So, I stumbled across this news article recently, where in the biologists have figured out that it’s to the advantage of yeast to cooperate. This came as a bit of a surprise for the biologists (OK, at least one physicist- I’m not sure why he was quoted):
Cooperative behavior has puzzled biologists because if only the fittest survive, genes for a behavior that benefits everybody in a population should not last and cooperative behavior should die out, says Jeff Gore, a Pappalardo postdoctoral fellow in MIT’s Department of Physics.
My response to this is that they should have talked to the computer scientists and mathematicians, or anyone who read Douglas Hofstadter: we figured this out 25 years ago. And in the process of figuring this out, proved something interesting: you can have morality and cooperation without requiring a religious enforcement mechanism.
My copy of the book went walkabout (meaning: I loaned to someone, forgot who I loaned it to, and they haven’t returned it yet), so last week I broke down and bought a new copy of “Metamagical Themas”, which is a collection of his columns in Scientific American. In between such gems as introducing the game Nomic (I’ve actually played this game- we had a discussion once about having a Nomic tournament, but couldn’t agree on the rules) and self-referential sentences (“Please, oh please, include me in your collection of self-referential sentences!”), he talked about the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
For those who don’t know about the Prisoner’s Dilemma, here’s a short introduction. I’m going to give a slightly different introduction than normal- so if you want to know more about this (including why it’s called the Prisoner’s Dilemma), wikipedia is, as usual, a good place to start. Say you’re buying drugs, or diamonds, or nuclear secrets, or whatever, from your casual associate George. Because of the illicit nature of this deal, you both agree to the following slightly odd exchange mechanism. Every weekday for the next four weeks, over lunch, you’ll happen to both sit on the same park bench, both of you with your paper bag lunches. Your paper bag will hold the money, George’s will hold the diamonds or whatever. Then, when you get up, each of you will “accidentally” take the other person’s paper back and, without inspecting it, wander off (technically, this is the iterated closed-bag version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma).
So each day, each of you have a decision to make: what to put in each of your paper bags. For example, you might put in the money you agreed to pay George. Or you might decide to fill the bag with cut up newspaper, knowing that George will have wander off, and allowed you to make your escape, before discovering that you cheated him. Likewise, George might put diamonds in his paper bag, or he might put in gravel, and you won’t find out until after George make his escape. So both sides can cooperate (put money and/or diamonds in their bag), or defect (put newspaper and/or gravel in their bags).
This was a medium to long lived subject of interest to a lot of people in the early eighties- fueled in large part by Hofstadter himself. But what I found really interesting was the tournaments. The idea was fairly simply- host a (iterated, closed-bag) Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament, and get smart people writing programs, and run the programs against each other, and see who can come up with the smartest algorithm. The people running the tournament seeded the programs with various simple algorithms- like “always defect”, “always cooperate”, etc. One algorithm they seeded the tournament with was “tit-for-tat”, a very simple algorithm that always cooperated on the first round, and then every round thereafter simply did whatever the other player did last turn. The idea in seeding these algorithms was to get the obvious ideas out of the way, so people would think up better algorithms. So it was a great surprise to all concerned when, in the first year the tournament was held, tit-for-tat won.
So, in the second year, people started writing specifically anti-tit-for-tat algorithms, trying to beat last year’s winner. And, being the sort of people they are, anti-anti-tit-for-tat algorithms, and anti-anti-anti-tit-for-tat algorithms, and so on. And to much dismay, tit-for-tat won again. By the third year, nobody was surprised when tit-for-tat went 3 for 0, and variations of the game, like making a generational version, where how many copies of your program survive to the next generation is a function of your program’s score this generation, just increased the dominance of tit-for-tat. After that, interested in the game waned, and the tournament was discontinued.
Hofstadter actually discusses some of why he thinks tit-for-tat is such a robust strategy. Included in this are two important points: one, that tit-for-tat reward cooperation with cooperation but punishes transgressions, and two, that tit-for-tat also forgives transgressions after they are punished, allowing the two programs to go back to cooperating. What I want to discuss is the applicability. There is an important question: which version of the game is more generally applicable, the single round Prisoner’s Dilemma, or the multi-round version? Because in the single-round version, the logical thing to do is to defect, but in the iterated version, having a bias towards cooperation is the winning strategy.
If you think about it, even in the modern world, most of our interactions with other people are, in fact, iterative in nature. We tend to eat in the same restaurants, shop at the same stores, talk to the same people, etc. Even in situations you might think are one-off interactions generally include the potential of multiple interactions- you might think that it’s safe to stiff your waitress at that roadside diner you never intend to visit again, but stop and think- how often do you forget your credit card, keys, cell phone, or whatever and have to come back ten minutes or an hour later to claim them? If you leave a decent tip, you’re likely to be met with a smile and a “I thought you’d come back for this”. Stiff your waitress, and your cell phone might just have soup “accidentally” poured on it.
