Ken Binmore says 'John Maynard Smith defines an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) to be a best reply to
itself that is a better reply to any alternative best reply than the alternative best reply is to itself,
but biologists seldom worry about the small print involving alternative best replies.'
This isn't the case. Maynard Smith was talking about species which have survived and are likely to do so in a robust enough manner. Thus, if you observe a particular type of behavior- e.g. non kin-selective food sharing among vampire bats- then either it contributes to individual fitness or it is irrelevant. We don't know whether or not it is 'optimal'. It may be wholly arbitrary but robust enough. Under greater selection pressure, it may disappear or be reinforced and become statistically more likely. Binmore's mistake is to think that coevolution can have a canonical representation as an optimization problem. There are no 'best replies'. There are robust replies- or so we think till they suddenly become very feeble indeed.
Binmore hopes that Evolution has endowed our species with a 'natural' morality such that we prioritize the least well off. If there is evidence that communities with this type of morality outbreed or otherwise take over territory from more 'selfish' tribes, then Rawls managed to hit on the 'evolutionarily stable strategy' for our species. Sadly, it appears that highly inegalitarian civilizations have expanded whereas egalitarian 'caring/sharing' communities have dwindled or disappeared. Ultimately, this is based on productivity.
On the other hand, many would agree that affluent Western societies have become 'fairer' in many important ways (less homophobic, misogynist, racist etc) though it may be that fungible wealth and Income inequality has increased because higher productivity requires 'control rights' to be more concentrated even if beneficial interests get more widely distributed.
A separate question has to do with who actually finances the 'Welfare State'. 'Director's law' suggests that the 'middle' order benefit more than the upper and lower elements who are paying into the scheme. But this is what we'd expect from what is essentially an insurance, rather than an income redistribution, scheme. True, there may be a class which appears parasitic. But, as I explain here, there is a Machiavellian reason for this. In other words, talk of philanthropy, or even actual philanthropy, can be deviously self-serving. As for whether any particular income distribution is robust- i.e. could be said to be evolutionarily stable- that is a matter for the fitness landscape. Sometimes, Rawlsian principle would be 'pro-natalist' with the result that more territory is secured. But there could also be population collapse or large scale enslavement.
Aside from 'games against nature', speaking generally game theory is concerned with coevolved processes which are a good way to 'tame complexity' but at the price of impredicativity and loss of a unique model. In other words, the use of mathematical analysis is vitiated by the 'intensional fallacy' which renders the underlying theory meaningless or 'anything goes'.
In a paper titled 'The origins of Fair Play' Binmore wrote-
Vampire bats have their own way of sharing, and we have ours.
But sharing is about caring or altruism or being a nice guy. It isn't about fairness- which has to do with observing rules. Thus, the fact that you beat me fair and square at Chess does not mean that it is unfair that you won't let me fuck your girl friend.
We call our way of sharing “fairness”.
No we don't. I think you did me a favor by sharing your pizza with me even though, since I didn't contribute money for its purchase, I had no equitable claim upon any of it.
If the accidents of our evolutionary history had led to our sharing in some other way, it would not occur to us to attribute some special role to our current fairness norms.
I suppose Binmore means 'equitable division' which is a matter of law, custom or rational self-interest. But we may share what we have with others for purely altruistic, religious, or whimsical reasons.
Whatever alternative norms we then found ourselves using would seem as solidly founded as those we find ourselves using today.
This is not the case. Questions of distribution under an incomplete contract or other type of relationship can be very vexed indeed. Sometimes, as a matter of abundant caution, or for reputational reasons, we may concede more than we deem 'fair' in the sense of being the proper outcome under what we believe to be are 'established rules' or conventions or social practices.
The how? questions are more troublesome. How do our current fairness norms work?
This is an ideographic matter which can be the subject of empirical research. We may find that situations where a fifty/fifty split is customary actually see deviations towards the 'Shapley' solution or the 'Humanitarian' solution or the 'Mafia' solution or whatever. As for the rule 'help the worst off', it may be merely hypocritical or a convention more honored in the breach. Chivalry appeared greater when women had no rights. Similarly, Princes and Prelates made a big show of being Charitable precisely when their arbitrary exactions kept almost everybody else in poverty.
How did they evolve?
They may not have done. The thing could be purely stochastic and may disappear because of selection pressure.
Both questions need to be addressed together, because each throws light on the other.
Both questions 'beg the question'. They are silly.
In particular, I think that we need to be sceptical about answers to the first how? question that requires our postulating “hopeful monsters” when we seek to answer the second how? question.
Why? The truth is we generally don't even have 'hopeful monsters' but wholly fictional monsters. Thus when you visit the commune where everybody shares everything equally, you find the leader of the cult has a fleet of Rolls Royces and gets to fuck all the females there.
Richard Dawkins tirelessly explains how the eye might have evolved as the end-product of a process involving many small steps.
What is true of the eye isn't true of the point of view of a cretinous Professor. Rawls was stooopid. Binmore should have pointed this out.
We need to be able to do the same for the evolutionary processes that created our sense of fairness.
The eyes of a guy on Wall street are the same as the eyes of a guy slaving away in a supposedly egalitarian commune. One may think it fair that he earns millions while the other may think it right and proper that he gets a bowl of gruel while the Cult-leader fucks his wife.
The Original Position How do our fairness norms work?
On the basis of ideographic 'uncorrelated asymmetries'- e.g. we may think it fair that 'women and children' get priority in boarding the lifeboats because we are Edwardian gentlemen who consider females too be to stupid to be entrusted with the vote. Alternatively we might think it fair that Princes and Prelates get priority because they are God's anointed.
My thesis is that all the fairness norms that we actually use in daily life have a common deep structure that is captured in a stylized form by an idea that John Rawls called the device of the original position in his celebrated Theory of Justice.
I used to see Binmore open the door for females, but not males. That was perfectly proper. The man was a gentleman. Had he been in the original position, he would not have known whether he should be opening doors for women or giggling or having a fit of the vapors when confronted with a door knob. I should explain, well bred females have a horror of knobs of all descriptions.
Rawls—who is commonly said to be the leading moral philosopher of the last century—uses the original position as a hypothetical standpoint from which to make judgements about how a just society would be organized. Members of a society are asked to envisage the social contract to which they would agree if their current roles were concealed from them behind a “veil of ignorance”. Behind this veil of ignorance, the distribution of advantage in the planned society would seem determined as though by a lottery.
So, Rawls is assuming 'no Knightian Uncertainty' i.e. all possible states of the world and their probability is known in advance. Thus. 'expected utility maximization' is rational. But this also means there is no need for language or education or markets or research of any type. We are windowless monads in pre-synchronized harmony. If there are perfect futures markets then I could find out the day I will die by looking at the futures market (which Arrow-Debreu assumes to be frictionless and individualized) for my own cremation. (This is because there will be no demand in that market till I drop dead. Nor will there be any demand in it, after I've been cremated. So there is only one day on which the expected price in the future's market peaks.) If this is not the case, then I don't live in an Arrow Debreu universe and thus Rawls and Sen are babbling bullshit.
