Conventions and Cooperative Virtues: Some Observations on Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Explanations of Social

Introduction The ubiquity of norms is overwhelming. There are (detailed) norms regulating our behavior in community at large, there are norms that regulate our actions in the school we attend, in the organizations we join, in the workplace we frequent. There are norms that tell us what to wear, how to eat and how much real fruit there should be in orange juice. The sequence of characters on this page is dictated by a norm. The important occasions in our lives ranging from birth to burial are structured by norms. In addition, there are norms regulating property, economic transactions, taxes, and there are norms which form the basic structure of society. No wonder then that philosophers and social scientists alike always have been interested in norms. The challenge is to provide a theory that explains the nature of our norms. One such theory is conventionalism. Conventionalism makes the following claims. First, that it is instrumentally rational to comply with norms. This is reductionism: norms are a subset of the set of rational prescriptions. Conventionalist theories are not alone in this adherence to reductionism. For example, Hobbesian contractarianism holds that one should comply with moral prescriptions in so far as they are the result of a hypothetical contract between rational agents. What distinguishes conventionalist theories from other reductionist theories of norms is the second claim of conventionalism: (part of) the reason that this is rational to comply with a norm is because it is known that all, or a sufficiently great number of others in the group, comply with those norms. This is conformity. With the introduction of game theory in the social sciences, conventionalism has been reformulated in game theoretic terms. Though the pioneering work was done in the sixties by Thomas Schelling and David Lewis, the real “boom” is of the last twenty years or so of this century.1 We have witnessed a plethora of publications that formulate models to explain the emergence and stability of norms. In this paper I will try to determine how 1 Schelling, Thomas (1960), The Strategy of Conflict, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.; Lewis, David (1969), Convention: A Philosophical Study, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.. Contribution APA 1999, version 19 June 2001 successful the conventionalist, game theoretic models are as characterizations of the nature of norms. In particular, I will raise the question whether the models explain the characteristics of what we intuitively would label as a “norm” or whether something is lacking. Section 2 presents an informal definition of norms that is derived from the work of Hart (1961; Winch (1990). Section 3 and 4 discuss a simple model of a property norm based on the “hawk-dove” game. Section 5 assesses whether this model can account for possibility of deviance from a norm. Section 6 discusses the role of sanctions in the model. Section 7 argues that sanctions presuppose the existence of moral motives. Section 8 deals with how deviance provokes resentment. Section 9 provides an alternative analysis of resentment, which shows that resentment presupposes moral motives. Section 10 draws some conclusions about the success of game theory in the analysis of social norms.