Anthony asks below - "What's wrong with the Tories?" This is a response.

Tony Curzon Price (London, oD): David Willets on Vampire Bat Blood Sharing is what's wrong.

But not because he is wrong on this - actually, I think he is right on the evolutionary foundations of group behavior - but because it won't do the poitical job the Tories want it to do.

Willets modestly agreed, talking on Today's 0857 "Funny Slot", that the evolutionary game theory model of justice as fairness (developed by my PhD advisor, Ken Binmore), was to provide an intellectual foundation to Cameronism. The social glue that Margaret Thatcher derived from her religious beliefs could be replaced with genetic virtue for a secular society. The gene's-eye view leads straight to compassionate Cameronian Conservatism.

John Humphreys mumbled his interest in the proposition. The promise is that here is a theory of society that justifies decentralisation, small-is-beautiful all in the light, compassionate embrace of Whitehall.

Attractive, but it doesn't actually work. The gene's-eye-view, even in the Binmore version of it, is quite indeterminate: almost any outcome in terms of the distribution of power is possible - even fair - depending on the socially set preconceptions for fairness. The democratic project, seen as the self-creation of society, is the project Europe has been engaged in for 300 years. It is the project about how, all constraints being taken into account, we should seek to make a set of norms for justice. The landscape of political self-creation is a bit like Second Life - strewn here and there with outlandish constructions, exercises of willfulness that might provide the building block for something that works. The Nation, the Union, the Church, Slavism, Europeanism, the Caliphate and so on are all active parts of the world of self-creation that the gene's-eye-view will miss. And those are the important parts today.

Conservatism used to fall back on religion for its norms. It now falls back on genetic history. But in neither case do we have any reason to believe that these are the sorts of constraints that bite in important places. The gene's-eye-view ultimately pushes us back to socially constructed meanings. So Conservatism still doesn't have any philosophy which is not anti-conservative. It remains as autophagous as ever. The project of self-creation, of course, is in no great shape either today.