Morality as cooperation: A problem-centred approach

Your country is under attack and you are preparing to join the fight to defend it. Just then, your mother calls and tells you she is seriously ill and needs your help. Do you take care of your mother, or do you abandon her to fi ght for your country? You are a member of a sports team that always loses to a rival team. You have an opportunity to join that rival team. Do you take it? You borrow £10 from a wealthy friend. The friend forgets all about it. Do you give him the £10 back? You and another friend are walking along the street when you spot a £20 note on the ground. You bend down and pick it up. Do you offer to share it with your friend? In most people, these scenarios evoke a range of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and intuitions about what to do, what is the right thing to do, what one ought to do—what is the moralthing to do. What are these moral thoughts and feelings, where do they come from, how do they work, and what are they for? Scholars have struggled with these questions for millennia, and for many people the nature of morality is so baffling that they assume it must have a supernatural origin. The good news is that we now have a scientific answer to these questions. Previous approaches have noticed that morality has something to do with cooperation (see Table 1). But now it is possible to use the mathematical theory of cooperation—the theory of nonzero-sum games—to transform this commonplace into a precise and comprehensive theory, capable of making specific testable predictions about the nature of morality. In this chapter, I use game theory to identify the fundamental problems of human social life, and show how—in principle and in practice—they are solved. I argue hat it is the solutions to these problems that philosophers and others have called ‘morality’. Thus, morality turns out to be a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation and conflict recurrent in human social life. I show how this theory of ‘morality as cooperation’ incorporates the best elements of previous theories, and moves beyond them to create a principled taxonomy of moral values of unprecedented depth and breadth. I derive from this theory testable predictions about the structure and content of moral thought and outline how they differ from those of rival theories. And I conclude that, because the debate between these theories can be resolved using standard scientifi c method, the study of morality has at last become a branch of science.