Ethics, Game Theory and Biology

One of the ideas I'm very fond of is that virtue isn't its own reward, it's a dominating strategy. More precisely, I am interested to see how far one can go towards showing that behaving ethically is actually a very good bet if one wants to come out ahead materially. Obviously there are times when nice guys lose, but it is an ancient observation that even a band of robbers must observe certain principles of morality among themselves, or perish. (So ancient I won't bother to try to run it down. See, however, Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing.) How far can we go with such reasoning?

The experiments of Robert Axelrod seem to indicate that a stance of "Be nice to everyone, but if someone hits you, hit back" is a very good bet. (When The Matrix came out, one reviewer, I think it was Stuart Klawans in The Nation, described the hero as "a Boddhisatva with compassion for all living things and the firepower to back it up": just so.) Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis have worked up from Axelrod's Tit for Tat to "strong reciprocity", explored in many technical papers and a great non-technical essay (below). This leads to a kind of social contract: we all agree to wallop the first guy to wallop anyone else. They would go further, and add a clause about agreeing to help each other out, until we catch someone cheating, at which point we wallop them, too.

Nice if we can get it to work; but why should we want to say, go out of our way to punish cheaters? Why should we want to cooperate? Clearly, we need some emotion which pushes us in that direction; to steal a useful phrase from Adam Smith, moral sentiments. Why should those evolve? Part of the answer, to my mind, comes from the work of Robert Frank, who showed, pretty convincingly, that sentiments like loyalty, honesty, love, and, yes, vengence have important material functions. They provide solutions to coordination and commitment problems, which make certain kinds of profitable undertaking possible in the first place. But they only do this if they are compelling (so you can't back out), and they are hard to fake. There is still a puzzle about how they could have evolved in the first place, but that's much more tractable.

Two biological questions suggest themselves. One is how the moral sentiments are implemented in the body, which they plainly are. It is conceivable that some people are physically incapable of feeling moral sentiments; it would be interesting to revisit brain-lesion studies in neuropsychology with this in mind. The other biological question is the evolution of the moral sentiments, and more particularly the evolution of dispositions to learn certain sorts of morality. (Whatever physical basis they have, it is plainly very flexible.) There are obvious free-rider problems here, as I said, but not insoluble ones.

(Incidentally, I find it vastly amusing that people like Bowles and Gintis, who are personally very nice and politically very perfect gentle bleeding hearts, find themselves arguing for things like egalitarianism and reciprocity on the grounds that people like to pull down those who are high and mighty and oppressive. This is, after all, pure Nietzsche, only with all his values transvalued. But if that's a dominating strategy, will-to-power considerations themselves tell us to adopt it...)

Some people object to this kind of explanation of ethics on the grounds that it cheapens ethical behavior and the nobler emotions. Indeed, some go so far as to make the Nietzschean syllogism "This offends my pride in my own morality; therefore it is false." (I have heard this done by Buddhists.) More serious is the objection that, even if it is true, it is impossible to belief it and act morally, virtuously, etc. This seems dubious; I can testify that it is possible to believe Frank's explanation of love and still fall head-over-heels in love.

Of course, none of this really solves the is-from-ought problem. At best it would show that ethics is a good strategy for material success, and we have therefore evolved to find it admirable and attractive. But maybe material success is utterly, unspeakably vile, and our attraction to modes of behavior which look altruistic but have our interests secretly calculated into them is not just vile but hypocritical. Less Gnostically, since we know we have inherited dispositions to make definite errors in logic, statistics, visual perception, etc., it's hard to rule out the idea that we have inherited dispositions towards finding the wrong sort of ethics attractive.

Cf. Evolutionary Psychology; Social Neuroscience

Herbert Gintis, "Behavioral Ethics Meets Natural Justice", Politics, Philosophy and Economics forthcoming [Commentary on Binmore's Natural Justice. PDF preprint]
Raymond Boudon, "The Sense of Values" [Online. Interesting comments on "naturalistic" theories of values.]
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, "Is Equality Passé? Homo reciprocans and the Future of Egalitarian Politics," Boston Review Dec. 1998
Jung-Kyoo Choi and Samuel Bowles, "The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War", Science 318 (2007): 636--640 [Lest one be tempted to take "altruism", in the biological sense, as an unambiguous ethical good]
Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Robert H. Frank, Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions
Thomas Huxley, Evolution and Ethics
Ken MacLeod, The Cassini Division [Review: The True Knowledge vs. the Rapture for Nerds]
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works [See esp. ch. 6, "Hotheads." Review: On Seeing the Computational Forest for the Cultural Trees]
Janet Radcliffe Richards, Human Nature After Darwin
Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny [Ignoring the last third, about the meaning of life in general]

