This is both right and important. This argument is misleading, for the most important constraint on social policy-making is American culture and institutions, not human nature. Bowles and Gintis's first thesis is both true and unoriginal. What is original in Bowles and Gintis's argument is not so much the claim but the claimants. It should be added that this move to the left is not surprising.
Reciprocity has a long and proud tradition within socialist thought.
Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the founders of Fabian Socialism in Britain, advocated requirements on welfare assistance that would chill the heart of even the most hardened advocate of workfare. One struggles to find important socialists and radical liberals before World War II who disagreed fundamentally with the Webbs' belief that a welfare state would require enforcement of work norms. Few socialists argued that social rights derived solely from mere destitution. Many were openly hostile to claims based upon compassion or altruism, as these smacked of noblesse oblige , and therefore of aristocracy. Democracy required that the welfare state be grounded in a civic conception, in which social programs would be rights derived from service to the community and fidelity to civic norms.