This feature of our lives was even more pronounced back when we still living in caves- it was rare indeed to meet a human who wasn’t either of your own extended-family/tribe, or one of the nearby extended-families/tribes with which you had regular dealings with (even if those “regular dealings” included going to war). We as humans are genetically programmed to be biased towards cooperation, as this is a pro-survival characteristic. Proto-humans who worked well together preferentially survived over those who didn’t.
This links into morality because morality is just another form of cooperation, only over issues we consider more fundamental or important. As an example of this, consider the following thought experiment: there are two different tribes of cave men. In tribe A, the members of the tribe make an agreement- you don’t try to kill me, I won’t try to kill you. You don’t steal my food, I won’t try and steal your food. You don’t try and steal my mate, I won’t try and steal yours. And so on. An agreement over things we’d consider “basic morality”- murder, theft, that kind of thing. Tribe B doesn’t make that agreement. Which tribe is more likely to survive? You’re right- tribe A. Being able to work together with less paranoia is a pro-survival characteristic, and pretty soon tribe B is extinct, and tribe A covers the land. It should come as no surprise, then, that most of the basic principles of morality are common among all religions and all people.
I often opine that those who espouse “enlightened self-interest” generally forget the “enlightened” part, and instead practice stupid, short-sighted self-interest. This is exactly what I mean when I say this- most often, the practitioners of “unenlightened self-interest” try and treat every situation as a non-iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, where the rational thing to do is defect. The problem is that true, non-iterative Prisoner Dilemma games are few and far between in pretty much all societies. Every man for himself is tribe-B mentality, and liable to get your genes removed from the gene pool.
But even in the case where defection doesn’t come with a direct cost, there is still the indirect cost of defecting. If widespread defections (without punishment) are the norm, than the basic societal agreements are at risk- and the survivability of the entire society is at risk. In fact, the most common argument in favor of “every man for himself” is that this breaking point has already been reached, that the social contract has already been broken. The evidence that this is false lies in the huge numbers of people blithely acting as if the social contract has not been broken- restaurants that don’t force you to pay before getting your food, people not stiffing their waitress, murder being a rare occurrence, etc. Almost all people are honest almost all of the time. The simple fact that the contract has not yet been broken, however, doesn’t imply that it can not be broken. And in each of our dealings with other people we choose, whether to reinforce the contract (cooperate), or harm the contract (defect).
And our decisions to reinforce or harm the contract, and thus help or reduce the survivability of ourselves, does count. It’s the aggregate, cumulative total of all decisions that determines the outcome, but each contribution (in either direction) is measurable, especially relative to it’s cost. And being unable to see the connection between small matters (like whether I tip my waitress, or kill someone) and large matters (survival of western culture, survival of the political entity called The United States, or the survival of the human race as a species) is mainly one of lack of imagination.
And even if the ultimate survivability of the tribe isn’t called into question, it’s wealth is. Paranoia costs- costs economic opportunities that would otherwise be taken advantage of because, in the lack of (general) trust and cooperation they are too risky. This places a real fiscal/wealth burden on all members of the society, making everyone poorer for it. Places where the social contract did collapse are synonymous with large reductions in wealth as well.
So this is the core question I wanted to tackle. Robert asked, in a comment on this blog, how it was possible to have morality without a god (paraphrasing here). This is my answer- all that is necessary to develop a morality which encompasses not only big things, like thou shall not kill, but also little things, like thou shall not stiff thy waitress, arises naturally from the combination of having any empathy for some other people at all (not even all other people, just some other people), some scientific and repeatable observations about the nature of the world, and the imagination and insight to see how your behavior affects not only yourself and those you may not care about, but also those you care about. And once the true downside costs are taken into account (including the probability of being punished for your defection, as most everyone else you are interacting with is using some minor variant of a tit-for-tat strategy), and compared to the upside advantages, most “sin” becomes cost-ineffective. In the remaining cases, either there is a significant case to be made that the action is not, in fact, a sin (how much damage, really, does a cartoon depicting Mohammad really do to society?), or the evidence suggests that religion is not a very effective deterrent against the sin (how many business fraud cases has the church prevented?).
In fact, injecting the concept of god and/or religion into the debate over morality can give rise to a suboptimal behavior for maximizing general wealth and/or survivability. An example of this is the case of slavery. Economically, free labor is much more productive than slave labor in an industrial society, which is why the north was richer than the south, and why Europe had already given up slavery. But the south argued that there was ample support for slavery in the bible, including Leviticus 25:44, “Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves.” I hope that everyone reading this will agree that slavery, in addition to being economically suboptimal, is also immoral. But by introducing God, or at least the Bible, especially as the final arbiter of morality, into the discussion you’ve actually made the argument against slavery more difficult.
