Welcome to the sixth lecture on general philosophy.
Today, we're going to be covering some related topics which might broadly be called philosophy of action.
We're starting off from where we were in the last lecture when we looked at personal
identity and the link that personal identity had with the idea of caring about our future.
We're then going to be moving on to discuss the issue of self-interest. Obviously,
that's intimately connected with the thought of care about our future self and discussing a little bit about the foundations
of morality before going on to free will and free will is a topic that is very intimately connected with moral issues.
We're not going to be completing free will this time, and we will be coming back to the issue of personal identity briefly as well.
Next time here we have, by the way, Bishop Joseph Butler, whose relevance will become clear later.
David Hume and Charles Darwin, whom we've seen quite a lot of Robert Axelrod and Peter Van in wagon.
So as we saw last time, it is possible to invent cases in which the concept of personal identity becomes threatened.
We can imagine ourselves being duplicated or our brains being split or things like that.
And the question is if I cannot identify a future individual as me, what issues does that raise and Derek half its way round?
That is to say, actually, there's nothing so special about my future personal identity.
What's important is my personal survival, and I might survive into more than one future person,
and I've got just as much reason to care about those future survivants as I have, if they were literally me.
So this naturally leads on to the question what it is about her future self that makes it especially rational to care about our self.
And that's where we're going to be starting today. So I want to introduce a theory called psychological egoism.
It's quite a popular theory. It won't surprise me if quite a lot of you actually hold it.
But let me explain it, and then you can tell me whether you do so.
Psychological egoism is the theory that in fact, everything we do is done with a view to our future self interest.
All of our intentional actions are done ultimately with our own benefit in mind.
Now notice this is a factual claim. It's a claim about human psychology.
It's often combined with a normative claim. People will say it's absolutely fine to look after ourselves.
That's the number one criterion. If you go materialistic with greed is good and all that kind of thing.
And it's a view that's associated, for example,
with Ayn Rand now notice that the psychological egoist doesn't claim that all our actions actually achieve our own benefit.
We might miscalculate. We might not know what will bring us benefit or harm.
We might do something thinking it's going to benefit, benefit us, for example, smoking because we enjoy it.
And then it ends up doing is harm. We might be unlucky.
We might fail in various ways. We might fail because other people following their self-interest cross our path and mess up our plans.
OK, now what do we mean by our own benefit?
Well, the most common interpretation of this and the one I'm going to focus on here is basically maximising our pleasure, minimising our pain.
And that theory is egoistic psychological hedonism.
So hedonism is the claim that what matters is pleasure and pain.
Psychological hedonism is the claim that we are motivated primarily by pleasure and pain.
Now, notice the psychological egoist doesn't have to claim that the only thing I desire is my own self-interest.
It's entirely compatible with psychological egoism that I desire the benefit of my family,
my friends, my country, my favourite football team, whatever it might be.
But the point is that the reason I desire their benefit is because it will ultimately benefit me.
I may want my favourite football team to win, but that's because their winning will bring me pleasure.
And it's the anticipated pleasure which motivates my hope that they will win.
So the crucial claim here is that the only thing we desire ultimately, rather than for the sake of something else, is our own benefit.
Now, if that's true, then it rules out the possibility of genuine altruism, so by altruism,
I understand acting for the ultimate benefit of someone else at potential cost to oneself.
So if I do something that costs me in some way,
that reduces my own pleasure and I do it because I ultimately care about increasing somebody else's, then that is an altruistic act.
Now, some people might think this is just a crazy theory, OK?
Because surely lots of normal, socially well-adjusted, apparently rational people do things like this.
OK, I'm sure most or hopefully all of you do some of these things or things like them from time to time.
And it may seem hard to think of some of these as a self-interested, I mean,
I think the last example is pretty good one taking out life insurance for the benefit of young children.
Right, that's something parents very commonly do. And we did it when we had children, we took out insurance.
And if we died, there would be money to look after the children until they were, you know,
20 or whatever it is that an egoistic act because any benefit they get is going to be after I'm dead.
So. So these things seem unselfish on the face of it.
But the psychological ego has a reply. And I think this is the principal attraction of psychological egoism.
Actually, it's something like this argument. I'm going to call it the a priori argument.
So here it goes. And here we are thinking about the philosophy of action.
What is it to act for a reason? Well, in standard cases, to do action a intentionally is to do a knowingly.
So I have to know what I'm doing and for a purpose. And the purpose will usually be to bring about some outcome.
