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No Place to Hide: Campbell's and Danielson's Solutions to Gauthier's Coherence Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Paul Viminitz
Paul Viminitz
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo
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Extract

In Morals by Agreement, David Gauthier convinced many of us—including Peter Danielson, author of Artificial Morality, the latest successor to MA—that morality can best be understood as a set of intramental, strategic responses to patterns of otherwise dilemmatic, game-theory-reducible interactivity. More particularly, Gauthier and Danielson are of a mind that: (a) characteristic of our interactive circumstances are the Prisoner's Dilemma and its cognates; (b) these are circumstances in which our pre-moral, straightforward maximizing (SM) disposition fares considerably worse than (virtually any species of) “constrained maximization” (CM)—the latter being the dispositional essence of morality—and (c) it should not surprise us, therefore, that (or, at least, if) selective pressure has rendered most of us just so morally (i.e., CM) disposed. In short, what Danielson calls the “fundamental” justification for morality—that is, one “that does not appeal to any of the concepts of [morality itself]” (AM, p. 19)—is that: conventional wisdom notwithstanding, nice guys—though, adds Danielson, not necessarily the nicest guys—finish first!

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , Spring 1996 , pp. 235 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1996

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References

Notes

1 Gauthier, David, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), cited as MAGoogle Scholar.

2 Danielson, Peter, Artificial Morality (London: Routledge, 1992). cited as AMGoogle Scholar.

3 Campbell, Richmond provides an excellent exposition of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD)–and of its implications for rationality and morality–in his Introduction to Paradoxes of Rationality and Cooperation: Prisoner's Dilemma and Newcomb's Problem, edited by Campbell, R. and Sowden, L. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

4 The force of this “or at least if” is that contractarians, as such, do not want to attribute the success of their enterprise to any evolutionary thesis. Nor, for that matter, do they want to attribute it to any historical thesis. Following the lead of Hobbes's observation that “It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this,” and his own concession that “it was never generally so, over all the world” (Leviathan 63). Gauthier, too, says, “We do not of course suppose that our actual moral principles derive historically from a bargain, but in so far as the constraints they impose are acceptable to a rational constrained maximizer, we may fit them into the framework of a morality rationalized by the idea of agreement” (MA, p. 168).

5 Paul Viminitz, “The Limits of Artificial Morality: Danielson's Solution to Gauthier's Undermotivation Problem,” unpublished paper, University of Waterloo.

6 Campbell, Richmond, “Gauthier's Theory of Morals by Agreement,” Philosophical Quarterly, 38: 152, p. 351Google Scholar.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Smith, Holly, “Deriving Morality from Rationality, in Contractorianism and Rational Choice: Essays on Gauthier, edited by Vallentyne, Peter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 242Google Scholar.