The Structural Evolution of Morality

Jason Alexander (LSE) gives a talk at the Conference on Agent-Based Modeling in Philosophy (11-13 December, 2014) titled "The Structural Evolution of Morality". Abstract: One general problem faced by attempts to explain the origins of morality using traditional rational choice theory is that the demands of rationality and the demands of morality often fail to coincide. This can happen in at least three different ways. Sometimes our moral intuitions recommend actions which are identified as irrational (such as cooperating in the prisoner's dilemma or in the centipede game, or rejecting unfair offers in the ultimatum game). Sometimes our moral intuitions recommend an act which is only one of several recognised as rational (as can happen in games having multiple Nash equilibria). And sometimes we have multiple competing moral intuitions in cases where rationality recommends a unique act (such as in asymmetric bargaining games, in contrast to the Nash solution). In this talk, I present a number of results drawn from agent-based models of imitative learning on social networks, showing how this single framework manages to explain many of our moral intuitions across a wide variety of diverse cases.