Abstract
To be viewed as full-fledged persons human beings must be presumed to be able to take part in certain common activities, especially activities involving or presupposing the use of language. As language is based on various shared assumptions, shared meanings and shared uses, we arrive at the view that human beings (as thinkers and language-users) are necessarily social and cooperative. Furthermore, and equally importantly, psychological and ethological evidence indicates that people have a general disposition to cooperate. Thus, it has been speculated that human cooperativeness might have evolved because cooperative food sharing was advantageous or perhaps necessary for survival. Be this as it may, it is still somewhat unclear what the general disposition to cooperate amounts to in various cases. Instead of cooperating, human beings sometimes fight, compete, or just act selfishly without considering others’ welfare (think of collective action dilemmas).
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Notes
Cooperation between larger collectives such as states and nations is a topic that basically falls within the scope of the theory created in this book, because the actors in cooperation can be collective actors as well. However, this broader topic deserves an extensive treatment, and it will be left for later work.
We can also view this matter from another angle, as does Pettit (1996) in his virtual selfishness model discussed in note 2 of Chapter 12.
The specially named theses in Chapter 12 are the following: Correlation of Preferences Thesis: Other things being equal, strongly correlated preferences concerning the relevant outcome possibilities are a desideratum for rational goal adoption and cooperative action for achieving the adopted goal. First Similarity Thesis: Other things being equal, strong preference correlation among the outcomes that the actions or strategies lead to (or, perhaps, amount to) partially explains the high correlation of similar actions (high probabilities p(Si/Si)) and the resulting rational cooperation. Second Similarity Thesis: a) In cases with the prospect of iteration (in some “wide” sense) and involving a collective action dilemma, such as a PD, believed action or strategy similarity can serve to explain and lead to stable rational cooperation, b) Cooperation (although hardly rational intentional cooperation in the case of collective action dilemmas) on the basis of the objective (e.g., genetic) similarity of the participants can occur, although there is not much evidence for this in the case of humans. (The similarity here can be explicated as high correlation of similar strategies, e.g., cooperation-cooperation, defection-defection, and can in some cases be strengthened to become the tit-for-tat strategy.) The Institutional Thesis is considered only briefly in this book, see Tuomela (1995) for a more detailed discussion, including the development of a mathematical systems-theoretic account of group activities, including institutional cooperation.
In the Appendix to Chapter 4 the following thesis is defended: (CG) A pure coordination game cannot be strictly rationally solved (viz., solved deductively on the basis of only the mentioned premises) without the participants’ having a choice combination as a shared goal (or without its being entailed by their shared goal, in case it is only a means to their shared goal). The shared goal (at least in “normal cases”) needs to be only a private goal (viz., i-goal) if exactly one of the joint outcomes is Pareto-optimal, although even in this case a shared collective goal (viz., g-goal) would be instrumentally better, given that the formation of a shared collective goal is relatively “cheap”. In a pure coordination game with a coordination dilemma (viz., one in which two or more cells are indistinguishable as to payoffs), a shared collective goal is “normally” (here: barring successful guesswork and the like) needed for an optimal solution (both in a single shot case and in the repeated case).
There are also other points of connection. Consider the following citation: “Social cooperation is always for mutual benefit and this implies that it involves two elements: the first is a shared notion of fair terms of cooperation, which each participant may reasonably be expected to accept, provided that everyone else likewise accepts them. Fair terms of cooperation articulate an idea of reciprocity and mutuality: all who cooperate must benefit, or share in common burdens, in some appropriate fashion judged by a suitable benchmark of comparison. This element in social cooperation I call ‘the reasonable.’ The other element corresponds to ‘the rational’: it refers to each participant’s rational advantage; what, as individuals, the participants are trying to advance. Whereas the notion of fair terms of cooperation is shared, participants’ conceptions of their own rational advantage in general differ. The unity of cooperation rests on persons agreeing to its notion of fair terms.” (Rawls, 1993, pp. 300–301) There is some unclarity in the above citation concerning the senses in which cooperation is assumed to be rewarding, but I cannot here discuss the matter in more detail. Let me just say that Rawls’s view is largely compatible with the basic account of rational (viz., individually rewarding) cooperation of this book. However, I do not strictly require reasonableness in Rawls’s sense, although without the involved fairness cooperation often may not occur. 6 Regan’s (1980) analysis of cooperation goes largely in the spirit if not quite the letter of Lewis’s analysis of convention. He is basically concerned with defending “co-operative utilitarianism”. On p. 127 he summarizes his view of cooperation by saying this: “In order for an agent to be co-operating, he must be attempting to achieve a jointly valued outcome by co-ordinated behavior. And in order for one agent to be cooperating with a second, the second must be a co-operator himself.” On p. 133 we find this on cooperation: “The phenomenon I am concerned with is the joint promotion of common goals by agents who are mutually aware.” Regan does not make the crucial distinction between g-goals and i-goals (nor a functionally equivalent distinction). I take his view to encompass (more or less) both g-cooperation and i-cooperation in my sense.
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Tuomela, R. (2000). Conclusion. In: Cooperation. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 82. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9594-0_13
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