Let's call that. Oh. But if I'm doing action a in order to bring about oh, and if that's going to give me a purpose,
if that's motivating me to do a, then it must be that I desire, oh, I desire the outcome.
So when I do the action, I am satisfying my desire for, oh, I'm doing a in order to satisfy that desire.
Now, if I'm doing something in order to satisfy my desire in order to get the satisfaction of that desire,
then I am in fact doing it for my own satisfaction. It is ultimately a selfish act may not seem it on the surface, but actually necessarily it is.
OK. Just informally, I'd be interested to ask you to put your hands up if you are attracted by this theory.
OK, yeah, that's that's quite a lot. I mean, typically in these lectures, I find it's about 50 percent.
So we're not talking here about a straw man. This is a theory that a lot of people are attracted to a lot of intelligent people.
Now I'm going to argue that the theory is completely wrong. Utterly wrong.
All right. It's completely wrong headed. So here goes first.
Reason for doubt about it. Let's apply Hume's fork. Remember Hume's fork?
The distinction between relation of ideas and matters of fact.
So psychological hedonism is a claim, it's a claim about the motivation of human action.
Now, is it meant to be a relation of ideas or a matter of fact?
So this is this is why it's called use fork.
You take out the fork and you apply it to the problem, you push it in and you say, Right, which prong are you taking?
Is it a relation of ideas or a matter of fact? It can't be both. Now we see it's a relation of ideas, then it's something that's true by definition,
you are just defining your terms in such a way as to make psychological egoism come out true.
But if you do that, it can't imply anything about the real world.
All right. You are just defining a maybe a selfish act as one that I do in order to satisfy my desire, right?
That can't tell you if you're defining it that way,
then it may trivially be true that anything that I do intentionally is selfish by your definition, but it doesn't say anything about the real world.
On the other hand, if the claim of psychological egoism purports to be a matter of fact,
a description of psychological reality, then it's got to appeal to empirical evidence.
It can't just appeal to an apparently a priori argument.
You can't have it both ways. There must be something wrong here. What's wrong is that there's a seductive ambiguity in the argument.
So satisfaction of a desire is different from getting satisfaction from your desires, being satisfied.
Those are completely different things, but they're very easy to confuse.
So satisfaction of a desire is a logical or semantic relationship between a desire and an outcome.
My desire for zero is satisfied. If it comes about.
Whether or not I know about it. OK. But if I desire something.
And that thing happens, my desire is satisfied, even if I'm completely unaware of its being satisfied.
Now, in the same way, I might guess that something is true. And that.
That belief of mine or I guess, of mine, that he could be a true get all belief, whether or not I know it's true.
So the logical, all semantic relationships between our desires and our beliefs and the truth are independent of our psychological state.
On the other hand, the satisfaction of an agent.
That is a psychological state, if you like a state of happiness or contentment or something like that, typically involving feelings of pleasure.
On contemplating an outcome.
Now, in this sense, my satisfaction at the coming about of a desired outcome, that is the personal pleasure I get from knowing about it.
OK, so those are quite different things. And notice that semantic satisfaction needn't be psychologically satisfying.
This isn't to deny at all the common sense, psychological fact that normally when our desires are satisfied, that gives us pleasure.
When we know about it, nobody's denying that. But they don't always.
There's no necessary connexion here. So, for example, I desire my children to thrive after my death, as I imagine do most parents.
I will not know if they do. That's never going to bring me any satisfaction at all.
Not the satisfaction of that desire. Of course I may I may get pleasure from doing what I can to ensure that it happens, but that's different.
The actual coming a bout of it will bring me no satisfaction at all because I won't be here to enjoy it.
We'll take another case, you know, I might wish to have, say, 10 grandchildren or that say 10 great grandchildren.
I will never know whether that is actually that desire will be satisfied.
Another point is that psychological satisfaction can be based on false information.
So let's suppose a journalist gets kidnapped by some terrorist group and his mother is dying.
The one thing she cares about is that her son is OK.
And there you are by the bedside, talking to you, trying to comfort her as she faces her death.
You hear that the Sun is actually being killed, but you decide to lie and you say the news has just come through your son safe.
Oh, I can die in peace and she dies. Let's not argue whether that's the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do that.
You can see that in that case, the woman feels psychological satisfaction.
But over the satisfaction of a desire which has not, in fact, been satisfied.
So those things are different. Hence, there is a flaw, a straightforward flaw in the a priori argument.
When I do a, I'm doing it in order to satisfy my desire for, Oh, that may be true.