Alexander, The Biology of Moral Systems
J. McKenzie Alexander, The Structural Evolution of Morality [Blurb]
Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation
Ken Binmore
- Game Theory and the Social Contract [2 vols]
- Natural Justice
- Review of Axelrod's The Complexity of Cooperation, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 1:1 [Link]
Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions
John Bolender, "The Genealogy of the Moral Modules", Minds and Machines 13 (2003): 233--255
William D. Casebeer, Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectionism, and Moral Cognition
J.-P. Changeux, The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge [Blurb]
Karen A. Cerulo, Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive Structure of Right and Wrong
D. Darcet and D. Sornette, "Emergence of human cooperation and altruism by evolutionary feedback selection", physics/0610225 Christopher T. Dawes, James H. Fowler, Tim Johnson, Richard McElreath and Oleg Smirnov, "Egalitarian motives in humans", Nature 446 (2007): 794--796
Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved
Lee A. Dugatkin
- Cheating Monkeys and Citizen Bees: The Nature of Cooperation in Animals and Humans
- The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness [Blurb]
Paul Lawrence Farber, The Temptations of Evolutionary Ethics [Free online]
Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher, "Social norms and human cooperation", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (2004): 185--190
Ernst Fehr and Bettina Rockenbach, "Detrimental effects of sanctions on human altruism," Nature 422 (2003): 137--140
Alexander Field, Altruistically Inclined? The Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity
John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, S. J., Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility [Blurb]
Robert H. Frank, What Price the Moral High Ground? Ethical Dilemmas in Competitive Environments [Chapter 1]
Norman Frolich and Joe A. Oppenheimer, Choosing Justice: An Experimental Approach to Ethical Theory [Free online]
Bernard Gert, Common Morality : Deciding What To Do
Walter Glannon (ed.), Defining Right and Wrong in Brain Science: Essential Readings in Neuroethics [Blurb]
Jeffrey Goldberg, Livia Markoczy and G. Lawrence Zahn, "Symmetry and the Illusion of Control as Bases for Cooperative Behavior", Rationality and Society 17 (2005): 243--270 [I should probably just start a collective-action notebook, since this is really stretching things...]
Leonard D. Katz (ed.), The Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives [Blurbed by Chomsky, of all people]
Jorge Moll, Frank Krueger, Roland Zahn, Matteo Pardini, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, and Jordan Grafman, "Human fronto-mesolimbic networks guide decisions about charitable donation", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 103 (2006): 15623--15628
Shaun Nichols, Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment
John Orbell, Tomonori Morikawa, Jason Hartwig, James Hanley and Nicholas Allen, "'Machiavellian' Intelligence as a Basis for the Evolution of Cooperative Dispositions", American Political Science Review 98 (2004): 1--15
Alvin E. Roth, "Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets", Journal of Economic Perspectives forthcoming (2007) [PDF preprint. Thanks to reader Nicolas D. P. for pointing this out to me.]
William A. Rottschaefer, The Biology and Psychology of Moral Agency [Blurb]
Angel Sanchez and Jose A. Cuesta, "Altrusim may arise from individual selection", q-bio.PE/0403023
Richard Schuster and Amir Perelberg, "Why cooperate? An economic perspective is not enough", Behavioural Processes 66 (2004): 261--277 [Thanks to Eric Thomson for alerting me to this]
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology
1. The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness [blurb]
2. The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity [blurb]
3. The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development [blurb]
Brian Skyrms
- The Evolution of the Social Contract
- The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure
Adam Smith, Theory of the Moral Sentiments
Ervin Staub, The Psychology of Good and Evil: Why Children, Adults, and Groups Help and Harm Others
Richard Tuck, Free Riding [blurb, excerpts]
Tom R. Tyler, Why People Obey the Law [Blurb, afterword]
R. Vilela Mendes, "Network Dependence of Strong Reciprocity", Advances in Complex Systems 7 (2004): 357--368
James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense

Notebooks

Ethics, Game Theory and Biology