Devil take the hindmost then becomes an unattractive principle for those bargaining in the original position, since you yourself might end up with the lottery ticket that assigns you to the rear.
Why not stipulate that the worst off be euthanized? Also, what's to stop people voting for a Borgesian 'Lottery in Babylon'? After all, in the real world, even risk averse people do buy a lottery ticket. This isn't a 'tax on stupidity' because there is a psychic benefit of thinking you might suddenly become rich. Indeed, we also benefit by thinking about what a wonderful time we will have in Heaven where we will be reunited with Granny and our puppy dog. For regret minimizing reasons, it is likely that the 'Social Contract' will feature ontologically dysphoric goods (which are not 'at home in the world'). Indeed, Rawlsian morality (or hypocrisy) is an example. The fact that some money is spent on this shit doesn't mean it isn't shit.
Rawls defends the device of the original position as an operationalization of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative,
But it can be 'operationalized' without 'the original position'. Judges and legislators could make it a practice to prioritize the needs of the worst off. Sadly, this may be counterproductive and Rawls himself provides the loophole which makes his theory 'anything goes'.
It is one thing to say 'by a legal fiction, there is a Social Contract' and another to say 'there could actually be such a Social Contract.' Why? No contract is valid without the passing of consideration. Only if you were given money or a blow-job in return for entering the original position and agreeing to a particular Contract would there in fact be a Contract. But it would be 'incomplete'- i.e. anything goes over its course as control and beneficial and other Hohfeldian incidents are adjusted in a non-deterministic manner.
but I think this is just windowdressing. The idea certainly hits the spot with most people when they hear it for the first time,
No. Most people were sixteen or seventeen when they heard this stupid shit. We understood that if we wanted to get our sheepskin and then get into Accountancy or Actuarial Science or whatever, then we'd better nod our head and pretend to take his virtue signaling pi-jaw at face value. True, if the Professor made it a practice to split his pay with his Teaching Assistants and the Custodial Staff, then we might wish to emulate him. But this is teaching by example, not teaching by spouting stupid, ignorant, illogical shite.
but I don’t believe this is because they have a natural bent for metaphysics.
Pataphysics maybe.
I think it is because they recognize a principle that matches up with the fairness norms that they actually use every day in solving the equilibrium selection problem in the myriads of small coordination games of which daily life largely consists.
Fuck off! They use something like Shapley's solution concept. That's why Monica Lewinsky didn't give beejays to homeless people. She only put out to POTUS.
Like many other of Binmore's students, I found that okay looking girls were ready to have sex with me only after I got a good job in the City. Matching problems are coordination games. Sex is an example. It isn't the case that people choose the poorest and worst looking person in the bar to have a one-night stand with.
It is important to emphasize that I am not following Rawls here in talking about the major coordination problems faced by a nation state. Our sense of fairness didn’t evolve for use on such a grand scale.
Being a Rawlsian, Binmore may have given beejays to hobos. But, as an old fashioned 'Whig', he didn't want the Queen, Gor' bless 'er, to do so on grand occasions of State.
Nor am I talking about the artificial and unrealistic principles of justice promoted by self-appointed moral pundits, to which people commonly offer only lip service.
whereas Binmore was offering full oral services to hobos. He was not a self-appointed moral pundit. He genuinely walked the Rawlsian talk.
Nor am I talking about the kind of moral pathology that led Osama bin Laden to believe that thousands of innocent New Yorkers should die to compensate for the humiliations that he thought Islam had received at the hands of the West.
He wanted US troops out of Saudi. That's what he got. But this made the Saudis stronger. Still, the Taliban are back in power while Iran now dominates Iraq and portions of Syria, Yemen, Lebanon etc.
I am talking about the real principles that we actually use in solving everyday coordination problems.
Very true. Binmore noticed that Professors pay fees to students and submit essays to them on the grounds that students are worse off than Professors. I recall Binmore walking into the 'Intro to Analysis' class I took in 1979. He said 'who here is worst off in terms of knowledge of Math? Oh. It's that cretin Vivek. Rawls says we must put the interests of the worst off first. Thus, in this lecture, we won't discuss Brouwer's fixed point theorem. Instead, we will help Vivek learn how to tie his own shoe-laces.'
The sort of coordination problems I have in mind are those that we commonly solve without thought or discussion, usually so smoothly and effortlessly that we don’t even notice that there is a coordination problem to be solved.
Binmore, smoothly and effortlessly, provided beejays to randy hobos.
Who goes through that door first?
Back in those days, it was women. That's an uncorrelated asymmetry- unless you think women are inferior in which case they will knee you in the groin.
How long does Adam get to speak before it is Eve’s turn?
Adam gets to speak? In that case, he can't be married.
Who moves how much in a narrow corridor when a fat lady burdened with shopping passes a teenage boy with a ring through his nose?
Does he have a knife? In that case, he should stab her and steal her purse and her shopping bags.
Who should take how much of a popular dish of which there isn’t enough to go around?
Me. I'm a fat bastard.
Who gives way to whom when cars are maneouvring in heavy traffic?
In India, both give way to cows.
Who gets that parking space? Whose turn is it to wash the dishes tonight? These are picayune problems, but if conflict arose every time they needed to be solved, our societies would fall apart.
The answer in each case is 'uncorrelated asymmetries'- e.g. who is on which side of the road. It isn't that the worst off have priority. On the other hand, we may yield to an ambulance or a police car or the Dictator's motorcade.
Most people are surprised at the suggestion that there might be something problematic about how two people pass each other in the corridor. When interacting with people from our own culture, we commonly solve such coordination problems so effortlessly that we don’t even think of them as problems.
Speak for yourself. I'm constantly going right when I ought to be bearing left.
Our fairness program then runs well below the level of consciousness, like our internal routines for driving cars or tying shoelaces.
All of which have to do with following a rule, not worrying about fairness. Binmore it is true never wiped his own arse or tied his own shoe-laces till he had wiped the arses and tied the shoe laces of the least well off in the vicinity.
As with Moli`ere’s Monsieur Jourdain, who was delighted to discover that he had been speaking prose all his life, we are moral in small-scale situations without knowing that we are moral.
No we are creatures of habit. That has nothing to do with morality or ethics. True, to ingratiate myself with some sociopath, I might say 'OMG! You wipe your own arse! That shows you are the moral equivalent of Mother fucking Theresa!'
It is true, that in ethology, there are 'innate releasing mechanisms' and 'fixed action patterns'. But we can say the same thing about machinery. This has nothing to do with fairness or morality or sharing.
