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Game
Theory, Freedom and Indeterminacy Kevin Quinn (Bowling Green State University, USA) © Copyright: Kevin Quinn 2006 “A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been squeezed
out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than
warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard. This is a radical mistake.
I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive genius has a better
chance of breaking new ground, - not, perhaps, of forcing a conclusion or of
coercing assent, but of deepening our sense of what the issue between the two
parties really is, of what the idea of fate and free will imply.” William James, “The Dilemma of
Determinism.” “All the influences were there waiting for me. I was born, and there
they were to form me, which is why I tell you more of them than of myself.” -Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie
March. “Sovereignty, which is always spurious if claimed by an isolated
single entity, be it the individual entity of the person or the collective
entity of the nation, assumes, in the case of many men mutually bound by
promises, a certain limited reality.” -Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. How can we economists reconcile
our conviction that we are free with what we spend our lives doing, namely,
offering up causal explanations
of human behavior?
If we’re so free, how come we’re so predictable? If we are rational choosers, then, given
our beliefs, desires and opportunity set, our choice is predictable. And if
the preferences that shape our choice
are in turn predictable, whether by biologists, evolutionary psychologists,
anthropologists or sociologists, what sort of freedom is that? In this paper I contend that
classical game theory, and the “inventive genius” (see the James quote above)
of the likes of John Von Neumann, Oskar
Morgenstern, and Thomas Schelling, have given us a
new way of thinking about the old issue of free will versus determinism. I claim that an appreciation of the
indeterminacy that obtains in games
with multiple Nash equilibria allows us to reconcile the scientific
explanation of human agency with human
freedom. This can be done if, and only
if, the link between scientific explanation
and determinism can be broken - and this is precisely what classical game
theory allows us to do. In games with
multiple equilibria, looking back from an achieved
equilibrium, it is manifestly the case
that we - though not any one of us taken individually - could have acted differently, in just the sense that champions of free
will have always maintained was incompatible with science while being
necessary for the ascription of genuine freedom. The first section of the paper
sets the scene with a survey of the
traditional free will versus determinism debate, paying special attention to
the determinist strategy that argues
for the compatibility of freedom, properly understood, and determinism - and indeed for the
meaninglessness of an account of freedom that doesn’t in fact presuppose determinism. The second
section then fleshes out my candidate account of freedom as one that
preserves important components of the traditional free will position - most
importantly, the essential link that position makes between freedom and
indeterminacy. To make the argument, I
defend the indeterminacy of game theoretic explanations from those - many
game theorists themselves - who argue that this indeterminacy is a failure of
the theory in need of correction. In the next two sections I then examine and
criticize the growing tendency among game theorists, fueled in part by embarrassment over indeterminacy, to
abandon rationality altogether. This
can be done either with the methods of evolutionary game theory (section 3)
or with an appeal to conventions, salience or focal points (section 4). The next section makes the case that
freedom understood along the lines I have proposed is a species of positive
liberty, in Isaiah Berlin’s sense, and indeed allows for a plausible interpretation of that much-maligned
notion. I also address the question of “spontaneous order,” in Hayek’s sense
and argue that the faith in the emergence of such an order in general can only be grounded on the non-rationality
of human beings; that for rational agents, spontaneous order is not an option
and politics is therefore inescapable.