It doesn't follow that I'm doing a in order to experience the psychological satisfaction that I get from I was coming about.
That's just a non sequitur. OK. Doesn't follow.
And by the way, though, particularly those of you who are studying PPE notice that there is a related ambiguity in the term utility,
very often in popular thoughts or discussions about economics, people interpret utility in terms of personal well-being.
Economists don't define it that way. Economists define utility as whatever it is that we are trying to maximise.
And in the case of a parent, for example, that may be the future well-being of their children.
And that's not their own well-being.
Okay, so I've got a quote here, actually, from the introduction to micro economics lectures that are happening this term,
and it's quite clear a utility is a measure of achievement of goals, not personal benefit.
And it's utterly, utterly wrong to put those together.
If you do, if you conflate those, then you are at risk of concluding that the only rational economic way to behave is in your own self-interest.
That is not implied by economic theory. That's a mistake. It's very unfortunate, I think that utility is often misinterpreted in that way,
and there are many people who somehow think that economic logic forces us or would force should force us to be self-interested,
that's simply not true. But surely you might say, when I try to achieve some outcome and succeed, I do get some personal pleasure from achieving it.
So my utility, as the economists define it.
And my pleasure. Do match up. Well, I've said it is plausible that they match in normal cases.
You know, a lot of the time satisfying our desires does bring us pleasure.
Sure. But even when that so it does not follow at all that I perform the action.
In order to obtain that pleasure, I may get pleasure from achieving some goal.
It doesn't follow that. My aim in achieving the goal was to get the pleasure.
Not at all. Indeed, if you think about it, that would be incoherent.
I can't desire to get pleasure from achieving a desire unless I have some other desire to achieve.
That my desires be satisfied cannot possibly be my only motivating desire.
Got a circularity there. You've got to have some independent desire in order to have something from which.
From the satisfaction of which you can get pleasure.
It is then possible to have a higher all the desire of getting that pleasure, but that's a different desire.
So actually, there's something really peculiar about thinking that your only desire is to satisfy your own desires.
It's logically incoherent, and psychological egoism basically gets the order of explanation back to front.
We normally get pleasure from having achieved something that we wanted to achieve.
It's not that we want to achieve the pleasure. We start off wanting to achieve something.
We get the pleasure when we achieve it. That's a much more normal way round.
Now, philosopher called Henry Henry Cejudo, he noted what he called the paradox of hedonism,
the impulse towards pleasure is too predominant defeats its own aim.
So basically, if you set out in a life. With the primary object of getting pleasure, you will fail,
you're far more likely to get pleasure in life to get satisfaction, contentment in life if you've set out with other aims.
Now that is a very well known fact.
It's very well known that people who just pursue pleasure end up with empty, unhappy lives, even killing themselves or whatever, right?
Riches and wealth and fame are not a passport to great happiness.
Most people get happiness in life from pursuing worthwhile aims rather than just pursuing their own pleasure.
And again, that's just a psychological fact.
But I think it's not surprising when you look at it in the light of the points I'm making about the psychology of action.
Now I want to show just how silly psychological egoism is.
So let's take the case of life insurance. I insure my life so that my wife and children will prosper after my death.
OK. I actually did this.
You know, my wife and I did insure our lives precisely to secure our kids well-being if we had both been in a car accident or something like that.
Now the psychological egoist comes along and says, Oh, but you did that because if you didn't do it,
you'd feel terribly uneasy about what was going to happen off to your children after your death.
So actually, the reason for paying the insurance premiums for making that financial sacrifice was to make your your own life easier.
But hang on a second. On the psychological egoist theory, I don't give a damn about what happens to my kids after my death.
I really don't. Sure. Their well-being while I'm alive may bring me pleasure, and I might care about that.
But once I'm dead, forget it. Who cares? So why should I feel uneasy if I'm actually that egotistical?
Then I'm not going to feel uneasy. So why do I feel uneasy?
Well, obviously the obvious explanation is I care about them.
I do care about what happens to them after my death. That's why I would feel uneasy.
And that is why I would indeed get some pleasure, if you like, from paying the insurance premiums.
But that's because it's relieving an anxiety, which I have independently.
I mean, he is a the psychological egoist explanation where I see an old lady wanting to cross the road.
Of course, I don't care in the slightest about her, well, being only about my own pleasure.
OK, I'm a psychological egoist, but I foresee that if I do go and help her across the road, I will feel some pleasure from having done so.
Why? I don't know, because I don't give a damn about her, but somehow or other strangely, I will feel pleasure from helping across the road.
