Abstract

This is a chapter about changing the desires of others. People often have to coordinate their actions in order to get what they want. The need for coordination produces a practical problem and a philosophical problem. The difference between the problems is that in dealing with the practical one he/she does not have to get hung up about rationality. Different coordination problems generalize in different ways to more than two people or more than two actions. The prisoner's dilemma has received more attention than these other situations because it has seemed to present the most intractable problems. If one can show how agents faced with prisoner's dilemmas can find their way to cooperation, then it will no longer seem implausible that people pursuing their individual good can achieve stable and mutually satisfactory social arrangements.