The last section concludes with a brief comparison of my account of
positive freedom with that of the great political theorist Hannah Arendt. Setting
the Scene: Compatibilism and Its Opponents A host of thinkers have tried to
square freedom with predictability, or freedom with determinism - this is the
compatibilist project, as it’s called. Mill was a well-known exponent of this
view.1 We are free, he
says, when we do what we want. The fact that we didn’t choose our wants, that
they are in principle predictable, shouldn’t bother us. Kant, on the other hand (in a crude
interpretation, to be supplemented
below with a somewhat more subtle one), sure that genuine freedom was incompatible
with determinism, located our freedom
not in the phenomenal realm, where objects in space and time exist subject to
causal laws, but in a mysterious “noumenal”
realm. On its face, at any rate, he
seems to throw out a scientific account of human agency in order to save
something like a metaphysical conception of freedom. If explanation in the social sciences is
conceived naturalistically - as no different in kind from explanation in the
natural sciences - it would seem that the notion of a metaphysically free
will can find small purchase, and must be rejected as a holdover from
religious views of the world, condemned to obsolescence by the rise of
science. The debate between compatibilism and incompatibilism
commences along with, and in response to, the scientific revolution of the
17th century. The most convincing and
influential of the early progenitors
of compatiblism was Baruch Spinoza, the dominating
figure in Jonathan Israel’s magisterial Radical Enlightenment. Israel writes: “That men suppose themselves
to be free, Spinoza ascribes to their consciousness of their desires and
appetites while failing to see ‘those causes by which they are disposed to
wanting and willing, being ignorant of those causes.’”2 Here Spinoza is debunking the traditional
conception of freedom, which is incompatible with determinism. One of Spinoza’s
British followers, Matthew Collins, describes the sort of freedom that is
compatible with determinism, making the compatibilist
case in essentially the same way it would be made by Mill nearly 200 years
later: “Whenever the doing or forbearing any action,
according to the determination of my will is in my power I am then always
free and at liberty, that is, free
from any agents hindering me from acting as I will, but not free from
necessity. For when I will, or prefer, going abroad to staying at home, that act of volition as much determines me
to act according to that preference, if it is in my power to go abroad, as
locks and bars will hinder one from acting according to that preference. The
only difference is that in the one case I am necessitated to act as I will,
and in the other case contrary to my will.....This seems to me..to contain the whole idea of human liberty.”3 The anti-compatibilists
of the time were the Cartesians. Descartes’s
radical body/soul dualism, in what looks like an earlier version of Kant’s
later move noted above, locates the
free will in the soul, not the thoroughly determined body. Human freedom is incompatible with scientific determinism,
but real nonetheless, since located in a realm, the soul, where science holds no sway. Flashing forward to the present, here is Julian Sanchez , reviewing a new book by the compatibilist
Owen Flanagan, glossing the latter’s argument, a mainstay of the compatibilist position, that not only is freedom not
incompatible with determinism, but that it is,
in fact, incoherent
without it: The human capacity for free choice is another cornerstone of liberal
thought that seems threatened by a thoroughly naturalized conception of
persons. Real choices are supposed to
be undetermined by what comes before. When I make a genuinely free choice, no
set of antecedent conditions predetermines what I must do . But an
exercise of free will is supposed to be something that an agent does, not
something that merely happens. It
would not count as free will if some non-deterministic quantum fluctuation in
my brain caused me to do good rather than evil. These two conditions -
indeterminacy and authorship - together define free will as traditionally
conceived. But, as Flanagan observes, they are mutually incompatible. To the extent that my actions are
undetermined - that I could have turned right just as easily as left -they
are not bound to any of my past mental states. To the extent that my own experience and
reasoning do explain my actions, those actions are determined and, therefore,
not ‘free’ in the radical sense. 4 I will call the compatibilist account of freedom “deflationary” as
compared with the traditional conception, which I will refer to, following Sanchez, as “radical,” or sometimes
“metaphysical,” freedom. The absence
of determinism, the compatibilist argues, would not
at all help the case for a non-deflationary, radical freedom. The attempt to preserve freedom by
appealing to indeterminacy and chance in nature itself, excoriated by the compatibilists, nonetheless has a long history. One of the
most famous attempts along these lines was by William James, the American
philosopher, following a nervous breakdown brought on by struggling to
reconcile science and free will. His solution5 was the postulate
of a radically indeterministic
universe- a non-solution, if the compatibilists are right.
James scorned the compatibilists as “soft
determinists,” as a determinism which “says that its real name is freedom,
for freedom is only necessity understood.”
