Life is complex. Life is multidimensional. One person alone can be a lot to comprehend. Combine many people together, and often enough, you end up with a clusterf*** of complexity of life. Moral philosophy takes an hopeless stand: the variations and sheer multitude of situations, the overwhelming number of eventualities are too much to deal with for the human mind to form lastingly valid principles out of it. “Combinatoric explosion” is the technical term, and no principle or idea is good enough to serve as a standard without exception. There is always the exception to the rule. Any rule.
I personally think that moral philosophy has the hardest stand of all philosophical disciplines. I believe, the above is essentially correct, and to me, it follows that each and every person has both the right and the obligation to decide from case to case, from situation to situation, what way to go, what option to take, how to behave, what to say, in any and all situations in his or her life.
No moral idea or principle I know of is without exception or counter case. Yet – and that is what this article is about – there is, I believe, one exception to this rule, too. What I am talking about is a concept rooted in game theory and is called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. I believe it is the one concept that applies to morality and moral philosophy, that is most worth taking a look at: because it covers a huge number of situations in life, starting with person-to-person interactions, goes its way all throughout politics, ending at the notion of morality and what “right” and “wrong” are all about.
It essentially goes like this: two prisoners are taken into custody by the authorities, both are guilty, as they both committed a crime together. The two persons are separated, so they have no chance to communicate with each other. They are interviewed separately on the events that brought them here.
For the sake of simplicity and concreteness, let’s start with numbers on possible punishment. If both prisoners admit to the crime, they both face three years of jail time. If both shut up and do not give in, do not admit nor confess their crime, in our example the police has little to go on but other indicators, and each suspect will only be locked up a few months, in any case, a relatively short time. If, on the other hand, one of them talks, while the other does not, the principal witness goes free, while the other faces a sentence of 8 years.
If the prisoners could talk to each other, they might conclude that both keeping their respective mouths shut is the winning strategy here, so they are both faced with a minimum of jail time. In our example, however, that possibility – communication – is kept from them as they are kept apart. So the only rational thing for both persons to do is admit to the crime, to avoid the maximum penalty, and at the same time entertain the hope, the other person might not do so, resulting in freedom. Each suspect must, by dictate of rationality, confess in order to save as much as possible out of a bad situation, since they cannot rely on the other to not do so. They cannot risk not talking, since they need to avoid the maximum penalty – they have to assume the other person captured comes to the same conclusion, and will not, cannot go with the risk of keeping his or her mouth shut, since he or she cannot trust the other person will do the same.
This is – a little crude and shortened – illustration of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (a concept quite prominent in sociology, game theory and philosophy). There are many different versions of the Dilemma, and there is an variant of it in game theory: let us call it the problem of cooperation vs. thief.
In a short manner, it goes as follows: two players each hold two cards in their hands. Their is only two types of cards: one, let us call it the “cooperation card“, gives a certain reward if played – but only if the opponent does the same. If the opponent plays the opposite card – let us call it the “thief card” – a higher reward will be given to the thief-card-player, at the expense of his or her opponent, who played the cooperation card, who is not only left with nothing, but has to pay up a penalty. Stated as short as possible: if both play the thief card, nobody gets a reward. If both play the cooperation card, both players get some moderate-level reward. If one plays cooperation while the other plays thief, the thief gets a high reward, while the cooperator not only gets nothing, but a (slight) penalty.
I trust you see the analogy to the prisoners dilemma. Again, the rational thing to do seems to be to play thief, not to run the risk of getting betrayed and facing the worst outcome. But then again, if thief is the only option to go, nobody is rewarded anything: nobody has a gain, as each player merely avoided the worst possible outcome.
Now, let’s add an additional component to the game: repetition in time. Both players play round after round, each time faced with the decision to go with cooperation or thief. What to do each round, play risky, or play it safe? Which strategy is the winning one? Obviously, playing thief always is not a good idea, because your opponent will adapt, that is, not trust you, and play thief as well. But what other strategy is there? Is there even a winning strategy in what seems to be a deadlock of interests?