In fact, most people’s behaviors are more in line with the economic/social-contract definition of morality than a biblical/religious definition, as the question of slavery demonstrates. The economic advantage of free labor in an agrarian society is much less than in an industrialized society- so the economic incentives to eliminate slavery are less in an agrarian society, and thus, in the pure economic/social definition of morality above slavery is more moral, or at least less immoral. In 1770, the United States was still, by and large, an agrarian society- which is why pretty much all of the founding fathers owned slaves. But between say 1790 and 1850, the north switched over from being an agrarian economy to being an industrial one, while the cotton bubble kept the south not only agrarian, but an labor-intensive cash-crop oriented (cotton being both of those things) agrarian society, that economically benefited from slavery. Within the economic/social definition of morality, one would expect the two sides to hold different opinions as to whether slavery was “moral” or not.
I could write a very similar story concerning the equal rights of women and minorities in an informational-technological society, but the fault lines are not nearly so clear there. Of course, we’re also not exchanging gunfire over the issue either. Yet. I hope.
And before you accuse me of being cold-blooded about slavery, allow me to remind you that the morality I’m discussing here isn’t a simple list of explicit (and supposedly invariant) value judgments- this good, that bad. Instead it is basically an approximation of providing the most good to the most people, with the caveat that circumstances change, and therefor how you provide the most good to the most people can change as well. And for those still hung up on the word “slave”, consider: what is the difference, at least to the person involved, between being a slave and a serf?
Morality is not the sole domain of religion. In fact, morality as it is actually practiced seems to be hardly influenced at all. If even the unthinking yeast bacteria cooperate for their own better as well as the betterment of others, might not we humans?
26 Comments
While this is a very interesting and applicable point, I’m not sure it pertains to the common working definition of “morality.” I have often heard morality/character defined as “what one does when noone is looking,” which is the non-iterated prisoners dilemma, in which case the rational choice, as you point out, is to always defect.
In this sense, morality is completely orthogonal to rationality, if not actually opposed to it. And this seems to be more the common definition – a man who does not break any moral laws purely out of fear of his standing changing in society (i.e, the iterated prisoners dilemma) is not normally regarded as an exceptionally moral person. Instead person who adheres to moral standards despite negative effects for themselves (e.g, the German who refuses to condone the Nazis, the whistleblower in Guantanamo Bay) are held as moral paragons.
So I don’t think you can successfully deconstruct morality purely in terms of the prisoners dilemma or rationality. You still have to bring in either evolutionary psychology or a supernatural explanation in order to explain it.
Still, excellent post, and excellent application of the prisoner’s dilemma to the question – very interesting read.
Luke V’s pretty much hit it on the head — all you’ve proven is that self-interested behavior can lead to a particularly cowardly kind of co-operation. As I stated back when we debated this a while ago in comments (cite — search for “defensible atheistic philosophical stance”), what you’re describing isn’t morality. In fact, it’s fairly amoral: to work in your own self interest when it also works in the self-interest of those around you doesn’t really have any moral weight one way or another. All the interesting questions revolve around what happens when there is a negative consequence to moral behavior, or a positive consequence for immoral behavior.
Oh, and re: the Bible stuff — yeah, the Bible can and will be regularly used to validate the status quo. And it can and will be just as regularly used to validate those opposing the status quo. (Wikipedia’s got more re: Christian abolitionists.) The “the buck stops here” nature of religion makes it the ultimate trophy: if you can convince people God’s on your side, there’s not a lot of moral high ground left for the opposition. And so there’s always going to be efforts to validate a given social practice from the point of view of religion — and that’s true for almost all issues.
A similar issue happens with science. From racism to creationism to homosexual equality to zoning ordinances, everyone’s clamoring after science to prove that their social practice is in line with the natural world, and they regularly jump on pseudoscience or quasi-proven science to push the issue in the popular imagination.
One more thing — I fully understand and appreciate a moral system based on empathy for others. There are some issues there (mainly having to do with personal self-deception — e.g. intentional ignorance, tribalism), but it’s a lot better than many of the alternatives, and so I’m more than happy to support people who take that stance.
But, that said, it’s also not rational. Nietzsche did a nice job of destroying its rationality in “On the Genealogy of Morality” and “Beyond Good and Evil” — the more literary (read: crazy-ass unstructured) version is “Thus Spake Zarathustra”. These ideas are parroted well (albeit with more vitriol) in the more lucid parts of LaVey’s “Satanic Bible”. The basic argument is that the only thing that can be experienced is the self, and the self mediates all of experience, so the self is all that really matters. To that end, empathy is basically weakness — it’s other people’s imposition upon your own desire and will, and generally a tool by which others convince you to not take advantages of opportunities for yourself. While faking empathy is a useful and key skill to getting ahead in life, actually experiencing empathy is to be perceived as a personal failure, since it’s destroying your self’s ability to express its intentionality.