Justice as fairness John Rawls offers a theory
of distribution. This was based on the fallacy that 'Social Justice' means something similar to 'Criminal Justice' such that rapists and robbers receive their 'just deserts'. According to, Binmore's colleague, Morishima's 'fundamental theorem of Marxism'- if even one Enterprise makes a profit then Capitalist exploitation exists. Social Justice requires that the profit be confiscated. But this would tank the economy. I may mention, what Marx actually said was 'to each according to his contribution', till the problem of scarcity disappears.
The fact is, there was a time when it was thought that voters wanted the redistribution of income and wealth. But by the early Seventies, they had turned against this method of picking their own pocket so as to featherbed the Unions or subsidize Employers.
that reduces our notions of justice to those of fairness.
Our notion of justice involves stringing up rapists and robbers and other such scum. Professors had to pretend otherwise because they were trying to turn themselves into the the priests of a godless and deeply boring religion.
I think our traditonal personification of justice as a blindfolded maiden bearing a pair of scales in one hand and a sword in the other provides some support for this reduction.
Justice is two-fold. Firstly there is a determination of what law applies to the case. Here the traits of the participants are irrelevant, but when it comes to a determination of the facts of the case, Justice is welcome to be eagle eyed. Uncorrelated asymmetries (e.g. who is a minor or who is within the jurisdiction) are what are picked out in the ratio of a case such that there is a unique outcome which, ceteris paribus, would be repeated no matter how many 'do-overs' were granted.
Her blindfold can be identified with Rawls’ veil of ignorance.
It can be compared with Oedipus Rex pronouncing judgment in a case where, unbeknownst to him, he himself was the culprit. The lesson here is 'Judge not lest ye be judged'. Oedipus ended up tearing out his own eyes.
On the other hand, we should also recognize that Justice is a service industry. It needs to get paid. It must hold its nose and turn a blind eye to the shitty nature of the kleptocrats who use it to feather their own beds at the expense of the commonweal. In England, the Law really took off only when big, beefy, Barons discovered they could wriggle out of their feudal duties by pretending they were holding their own Estate on behalf of the puny little potential baby son they would sire upon certain named matrons of the shire who were of past child bearing age. In other words, the law is about wealthy sociopaths claiming immunities or entitlements created for helpless widows and orphans.
She needs her scales behind the veil of ignorance to weigh up the relative well-being of different people in different situations.
Nonsense! Economists and Sociologists are welcome to gather data on relative deprivation and to publish those results. In late Victorian England, this sometimes led to legislative and other ameliorative measures. The problem with saying 'what if you yourself were very poor?' is that the reply might be- 'I'd want to be painlessly put to death' or else 'I would welcome being very very poor because then I would grow closer to God and thus gain eternal bliss.'
The issue of how interpersonal comparisons are to be made is often treated as a side issue of no great importance by tradititional moral philosophers,
because, traditionally, they have been shitheads
but it is clearly necessary for people to be able to make such comparisons in order
to decide whether they would personally feel better off as a Professor of useless shit or a guy making a lot of money in the City doing useless shit. Some wanted the money and cocaine. Others realized that you can teach useless shite and then back the right political party and thus get sinecures of various sorts.
for it to be possible for them to use the original position to make fairness judgements.
If I didn't know if I'd be a woman or a man, I'd want to ban heterosexual sex because I don't want a dick entering any portion of me. I can wank well enough to Lesbian porn.
If we weren’t able to say whether we thought it preferable to be Adam in one situtation as opposed to being Eve in another situation, we would be helpless to say anything at all behind the veil of ignorance.
A heterosexual woman may have no objection to a dick entering her. Also, she may feel differently about pregnancy and child birth. Perhaps, if I was given female hormones while in the original position, I wouldn't want to ban hetero sex.
Under mild conditions, John Harsanyi [26] showed that such empathetic preferences—preferences requiring us to put ourselves in the position of another to see things from their point of view—can be summarized by naming a rate at which Adam’s units of utility are to be traded off against Eve’s units.
This assumes no Knightian Uncertainty. Even otherwise it is arbitrary and non-unique.
But how do we acquire such standards of interpersonal comparison to which we implicitly appeal every time we make a fairness judgement?
By arbitrary, not to say stupid, ipse dixit stipulation. The problem here is Preference Falsification. At one time pedagogues would have agreed that masturbation was a horrible sin. Thus they would pretend that teaching worthless shite discouraged masturbation. Later they had to pretend that teaching worthless shite prevented Nazis like Trump or Rishi gaining power.
Finally, attention needs to be drawn to the sword carried by our blindfolded maiden.
Because blokes tend to focus on her tits.
The enforcement question is often neglected altogether by traditional moral philsophers, who commonly take for granted that fairness exists to trump the unbridled use of power that they think would otherwise reign supreme. However, I shall be be arguing that fairness evolved as a means of balancing power rather than as a substitute for power.
Very true. Fairness evolved as the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile capable of deploying Hydrogen bombs against multiple targets as a means of balancing power- more particular the power that might refuse to give beejays to hobos.
Without power being somehow exercised in her support, our blindfolded maiden would be no more than a utopian fancy.
with nice tits.
As Thomas Hobbes put it: covenants wthout the sword are but words.
Covenants with the sword are still just words, more particularly if the other guy has machine guns. Economic History teaches us that productivity determines who gets control over scarce resources- including land. How a particular group divides up its output may have 'dynamic effects'- i.e. lead to 'run-away' processes where there is a feed-back loop between accumulation and innovation. But, the same thing may happen mimetically or in response to some other selection pressure- or just happenstance.
There is no shortage of cultural differences between Kalarahi bushmen, African pygmies, Andaman islanders, Greenland eskimos, Australian aborigines, Paraguayan Indians, and Siberian nomads, but
all lost territory to those who could use it more productively.
the consensus is strong among modern anthropologists that these and other pure hunter-gatherer societies that survived into the twentieth century all operated social contracts without bosses or social distinctions in which food, especially meat, was shared on a markedly egalitarian basis.
A Hawaiian aristocrat visiting nineteenth century London might have thought Britain was an egalitarian country. How come, the King was not 'taboo' to the people? Come to think of it, an Indian visitor who saw a 'crossing-sweeper' doff his cap to the Prince Regent only for the latter to fling him a coin (De Quincey says this was because the Prince didn't want to tip his own hat to a darkie) would have come to the same conclusion. The 'untouchable' in India did not dare raise his eyes to those of superior status.
I suppose perishable products- e.g. meat- were shared more equally than grain which could be stored for longer periods. The agricultural revolution is considered to have greatly increased inequality.
Even Westermarck, a leading anthroplogist who was famous for his moral relativism, agreed that the Golden Rule—that we should do as we would be done by
or that we do as we are done by. However, no great harm befalls if you give the other the benefit of the doubt and only retaliate when he fails to reciprocate.