Though flawed, James’ move is
interesting because, rather than embracing any sort of supernaturalism, it would
make naturalistic, empirical
explanations in general more expansive. Like the compatibilists
he is a monist6- his thorough-going empiricism has no use for a
non-empirical, realm, neither Kant’s noumenal realm
nor Descartes’ mysterious soul - but
his monism works by inflating nature, if you like, hoping to reconcile naturalism with more
inflationary accounts of human freedom, rather than deflating the latter along compatibilist
lines. Dualism, of course, is not touched
by the compatibilist critique, although the price
of such invulnerability - to the extent that it involves postulating entities
such as souls - is not one most of us would be willing to pay. Though
Descartes’ version is not widely embraced, dualism retains its appeal in some
quarters. Like Descartes, later
dualists deny that one can give a scientific account of human agency. If
science only allows the choice between freedom as random, unpredictable
action and the thin compatibilist notion, so much
the worse for science. Think of Sartre’s existentialism: people, unlike
things, have no essence; our essence,
as he put it, is to exist.7 Escaping the causal nexus, thus, we
are capable of radical choice, though constantly attempting to deny this
about ourselves. When we think of
ourselves as things, determined in our action, we are exhibiting what Sartre
calls mauvaise foi,
(bad faith). A more subtle attempt along these
lines is that of Kant. He argued that
causality and determinism are imposed on the world by our reason; not a
property of things-in-themselves but a human construction. Our freedom can
never be a matter of knowledge, for knowledge, given the way we are
constituted, can only ever be of phenomena, causally determined in space and
time. But we are free, Kant argued,
when we engage our practical reason, by acting in accordance with the
moral law, a law we give to ourselves, in the teeth of inclination.8 Our freedom is bound up with our status as
rational agents, and takes the form of acting on obligations to respect both
others and ourselves as rational agents. The moral law free agents give
themselves carries the well-known injunction never to treat ourselves or
others as mere means, always as ends - one formulation of the categorical
imperative. Before trying to salvage something
from the apparent wreckage of the metaphysical conception of freedom on the
shoals of science, let me mention a parallel discussion of political freedom
or liberty. Since Isaiah Berlin’s
seminal essay9, it is a commonplace to distinguish between two
concepts of liberty, negative and
positive - usually, among self-styled Liberals, preparatory to anathematizing
the latter. Negative liberty simply
means the absence of coercion, the ability to do what one likes. In Berlin’s essay, positive
freedom comes in several varieties. It
may be, in the first place, the idea of participating as a citizen, along
with other citizens, in democratic
self-governance. Second, it may refer to the idea of being enabled to become
“who one is.” In this second conception, we are only free when we pare away
non-genuine, inauthentic preferences and act on the basis of the remaining,
better self. Berlin himself finds the latter conception at the root of
utopian totalitarianisms, where the State takes it upon itself to force its
benighted subjects to be free. Positive freedom of either variety entails
that the uncoerced subject may well be unfree, because unable or unwilling to participate in self-government, on the
first reading, or a slave to inauthentic desires, on the second; and the coerced subject, on the contrary -
coerced by the will of the people or a dictator with one’s allegedly genuine
interests in mind, respectively - free.
There seems to be a natural
connection between compatibilism, on the one hand,
and an exclusively negative conception of political liberty on the other. On
the compatibilist account, after all, what else is
there for freedom to be but acting on one’s preferences without interference?
The first variety of positive freedom seems to privilege one preference above
the rest and give it lexicographic
priority. But it is empirically dubious that such a privileging obtains. Many
of us are quite happy to trade-off a desire to participate in politics for
other stronger desires; and efficiency would seem to argue for benefits of
the division of labor here as elsewhere, with some
people specializing in governance. The
second conception of positive liberty in many formulations smacks of incompatibilism,
the criteria for genuineness among preferences sounding often like a
requirement of radical authorship,
with non-genuine preferences having been caused by external factors,
and genuine preferences not so caused. The picture of a self able to reflect on its own
preferences - where that is not simply a matter of second-order preferences
with no more authority than the preferences they sit in judgement upon -
would also seem to defy compatibilist accounts. The fact that the compatibilist account of freedom and a strictly negative
account of political freedom have always met, and continue to meet,
strong resistance despite the
apparently compelling case that can be made for each, is, I think, significant. With the account of
freedom I offer, I hope to capture
some of the themes in this alternative literature while maintaining, like compatibilism, a naturalism about human agency ( in this
respect, my strategy mirrors James in its monism). In particular, I hope to capture the idea that freedom and indeterminacy are
mutually implicating, and to show: that the concept of bad faith has a
naturalistic application; that freedom is intimately connected with rationality, and with respect for the rationality of
other rational agents; and that positive liberty understood as democratic
self-governance has some claim to be seen as freedom par excellence. I hasten to say that my account will please neither compatibilists nor non-compatibilists. Non-compatibilists
will most likely find it almost as deflationary as the compatibilist
account, and find my re-interpretations of their views unpersuasive. Compatibilists, on the other hand, will find that it grants too much to the
other side. But where positions are so dug in, with neither side conceding
defeat over many centuries, a correct account, if such there is, will surely incorporate something from both camps - inevitably offending both. My
candidate account, at any rate, satisfies this necessary, though certainly
not sufficient, criterion! And I would
like to think that William James would
be pleased10. The
connection between indeterminacy and freedom James was right to link the
freedom with indeterminacy, and to reject the idea that scientific
explanation is incompatible with indeterminacy. The indeterminacy I want to
link with freedom is the indeterminacy that obtains in non-cooperative games
with multiple Nash equilibria played by rational agents with common knowledge of
one another’s rationality. Our freedom
is then the freedom to coordinate on any of the multiple equilibria:
the rational choice account of human agency,
arguably the best scientific account we have, cannot say anything about which one that will
be. If this right, then note that this
is properly our freedom: isolated agents cannot be said to be free in
this sense11. This I think
helps to explain how standard compatibilist
accounts can be persuasive: there is nothing that corresponds with radical
freedom that can be said to characterize individuals qua individuals.