So I'll go and help her to get that pleasure. And by the way, nobody's looking.
So I'm not scoring any points, you know, on the social scale from doing this.
I mean, it's a crazy explanation. Compare it to this one.
I see an old lady wanting to cross the road. I don't want her to get hurt, so I'll go and help her.
I mean, you know, this explanation is crazy,
because it's postulating a completely unexplained pleasure that I anticipate getting from doing something that I don't actually care at all about.
This is simply pointing out that we naturally feel concern about other human beings.
And it's a completely familiar phenomenon, right? This isn't this isn't a surprising thing.
If anything, we should be we should think that psychological egoism is wildly paradoxical.
I just find it astonishing that so many people are attracted by it.
And I can only think that it is something like the superficial appeal of the a priori argument.
And maybe it seems a bold and exciting theory, but.
Another point recall human induction, we are not as intellectual and rational as we like to think of ourselves,
sometimes as being in the case of induction, we just take for granted that the future will resemble the past.
That's an irresistible instinct just as well. We've got it, isn't it?
Now, our motivations also don't generally involve rational calculation.
Nearly as much as the psychological ego is to claim the psychological ego instincts that all the time.
Any intentional action we do, we're busy calculating how it's going to benefit us.
No. Lots and lots of things that we do. We just do pretty much from straight animal instinct.
And as Hume points out, animals instinctively show kindness both to each other and to us.
Do we think they're calculating their self-interest when they do that?
No, that's ridiculous. Well, if we can suppose animals can act kindly without doing calculation, that's likely to be true by humans as well.
And again. An evolutionary explanation is here extremely straightforward.
I mean, it's dead easy to explain by evolution why those of us who are parents typically care deeply about our children.
It's obvious, isn't it? Take a set of parents and not in our society, you know, with all the medical and social support and all the rest.
Think about a relatively primitive society, the kind of society in which humans evolved.
You get parents who don't give lots of attention to their helpless little infants and those who do because they love them dearly.
Which of them is going to have more offspring that survive to adulthood to breed themselves?
Well, obviously the ones who look after their kids. In which case the genes that lead them to look after their kids will be more frequent in
the next generation than the genes of the people who don't give a damn about their kids.
So, of course, the genes that lead to parental care will spread straightforward evolution very, very easy to explain and notice.
I think it's a little bit unfortunate. Richard Dawkins came out with this this phrase, you know, the selfish gene.
And some people, I think, think, Oh, there's something in genetics that makes us selfish.
No, no, no. It's the gene that selfish.
Not us. Right. And it's not really selfish, of course, because the gene isn't thinking.
But the metaphor is that genes that do their best as it were to propagate their own regeneration, their own reproduction into the next generation.
Those are the genes that prosper. And of course, those are precisely the genes that lead to parental care.
So from the genes point of view that the gene that makes us care intensely about our offspring and love them more than almost anything in the world,
those genes are extremely well adapted for surviving into the next generation they're bringing about that they do.
So it's the genes that are selfish. But again, it's a metaphor.
But the whole point is that the selfishness of the genes forces us.
If you like not to be selfish or brings about that, we all know.
Another point, I mean, I've said that the psychological ego is this overly intellectual thinking that we're rationally calculating all the time.
Evolution, of course, works through instincts and emotions. They're far more reliable.
I mean, if you want to get a parent to look after a child,
the mechanism of just giving the parent an intense love for the child and the desire to to keep it away from any danger
that's far more effective than having a parent who's busy calculating as the child walks towards the edge of the cliff.
If the child falls over the cliff, will that make me unhappy? Hmm. I'll have more time to, you know, do other things blah blah blah.
Calculate. Calculate, no, no. Nature just gives us an irresistible instinct child walking towards cliff.
Go and save it. So psychological egoism is wrong on so many angles.
It's illogical. It's back to front. It's overly intellectual.
Now, I have heard this last ditch defence of psychological egoism.
You care about your children, but only because you see them as part of your self.
Indeed, they share your genes. You want your genes to prosper. So it's still fundamentally self-interested.
Now, come on. I'm not stupid. I don't think my children are mean.
Of course I don't. And the idea that people evolved to care about their genes when until what?
Nineteen fifty three or whatever, nobody even knew what a gene was. This is just cloud cuckoo land.
If somebody says, well, when I say your, your children are part of you.
What I mean is you care about them as though they were part of you.
Oh, maybe that's sort of plausible. I care about my children as much as I do about myself in many respects, yes.
