticism of social preferences does not apply to guilt aversion, which in fact lends itself to the rephrasing of most of their claims in the language of individual reasoning (Section 3). Then I argue that aiming for mutual benefit does not prevent individuals from facing trade-offs between their own and their partners’ surplus, so the notion of sacrifice cannot be entirely eschewed. Since in enduring relationships agents’ attitudes towards each other evolve as a function of past actions, reciprocal ‘sacrifices’ have a role to play: to enhance cooperative intentions and help create those ‘feelings of friendliness and goodwill’ that are associated with the idea of fraternity (Section 4). Section 5 presents some concluding comments.