At the same time it explains why radical accounts cannot be defeated, since
there is something highly congruous with radical or metaphysical
accounts that pertains to the interaction
of rational agents with common knowledge of rationality: how we successfully
coordinate is radically unpredictable, and it is at the same time our
achievement, for which we are responsible.
James thought that a universe full of chance might solve the problem of reconciling
science and free will. But this just makes our actions thoroughly
contingent: we are not responsible for
them - they are not our actions, so they cannot be the actions,
however unpredictable, of free
agents. In my account, individuals who
succeed in coordinating on one of many equilibria,
by, e.g., talking together, have determined themselves: freedom is the
freedom we have to so determine ourselves12. This account has advantages over
the standard compatibilist account, in virtue of
its greater ability to capture some of what traditional accounts
encompass. It is less deflationist
than the standard compatibilist account, while
remaining, I claim - and this is its advantage over the radical account -
compatible, not with determinism, but with science. Obviously, this needs to
be argued for. Freedom as I understand it is
compatible with scientific explanation, with naturalism about human agency, provided
that game theoretic accounts
that stipulate rationality and common knowledge of rationality are so
compatible. This, for many, may
appear to beg the question. For
many, the very fact that game theory
cannot tell us which of the multiple Nash equilibria
encountered in so many games will be selected, is a signal failing of the
theory, serious enough, indeed, to make its explanatory force suspect.13 The fact
that game theoretic
explanations14 imply indeterminacy (and thus freedom, in my
sense) is for many, if not most, a
reason, not to accept indeterminacy,
but to reject game theory. Quine
taught us15 that there are
no beliefs in the web of beliefs we take to be our fallible knowledge at any
time that may not, under certain circumstances, in the face of new evidence,
be jettisoned, including, famously,
what prior to Quine we were pleased to call
conceptual or analytic truths. Admittedly, the belief that a scientific
explanation, to be such, must make a unique prediction is a highly embedded
belief - right up there with the belief that bachelors are unmarried! Nevertheless, given the progress
of our discipline, so, too, is the
belief in rationality and the
sophisticated development given to that concept by game theoreticians,
including the idea of common knowledge.
Certainly, in the wake of the seminal work of Thomas Kuhn16
and the whole revolution in philosophy of science he inaugurated, whatever
prior temptation one may have had to believe that there are any analytic
truths about scientific explanation,
to believe that the criteria for scientific explanation have not
themselves evolved along with the growth of knowledge, ought to have been sufficiently
allayed. So
it is arguable - I will so argue - that the belief that agents are
rational has as much claim to being in
the hard core of our web of beliefs as does the belief that scientific
explanations must make unique predictions.
Where they conflict - and they do conflict in games with multiple equilibria - I am inclined to jettison the latter, not
least because doing so allows us, as I have argued, to salvage something of
the equally hard-core beliefs about human freedom that the standard compatibilist account has never succeeded in undermining. It is finally only the prejudice
against the idea of unpredictability in an explanation that keeps us from
saying, instead of “game theory fails insofar as it cannot allow us to
predict a unique outcome,” that “game
theory succeeds at showing us
why many of the interactions of rational agents with common knowledge of each
other’s rationality are in principle unpredictable. This unpredictability, I claim - our
freedom - is a fact about the world, a fact that game theory can
persuasively explain, not a failure of the theory. Game theorists, instead of being
embarrassed about indeterminacy, or promising
future refinements that will get rid of it, or, even worse, abandoning
rationality altogether17, need to hold their heads high and tell
the critics, “We have been able to give, without any appeal to metaphysics or
the supernatural or any sort of religious thinking, an account of the deep sense we have that rational animals, unlike all others, are free. And we needn’t
use anything more than plain old instrumental rationality here - we needn’t
appeal, like Kant and many others, to a scientifically suspect non-instrumental
reason18. Pascal was right that we are “ni
ange, ni brute,” neither
angels or brutes - not brutes, because we are rational; but not angels
either, because it is plain old vanilla instrumental rationality that we
have, nothing fancier, nothing of the angelic
species that Kant imagined. Kant was absolutely right, though,
in two respects: first, in tying
freedom closely to the idea of rational agency; and in his conviction, second, that freedom is bound up with respect for the rationality of others -
treating them never as mere means. I
would say that freedom emerges when we stop forming beliefs about others
based on statistical probabilities, treating one another parametrically, on a par with the weather, and start treating one another as rational
agents; it emerges, that is, with rationality. This is a far cry from Kant’s moral
law, I
know: these are just
instrumentally rational agents who are trying to advance their
interests. And although freedom isn’t
associated with any categorical imperatives (do x unconditionally, whatever
you happen to want), it is associated with the failure of any straightforward hypothetical imperative to
be action guiding in the context of strategic interdependence and
indeterminacy - “if you want y, do......what, exactly?” 19 Abandoning
Reason I: Evolutionary Game Theory The
following coordination game is justly famous; it is Rousseau’s Stag Hunt:
Payoffs:
Player 1, Player 2 On
opposite sides of a clearing, two hunters sit in the brush. A stag will be along soon, as will several hares. The stag can only be caught if both act
together to trap it in the clearing.