Since this article ought not be an academic treatise, I will just skip to the end: computers have been programmed to play this game, and many strategies have been tried and examined. The way to play this game with – on average over time – with the most success, is the so-called “carefully optimistic” one. If your opponent plays thief on you all the time, you have no choice but to mirror his decision. But from time to time, offer up cooperation, to invite the opponent to a careful level of trust. Then, adaption to experience dictates what you play next: if your opponent rewards you with playing cooperation as well, do the same the next round, i.e. play cooperation again. If he does not, you are forced to minimize your losses, and play thief yourself. Since you do not wanted to be ripped of, you keep playing thief the next couple of rounds, but from time to time, offer up cooperation, to invite your opponent not to be your enemy, but to be your friend: the case, where both get the mid-level reward. Ideally, you end up with each one playing cooperation all the time, maximizing the reward out of the game for both sides. Worst case scenario is you end up in the deadlock of no trust at all: both keep playing thief over and over.
What have these game-theory examples have to do with real life? The basic structure of these examples can be traced and found in an overwhelming number of everyday situations. Suppose instead of players of a game you have business partners; where at least one party has the option to rip off the other somehow. You can decide to steal to maximize your profit short time, but lose your partners trust in what could amount to a mutually beneficial arrangement over a long time, resulting in much more outcome than the shortsighted strategy.
A lot of the laws and social norms we have today exhibit a prisoner’s dilemma/cooperation vs. thief – character, when examined carefully. A lot of basic rules of civilization rest on this concept: when you walk the streets, you trust the next arbitrary person coming your way will not try to knock you out and steal your money – in a civilization governed by law, the vast majority of people rationally follows this maxim. When you buy groceries, you implicitly trust, the manufacturers have a clean way of producing their goods, and only put in the designated and healthy ingredients – when they theoretically could fill up the contents with cheap, unhealthy stuff, or lie about the ingredients (which has happened on a multitude of occasions), or do not care for a clean environment in their factories for cost reasons. And finally, basically almost every aspect of civilization rests on collaboration rather than exploitation; because we have learned, in the overwhelming number of situations, working together is the winning strategy over working against each other – at least, and especially, over time. It took the human civilization hundreds, even thousands of years to learn not to play thief but cooperation – in our times, at least in some areas in the world, the dominance of cooperation has been established, not so much because it is the moral thing to do, but the rational thing to do, simply to secure better outcomes for yourself.
And yet, there is the human stain: the natural, intuitive grasp of the prisoner’s dilemma often enough does not extend beyond the line of sight. Psychological studies have shown that people are significantly less prone to completely self-serving behavior and consequently more open to cooperation when they can see the person to potentially cooperate with. Additionally, any sort of prior acquaintance or relationship to that person plays a huge role, too. But to offer up cooperation blindly, to a stranger, that is additionally hidden from them sensually, is something that a large number of people is at least hesitant about. We see the effects of that close-range dependent behavior all the time: people (including myself) buy smartphones that have rare metals in them, mined in Africa under dangerous and inhumane conditions, often through forced labour or children, and were put together in factories in China, whose operators house their workers in so tiny spaces, they might as well be called cages. Although these facts are known to an increasing number of people in the information age, since we are not acquainted with the people exploited in the production process, and cannot directly experience the suffering behind the product, we tend to act completely oblivious about it when it comes to our buying choices. Evolutionists argue that our capacity for compassion is historically, i.e. genetically limited to the tribe we once belonged to in ancient times. Today, we no longer have tribes, but loyalties in many forms, to members of the family, to friends, to coworkers, to persons we share something we value with. Certain small groups of people deserve our trust, and therefore our reliable willingness to be unwary about cooperation. Modern life is multi-dimensional in that respect: alliances are formed and broken in all sorts of situations. The nastiest forms of non-cooperation in a prisoner’s dilemma-like situation can today be seen in nationalism, racism, sexism, and the like, where the mere belonging to a certain group of people is reason enough to suspend sometimes nearly all of our hard-won civilization achievements with regard to the non-members, by actively denying them the most basic human rights, even up to the mere right to live. The reasoning behind this behavior is often a perceived threat (which in nearly all of those instances is purely imaginative), like their own survival, endangerment of their standing by “different” people, continuity of a certain cultural element, or culture as a whole, persistence of a certain social structure or social hierarchy they are used to, or the fear to loose their perceived social-economic standing.
I personally think, the prisoner’s dilemma or the cooperation vs. thief-problem should be taught in school, because its basic structure can be found in an overwhelming number of everyday situations. If we were all aware the very moment a prisoners’s dilemma-like situation occurs, we might learn to do the right thing more often. I think it is easy enough to understand for everyone – and hence should be taught at a young age, so the knowledge about it sinks into our society, and we might be able to avoid doing the wrong thing for us as well as others, on multiple occasions later on in life.