Insert into 3: 139 as corrections and additions to Proposition 15:1

The trends to show positive emotive reactions, and (c) if these circumstances are made visible to others in encounters, these others tend to give the person who received big rewards for small efforts emotive degrading (such as envy or indignation).

Consider, first, what we can learn from clause (a) and (b). If granted, etc.

Insert in 3: 140 before the heading Anomie

Thus is clear that a legal law may be unfair.

Clause (c) in Proposition 15:1 hints that unfairness is a volcanic crater that spontaneously erupts in circumstances described in Clause (b), i.e. when too big rewards are given to some who have exercised small or no efforts. Indignation will hit professors who, without giving the students full credit, take as their own, some discoveries of their students, made in hard and long work on their theses. Indignant demands of reformation may arise when Roman Catholic priests give Eucharist to themselves but not to their congregation. Indignant protests are certain when white citizens have legal privileges that are denied other races.   

Insert into 3: 142 at the end text of Proposition 16:5

(f) If visible, the above reactions of compliance and deviation spread to other encounters in a shared symbolic environment

A remarkable quality of social control is stated in clause (f) of Proposition 16:5. Sanctions and compensations for wrongdoers are called for also by people who have not been injured or deprived by the perpetrators. It provides a commonly accepted justification for indemnification in jurisprudence.

That those who have been offended are ready to apply sanction is easy to understand. It also seems reasonable that the hurt ones may react stronger than others in the general public. However, it is a remarkable form of solidarity that all involved – affected or unaffected, acquaintances and strangers, good or bad – tend to apply sanctions spontaneously to a violator of social norms. As all of our propositions in social science, this sociological law of solidarity is probabilistic, and it is subject to social designs that may negate it, albeit at a cost. The propensity toward solidarity also raises the hope that violations of lofty human rights eventually will be met by universal disapproval.

To violate a fellowman {XE "violation of fellowman" } is not a private matter. As soon as such violation becomes visible or reported or talked about, it automatically becomes is a public issue and subject to a collective response. Without this quality of human interaction, social life would be reduced to an eternal tit for tat between individuals acting on their own. A human society, {XE "society" } as we know it would, then, not be possible; such a society would, at best, only be congruent with an outdated textbook view of economics.

Seen in this sense, homo economicus is a misleading construction that should be abandoned in serious social science. A more viable construction for the understanding of economy would be that its actors are driven to be “economic and rightful.”

Critics often feel that it is something barren or even “inhuman” about reasoning in strictly economic terms. If undertaken between equals, economic transactions can remain private and fair. When one party has an advantage, for example, more or better information {XE "market information" } than the others in a market, the resulting transactions can easily develop into a contentious public issue about fairness. Such transactions also have certain similarities to monopoly transactions, and they are affected by similar inefficiencies to those of monopoly dealings. More on this is discussed in the context of social welfare in Volume 6 of The Many-Splendored Society.