In a recent issue of this journal, C. L. Sheng claims to havesolved andexplained the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) by studying it ‘from a moral point of view’ - i.e., by assuming that each player feels sympathy for the other. Sheng does not fully clarify this claim, but there is textual evidence that his point is this: PD's arise only for agents who feel little or no sympathy for each other; they cannot arise in the presence of a high degree of (...) reciprocal sympathy. A high degree of such sympathysolves the PD in that it prevents PD's from arising, and a low degree of itexplains the PD in that it provides an essential condition for the occurrence of that game. This thesis is false, as some examples show. These examples are important; they prevent us from underestimating the problem posed by the PD. (shrink)

Though political philosophers often presuppose that coercive enforcement is fundamental to law, many legal philosophers have doubted this. This article explores doubts of two types. Some legal philosophers argue that given an adequate account of coercion and coerciveness, the enforcement of law in actual legal systems will generally not count as coercive. Others accept that actual legal systems enforce many laws coercively, but they deny that law has a necessary connection with coercion. There can be individual laws that lack coercive (...) sanctions, and it is at least conceptually possible for there to be a legal system that lacks coercive enforcement altogether. This article then examines why most political philosophers and some legal philosophers have been reluctant to treat the conceptual possibility of non-coercive law as significant. (shrink)

The backward induction argument purports to show that rational and suitably informed players will defect throughout a finite sequence of prisoner's dilemmas. It is supposed to be a useful argument for predicting how rational players will behave in a variety of interesting decision situations. Here, I lay out a set of assumptions defining a class of finite sequences of prisoner's dilemmas. Given these assumptions, I suggest how it might appear that backward induction succeeds and why it is actually fallacious. Then, (...) I go on to consider the consequences of adopting a stronger set of assumptions. Focusing my attention on stronger sets that, like the original, obey the informedness condition, I show that any supplementation of the original set that preserves informedness does so at the expense of forcing rational participants in prisoner's dilemma situations to have unexpected beliefs, ones that threaten the usefulness of backward induction. (shrink)