And as one gets older, by the way, that gets more so.
But that simply acknowledges psychological egoism is false that simply acknowledging that we do care very deeply about our children.
And I think it's quite interesting, I mean, we started all this with from the issue of personal identity and nowadays,
especially with identity politics and so on.
We do think of people as identifying with a cause and they may be religious, national, political, social and so forth.
And the simple fact is, people often do care more about some cause than they do about their own self-interest.
Many people will undergo all sorts of hardship for a cause, and we may say, Oh, they're identifying with it.
But when we say that we are not saying that somehow they are irrational about their own personal identity,
that they somehow think they've ceased to be a person. All we're saying is that they they treat.
They treat the cause as something that they are intimately committed to.
And there's nothing particularly irrational about that.
I mean, of course, there can be some lining up with some causes might manifest irrationality in various ways.
But but there's no you can't give any rational argument for saying we shouldn't care about this or that.
I mean, you can argue that some commitments are inconsistent, but an important point that David Hume made in the treatise of human nature,
I say it's notorious because he kind of throws it off in a paragraph and raises it as a big question can you ever infer an ought from an is?
And he seems to be hinting that you can't. And this is widely accepted in many philosophers would agree.
Most philosophers, I think, would agree you cannot get an ought from an is that is merely factual.
Claims will not by themselves generate a statement of obligation.
Now, if that's true, then no argument can rationally force us to relinquish our most fundamental normative commitments.
If there is something I care about. So much that it dominates everything else, then nobody's going to be a and it's consistent.
It is not some kind of inconsistent desire that can be shown to be logically faulty.
There is no way I'm going to be reasoned out of it. And indeed, when you reason with people about things like morality,
typically what you do is you either bring new facts to light that may bear on their view or you have potential inconsistencies between their views.
It's impossible to argue about normative issues as it were right from the base.
You've always got to appeal to something that somebody already cares about.
So let's now turn towards morality and on to free will, which is intimately connected with it.
I'm being a little bit dogmatic here and saying I, I simply don't think any of the attempts to found the morality on pure reason.
I mean, Kant is the most famous have actually worked.
I don't suppose they ever will, attempts to argue that morality can be justified in terms of self-interest.
Well, there's something to that. But it seems rather dubious as a general claim unless you believe that there is some
sort of reward and punishment in an afterlife administered by a perfectly just God.
We all know of plenty of cases that seem to tell against that heroic people who've ended up being tortured,
nasty people who've ended up being very rich and comfortable and so forth.
But we might get a more balanced view between moral and selfish attitudes if we
if we see them both as having the same ultimate source they both come from.
If you like the broad biology and evolution and context of human life,
human sketch sketches an account of morality that fits very easily with an evolutionary
perspective because Hume didn't know about evolution as we now understand it.
Darwin was writing a century after Hume. But you can see the kind of story there is a natural appetite between the sexes,
which unites them together and preserves their union till a new tie takes place in their concern for their common offspring.
OK. Makes sense. Boy and girl fancy each other, child comes along a natural evolution,
evolutionary instinct kicks in, they both think this little bundle is absolutely adorable.
And as a result, they've now got a new tie. They're both.
They're both concerned about making sure that this little bundle survives.
A family immediately arises and particular rules are found requisite for subsistence.
When several families unite together into one society, the rules which preserve peace and order enlarge themselves to that extent.
Now, within one family, you know you might not have strict rules,
you might obviously have conventions and they might come from the way the society works.
But once you get societies, families uniting together in a tribe or whatever, there are going to be conflicts of interest.
There are going to be these things are going to need to have rules to sort them out.
And then the boundaries of justice will grow still larger with a corresponding natural progress
of human sentiments when different societies interact for mutual convenience and advantage.
So basically, humans saying morality, rules of justice and so forth naturally come about from the biological reality.
Now, obviously, Hume's story, I mean, particularly the last bit when he's talking about this natural progress of human sentiments.
What I think he means there is that when we interact with people from other societies or, you know, other towns, other tribes,
whatever it is in doing that, we apply principles of justice, fairness and so forth,
and those principles will probably emerge within our smaller groups.
So within our village, we have an idea of justice. You know, this is mine.
That's yours. I won't touch yours if you don't touch mine, you know that sort of thing.
And then when we interact with the neighbouring village, maybe we want to trade.
We bring to that conversation our understanding of justice.
Now you might naturally think, well, OK, that seems so straightforward, but how does the evolutionary story work exactly then?
