A brief pause in a busy day to write about what I've been reading during other brief pauses in my busy days. (Man, that Godel class is getting to me already :) ). The book is Game Theory and the Social Contract, by Ken Binmore, and I'm finding it totally fascinating. The author develops a moral theory based on the mathematical field of game theory, and I find myself agreeing with many of his beliefs about what morals are and how we should develop social contracts. It also contains lots of basic game theory, which is great for me as I've never taken a basic class on the subject, only on the CS-related aspects, but am very interested in it.
To understand the basic idea of the book, you must understand Rawls's original position notion, which is an ingenuous defense of redistributive social systems. The idea is that we should picture ourselves as disembodied souls behind a veil of ignorance, negotiating rationally about how society should be structured. We don't know what bodies we'll be put into, what our abilities or social class will be, and thus we are likely to wish to insure against getting unlucky. A social system which helps the less well-off (at the expense of the well-off) is the obvious way to do this.
I find this as disingenuous as it is creative. As Binmore says, "in this section, attention has centered on why a hypothetical deal envisaged as being agreed behind an imaginary veil of ignorance at some indefinite time in the past should be regarded as a binding commitment for everyday folk here and now...There is nothing about the circumstances under which people are hypothesized as bargaining in the original position that can justify the assumption that they are bound, either morally or in practice, to abide by the terms of a hypothetical deal reached in the original position."
Personally, I find the whole soul-seperating thing extremely counter-intuitive. Wrapping my head around the idea that I might have been born in a very different social class is easy, but the idea that I might have different abilities which dramatically affected my potential income just doesn't make any sense to me. If I had different abilities, I wouldn't be me, they are an integral part of my self. A deal made by some hypothetical entity without my abilities has little to do with me that I can see.
Binmore is far more pragmatic. He believes that we should only seek social systems that are equilibria, in the game theoretic sense, which I think is a powerful idea. He also thinks we should focus on reachable equilibria from the world we inhabit, rather than speculating about utopias, which I also totally agree with. And he quickly convinced me of his view on where morals come from. His ideas about designing realistic social contracts for mutual benefit dovetail nicely with anarcho-capitalism. A-C is rabid about making such contracts explicit and open-minded about how they should be structured.
Here are some of the quotes I've found striking so far:
"I believe that Mrs. Thatcher was right to reject the leftist Leviathan as a model of what society is our could be. A view of human society that sees Leviathan simply as an individual on a giant scale, equipped with aims and preferences like those of an individual but written large, would seem to place man in the wrong phylum. Perhaps our societies would work better if we shared the genetic arrangements of the hymenoptera (ants, bees, wasps, etc.)...But this is not the case, and all that can be expected from "reforms" based on such misconceptions about the human condition is that they will fall apart in the long run, leaving behind a sense of disillusionment and a distaste for reformers and for reform in general....The truth about society is much more complex than either the left or right is willing to admit...A conservative may feel that to concede this is to concede little of importance. No doubt common understandings exist, but surely they are too fragile and ephemeral to be other than peripheral to the way society operates? Along with many others, I think this view is badly mistaken. Far from being peripheral to society, such common understandings constitute the very warp and weft from which society is woven."
"We are all players in the game of life, with divergent aims and aspirations that make conflict inevitable. In a healthy society, a balance between these differing aims and aspirations is achieved so that the benefits of cooperation are not entirely lost in internecine strife. Game theorists call such a balance an equilibrium. Sustaining such equilibria requires the existence of commonly understood conventions about how behavior is to be coordinated. it is such a system of coordinating conventions that I shall identify with a social contract."
"Whigs argue that it is sensible to look at the whole class of social contracts that are feasible for a society and to consider whether one of these might not be an improvement on our current social contract. Left-wing socialists...do not understand that there is a feasibility constrant. They therefore propose social contracts that are unworkable because they call for behavior that is not in equilibrium. The utopias they envisage are therefore unstable. Right-wing conservatives...in concentrating on the need to sustain our current social contract, they lose sight of the opportunity to select a better equilibrium from the many available."
"A community based on the assumption that its citizens can be relied on to behave unselfishly much of the time simply will not work...Nobody need make great sacrifices in the process once it is understood that it is not in the self-interst of the "strong" that they always let the "weak" go to the wall. We can go from the old to the new by mutual consent. We do not need to set up stultifying and inefficent bureaucracies along the way."
"Utopias are typically founded on misconceptions about human nature and hence are doomed to fail. Nor does there seem much point in adopting a point of view that evaluates what we have now by comparing it to such ideal but unattainable societies. All that can be achieved by doing so is to distract attention from improvements that actually are feasible."
[Footnote. Book was published in 1994, long before the war on Iraq]: "A reform that was succesful in one society need not be succesful in another society - ie what proved to be feasible here need not be feasible elsewhere. In particular, it is far from obvious that we act in our own best intersts if we unthinkingly seek to remodel our neighbors in our own image. Reforms need to be tailored to the system of common understandings that currently operate in a society, not to those which once operated in our own society."
"I believe that the actual rules that govern our moral behavior are simultaneously less grand and more complex than those which moral philosophers have abstracted from the mythology of our culture. Insofar as people are conscious of the actual rules, they call them conventions, customs, or traditions. Such rules are neither absolute nor immutable. They are shaped larger by evolutionary forces - social and economic, as well as biological. if one wishes to study such rules, it does not help to ask how they serve the "good". One must instead ask how and why they survive."
"...any ideal standards of justice that we choose to advocate should be workable in at least one possible world. Moreover, it should be a possible world that is attainable from the world in which we currently live by a process that is itself possible, and not just in some abstractly conceived best of all possible worlds."
"The problem for a reformist will then be regarded as that of seeking a new social contract to which society can be shifted by mutual consent. When will such consent be forthcoming?...Individuals will be assumed to consent to a reform only if it is in their enlightened self-interest to do so."
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