—was universally endorsed in such societies. Two caveats are important here. The first is that it really matters that we are talking about pure foraging societies, in which the economic means of production remained the same as among our ancestors before the agricultural revolution of ten thousand or more years ago.
In other words, productivity wasn't changing much. Still, it is likely that some groups displaced others from more favorable terrain.
The evidence is strong that a society’s social contract evolves in tandem with its economy.
Contracts become more complex as economies become more sophisticated. However, there may not be very much productivity improvement. You could have a situation where one person has property rights over the fruits of a tree, another has a right to cut it down under some particular contingency. Then some invaders turn up and kill or enslave or chase them away. It turned out their intricate and highly equitable Social Contract was shit. Coase's theorem reminds us that who owns what may not matter if control rights can be purchased by those who can put the resource in question to the most productive use.
I suspect that one would look in vain for universal principles underlying the social contracts that cultural history generated in different times and places after the agricultural revolution.
I think one would find positional goods of an 'ontologically dysphoric' type- i.e. things 'not at home in this world'. They may have to do with 'Thymos' (Honor) or Soteriology (getting to Heaven) or Voodoo or Rawlisan pi-jaw.
In some societies, a fair allocation is achieved through “tolerated stealing”.
In all societies, the law isn't enforced if it isn't worth enforcing it. But the law may also be disintermediated. The good may disappear from legal markets and be supplied by gangsters who devise fiendish punishments for transgressors.
Eve may grab some of Adam’s food because she thinks he has more than his fair share. If the rest of the group agree, Adam is helpless to resist.
But this is also true if Eve is an evil cunt while Adam can't hurt a fly. Let Adam fuck off somewhere else. Why protect a useless wimp?
Even when possessions are voluntarily surrendered to others, the giver will sometimes explain that he or she is only complying with the norm to avoid being the object of the envy that precedes more serious sanctions.
You don't need to worry about envy if you can slit the throats of all and sundry. People then say 'I don't envy the Don. He is so selfless that he devotes himself to raping all the virgins in the vicinity. I tell you, I'd top myself if I had to take on so onerous a task.'
Indeed, we would find it unbearably stifling to live in some foraging societies because of the continual envious monitoring of who has what.
Actually, this was also a feature of certain ancient Greek polities. The ecclesia might vote to exile a guy just because everybody thought him the cat's whispers. If there must be people who excel, let them do so elsewhere amongst other people. Thus Aristides the Just was told to just fuck the fuck off.
There is therefore squabbling and pettiness aplenty in pure foraging communities,
or ancient Athens
but there is also laughter and good fellowship.
Till, invaders enslave everybody.
In brief, human nature seems much the same in foraging societies as in our own.
In other words, norms are arbitrary.
I therefore think the strong parallels that anthropologists have uncovered between the social contracts of geographically distant groups living in starkly different environments have important implications for us.
Raise productivity. Otherwise, you too will go the way of the Hottentot.
If their nature includes an instinctive disposition to use fairness norms that all share the deep structure of the Rawlsian original position, isn’t it likely that the same disposition is built into our nature too?
Being lazy and useless was built into my nature. It wasn't built into Binmore's nature. He did useful work designing the 3G spectrum auction. He had a soft spot, in the head, for Rawls, because he was a nice man who, being aware of his own superior intelligence, had a sense of social responsibility. Still, like Arrow, Sen, Rawls etc. he committed the 'intensional fallacy'. The fact is 'least well off' is epistemic, impredicative and does not have a robust 'extension' save for some particular ideographic purpose. But the thing isn't nomothetic. It lacks 'unicity'. Just say 'don't be a dick. Think of those worse off than you'. Don't bother with Rawlsian rubbish.
John Mackie invited us to look at both anthropology and game theory. The basic idea in game theory is that of a Nash equilibrium.
Actually, it is Aumann correlated equilibria. Public signals matter. Nash eqbm just means 'If I think I have rigged a game, I think players will do what I want them to do'. The problem is that the players may be smarter than you or may do the reverse of what you want them to do just to spite you.
John Nash was the subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind, but the writers of the movie got the idea hopelessly wrong in the scene where they tried to explain how Nash equilibria work.
Fair point. Nash equilibria is one where all the boys hit on the prettiest girl and so all the girls leave in a huff. This is because girls want to enjoy proper social interaction of a refined sort. They don't want to be treated like pieces of meat- more particularly if they themselves are rejected in favor of a juicier piece of meat. The 'public signals' which are 'Schelling focal' here have to do with Collidge boys pretending they are gentlemen and scholars- not slavering beasts.
However, the idea is actually very simple. A game is any situation in which people or animals interact. The plans of action of the players are called strategies. A Nash equilibrium is any profile of strategies—one for each player—in which each player’s strategy is a best reply to the strategies of the other players.
The problem here is that if you are dealing with 'people or animals' then, because life evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape, the menu of choice will never be fully specifiable. What you have is something like Conway's 'game of life' (featuring cellular automata) where the pay off matrix may look empty for a period before suddenly being repopulated.
In particular, there is a reason why 'Preferences' or 'Utility' must remain relatively opaque to the agent. Otherwise they can be 'hacked' by a predator or parasite. We expect something like Hannan consistency or 'regret minimization' rather than expected utility maximization.
Some simple examples appear in Figure 1. The game on the left is the famous Prisoners’ Dilemma. The game on the right is the Stag Hunt, which game theorists use to illustrate a story of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Each of these toy games has two players, whom I call Adam and Eve. In both the Prisoners’ Dilemma and the Stag Hunt, Adam has two strategies, dove and hawk, that are represented by the rows of the payoff table. Eve also has two strategies, dove and hawk, represented by the columns of the payoff table. The four cells of the payoff table correspond to the possible outcomes of the game. Each cell contains two numbers, one for Adam and one for Eve. The number in the southwest corner is Adam’s payoff for the corresponding outcome of the game. The number in the northeast corner is Eve’s payoff. The payoffs will not usually correspond to money in the applications relevant in this lecture. Using the theory of revealed preference,
which assumes that ex ante is ex post- i.e. what people did is the same as they would if they had a do-over. In other words, this assumes 'equilibrium'. The problem is that evolution is about far from equilibrium systems.
economists have shown that any consistent behaviour whatever can be modeled by assuming that the players are behaving as though seeking to maximize the average value of something.
Just as it can be modelled by Astrology or Voodoo. Why did I just scratch my arse? It was because Mercury bumped into Uranus or else the witch-doctor stuck a pin in a wax doll.
This abstract something—which obviously varies with the context—is called utility.
or ophelimity or the fart of my imaginary Uncle who lives in Uranus.
When assuming that a player is maximizing his or her expected payoff in a game, we are therefore not taking for granted that people are selfish. In fact, we make no assumptions about their motivation except that the players pusue their goals—whatever they may be—in a consistent manner.