If caught the large game gives
payoffs of 6 to each player. On the
other hand, each can easily catch, without help, one of the hares who
frequently appear. This choice would
leave the other hunter, who had chosen stag, with neither stag nor hare and a
payoff of zero; the smaller hare has a payoff of 2 for its captor. There are two equilibria
in pure strategies, Stag/Stag and Hare/Hare and an equilibrium in mixed strategies which
has each playing Stag (Hare) with probability 1/3 (2/3) and expected payoffs
of 2. The game is incidentally a marvelous metaphor for the emergence, or failure to
emerge, of a complex market-coordinated division of labor,
where choosing Stag is the analogue of choosing to specialize, intending to
trade the bulk of what one produces for a variety of consumption goods, which
will have a very low payoff indeed of others haven’t chosen to specialize as
well; while the hare strategy is the
analogue of autarky. One way to achieve determinacy
here is to abandon rationality altogether.
Let people among a large population randomly pair up and play the
game. Let p be the proportion of the
population choosing Stag at any time, and let people be rational only in the
sense that they learn from experience and gravitate toward the most
successful strategy over time. p will
then increase over time whenever the Return to Stag
(6*p) is greater than the return to Hare (2) and decrease when the
inequality is reversed. Then if p
> 1/3 it will increase, and if p< 1/3 it will decrease. The dynamics of p are then perfectly
determinate; if p is initially above 1/3, it rises to 1 over time; if < 1/3, it falls to zero.
Knowing the initial p, we know exactly which of the pure strategy equilibria will be reached. But what an enormous sacrifice
this is to make for the sake of determinacy!
The agents in this scenario are not rational agents, but brutes, no less brutish than their
prey. In fact, as the reader doubtless
recognizes, this is simply an application of the methods of evolutionary game
theory, which are making more and more inroads among economists, alarmed
enough about indeterminacy, or so it would appear, that they are prepared to sell their
birthright - the proud tradition of rationality - for a mess of evolutionary
pottage.20 The only change we would need to make to make the
application exact would be to “hard-wire” a pure strategy into the agent and
then postulate greater reproductive success for those hard-wired with the
higher return strategy. Achieving a determinate outcome would be assured,
too, if we formed beliefs about each other just as we form beliefs about the
weather, if we started with a guess and then adjusted our subjective p towards the last period’s actual p
adaptively. Starting from an initial distribution of subjective priors, the
outcome would be entirely predictable.
But this would be to ignore the fact that we are playing rational
agents just like ourselves, to treat
one another not as people but as things.
The echo of Kant and of Sartre here is intended: we would be acting in
bad faith, denying our freedom if we were to act in this fashion. Using game
theoretic techniques in this way is using a mean and paltry version of the
theory, one shorn of its very heart and soul: rationality. It is Ulysses without Leopold Bloom. Abandoning
Reason II : Conventions, Focal Points, Salience Coordination games have been
thought either to throw light upon, or
alternatively to be enlightened by, the notion of a convention. In either case, this is a mistake. Margaret Gilbert’s work21
explains why, pace David Lewis22, a convention is not
reducible to one of the multiple equilibria in a
coordination game which has been achieved.
