Moral sciences are back. Natural laws of ethics, envisioned early in the Enlightenment, can now be studied. Scientists are relearning the wisdom of old traditions by objectively rating their performance. And they’re suggesting improvements: any rule system is weaker without “The Golden Punishment Rule.”
Humans, being social, can’t live without rules. Certain rules work better. Game theory provides “behavioral telescopes” to study them.
Game theory, the mathematical theory of games of strategy, was developed by John von Neumann in several successive stages in 1928 and 1940-41, according to his book “Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour” which he co-authored with Oskar Morgenstern. In game theory, these are called “evolutionarily stable strategies”. It isn’t just lizards, either. Where high numbers of adults admit to cheating on their partners, for example, can be.
The naturalistic fallacy says we can derive no ethical lessons from nature. But without seeking good and evil in nature, we can compare the productivity and sustainability of behavioral rules—and map negative ethical spaces, which are inherently unworkable, and thus inherently bad.
For example: we can compare how ethical traditions do in Prisoner’s Dilemmas against the game’s best strategy, called Tit-For-Tat, which is an “evolutionarily stable strategy.” As Tomas Sedlacek asks: What would Christians do? Or practitioners of any religious or secularly sourced Golden Rule?
The results are clear: Rationalists do worse than the Golden Ruled. And Jewish preferences beat Christian ethics. So-called rationalists, dominated by some dire logic, produce no cooperation and low productivity. Two Golden Ruled players cooperate, thus beating rationalists. But New Testament turning-the-other-cheek is exploitable (as Machiavelli and Nietzsche complained). Old Testament eye-for-an-eye comes closer to Tit-For-Tat, if forgiveness follows (which might be divine, but is also evolutionarily adaptive). But punishment sufficient to ensure that cheating doesn’t pay must also prevent escalating revenge. Hunter gatherers avoid such feuds by delegating the severest punishment to close male kin. A “Golden Punishment Rule,” that mimics Tit-For-Tat, enables cooperation by sustainably preventing exploitation. Similar logic likely applies beyond Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Darwin, being un-Darwinian, said “social instincts…with the aid of active intellectual powers… naturally lead to the golden rule.” Game theory shows that simple rigidly followed rules can create workable cooperation. Evolution is a game theorist, endlessly testing behavioral strategies and naturally selecting the more productive.
Another religious idea can clarify evolutionary thinking. Richard Dawkins’s selfish gene errs by overusing the non-exhaustive binary of selfishness vs. altruism. Dawkins uses and inverts the Christian framing that promotes self-sacrifice and discourages self-benefit. Jewish ethics, however, encourages self-benefit, but warn against the dangers of selfishness. Rabbi Hillel said, “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I?” Hillel’s self-and-other frame includes the win-win space in which cooperation can evolve (and which Dawkins initially ignored).
It’s still early in the use of game theory, but it seems the behavioral universe has gravity-like pull towards certain stable high productivity social rules. We should use our “active intellectual powers” to adjust what’s deemed rational, and to more intelligently design our economic and political (once called moral sciences) systems.
Illustration by Julia Suits, The New Yorker Cartoonist & author of The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions.
Previously in this series:
A cultural history of digital gameplay that investigates a wide range of player behavior, including cheating, and its relationship to the game industry.
The widely varying experiences of players of digital games challenge the notions that there is only one correct way to play a game. Some players routinely use cheat codes, consult strategy guides, or buy and sell in-game accounts, while others consider any or all of these practices off limits. Meanwhile, the game industry works to constrain certain readings or activities and promote certain ways of playing. In Cheating, Mia Consalvo investigates how players choose to play games, and what happens when they can't always play the way they'd like. She explores a broad range of player behavior, including cheating (alone and in groups), examines the varying ways that players and industry define cheating, describes how the game industry itself has helped systematize cheating, and studies online cheating in context in an online ethnography of Final Fantasy XI. She develops the concept of 'gaming capital' as a key way to understand individuals' interaction with games, information about games, the game industry, and other players.
Game Theory Cheating
Consalvo provides a cultural history of cheating in videogames, looking at how the packaging and selling of such cheat-enablers as cheat books, GameSharks, and mod chips created a cheat industry. She investigates how players themselves define cheating and how their playing choices can be understood, with particular attention to online cheating. Finally, she examines the growth of the peripheral game industries that produce information about games rather than actual games. Digital games are spaces for play and experimentation; the way we use and think about digital games, Consalvo argues, is crucially important and reflects ethical choices in gameplay and elsewhere.