Also, they are in equilibrium in terms of ex ante and ex post.
It would be easy for the players to maximize their expected payoffs if they knew what strategy their opponent was going to choose. For example, if Adam knew that Eve were going to choose dove in the Prisoners’ Dilemnma, he would maximize his payoff by choosing hawk. That is to say, hawk is Adam’s best reply to Eve’s choice of dove, a fact indicated in Figure 1 by starring Adam’s payoff in the cell that results if the players choose the strategy profile (hawk, dove). However, the problem in game theory is that a player doesn’t normally know in advance what strategy the other player will choose.
Unless they rely on 'uncorrelated asymmetries'. If Eve owns a particular resource she is likely to guard it hawkishly.
A Nash equilibrium is a strategy profile in which each player’s strategy is a best reply to the strategies chosen by the other players. In the examles of Figure 1, a cell in which both payoffs are starred therefore corresponds to a Nash equilibrium. Nash equilibria are of interest for two reasons. If it is possible to single out the rational solution of a game, it must be a Nash equilibrium.
It is perfectly rational to do 'discovery'. Indeed even thrill seeking 'FOMO' could be regret minimizing. I know Eve will slap my face if I pinch her bum. But it was worth it to see her eyes sparkle. Also, maybe she feels sorry for me because I burst into tears and explain that the Doctor has given me just four hours to live unless some lovely lass gives me a leg over.
For example, if Adam knows that Eve is rational, he would be stupid not to make the best reply to what he knows is her rational choice. The second reason is even more important. An evolutionary process that adjusts the players’ strategy choices in the direction of increasing payoffs can only stop when it reaches a Nash equilibrium.
But 'Nash equilibrium' is like 'Providence' or 'the Will of the Mighty Witch Doctor in Uranus'. It is just something people say. Yet, the truth is, coevolutionary processes (which tame complexity something fierce but which lack a canonical form) don't stop. Ever.
Because evolution stops working at an equilibrium, biologists say that Nash equilibria are evolutionarily stable.
ceteris paribus. But this is like Equilibrium in Econ or the dream of naturality in category theory. It is far to seek and even farther if the person seeking aint as stupid as shit.
Each relevant locus on a chromosome is then occupied by the gene with maximal fitness.
None is. We don't know past or present or future fitness landscapes.
Since a gene is just a molecule, it can’t choose to maximize its fitness, but evolution makes it seem as though it had.
These are co-evolutionary processes relatively independent of a common fitness landscape. That's why, even if we knew the fitness landscape, there would still be non-determinacy. Because nothing will be 'optimal' (indeed it may not even be 'good enough') category theory can't find any fucking 'naturality' or non-arbitrariness.
This is a valuable insight,
No. It is false.
because it allows biologists to use the rational interpretation of an equilibrium to predict the outcome of an evolutionary process, without following each complicated twist and turn that the process might take.
What fucking prediction have they made about themselves? Will they develop fins so as to breathe underwater? I hope so. That would be cool.
The title of Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene expresses the idea in a nutshell,
it says that a particular gene is striving for the reproductive success of all other genes like itself no matter what bodies they may inhabit. Back then, there was some idea that maybe these genes could communicate or alter each other using Temin pro-viruses or something of that sort.
but it also provokes a lot of criticism. It is easy to be tolerant of critics like the old lady I heard rebuking Dawkins for failing to see that a molecule can’t possibly have free will, but tolerance is less easy in the case of critics like Lewontin or Gould, who chose to whip up public hostility against Edward Wilson and his followers on similar grounds.
Nothing wrong with a bit of public controversy on the subject. It helps convince the Bible Belt that Darwin isn't a Marxist who was actually born in Africa. Also, did you know Kamala's mother was Caucasian? She is only pretending to be bleck.
As Alcock’s Triumph of Sociobiology documents, they wilfully pretended not to understand that sociobiologists seek explanations of biological phenomena in terms of ultimate causes rather than proximate causes.
If so, they were wrong. The only thing available to us is co-evolutionary, not evolutionary, processes. But they extend to inorganic matter and even the evolution of the multiverse or whatever shitshow it is that we inhabit.
Why, for example, do songbirds sing in the early spring?
Because my pussy cat is lazy. Fuck you songbirds! Fuck you pussy cat! I tend to have really bad hangover in the early and middle and late Spring, Summer, etc.
The proximate cause is long and difficult. This molecule knocked against that molecule. This chemical reaction is catalyzed by that enzyme. But the ultimate cause is that the birds are signalling territorial claims to each other in order to avoid unnecessary conflict.
So, these are signals re. uncorrelated asymmetries. Still, it is as annoying as fuck.
They neither know nor care that this behaviour is rational. They just do what they do.
Unless pussy cat does what it ought to do. Climb that fucking tree and eat tweetie-bird! Do it now!
But the net effect of an immensely complicated evolutionary process is that songbirds behave as though they had rationally chosen to maximize their fitness by operating a Nash equilibrium of their game of life.
This is a correlated equilibrium based on a public signal- viz. annoying-as-fuck singing by birds which pussy cat really ought to have eaten.
The Prisoners’ Dilemma is the most famous of all toy games.
It is silly. Criminals understand that they guy who takes the fall is the low man on the totem pole. Otherwise, his family will be killed.
A whole generation of scholars
I suppose Binmore is using the term 'scholar' in a mood of pure farce
swallowed the line that this trivial game embodies the essence of the problem of human cooperation.
Cooperation, like anything else which is co-evolved (including our 'preferences') is impredicative, epistemic, and has no unique or well defined extension.
The reason is that its only Nash equilibrium calls for both Adam and Eve to play hawk, but they would both get more if they cooperated by both playing dove instead.
Why not cooperate by forming a winged army and, as in Hitchcock's 'Birds', throw a scare into Tippi Hedren?
The hopeless task that scholars set themselves was therefore to give reasons why game theory’s resolution of this supposed “paradox of rationality” is mistaken. Game theorists think it just plain wrong to claim that the Prisoners’ Dilemma embodies the essence of the problem of human cooperation.
Game theorists are as stupid as shit. I've never seen a pay-off matrix which was not fundamentally mis-specified.
On the contrary, it represents a situation in which the dice are as loaded against the emergence of cooperation as they could possibly be.
Unless, prisoners have watched a cop show or two and have enough nous to say 'no comment, allegedly, Guv'. Come to think of it there was a dude named Shivpuri who was studying Law at SOAS and thus was too stupid to say 'no fucking comment'. The result was he got sent to jail for bringing in drugs even though he hadn't actually brought in any fucking drugs!
With unconscious irony, Binmore speaks of what
psychologists call magical reasoning, in which logic is twisted to secure some desired outcome.