I want to argue against the reverse implicature
, the idea that a convention can solve the “equilibrium selection” problem in
a coordination game - relying on her
arguments and those of Martin Hollis. Suppose, then, that there is a
convention among us that one plays Stag in the Stag-Hunt Game. How does this solve the problem?23
Does it do so by creating the belief among us that the other will follow the
convention? But that is inconsistent
with how beliefs are formed in games among rational players whose rationality
is common knowledge. I should believe
that you will play conventionally,
just in case I believe that you believe I will play conventionally; that is,
if I believe that you believe that I
believe that you believe I will play conventionally - and so on ad
infinitum. But equally, I should believe that you will play
unconventionally if I believe that you
believe I will play unconventionally...and so on. This is obviously the same coordination
game, with strategies of playing Stag or Hare, respectively, replaced by
strategies of playing conventionally or unconventionally - and has two equally good equilibria.
Rational people are not bound by conventions, or, as I would put it,
rational people are free. Whether they will follow the convention is in
principle unpredictable. When I act based on the brute belief that you will
follow the convention, I am not respecting your rationality, which requires
that you play a best response to what you believe I will do. What we need to do, rather, we
rational agents, is to agree on a way to play. Gilbert
argues that what we do when we agree on a way to play is to form what she
calls “a plural subject” We agree. This plural subject, she
claims, then gives each of reasons
that are not reducible to individual reasons: from “We have agreed on Stag,”it would , she argues, follow directly, without any
need to specify individual goals, that each of has a reason to play Stag. I
am not very comfortable with this way of putting things, but I cannot decide whether I have a
substantive or simply a semantic disagreement. Here is the way I would prefer to put it:
coming to an agreement here is an exercise, quite literally, in self-determination. In the next section, I make this the defining characteristic
of the political realm, the realm of
positive freedom. What is
irreducible, then, for me, is not, as
I think Gilbert says, “the Social,” but
the Political24. Similar objections pertain to
another candidate for equilibrium selection, Schelling’s
notion of focal points or salience. If
I want to meet you in New York City, the fact that Grand Central Station is
salient does not give me a reason to go there under the terms of classical
game theory. However salient it is, I
have just as much reason to go to a non-salient spot if I think you will. And
I do think you will - you have good reason to - if you think I will.
Believing you are rational, I believe you will play a best response to what
you think I will do. To believe that you will go to a spot because
it is salient, whether or not it’s a best response to what you think I will
do, is to believe that you are not rational: “Because it is salient” is not a
reason. Of course, it may be a compulsion - but here again, even more
obviously, we’ve left the realm of reason.25 Positive
Freedom and The Inescapability of Politics Let us call the realm of the
political that realm, wherever it happens to arise in life, where instrumentally rational agents reach
agreement on how to coordinate their behavior in
games with multiple Nash equilibria, and thereby
achieve self-determination. Then the realm of the political is the realm of
freedom par excellence, as I have been
using the term. If negative freedom is the ability to do what we want, then
positive freedom is simply the ability to reach an agreement with others when
it is not clear, due to strategic interdependence among rational agents who know themselves to be rational, what it
is we should do to get what we want - when, that is, the game has multiple equilibria.
Politics becomes the art of the
possible, not in contrast to the
impossible, as the phrase is usually intended, but in contrast to the
uniquely determined: it is the realm where we have options. Nor is this a
small realm, especially when it is appreciated that every iterated prisoner’s
dilemma with no terminal date is a
coordination game. Hayekians have always argued against political
coordination in favor of the virtues of spontaneous
order. This argument is generally persuasive only when coupled with their equally perennial denial that
agents are rational in the sense of
classical game theory. As we
have shown above, and as Sugden’s26 interesting work has made
clear, a collection of non-rational agents will indeed achieve a spontaneous
order, a determinate equilibrium in games where they are multiple. It may not be an efficient equilibrium, but
it will be an equilibrium nonetheless.
Genuinely rational agents, on the other hand, have no idea what to do
in such a situation: to achieve any equilibrium at all will require politics. Let us take a look at one of Sugden’s and John Maynard Smith’s favorite games
for an illustration.