Robert: this was a partial reply to those messages. I’ll pick up the rest of the reply later.
You both missed a turn. Let me tackle this from the perspective of “morality is what you do when no one is looking”. There are, broadly, two sorts of “no one saw that” sins- those sins which people can not detect after the fact, and those sins that people can detect happened, even if they don’t know (or at least can’t prove) who did them.
The first category I’d argue aren’t sins- if a tree blasphemes in the forest and no one is there to hear it, has a sin really occurred? This is the principle of “no harm, no foul”. Note that being excessively concerned about what someone else is doing when it doesn’t harm you are anyone else is the source of a lot of stupid laws.
In the second category, real harm is done to the society. When you come home and find your home robbed of everything, you know that a sin/crime has been committed- you may not know who did it, but it’s existence is known. And thus the damage to the society as a whole is done.
And remember that this is assuming a perfectly spherical cow here- the perfect crime that can’t be tracked back to you. This is more difficult than it looks, even for small things.
So the question is, within the context of Neitzsche and LaVey, how do you explain the yeast result? What, the yeast have found Christ? Yeast have no empathy, no morality, no imagination, no thought what so ever. They’re little machines. And yet the cooperate. In a situation where they can’t even do tit-for-tat, where they can’t punish the defectors. Even in the case where the defectors can get off scot free- at least up until the point where there are too many of them, and the whole culture dies (oh, the embarrassment). This is precisely and exactly the “no one is looking” situation. And yet, the yeast cooperate. Not all of them, granted. Just most.
@Brian
That’s exactly the Nietzschean viewpoint I was asserting as the only rationally defensible position — you just seem reluctant to take it to its logical conclusion. You say that if an act cannot be detected after the fact, then it is not a sin. So if I kill someone for personal gain, but I successfully manage to make it look like an accident, then my murdering of that person was okay. In fact, you’re going so far as to assert that the very morality or immorality of that murder is dependent upon whether or not the murderer is caught.
Sure, but if I (the robber) net win more than society’s damage impacts me, why should I care?
That cooperation isn’t a “moral” act, and they certainly don’t have empathy, so I don’t really see the connection to this discussion. Both Nietzsche and LaVey assert that cooperation is fine, as long as it net benefits you. As soon as you’re engaged in a cooperation that isn’t a net benefit for you, you need to fix that relationship. This is why a lot of LaVeyan Satanists are extremely friendly people — it’s not a coincidence that the High Priest of the Church of Satan was one of the most entertaining and accessible guests on Out There Radio.
BTW, “sin” is a technical and highly reserved word in this context, having very much to do with one’s obedience to God. The relationship between sin and morality isn’t 1-to-1 for most definitions of “morality”, as Kierkegaard well explains. But that’s another blog post. Or a Ph.D. thesis.
>The first category I’d argue aren’t sins- if a tree blasphemes in the forest and no one is there to hear it, has a sin really occurred? This is the principle of “no harm, no foul”. Note that being excessively concerned about what someone else is doing when it doesn’t harm you are anyone else is the source of a lot of stupid laws.”
Granted for the sake of argument, although I’d argue that wanton destruction of nature or art is immoral regardless of who it effects. And, hypothetically, if the supernatural exists then there could be “crimes against God” as well.
>In the second category, real harm is done to the society. When you come home and find your home robbed of everything, you know that a sin/crime has been committed- you may not know who did it, but it’s existence is known. And thus the damage to the society as a whole is done.
Not necessarily. It may be more desirable for me personally and for my society if I kill the prisoners, or continue to disenfranchise women, or extort foreigners in overseas sweatshops. Yet all of these actions are regarded as highly immoral.
Plus, what Robert said. Any working definition of morality has to account for the “oughtness” of _my_ actions in a given scenario, not just society in general. Unless you want to go down the evolutionary psychology road, which I mention later.
> … how do you explain the yeast result? What, the yeast have found Christ? Yeast have no empathy, no morality, no imagination, no thought what so ever. They’re little machines. And yet the cooperate. In a situation where they can’t even do tit-for-tat, where they can’t punish the defectors. Even in the case where the defectors can get off scot free- at least up until the point where there are too many of them, and the whole culture dies (oh, the embarrassment). This is precisely and exactly the “no one is looking” situation. And yet, the yeast cooperate. Not all of them, granted. Just most.
It’s interesting, and definitely a real consequence of their evolution. But it isn’t morality by any normal definition a human would use, and thus I’m not sure you can apply it to human morality.
Unless you want to define morality solely in terms of evolutionary psychology (which is what the yeast have, in essence.) But that seems problematic to me because it is purely descriptive, whereas most people would consider morality to have at least some prescriptive or normative value. Then, you could argue that prescriptive morality doesn’t exist, but that’s a different discussion, and likely to meet a lot of resistance.