This is what game theorists- like Kaushik Basu- do. Binmore himself could do a nifty piece of auction design and 'mechanism design' could be considered 'reverse game theory' but he wasn't saying he had maximized returns to the Treasury. He was just saying, ceteris paribus, his 3G Spectrum auction would be in the public interest and bring in about 10 billion smackers.
The leading example remains Kant’s claim that rationality demands obeying his categorical imperative.
A particular sort of rationality which was supposed to be 'natural religion's' replacement for Christian 'synderesis'. The idea was that 'enlightened self-interest' was the 'invisible hand' by which the mysterious economy of the Katechon keeps the Eschaton at bay. Nothing wrong with Christianity. Replacing it with some pedantic shite involves magical thinking. This is because Religion has no problem admitting that Faith is founded upon a mystery, not some stupid logical fallacy a pedant pulled out of his arse.
In the Prisoners’ Dilemma, rational players would then all choose dove, because this is the strategy that would be best if everybody chose it. The following argument is a knock-down refutation of this nonsense.
But the argument is itself nonsense. The fact is, the guy low on the totem pole should confess and exonerate the other. This is because the Police might not bother to fabricate evidence if they get a conviction. The Godfather will be pleased. He may give your family some money though, no doubt, he will insist on raping your teenage daughter. The Don can be very thoughtful in such matters.
So as not to beg any questions, we begin by asking where the payoff table that represents the players’ preferences in the Prisoners’ Dilemma comes from.
They were pulled out of the arse of a pedant.
The economists’ answer is that we discover the players’ preferences by observing the choices they make (or would make) when solving one-person decision problems. Writing a larger payoff for Adam in the bottom-left cell of the payoff table of the Prisoners’ Dilemma than in the top-left cell therefore means that Adam would choose hawk in the one-person decision problem that he would face if he knew in advance that Eve had chosen dove.
Similarly writing a large number in the cell which represents Binmore snatching a dog turd from Sen and greedily devouring it will cause Sen to cry and cry.
If a society found itself at a social contract corresponding to the inefficient equilibrium in which everybody plays hawk,
e.g everybody refuses to pay taxes on the grounds that the money would be stolen
why wouldn’t they just agree to move to the efficient social contract in which everybody plays dove?
there is a concurrency problem. Consider the problem Ancient Athens faced with getting wealthy citizens to undertake 'liturgical' duties. If we point at one guy and say 'let's start with him', he is bound to reply 'No! Start with that other guy there. He is wealthier than me.' The solution concept was called 'Antidosis' or exchange of estates. Essentially, the guy allotted a liturgical duty can offer to exchange all he owns with somebody else in return for which that other person takes on that duty. This is like the solution to the cake cutting problem. One guy cuts the cake. The other gets first pick.
What happens to polities which don't raise productivity or threat point by doing sensible things? The answer is that they get invaded or go extinct and thus a new arrangement is enforced. But this may lower productivity.
...attributing rationality to the players isn’t enough to resolve the equilibrium selection problem
because there is no unique model nor is there any 'function' (with a graph) for the purpose of constrained optimization.
The underlying point here is that those of us who would like society to move to what we think will be a better social contract just waste our time if we simply bleat that people should be more trusting or honest. We need to try and understand how and why it makes sense to be trusting or honest in some situations, but not in others.
Why not point to productivity gains such that there is immediate 'consideration' for adhering to a new Social Contract?
We can then hope to improve our social contract by doing what we can to promote the former situations at the expense of the latter.
This is what Rawls failed to do. Previously, Liberals said 'guys, there are positive externalities and productivity gains to be made from adopting various collective insurance schemes. Raising up the poor means we become healthier, wealthier and more secure. There are 'dynamic' benefits such that the terms of trade move in our favor and thus we climb the value chain and engross more and more of the gains of trade. Also, if we make a practice of doing sensible things, then rabid nutters will steer clear of politics. Virtue signalers we may still have with us, but they will be banging on about Mother Gaia or the Great Spaghetti Monster or shite of that sort. They won't be fucking up fiscal policy.'
Economists don't appear to understand that a coordination game is likely to be a 'cheap talk' based pooling equilibrium. Hedging will occur and Income effects will arise on 'discoordination games' which are 'costly signal' based 'separating equilibria'. There will be arbitrage between the two. This is likely to be associated with 'interessement' or the seeking of political or epistemic 'obligatory passage point status' for rent extraction.
I have already signalled my intention of modeling a social contract as the set
of common understandings in a society that allow its citizens to coordinate on
one of the many equilibria of their game of life.
I don't understand any of the countless contracts of adhesion I am obliged to enter into. But Ebay and Apple etc. haven't tried to fuck me over because of stuff I signed. (Though Disney is arguing that a subscriber to its streaming service has signed away his right to compensation for the death of his wife at Disneyworld).
Furthermore, though my life is very boring and sedate it aint a fucking equilibria. That's why my hair and my teeth keep falling out. Quite soon, I will be dead. After my ashes waft away in the wind, I will be in equilibrium.
Game theorists think that only
equilibria are viable in this role, because, when each citizen has independent
goals which sometimes conflict with each other, only equilibria can survive in
the absence of an external enforcement agency. In brief, only equilibria are
self-policing.
I suppose Binmore means the folk theorem of repeated games. Back then, there were still plenty of Marxist nutters in the Academy and so it was worth saying 'anything coercion can do, non-coercive means can also do.' But this wasn't really true. People killing people probably led to our 'self-domestication'.
Game theorists rediscovered Hume’s insight
which would have been forgotten if a Stuart restoration had led to his head being chopped off
that reciprocity is the mainspring
of human sociality in the early fifties when characterizing the outcomes that
can be supported as equilibria in a repeated game. The result is known as the
folk theorem, since it was formulated independently by several game theorists in
the early fifties (Aumann and Maschler ).
Both Jews. Aumann found game theory (Shapley values in particular) in the Talmud. I've discussed this elsewhere.
The theorem tells us that external
enforcement is unnecessary to make a collection of Mr Hydes cooperate like Dr
Jekylls.
It would be futile. Hydes are crazy.
It is only necessary that the players be sufficiently patient and that
they know they are to interact together for the foreseeable future.
No. It is enough that their reputation matter. Incidentally the Hebrew 'bat kol' is like Sanskrit 'upashruti'. In the latter case, it can be 'gossip' but more generally it is 'Fama' which meant rumor and is the Latin word (through the Greek) for 'Fame'. We must be careful of our 'Name & Fame' or reputation. This is like the 'voice from Heaven' which, in Hinduism, can even dethrone the King of the Gods.
The rest can
be left to their enlightened self interest, provided that they can all monitor each
other’s behaviour without too much effort—
unnecessary. Gossip has a hundred eyes and 'Fama' a million tongues.
as, for example, must have been the
case when we were all members of small hunter-gatherer communities.