Here
there are multiple Nash equilibria, two
asymmetrical (H/D and D/H), and one symmetrical the latter an equilibrium in
mixed strategies with Hawk and Dove played with probablity 1/2 each. The mixed strategy equilibrium gives lower average payoffs per
person, 1.5 versus 2, because it
involves the resource being destroyed by mutual hawkishness
with probability 1/4. Sugden ingeniously shows how non-rational agents (trial
and error rational27, that is)
playing anonymous random opponents can stumble spontaneously and
predictably into an equilibrium where the conditional strategy “Play Hawk, if
you are in possession; Play Dove, otherwise” is adopted by each. (The conditioning factor could be anything:
play Hawk if are the taller player, or
if you are not in possession. e.g.; Dove otherwise. Sugden argues that some of these asymmetric roles,
depending on the game, will effectively be more salient.) But truly rational agents can’t
stumble into anything, and, for them, the
indeterminacy here makes politics inescapable. This stands the Hayekian message on its
head. Hayek would say that spontaneous
order here is desirable compared with the inevitable distributional struggle
that an opening to politics would entail. Again, with sub-rational agents
this is persuasive. But with rational agents, it is only a political
settlement that can end what would otherwise be a potentially chaotic
struggle for resources. Once there was an Eden of spontaneous order, where
innocent a-rational agents had no need
for politics. But having tasted of the
fruit of the Tree of Rationality, despite having been warned, they were
evicted from the Garden and forced to explicitly order what had once been
spontaneously done. Envoi
: Arendt and Politics Without departing (if my earlier
arguments are convincing) from a scientific account of human agency, this
account of the political captures, I
think, some of what our greatest philosopher
of positive freedom, Hannah Arendt, had in mind in defining the political as
the realm of freedom. Arendt made the political the realm of unpredictable action,
as opposed to predictable behavior .
And the freedom she saw in the political realm was indeed “our” freedom - tied constitutively to the
plural nature of the public realm. In
the quote that appears at the head of the paper, she claims that no individual man can be said to be
sovereign, only many men mutually bound by promises. Arendt would
not, I’m sure, be pleased to have her
ideas deflated in this way - she clearly
rejected the economists’ idea that we are simply instrumentally
rational agents. In her polis, we are free in virtue of acting and
speaking together, but as soon as we begin speaking about how to obtain
our individual, pre-political ends,
we have lost our freedom, falling into the realm of the social or what
she sneeringly calls “national house-keeping.” Jon Elster28 wondered along with
many just what it is we do talk about in that case. My account of positive freedom maintains
the qualitative distinction between the political and the non-political that Arendt wanted, but gives us something to talk about in
the forum, without appealing to any other kind of agency than the
instrumental. Notes 1. Martin
Hollis, in his wonderful Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science
(1994) makes Mill the spokesman for compatibilism. 2. Israel, Radical Enlightenment (2001), p. 232 3. Collins
cited in Israel, p.616 4. Sanchez, “Self Delusions: Does Morality Require a
Soul, in Reason, January 2004. 5. In
“The Dilemma of Determinism” (1968) 6. A monist in this respect - in rejecting any
appeal beyond experience - he nonetheless calls himself a pluralist, because
he makes experience itself plural, meaning that the parts of the
universe “have a certain amount of loose play on one another, so that the
laying down of one of them does not necessarily determine what the others
shall be.” 7. Sartre
surely intended us, with this phrasing, to hear the echo of the medieval
conception of God as self-caused: the only entity whose essence
entails existence. Sartre’s philosophy makes each one of us authors of
ourselves in just the way theologians saw God to be. 8. Amartya Sen’s notion of
commitment as ‘counter-preferential’ choice has a strong Kantian flavor. See his “Rational Fools” (1991). 9. “Two
concepts of liberty.” (1969) 10. The
James who wrote: “Of the two alternative futures we conceive, both may now be
really possible; and the one becomes impossible only when the other excludes
it by becoming real itself. Indeterminism thus denies the world to be one
unbending unit of fact. It says there is a certain ultimate pluralism to it;
and so saying, it corroborates our ordinary, unsophisticated view of things.