Great blog entry, but I am a little surprised to see that it does
not mention the name “Dawkins” at all, for instance to allude
to his first book “the Selfish Gene”.
Concerning the premise of the essay, perhaps biologists were
actually puzzled, and perhaps a journalist was caught in
a dilemma between a punchy phrase and a longish paragraph
explaining a complex subtlety. And that’s with the benefit of
the doubt; the journalists I have been involved with (when
I was familiar with the facts being reported) were not even
aware that there was a dilemma.
Pascal
Wow, a deep and meaningful post, but three vodka’s and I’m not sure I got full value out of it. Maybe somehow I left something on the table.
Robert: what you’ve done there is not “taken the viewpoint to the logical conclusion”, but instead introduced a perfectly spherical cow. To make this point more explicit, let’s try the following thought experiment- say I have a magic wand that can instantly raise any (recently deceased) person from the dead. So I walk up to some random guy on the street and bang, kill him. Then I wave my magic wand, bippity boppity boop, and he’s alive again. Have I committed a sin and/or crime? Arguably not- but I had better be damned sure that magic wand will work.
The magic wand you’ve introduced is the “perfect crime”- perfect not only in that there is insufficient evidence to prosecute you, either now or some time in the future (a lot of murderers and rapists who thought they got away with crimes decades ago are now getting convicted on the basis of genetic tests, which were possible when they committed their crimes- remember to future-proof your crimes as well), but that people are not even suspicious a crime has occurred.
As an example of this in the real world, consider the CIA. It’s pretty much an open secret that the CIA has assassinated people, and it’s probably done it and made it look like an accident. And blackmail, and bribing, and overthrowing governments, and all sorts of rapscallion behavior. Which makes the CIA the biggest threat to democracy in America, exactly that which is it’s central mission to protect. It’s a danger both directly, the moral hazard of the CIA deciding to assassinate, blackmail, bribe, or overthrow this government, and indirectly (and attract people who think this sort of thing is a good idea, and are looking for permission). The indirect damage it causes is that valid concern among Americans that they are engaging the direct threat to democracy, and that thus peaceful, democratic change is impossible and the only resort is violent, undemocratic change (which, to first approximation, never ends well), or at least a retaliation in kind. The concept of a moral hazard doesn’t depend upon the notion of a judgmental god for it to work.
And even if the crime is perfect, society is now losing the potential contributions of that individual for the rest of their life. Even if no one but you knows that a crime has been committed, there is still a cost to society, and thus to you.
Now, let’s put the shoe on the other foot for a moment, and test the fit. First, consider this this video. Take a good long hard look at it- because that is taking your position to it’s logical conclusion. If the only reason killing someone is wrong is because God doesn’t want you to- and the only reason you know that is faith- then once you become convinced that God wants you to kill someone, not only is there no reason not to do it, you now have good to reason to kill that person.
In fact, according to this logic, if someone is in a state of grace, the best thing you can do is put a bullet in their brain. At that point, if they die they go to heaven (a good outcome, right?), but if they live, they have the potential to sin and be denied heaven. Of course, now you’ve committed the sin of murder- but I’m sure that, after a suitable penance, God will forgive you. After all, you were only trying to help…
Yeah, you say that God doesn’t want me to kill. God said you’d say that, when he appeared in my dreams last Tuesday. He also said that was Satan talking, and that, since you were the mouth of Satan, you should die to. Now, hold still, this won’t hurt a bit.
The perfectly spherical cow was introduced to illustrate a flaw in the thinking. The reality is that there are many forms of non-spherical cow which still net out to you, personally, being better if you do bad things — and, if that’s the case, then you’re off and running. You can assert that such a “perfect crime” is wildly improbable, but that doesn’t change the potential that such an occasion could occur, and when it would occur, your thinking about moral action mandates ghastly action.
But let’s go on to less spherical-cow examples.
Sure, there’s a chance that the person you just lied about and screwed out of a promotion might save the company…but the far better odds are that nothing will be better or worse in six months for them being gone, and now you’ve got a raise and more influence. You can argue that you’re hurting the society of the company in some vague way, and this will come back to get you in some indeterminate way, but if you’re the only one who’s doing it and you’re not caught — or, worse, if it’s the norm at the company — then it’s a wash. And, again, there’s a 100%, very direct way in which you’ve benefited.
Consider also the case of a “good Aryan” under Nazi rule at the point when the Nazis seemed to be the new and (for all intents and purposes) permanent face of Europe. Sure, what’s happening to the Jews and Gypsies and Homosexuals and Communists is a shame, but if this “good Aryan” acts against the Nazis, he’s guarantied to die. Dying being pretty much the ultimate Bad Result, there’s no amount of societal damage that can justify a move against the Nazis based purely on selfish motivations. In fact, the real, tangible rewards that he’ll directly receive by being complacent/complicit far outweigh the alternatives.