If Beyonce farts at the Oscars, I will know about it before her fellow guests get to smell it.
What outcomes can be sustained as Nash equilibria when a one-shot game
is repeated indefinitely often? The answer provided by the folk theorem is very
reassuring. Any outcome whatever of the one-shot game—including all the
outcomes that aren’t Nash equilibria of the one-shot game—can be sustained
as Nash equilibria of the repeated game, provided that they award each player
a payoff that is at least as large as the player’s minimax payoff in the one-shot
game.
In other words, if we think we have rigged a game, we think the game will stay rigged.
The folk theorem ... tells us that we can sustain the
outcome in which both players alternate between attending the boxing match
and the ballet as an equilibrium in the repeated game.
In which case, it tells us a lie. The value of an outcome changes if it is indefinitely repeated. Suppose I want people to know I'm not 'pussy-whipped'. It is enough if wifey show up with me three or four times to boxing matches. After that, nobody cares if I keep going to the ballet. They understand that hubby will get a beejay afterwards. Anyway, you can sleep peacefully at the ballet.
The kind of equilibrium strategy described above is often called the grim
strategy, because the punishment that keeps potential deviants on the strait
and narrow path is the worst possible punishment indefinitely prolonged.
i.e. ostracism. However, in practice, there is generally some method or expiation and readmission.
One
sometimes sees this strategy in use in commercial contexts where maintaining
trust is vital to the operation of a market. The Antwerp diamond market is a
good example. Traders pass diamonds back and forward for examination without any writing of contracts or attempt to monitor those trusted with diamonds
on approval. Why don’t the traders cheat each other? Because any suspicion
of misconduct will result in a trader being excluded from the market thereafter.
To quote a trader in the similar New York antique market: “Sure I trust him.
You know the ones to trust in this business. The ones who betray you, bye-bye.”
Up to a point. Sometimes you have to go back to the shady fellow. After all, a guy who tricked you might also be willing to break the law to benefit you. It's a question of getting the price right and the other guy having a sufficient incentive to keep his word.
Rawls did not understand that we are all behind a veil of ignorance in that we don't know whether out house might not burn down or that we might be hit by a bus which is why we buy fire insurance and health insurance etc. Moreover, the actuaries and other experts employed by Insurance agencies have an incentive to understand the underlying Structural Causal Model so as to get both individual and collective behavior to change in an eusocial manner.
Does Binmore understand this?
Of course, in an insurance contract, the parties to the agreement don’t have to pretend that they might end in somebody else’s shoes. On the contrary, it is the reality of the prospect that they might turn out to be Ms Lucky or Mr. Unlucky that motivates their writing a contract in the first place.
But they choose the level of cover and, in any case, recompense will never be 100 per cent because of moral hazard/ adverse selection.
But when the device of the original position is used to adjudicate fairness questions, then John knows perfectly well that he is actually Adam, and that it is physically impossible that he could become Eve. To use the device in the manner recommended by Rawls and Harsanyi, he therefore has to indulge in a counterfactual act of imagination.
Why not pretend he is an imaginary giraffe teaching calculus in the rectum of Donald Trump?
He can’t become Eve, but he must pretend that he could. How is this gap between reality and pretense to be bridged without violating the Linnaean dictum: Natura non facit saltus? As argued earlier, I think that human ethics arose from Nature’s attempt to solve certain equilibrium selection problems. But Nature doesn’t jump from the simple to the complex in a single bound. She tinkers with existing structures rather than creating hopeful monsters. To make a naturalistic origin for the device of the original position plausible, it is therefore necessary to give some account of what tinkering she might have done.
By a similar line of argument, we may well ponder what 'tinkering' Evolution must have done to explain why Binmore grabs and devours dog turds from Prof. Sen causing the latter to weep bitter tears.
In Peter Singer’s Expanding Circle, the circle that expands is the domain within which moral rules are understood to apply. For example, Jesus sought to expand the domain of the principle that you should love your neighbor by redefining a neighbor to be anyone at all.
This is the Stoic notion of expanding circles of oikeiosis. But only the Sage is capable of this. Jesus was a guy who could change water into wine. Also, he was GOD ALMIGHTY. Seriously, don't piss that dude off. Just pay your tithes and shut the fuck up.
How might evolution expand the domain within which a moral rule operates?
By causing Binmore to snatch and devour the dog turds which are Prof. Sen's favorite repast. This domain could be expanded by turning Binmore into an imaginary giraffe while Sen could become the rectum of Donald Trump.
My guess is that the domain of a moral rule sometimes expands when players misread signals from their environment, and so mistakenly apply a piece of behaviour or a way of thinking that has evolved for use within some inner circle to a larger set of people, or to a new game. When such a mistake is made, the players attempt to play their part in sustaining an equilibrium in the innercircle game without fully appreciating that the outer-circle game has different rules.
Binmore helped the UK Government by doing good auction design. Sen didn't. This is why Binmore should teach calculus as an imaginary giraffe inside Trump's rectum which is actually Sen.
Binmore mentions kin-selective altruism. There is some evidence that humans and some animals have sufficient plasticity as to assume kinship if brought up together at an early age. Thus, siblings reared apart may have the opposite of 'incest avoidance' while un-related infants brought up together have strong incest avoidance. There are various methods- e.g. collective worship or compulsory military service- whereby 'oikeiosis' or fraternity extends over a large class at least in some respects. However, this is to ignore the fact that Hamilton's rule, Price equation etc. assume kin are brought up together. If they are not, artificial kin are just as good as the real thing.
Harsanyi invents an agency called “moral commitment” that somehow enforces the hypothetical deal reached in the original position. Rawls similarly invents an agency called “natural duty” for the same purpose.
But both have no unique model and will tend to become anything goes. Still, as a matter of practical politics, we do prefer a statesman who appears principled even though we have to admit that, at the end of the day, principles have to be elastic.
My own view is that we are not entitled to invent anything at all.
I imagine, Binmore was raised in the 'positive econ' school. He certainly did something very positive for the Exchequer of this country.
If we treat the government of a modern state as an omnipotent but benign power whose function is to enforce the decisions made by the people under fair conditions, then Harsanyi’s analysis provides a reason why the government should make decisions on a utiltiarian basis. However, if there is no real (as opposed to invented) external enforcement agency, then Harsanyi’s argument fails. In particular, it fails if the officers of a government are themselves treated as people with their own personal interests, just like any other citizen. How come that Harsanyi is led to a utilitarian conclusion and Rawls to an egalitarian conclusion, given that they begin with the same assumptions?
Harsanyi, being a mathsy guy, got the math right. Rawls didn't. But both were barking up the wrong tree because Knightian Uncertainty exists. With Harsanyi, you can easily bring in the Insurance industry and the way it can itself drive premium reduction (thus permitting it to gain scope and scale economies and thus go from 'risk pooling' to actually reducing 'Knightian Uncertainty') and then go on to Incomplete Contract theory, the Revelation Principe, Mechanism Design etc. etc. That's fine because Harsanyi was an Economist. Rawls wasn't.
