Game theorists assume that rational defensibility is a necessary condition for moral, social, or political justification. By itself, this is a fairly uncontroversial claim; most moral or political philosophers would agree. And yet game theorists tend to be advocates of the free market. External critics of game theory usually claim this is because game theorists assume that individuals are atomistic and self-interested. Game theorists themselves deny this, however, for what strike us as good reasons. In principle, game theory has no (...) necessary ties to right-wing distribution schemes. Why, then, is game theory almost exclusively the province of conservative philosophers, political scientists, and economists? The problem, we believe, lies in the theory of rational choice standardly employed by game theory. Even if we accept, for the purposes of argument, game theory's account of the justification of moral dispositions — that a disposition is morally justified if and only if, in its absence, it would be game theoretically rational to acquire it — we need not be led to right-wing solutions. If we expand the kinds of choices facing individuals to include choices about what we will call ‘institutional roles,’ then we can explain the game theoretic rationality of the kinds of emotions and behavior exemplified by duty, loyalty, and love. (shrink)

Mes collègues partisans du contractarianisme et moi sommes d’avis qu’il serait irrationnel de se soumettre à une distribution de la dividendecoopérative qui empirerait sa propre condition. Mais par rapport à quoi peut-on dire que cette condition serait «pire»? Selon David Gauthieret al., elle serait pire que la non-interaction, c’est-à-dire ce qui se produirait si les négociateurs ne s’étaient jamais rencontrés. Je soutiens plutôt qu’elle serait pire que le cas où ils ne seraient pas parvenus à une entente. Il se trouve (...) que cette distinction peut être, et est souvent, une question de vie ou de mort. (shrink)

In Morals by Agreement, David Gauthier convinced many of us—including Peter Danielson, author of Artificial Morality, the latest successor to MA—that morality can best be understood as a set of intramental, strategic responses to patterns of otherwise dilemmatic, game-theory-reducible interactivity. More particularly, Gauthier and Danielson are of a mind that: characteristic of our interactive circumstances are the Prisoner's Dilemma and its cognates; these are circumstances in which our pre-moral, straightforward maximizing disposition fares considerably worse than “constrained maximization” —the latter being (...) the dispositional essence of morality—and it should not surprise us, therefore, that selective pressure has rendered most of us just so morally disposed. In short, what Danielson calls the “fundamental” justification for morality—that is, one “that does not appeal to any of the concepts of [morality itself]” —is that: conventional wisdom notwithstanding, nice guys—though, adds Danielson, not necessarily the nicest guys—finish first! (shrink)

In the first Russian Roulette scene in the Deer Hunter, do the circumstances giving rise to Mike's and Nick's "rebellion" merely document Kahneman-Tversky-type glitches in the reasoning of their Vietcong captors, or does the scene also reveal a genuine inadequacy in our current understanding of interactive rationality--the resolution of which would have profound implications for rational choice theory and its myriad applications? I argue the latter.

Von Clausewitz thought that war is just the continuation of politics by other means. I hold that it’s exactly the reverse. But if all political categories are reducible, without remainder, to military ones, to what are considerations of distributive justice reducible? Tribute? Precisely! But is it helpful to view issues of distributive justice this way? I argue that it is. The folk-vocabulary acquiesced to by traditional political philosophy may swell our hearts. But it leaves political counsel decidedly undecidable, and it (...) renders us vulnerable to exploitations against which military vocabulary offers us much better protection. This reduction is, I concede, more than a tad disgusting. But so is most life-saving surgery! (shrink)