And yes, I 100% agree that people acting in accordance with God’s will can appear to be nonsensical, self-destructive, and a threat to society — Jesus and the prophets were often all three of those things. And I don’t begrudge people reacting to them and treating them appropriately. That still does not change the fact that without some kind of external obligation, Nietzschean self-interest is the only justifiable course, and something along the vein of LaVeyan Satanism is the only proper response to the cultural dominance of Christianity. As laid out there, empathy is a person’s key weakness, and morality is relevant only insofar as your society obliges you to appear so.
BTW, if I know the number of rounds, I can beat tit-for-tat consistently. Given
nrounds, on rounds 1 throughn-1, I act like tit-for-tat. On roundn, I betray for the win. With no roundn+1, there’s no accountability for my roundnbetrayal. Which is exactly illustrating my point here. :)If you play yourself, however, you lose (compared to tit-for-tat). You don’t know what strategy the other side is playing, it could be another copy of you. So tit-for-tat, playing against it self, gets 60 points (it always cooperates). You playing against tit-for-tat get 62 points (you get the extra two points for the final defection). But you playing against yourself only gets 58 points- you both defect the last round.
But this strategy only works if two things are true:
1) Only a minority of the participants are playing this strategy- remember that if too many play it, everyone is poorer for it (including those who play it). Also, the more people playing the strategy, the more “profitable” it is to defect even earlier. If you know it’s highly likely the other person will defect on round n, you want to start defecting at round (n-1). Lather, rinse repeat.
This is actually an interesting case. Consider the slightly simplified case: you have a population of 10 players running tit-for-tat, and 10 players racing to be the first to defect according to the above logic. But according to the above logic, the early defectors want to start defecting on turn one! Any cooperation move is simply an opportunity for the other play to defect on you. So these players, with “perfect logic”, always defect. Now, what are the scores?
The defectors will get 20 points for each other defector they play, that’s 180 points, and 24 points for each tit-for-tat they play (5 points for the initial round defection, and 19 points for the 19 straight double-defections), for a total of 420 points. The tit-for-tat players get 19 points for each defector they play (0 points for the initial defection, and 1 point each for the 19 consecutive defections), for 190 points, but 60 points for each of the other tit-for-tat players they play, for a total 540 points, giving them 730 points each!
Even if the defectors only ever defect the last round, that means that tit-for-tat players are winning 1,110 points per round vr.s the last-round-defectors 1,133 for the last-round defectors. The defectors are winning, but only by 2%. Note that if 5 tit-for-tat players switch to last-round-defectors (so now there are 15 last-round-defectors and only 5 still doing tit-for-tat), that means that the defectors are only getting 1,108 points- even the defectors are worse off now than they were. Everyone is poorer.
Now, you might think “but 1,133 points is still better than 1,110 points”, and you’d be right. But remember, a society of 20 tit-for-tat (aka “honest”) players, everyone is scoring 1,140 points. By choosing to defect, you are making society as a whole poorer- including yourself. You’re not so much lifting yourself up, as pushing everyone else down faster than you yourself are going down.
2) This strategy only works if you know exactly how many rounds are going to be played. In other words, this depends upon a crime you know in advance you can not be punished for. In real life this basically never happens- there are crimes you probably won’t be punished for, or at least maybe won’t be punished for, but nothing is perfect. Remember that you have to guard not only against modern detecting technology, but all possible future crime detecting technology (including mind reading and time travel/historical viewing!). “Probably” is as good as you’re going to get. At this point, defecting becomes even less profitable.
To model this, imagine a variation, wherein starting at round 20, there is a 50/50 chance that is the last round (i.e. 50% of the games end on round 20, 25% on round 21, 1 game in 1024 ends on round 30, etc.). Scores are then normalized to 20 rounds- so if the game runs to 25 rounds, the final score is multiplied by 20/25. So if the game goes to round 22, and you defect on rounds 20-22, and the other player defects on rounds 21 and 22, your score is (19*3+5+2)*20/22 = 58.19, while the tit-for-tat player gets (19*3+2)*20/22 =53.64. While you’ve won more than the tit-for-tat player, you’ve lost what you could have gotten if you hadn’t defected and been punished (straight cooperation wins 60 points no matter how long the game goes on). You’ve made yourself poorer than if you had just played straight.
Trust me, that tactic was tried. Remember- the second year, there was a whole host of anti-tit-for-tat algorithms, designed explicitly to detect and/or take advantage of tit-for-tat. But remember that you’re not only playing yourself, you’re also playing everyone else- including yourself (or other people playing your strategy). You need to punish those who do defect- but the question of whether to preemptively defect against someone who has not defected against you, the answer is always “no”- doing so ends up making both you poorer than if you hadn’t.
