Robert Paul Wolff replies re: the prisonder's dilemma.

A couple of days ago I posted a criticism of Robert Paul Wolff's dismissal of the prisoner's dilemma . Wolff has now posted a reply on his blog (quoting the version of my post I had emailed to him). He is pressing the fact that game theory is only properly-speaking a study of decision under certainty, while the problem I identify (which is hardly original on my part!) is to do with decision theory, etc, regarding  decisions under uncertainty. He thinks I'm not really addressing decision theory head-on, and in turn I think he's not really addressing the concern head-on (as I have said in my response there). That's how philosophy works: round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows. But every iteration hopefully we know more than at the beginning: I certainly find exchanges like my current one with Prof. Wolff to be very helpful.

What to make of the prisoner's dilemma

About a year ago, when I was making my first serious inroads into the technical underbelly of my field, following my utilitarian opponents into a futurist landscape of backwards Es and upside-down As, