Politics for the New Dark Age offers a robust defense of a libertarian socialist approach to politics and governance, embedded in a liberal political and social framework. It explicitly makes use of social contract theory, a shared myth that the members of a society have an implicit agreement that establishes the ground rules for their future interaction. The social contract is of course only a thought experiment, but the fact that it is merely a convenient fiction is irrelevant if it is useful. The veil of ignorance is a particularly important element of Rawlsian liberalism. The veil provides a selective structure to social contract-based ideologies by providing a metric by which social rules can be considered just.
In Part 1 of this series, I argued that recent discoveries suggesting different modes of moral reasoning in the human brain offered one justification for the veil of ignorance story. If people have different ways of reasoning about moral decisions, then foundational, universal rules can only be constructed from those rules we all share in common, namely care (the prevention of harm) and fairness (legal equality). Today's blog post will tackle this problem from a different angle, namely game theory, mathematics and cultural evolution.
The Darwinian Veil
Readers will have noticed passing references in both my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age", on this blog to evolutionary game theory. Evolutionary game theory originated in the 1970s from the work of John Maynard Smith and George Price and has been extensively developed in the field of mathematical biology. It provides a way of understanding the dynamics of complex systems (including cultural systems) divorced from the need to explain the behaviour of all the individual participants in those systems.
Most readers should be familiar with the basic conceits of game theory, or at least have heard of some of the basic games such as the "Prisoners' Dilemma" and "Chicken". Unlike simpler utilitarian rational-choice models, game theory incorporates the interdependence of actors' choices into its thinking. In other words, the consequences of my decisions are not simply a function of my pursuit of goal-optimising strategies, but also the strategies employed by other actors. More relevantly for modern political and economic policy, my success as an individual is not merely the result of my skill, luck or effort, but also the assistance and/or hindrance generated by everyone else.
In the classic Prisoners' Dilemma, for example, I cannot reduce the prison sentence I receive because my sentence also depends on whether the other player chooses to cooperate with the police or not. My best strategy is therefore to 'cheat' and colloborate with authorities, leading to a sub-optimal outcome with hefty punishments for both players. In iterated [repeated] versions of game theory, players can learn from past behaviour and do more or less well depending on the strategies they adopt in response to the strategies of the other players. They can adapt and improve their strategies over time.
Evolutionary Game Theory is distinct from traditional game theory by recognising that individual rationality is not strictly necessary for complex biological and cultural rules and behaviours to evolve. Thanks to the generalised processes of Darwinian mutation, selection and replication, behaviour rules can be functional without being designed. Rules and behaviours that reduce fitness will be selected out of the system and rules and behaviours that enhance fitness will come to dominate the social ecosystem. And because strategies can be changed by learning, imitation and innovation, cultural evolution occurs much, much faster than biological evolution.
The key insight of evolutionary game theory has been to divorce the strategy from the player. What we must look for is not the success or failure of individual players, but the success or failure [measued as frequency in the population] of strategies or families of strategies. In this way, evolutionary game theory applies the same concepts to cultural evolution that biologists apply to the evolution of species. The survival of carrier of a gene matters not at all if the gene survives and is passed on to the next generation. Both genes and memes code for strategies: they generate behaviour by processing external information into motivated action.
Perhaps the best introduction to evolutionary game theory in a social science context is Brian Skyrms ‘Evolution of the Social Contract’, a concise (110 page!) work of quiet genius. In that book, Skyrms labels this core assumption of evolutionary game theory in passing as the Darwinian Veil of Ignorance. Because it is strategies (i.e. social rules and norms) that show consistency and stability over time, not individuals, then when we’re looking for evolutionary stable social rules and behaviours the personal characteristics of the individual who performs those behaviours are irrelevant. In other words, a successful ideology can be judged by its capacity do dominate a social 'ecosystem', and not by the payoffs it generates for a given individual.
Beyond the concepts, Skyrms demonstrates that while a pure utilitarian decision rules lead to an infinite number of possible strategies in many common games, an equilibrium strategy of fairness (which Skyrms terms approximate justice) is highly likely to be stable when those strategies compete with one another over many generations. In other words, the reason why humans value fairness and equality is not because fairness and equality have moral value in their own right, but because those are adaptive strategies necessary for a social species such as ours to be successful in the long term.
In the ultimatum game, for example, players can offer a division of money to another player, who in turn can either accept the amount offered or reject it (denying the funds to both). Utilitarianism predicts that the strategy ‘offer [any] amount [if Dictator]’ will be stable. But game theory can demonstrate that in a population of game players, only strategies that approximate fairness will survive multiple interactions. By refusing to accept small offers, the weaker player punishes the dictator by withholding their consent from an unfair distirbution of resources.
Given the impact of our species’ sociality on our recent evolutionary history, it’s unsurprising that we should be biologically hardwired with an instinct for fairness (an issue address in page 38 of my book), an instinct that most [but not all] cultures have rules and rituals to reinforce. By working with, rather than against, these instincts, social contract-based ideologies have an adaptive advantage in deriving rules that benefit society as a whole.