Oh, and responding to the company where it’s the norm to lie and screw people over, I don’t work at that company. Generally, such companies don’t do nearly as well you think- time spent playing political games is time not spent doing productive/profitable things for the benefit of the whole company. Actually, the person sitting quietly in the corner contemplating their belly button is less harmful than the people playing politics- because the people playing politics are forcing other people to stop doing useful things and play politics in self defense instead. So the smart management keeps a lid on things. So if lying/cheating/etc. is not the norm, then generally I can get some corrective action- in other words, I can punish them right back.
Also note that introducing a perfectly spherical cow does indicate a flaw in my logic, in indicates a flaw in your logic.
Now, the “good Aryan” comment you made is very interesting. Because, remember the debate isn’t whether atheists can commit crimes, it’s whether religion helps prevent people from committing crimes. Hitler was a devout catholic, remember- and you couldn’t be a good Nazi without also being Christian. And they were quite willing to discuss at length why eliminating the Jew, Gypsies, and Gays was God’s will.
Not only is there very little evidence that religion prevents more crime than intelligent self-interest does, there is a lot of evidence that religion permits, even encourages, blatantly self-destructive and self-empoverishing acts. I disagree that death is the ultimate bad outcome (currently it’s an inevitable outcome- and if you give a shit about anyone or anything other than yourself, how you die can be very important), but even if you accept that as an axiom, religion can convince you to accept that ultimate-bad outcome. If you believe, for example, that if you die doing Allah’s will, there will be 72 virgins waiting for you in the afterlife, then it’s perfectly “rational” to strap a bunch of dynamite to your chest. If you don’t, such actions are distinctly irrational. Accept a false premise as an axiom, and who knows where your logic will end up.
I haven’t gotten time to read through everything, but something jumped out at me quickly. Hitler was not a devout Catholic. Nazism was fairly hostile to the Catholic church, although certainly in a stand-off-ish way. The SS was well-reputed to destroy churches and crosses, though, and had deep and involved ceremonies based on Germanic occultism and an invented mythology. While it’s never entirely clear what Hitler’s religious beliefs were (You thought Kennedy’s assassination was well-trod ground! Ha!), it’s pretty clear that Himmler had some really fucked up and profoundly anti-Christian sentiments.
I haven’t vetted them, but there’s at least a lot of text and cites in Wikipedia on this topic:
Religion in Nazi Germany
Adolf Hitler’s Religions Beliefs
I did want to add a link to this article. Apparently, simply saying that you can be a good person without believing in God is offensive to many Christians.
*sigh*
The article is about a recruitment billboard for an anti-Christian organization[1] in the middle of a heavily Christian community. That’s not exactly innocuous. The Christians of the community are interpreting it (correctly) as an attempt to undermine people’s faith, and are having the reaction you would expect. Trying to pin their reaction onto what the sign actually says is missing the larger context of what’s going on.
[1] Yes, it’s anti-Christian, not just atheist—see their website for evidence. Anything running under the “free thought” moniker has good odds to be anti-Christian.
So, I went and looked at their website (I’ll admit to not having done that before), and I don’t see anything anti-christian about that, unless you count that the fact that they make a big deal about being atheists and not being monsters. The closest I’ve come to finding anti-christian sentiment on the board is this forum post.
And Christians being upset about some (else) proselytizing is hypocritical, to say the least. Do unto others as you would have done unto you.
Christians are used to people being pissed about them proselytizing: that happens all the time. Particularly fundamentalist Christians.
Notice this line about the sign itself?
That whole ‘cherry picking’/'bigotry’ bit is not exactly friendly (and I’m not entirely sure what they’re responding to). The statement itself is also a bit of whitewashing: if the sign was already targeted at people who already believed in what they believed, what’s the value of the “Being a good person doesn’t require God.” assertion? And why put it in the middle of a predominantly Christian locale instead of in a place where more humanists might be?
And when I went to the site, I got a Nietzsche quote in the “SecularEarth” widget:
These kinds of groups are exactly the people I was responding to here:
http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/a-note-on-terminology/ (see “Free Inquiry”)
Maybe they’re annoyed at people who says things like:
Obviously, the idea that atheists are immoral and/or evil is pretty wide spread, and it makes sense for the atheists to want to combat that (for the same reason the Muslims want to combat the idea that all Muslims or terrorists). Not everyone propagates the idea that atheists are immoral/evil by cherry picking bible verses, but some (many) do.
As for the sign being in a “Christian Community”, two points. One, you don’t win converts preaching to the choir. And two, name me one atheistic community. On the planet. Anywhere. And before you say “Cambridge, MA” or “Berkley, CA” better google for churches in those communities. Saying a community is a Christian community, in this country especially, is not unlike saying it’s a heterosexual community.