Game theorists trace the reason to Rawls’ decision to deny orthodox decision theory.
As Harsanyi pointed out, Rawls adopted a 'maximin' principle such that you would never cross a road just in case you might be hit by a bus.
Without this iconoclastic expedient, he too would have been led to a utilitarian conclusion—although his Theory of Justice was explicitly written to provide a reasoned alternative to utilitarianism.
Why didn't he course correct after Harsanyi pointed out his error? I suppose the answer is that his was a 'deontological theory'. If it is your duty to believe stupid shit, stupid shit is what you must believe.
My own view is that Rawls’ purposes would have been better served if he had taken more seriously the concerns he refers to as the “strains of commitment” in the third and longest part of his book. Taken to their logical extreme, these stability considerations require that everything involved in operating the original position must be self-policing.
In which case there is an infinite regress of original positions. What I mean is, why should economic considerations be given higher weightage than dick size? We need an original position where people don't have this absurd idea that money matters but it is impolite to mention penises.
But then we are led to an egalitarian position not so very different from that he defends in his Theory of Justice.
But it doesn't mention dick size! Not that dick size is the be all and end all. The truth is the quality and variety of a person's farts are the most important thing about him. How is it just that we celebrate smart people, wealthy people, dudes with big dicks but nobody has given me a Nobel for farting?
There is, in fact, some empirical support for the kind of egalitarian sharing to which one is led by analyzing the result of bargaining in the original position when all the arrangements must be self-policing. As in Wilson [60], the theory is usually called “modern” equity theory, although it goes all the way back to Aristotle [5], who observed that: What is just . . . is what is proportional. The theory says that people decide what is fair using the principle that each person’s gain over the status quo should be proportional to the appropriate social index for that person in the relevant context. The fair outcome generated by such an egalitarian norm will generally be very different from the outcome generated by a utilitarian norm. The latter is determined by dividing each player’s gain by the appropriate social index. The sum of these corrected payoffs is then maximized. Aside from other significant differences, a player gets more from the egalitarian norm if his social index is increased, but less from the utilitarian norm.
If there is unrestricted exit and 'Voice', this may work well enough. The problem is unrestricted 'entry'- as Malthus pointed out rebutting Condorcet. Binmore lived through a period when the demographics of London changed greatly. British Whites are now a minority. True, this has been accompanied with rising material standards of living but one wonders whether it was a 'democratic' outcome- i.e. one the British voters chose for themselves. Interestingly, Brown British politicians- from as far back as 1904- have wanted to greatly restrict immigration- more particularly of those of non-British religion or ethnicity! I suppose people like Binmore would be saddened by this outcome. As I said, he is a decent man. But he may just as well be a Christian like Dummett. But you don't have to know Calculus to be a Christian. You just have to refrain from masturbation. Seriously, Christ hates wankers. That's why I will stick with Hinduism.
(a) universal natural property (of all humans) is the deep structure of fairness. If I am right, then all the fairness norms we use successfully in solving the small-scale coordination problems of everyday life are rooted in Rawls’ original position.
I am reminded of a passage in James Hilton's Random harvest. A Rolls Royce car, in which a top hatted Capitalist is seated, has to wait as the workers stream out of the factory and cross the road. Suddenly, a cloth capped prole says 'let's have a bit of fair play here! Let the car through. It's been waiting long enough'. The workers, tired and hungry as they must be, nevertheless respond to the demand for 'fair play' and so the Rolls Royce moves on. This sort of incident was considered the reason Britain hadn't had a Bolshevik Revolution. But, what it was predicated on was the British love of orderly behavior- e.g. forming a queue or observing the rules of the road. Did this 'evolve' or was it rather something inculcated by Church, State, and the Family? Some might say 'British security depended on the Navy. Sailors must be extremely disciplined, organized, cooperative and withal cheerful and of good spirits.' But Britain hasn't relied on the Navy for its security for many decades now. Still, there are hysteresis effects.
Space precludes giving the arguments, but a testable consequence is that we should expect all fairness norms
all legal systems claim to be fair
that are actually used in all well-established societies to respond in the same way to changes in contextual parameters like need, ability, effort, and social status .
Do all legal systems change in the same way as circumstances change? I think there is some truth to this notion. But is it because jurisdictions have to compete for fear of being disintermediated? Not as far as I know. The French once talked of making fundamental changes to their Napoleonic Code so as to compete with Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions but I don't think anything came of it. The truth, I suppose, is that people at the top of the legal profession are faced with similar problems and apply similar solution concepts even if their legal systems are different.
Although I believe that the deep structure of fairness is probably universal in the human species, the same can’t be true of the standard of interpersonal comparison that is needed to operate the device of the original position.
Good point. It is very difficult to strip ourselves of our prejudices. Hence the paradox of homosexuals who opposed the decriminalization of sodomy. Centuries of brain-washing had caused them to have a false and harmful self-image.
This must be expected to vary, not only between cultures, but between different contexts in the same culture. Otherwise it wouldn’t be possible to explain the substantial differences in what is regarded as fair in different places and times, as documented in books like Elster’s [18] Local Justice. If I am right, the analogy with language is therefore close. All our fairness norms share the same deep structure, but just as the actual language spoken varies between cultures and contexts, so does the standard of interpersonal comparison that determines who gets precisely how much of a surplus that is divided fairly. For example, my theory suggests that it will always be regarded as fair for a person with high social status to get a smaller share than a less exalted individual, but the exact amount by which their shares differ will depend on the cultural idiosyncracies of the society in which they live.
I don't understand this. Why would we expect the Queen to get fewer chips or a smaller glass of Iron-bru at a State banquet? Speaking generally, we consider the material needs of those of higher status to be greater. The Queen needs a bigger privy purse to keep up appearances than the janitor. After all, we don't want all the other Queens- Beatrix, I'm looking at you!- saying 'yore Mum's a bag-lady. Take the shame!' to Prince Charles. He's a very sensitive lad.
Binmore's solution is sensible enough-
We don’t need a source of authority
to wish that society were organized differently.
Nor do we need bogus game theory or talk of evolution.
If there are enough people with
similar aspirations sufficiently close to the levers of power, we can get together
and shift the social contract just because that is what we want to do—and for
no other reason.
Provided it is incentive compatible. But Binmore, unlike Sen, has shown he can actually do useful mechanism design. He was more of a 'good egg' (as Bertie Wooster might have said) rather than an addled egg-head. But, maybe that was because he was actually smart, not pretending to be so. Socioproctologists, sadly, must cut their coats according to an exiguous amount of cognitive cloth.
