Reason, Egoism, and the Prisoners' Dilemma

Extract

In this essay I shall try to show that the egoist's inability to avoid the Prisoners’ Dilemma is not a reason for rejecting egoism. In the first section I shall outline the Prisoners’ Dilemma and indicate why the egoist cannot avoid the dilemma. In the next section I shall consider an argument against egoism based upon an appeal to our intuitions as to what is rational. And in the final section I shall consider the argument that egoism is not self-supporting and so is not an adequate conception of rationality.

But first a few words should be said about what is meant by egoism here. The egoist is commonly thought of as someone who acts from selfinterest. This is in keeping with the present use of the term as long as ‘self-interest’ is not understood in a too narrow a fashion. Perhaps a Jess misleading way of characterizing the egoist, though, is as someone who tries to maximize his happiness - i.e., he is an individual utility maximizer.