So given there are Jewish communities, and gay communities, surely there are Christian and heterosexual, or are you saying those are the defaults?
Where are there “gay communities”- by which I mean communities where the majority of the people are gay? The closest I can think of is Haight & Ashbury in San Fransisco. In most places, the gay community isn’t a community in the geographic sense of the word, it’s members are spread out through the community as a whole.
Here’s the thing: atheism doesn’t require a community. You don’t need to find other people of the same bent to find a mate or validate your (lack of) beliefs. And it doesn’t take all that many people freaking out when you bring up the subject to convince you that maybe it’d be better to keep your trap shut and just avoid the subject. So long as an atheist keeps mum, it’s hard to really out them. This means there is even less reason for there to be an “atheist community”. This still doesn’t mean it’s OK to label atheists as immoral and/or evil.
Put the shoe on the other foot: is it bad if Christians put up billboards in primarily Jewish, Muslim, or other non-Christian communities? (And if the locals did complain about them, would they get any sympathy, let alone get the billboards taken down?) And is it OK if non-Christian countries (such as China or Iran) suppress Christian advertising?
I think you raise too good points.
People freaking out if you have a difference in opinion, which I just don’t get. To me it this shows insecurity in your own beliefs. This has a flip-side of people who are so righteous and can’t even consider there is another foot to try the shoe onto.
And the second point of the PC nature of the world, where every other religion is a sacred cow, but Christians should learn to take a joke. (Well in the New Zealand they do)
Personally I think everyone should question their beliefs, and chose them because they fit. If you can question the weak points, you can find the personal answers of why you still accept you stance, and thus accept the humour in your beliefs faults.
Brian: Where did that quote come from? It sounds like something I would say, but I can’t find the quote itself. And, yes, you have successfully proven that both sides of the argument are opposed to eachother, and demonstrated that there is a reason why people might want to place an unwelcome recruitment sign somewhere it will get on people’s nerves. How does that make the sign any less an explicit attack?
I think lots of atheists are moral people, but I’m yet to be shown a firm philosophical grounding for moral behavior1 in atheism/agnosticism (the conversation that started this whole thread). It’s certainly true, though, that a lot of atheists and agnostics go ahead and adopt moral standards anyway. It’s a bit hypocritical, but it’s hypocrisy to a good end, so no reason to knock it.
1That is, a firm philosophical argument for an atheist to perform self-limiting/self-destructive altruism.
Note that all this is very different than labeling atheists immoral or evil. Although there are specifically immoral (okay, amoral) atheists, that group is a tiny minority compared to the more standard case of atheists who adopt some flavor of the moral set of their surrounding culture.
+1 to Simeon’s:
Life is a whole lot more entertaining if you recognize your faults and limitations. :)
There’s been a lot here—is there something in particular I should speak to?
Robert: Why yes, it is something you’ve said. Also, you have been shown a philosophical grounding for moral behavior1 in atheism/agnosticism, you simply refuse to accept it. I can’t help you with that. Myself, I’m still waiting for any evidence that there is a significant correlation between being religious and being moral (even by the standards of said religion).
As for the sign- the sign, not the website- being an attack, all the sign said was that 1) Atheists exist and 2) They’re not immoral. That qualifies as an attack (your words)? And even the evidence you’ve presented that their website is an attack is pretty milquetoast- “They quote Nietzsche! They make snide comments about cherry picking from the bible!”
You know what qualifies as an attack? This does.
Yes, an abortion doctor being attacked is an attack. Granted. Now back to our conversation.
The sign’s a bit more involved than you’re asserting: you’re probably just not seeing it b/c you’re prone to be sympathetic to the people who put it up. And that’s fine: we’ve all got differing sensibilities. But I don’t really care about the sign, so I’m dropping it. You’re welcome to jump in with a last word on the issue, if you’d like.
Want to lay out the argument for morality in straightforward, strict logical terms? Because I’m clearly not understanding it. In specific, I’d like to know the logical reasoning that goes in the middle of these philosophical arguments:
1) There exists an action which is a net positive for the well-being of the whole, but results in a net negative on the well-being of the subject.
[INSERT ARGUMENTATION HERE]
N) Subject should perform the action.
1) There exists an action which is a net negative for the well-being of the whole, but results in a net positive on the well-being of the subject.
[INSERT ARGUMENTATION HERE]
N) Subject should NOT perform the action.
Note that “net positive for the well-being of the whole” does not necessarily imply “net positive on the well-being of the subject”, and “net negative for the well-being of the whole” does not necessarily imply “net negative on the well-being of the subject”. We both agree that insofar as “net positive for the well-being of the whole” means “net positive on the well-being of the subject”, that’s the action to take, and if “net negative” lines up, then don’t take the action. This is the tit-for-tat conversation we had before.
But when those issues line up, there isn’t really an interesting moral question. The interesting question is when they break down.