To that view, actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from
out of which they are chosen; and somewhere, indeterminism says, such
possibilities exist, and form a part of truth. (“The Dilemma of Determinism,”
op. cit., p.591. 11. The
liberty of one requires, if not the liberty of all, the liberty of at least one other! 12. Consider
a simple coordination game, such as driving on the left or right side of the
road. In either equilibrium, each is driving on the side in
question because others are. Thus,
at the aggregate level, we drive on the left (right) side of
the road because we drive on the left (right) side of the road - the connection with the notion of
self-authorship is here obvious. Our
actions in any particular equilibrium are their own causes. 13. In
his witty principles primer, Hidden Order, David Friedman titles the few pages in the
book that use game theory ( the section on oligopoly, p.165 )“TOO MANY
ANSWERS.” Hundreds of remarks by others along these lines might be cited - I don’t single Friedman out - by people
for whom more than one is “too many.” 14. That
is, game theoretic explanations with rational agents and common knowledge of
rationality. 15. In
“Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” (1980) 16. in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) 17. The
sad topic of the next section. 18. See
Jean Hampton, The Authority of Reason (1998) on the “queerness” of
non-instrumental reasons. I should say she rejects this position and argues
that to the extent that science finds the idea of the authority of a norm
queer, it undermines itself. 19. Joseph
Heath in his excellent Communicative Action and Rational Choice (2001) argues from indeterminacy to the
need to postulate non-instrumental reasons for choice. In his account we have
“normative” preferences which rank actions directly, along with standard
instrumental ranking of actions based on the their varying perceived efficacy
of achieving outcomes, and a weighting scheme which assigns weights to the
two different sorts of reasons. I am uncomfortable with this sort of move,
because it restores determinism. I argue from indeterminacy, not to a new and improved rationality, but
to freedom. An excellent discussion of
the implications of indeterminacy for game theory is Hargreaves
Heap and Varoufakis, Game Theory (1995). They argue - or at least one of them argues;
they disagree - that indeterminacy may
sound the death knell for methodological individualism, that irreducibly
social phenomena -such as a convention, on some understandings- may be required to “solve” the equilibrium selection problem
in games with multiple equilibria. Again, for me
this is not a problem that needs to be
solved! 20. Don’t
get me wrong: evolutionary methods have their place in modeling
animals. But once evolution has thrown up - not at all mysteriously -
rational animals, matters need to left to the economists. The problem is not
that the evolutionary psychologists don’t understand our immortal souls
- the problem is that they don’t
understand instrumental rationality. 21. See
her “Rationality, Coordination and Convention,” “Rationality and Salience,”
and “Notes on the Concept of a Social Convention,” all reprinted in her Living
Together (1996) 22. Convention (1969) 23. Here
I follow Hollis closely, op cit., p. 137 et seq. 24. This is somewhat misleading. Gilbert wants
to analyze conventions themselves as fundamentally agreements. Her category
of the social, that is, is already through
and through political. I remain
uncomfortable, though, with the “plural subject” locution: it seems to me to
reify our agreement. 25. In
Natural Reasons (1989) Susan Hurley points out that Schelling himself never thought that salience as a brute
fact could solve a coordination game. She quotes this, adding her own
emphasis: “ ‘ In the mutually recognized response of players to salient
characteristics, the fundamental psychic and intellectual process is that of
participating in the creation of traditions. The players must
jointly discover and mutually acquiesce in a mode of play that makes the
outcome determinate. They must together find rules of the game or
suffer the consequences.’”(p.155) 26. in
The Economics of Rights, Cooperation and Welfare (1986) 27. “I
shall assume that individuals tend to adopt those strategies that proved
successful over a long sequence of games.”
And, “The theory of games is often defined as the theory of how games
would be played by completely rational individuals...it is here that my
approach to game theory diverges form the traditional one. Indeed, on a
strict interpretation of these definitions, this book is not about game
theory at all.” op. cit. p.16 28. In his “The market and the forum” (Elster ,1986) Works Cited Arendt,
Hannah, 1958, The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. Berlin, Isaiah, 1969 ,
“Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. Elster,
John, 1986, “The market and the forum: Three varieties of political theory,”
in Elster and Aanund
Hylland, eds., Foundations of Social Choice
Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, David, 1997, Hidden
Order. New York: HarperCollins. Gilbert, Margaret, 1996, Living
Together. Lanham, Md. : Rowman
and Littlefield. Hampton, Jean, 1998, The
Authority of Reason. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hargreaves
Heap, Sean amd Yanis Varoufakis, 1995, Game Theory: A Critical Introduction.
(London: Routledge.) Heath, Joseph, 2001. Communicative
Action and Rational Choice. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hollis, Martin, 1994, The
Philosophy of Social Science. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hurley, Susan, 1989, Natural Reasons. New York: Oxford
University Press. Israel, Jonathan, 2001, Radical
Enlightenment. New York: Oxford University Press. James, William, 1968,
“The Dilemma of Determinism,” in The Writings of William James. New
York: The Modern Library. Kuhn, Thomas, 1962 , The
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Press. Lewis, David, 1969 , Convention:
A Philosophical Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Perelman, Sidney, 1973 , Crazy
Like a Fox. New York: Vintage
Press. Quine,
W.V.O.,
1980, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From A Logical Point of View.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sanchez, Julian, 2004.
“Does Reason Require A Soul,” Reason,
January, 2004. Sen,
Amartya, 1990 , “Rational Fools,” reprinted in Jane
Mansbridge, Ed., Beyond Self-Interest.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sugden,
Robert, 1986, The Economics of Rights, Cooperation and Welfare.
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell.) |
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