It's very easy to explain why we should all be concerned intensely about our offspring because they carry our genes.
But how does it work more broadly than the family?
And this is an area where computer modelling has actually recently, I mean, in the last 30, 40 years made a profound difference.
This chap, Robert Axelrod, was particularly influential.
I think he was the first person to try doing this.
So let's look at a game called the prisoner's dilemma.
A lot of you, I imagine, would have come across the prisoner's dilemma. I'll just talk you quickly through a version of it.
OK, so imagine that there are two of us one male, one female, I'll be the male.
The gender isn't important, it just makes it easier for reference. That's all.
So I'll and I'll refer to you as the you're the female, right?
So you're in one room. I'm in another. And each of the rooms is set up in an identical way.
There are two buttons in the room. One is called. One is labelled cooperate.
One is labelled defect. And underneath the buttons, there is a slot where money can come out.
OK, now I don't know who you are and you don't know who I am.
We have never seen each other, we're never going to meet again. This is just a one off interaction between you and me.
You're in your room. I'm in my room. We cannot influence each other at all.
All we can do is press either cooperate or defect.
OK, if I press cooperate. And you press cooperate to.
Then three thousand pounds will come through my slot. And likewise, yours.
If I press cooperate and you press defect. I'll get nothing at all.
You will get 5000. Likewise, if you cooperate and I defect, I will get five thousand pounds.
You will get nothing. If we both defect.
We will both get £1000. Got that.
OK, so what should I do? Well, here's how I might reason.
I don't know what she's going to do. She's either going to cooperate or she's going to defect.
If she cooperates, however, I'm clearly better off defecting, I'll get 5000 pounds instead of three thousand pounds.
But if she defects. Oh, I'm still better off defecting because I'll get one thousand pounds against nothing.
So whatever she does, I'm better defecting. Defect. Meanwhile, you in your room, you're thinking, well, I don't know what he's going to do,
but if he cooperates, I'm better off defecting and if he defects, I'm better off defecting defect.
And we both get £1000 pounds. Well, OK, it's better than nothing.
But we feel pretty silly as we walk outside and talk to some other people who've been playing this game and we talk to them and they said,
Oh, I didn't calculate. No, I just thought it would be nice to cooperate. And I got three thousand pounds.
But there we were, rationally calculating our self-interest.
And we ended up worse off. So that's why it's called the dilemma.
It seems that rational calculation actually can lead to a situation in which everybody does worse.
Now, it does seem in the one shot prisoner's dilemma, if you've just got, you know, one go, it's hard to argue against the case for pressing defect.
Sadly. But the situation changes, right, radically if you iterate the prisoner's dilemma.
This is what Axelrod Rob discovered. If you have a prisoner's dilemma, which is repeated where the interactions continue again,
it doesn't necessarily involve any personal relationship with the individual concerned.
You'll stay in your room. I'm still in my room, but instead of just pressing cooperate and effect once.
We do it repeatedly. I mean, maybe we do it 100 times in a row or something like that.
And you can imagine then the dynamics would change a great deal.
So imagine you're in your room. I'm in my room this time instead of thousands of pounds, it's just pounds.
OK, so imagine we've got 100 or more of these interactions to go.
So I start off well, I know. I know. The right thing to do is defect defect, one pound defect, one pound defect.
This is silly. This is silly. We could both be getting three pounds every time.
I'll try cooperating. Cooperate nothing. Go rotten, woman.
She defected on me, well, I'm going to defect on her defect. £5.
Oh, that's interesting. I cooperated once and she got £5.
Now she's cooperating back.
She got the signal, not that he was intending it in that way, but now let's just try again cooperate 3lb, cooperate 3lb, cooperate three.
You can see how it would happen yet. Not because I care at all about her or she cares at all about me,
but because we are stupidly foregoing the possibility of getting three every time just by being suspicious and getting one every time.
And it's a very interesting backwards induction argument, if you know how many iterations this is going to happen.
And that leads to a very curious and I think rather dubious result about that.
But leave that aside, just take the point that in general, if the prisoner's dilemma is iterated, things change.
The dynamic is different. OK, so let's take an example.
Of three strategies. So I'm going to use red for the strategy that's commonly called all see the naive co-operator.
So if it's worthy of the name strategy, this just cooperates all the time.
And then all d so which all use blue is a nasty defector.
It just defects all the time. And we have one strategy here that's just a little bit clever.
It's called [INAUDIBLE] for tat. It's a nice strategy, meaning it will never defect until it's been directed against.
It's never the first to defect, so it starts out being cooperative, but then reciprocate.
It behaves in exactly the same way that the other guy did on the previous term.
We've got that. So we got three different strategies. Now imagine that you have a context in which that is being played out.
So here's a simple computer model you can see we've got a grid.
Most of them are red, so they're the naive co-operators.
We've got a few blues scattered around there, the nasty defectors, and we've got a fair number of greens there, the [INAUDIBLE] for tat.
What will happen when we set this going well?
Let me just explain how it works. Each cell is interacting with all of the cells around it.
OK. And by the way, the edge is one wraparound to the other side, so they've all got eight neighbours.
So each cell has a sequence of 10 iterated prisoner's dilemma.
Interactions with each of the other set cells with each of its eight neighbours got it with the same scoring that I showed you before.
So it's doing a sequence of 10.
And then once they've all done that, the cell gets taken over by whichever strategy of the nine around it has been most successful,
whichever has the biggest payoff reproduces itself into the new cell.
OK, so let's see what happens. You might be able to guess what's going to happen to start with.
So. Who do you think's winning? Blues winning.
Now, it's very misleading.
Obviously, what's happening is that the nasty defectors are exploiting the naive co-operators wherever you get a blue with a load of reds.
The blue is just defecting, defecting, defecting and the co-operator is just cooperating, cooperating, cooperating.
So the defector gets five for every one of those interactions, and the coffee cooperative gets nothing.
So the defector ends up with 50 over the 10 interactions, right?
So it's scoring big time. So it's not surprising that the Blues are taking over most of it.
And you might think this shows that the Blues are doing really well. Actually, the Blues aren't doing really well.
Because in the middle of any of those blue blocks, you get a blue totally surrounded by all the blues.
Right? And they are being directed against on every single move by their neighbours, so they they're each scoring 10 each time, not 50.
Right. So you get a very misleading impression here.
It's a bit like if you have a country which devotes huge resources to its weapons and neglects its people.
And if you have a war, the country makes great advances against the others and you think, Oh, they're doing really well.
No, they're not. They're not doing really well. They're just really good at attacking other people.
And the Reds in the middle of these red clumps are doing much better in terms of pay off than the Blues in the middle of the Blues.
It's just that when they encounter each other, I'm afraid the Blues exploit them.
So let's let it continue. Now, the great thing about the [INAUDIBLE] for tat is when they interact with the Blues.
Obviously, on the first round of the 10, they cooperate in the blue defects, so they lose.
But then from then on, they defect, defect, defect effect against the defector.
Meanwhile, because some of their other other neighbours are greens, as long as they are,
as long as they have some other [INAUDIBLE] for tat with them, they're cooperating against each other all the time.
So they're getting 30 every time from that pile.
So even a small group of [INAUDIBLE] for tat can fairly easily survive against the Blues, and eventually you see the Blues get completely wiped out.
Good riddance. So there is a nice lesson here, and Axelrod found that this was in fact a robust result.
Nice strategies do better than nasty ones. So what we have here effectively is cooperation evolving, not on the basis of relationships,
not on the basis of kin selection genes being favoured because they're all in the same family, but cooperation through reciprocation.
So nowadays, whereas in the past, before Axelrod and so on, people found it rather a puzzle how altruistic behaviour could evolve.
Now it's accepted that there are plenty of sort of game theoretic explanations.
OK, so let's move now towards free will, and I'm just going to briefly introduce the topic here.
We'll be discussing it much more next time. So we think of people as morally responsible for what they do in general.
But actually, we don't think of them as morally responsible for absolutely every thing they do, only what they do freely.
And there's a big question about what counts as free.
And I've been talking a lot in this lecture about evolved patterns of behaviour.
And you might very well wonder whether that actually impacts negatively on morality.
I mean, if if what I do is, I do because I've been programmed that way, you know, by evolution, by my genes and so forth.
Is it really morally worthy or subject to moral appraisal?
So we're in the realm here of talking about the ancient issue of free will and determinism.
OK, so determinism is basically the thesis that all events are determined by prior causes.
So for any event, given the causal laws governing the universe and the prior state of the world, it was inevitable.
OK, and there's David Hume there saying people normally accept determinism with regard to physical things.
Hume goes on to argue that that's true of human action as well. So everything in the universe is determined.
Laplace gave the famous encapsulation of what determinism would involve you.
Imagine an omniscient intellect that knows the position of every single particle in the universe and how
you know what direction they're moving in the speed it would be able to calculate all future outcomes.
So that's what we're talking about when we talk about determinism.
Now, I've mentioned in the first couple of lectures why the early modern period, the people,
the period of Descartes lock humans, so on why it was such a fruitful period for new philosophy.
And with the scientific revolution, with the overthrowing of the Aristotelian picture of the universe,
certain problems came into relief, which are still with us today.
And in particular, the removal of purpose and the bringing in of mechanism as the way in which the universe broadly works,
seems or risks pushing out a moral accountability.
If we are physical things and we are placed within a physical universe operating according to physical laws,
which means that actually every movement of my body, including, of course, my mouth and my hands and so forth.
If all of that is physically determined, is there really any room for morality?
OK, so just as a sort of introduction to next time, and if you can come along armed with a clear grasp of these distinctions, that will be helpful.
Some people think free will is compatible with determinism. Some don't.
The people who think that free will is incompatible with determinism.
Uh, most of these people are either libertarians or hard determinist because you could be neither.
You might think we don't have free will. Then determinism is false.
But most people in in this game are either libertarians.
They think we do have free will. Free will is incompatible with determinism.
Therefore, determinism is false. They must be false if we are to have free will.
So there are libertarians. On the other hand, you get hard determinist to say determinism is true.
Free will is indeed incompatible with determinism, so we don't have free will.
So they might be likely to think that morality is therefore bunk,
the whole idea of moral responsibility is nonsense because we do not have moral freedom because determinism is true.
So libertarians and hard determinist, they might seem polar opposites, but actually in one respect in this debate,
they're quite close together because they're both incompatible lists, compatible lists,
which I think is definitely the majority amongst contemporary philosophers.
Compatible is, say, having free will and being determined being causally determined are compatible.
There's no reason why I can't be both fully determined by causal laws and at the same time, free notice, by the way.
And that's my position.
By the way, I'm a compatible IST, but I just want to make clear I'm not a soft determinist, so a lot of compatible starts of determinism determined.
It's because they think determinism is true, but it's entirely possible to be a compatible list and not to believe determinism is true,
e.g. because of quantum mechanics and stuff like that.
So my view would be if determinism were true, I don't think that's a particular problem for free will,
but actually, I don't think determinism is true.
OK, so it's important to distinguish between compatible ism and soft determinism, because these days, you know,
since quantum mechanics, there are quite a lot of people who would be compatible without being soft determinism.
OK, so I'm going to briefly mention the a big argument, the consequence argument.
Peter Van wagon's famous argument, which basically tries to push the incompatibilities line and it's intuitively a very powerful argument.
If determinism is true, then all human actions are causally determined consequences of the laws of nature and prior conditions.
That's what determinism means. Hence, I cannot do otherwise than I actually do, except either by falsifying the laws of nature or changing the past.
But I obviously can't do either of those things. If I cannot do otherwise than I actually do, then I don't have free will.
The essence of free will is to be able to do other than you actually do.
So if determinism is true, I don't have free will, but that seems a pretty powerful argument.
It's the probably the chief weapon in the incompatibilities armoury.
Against that, a compatible response, I'm just going to sketch.
Free will matters to us because it involves being able to choose what we want and
being able to achieve our ends accordingly without being prevented from doing so.
So as long as what I did was determined by my own thought process is guided by my own desires and purposes, then what I did was indeed free.
Under this conception, where those purposes and thinking capabilities came from is irrelevant, the fact that I was evolved to prefer certain things.
Who cares? That doesn't matter.
You know, I evolved to prefer ice cream over cake, and so I will predictably choose ice cream over cake whenever offered it.
Absolutely predictable. Does that impugn my freedom? No, no.
I'm perfectly happy choosing the ice cream because I prefer it.
So being free is simply a matter of being able to do what I want to do and in the way I decide to do it.
That is not affected at all by determinism. OK, so then we've got the two positions, and I'll end with David Hume's definition of liberty,
which you'll see is exactly in the spirit of what I just said by liberty.
Then we can only mean a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may.
If we choose to move, we also may. Now this hypothetical liberty is university allowed to belong to everyone who is not a prisoner or in chains.
OK, so most of us, we're not totally tied up in chains.
We are able to act according to our desires in the situation in which we find ourselves.
Therefore, we have liberty so defined. Peter van in-world and we'll say that's no real liberty at all.
If everything you do is actually forced on you by the laws of nature and prior conditions, then those are your chains.
And on that point, I shall end and we'll pursue this next week.
Thank you.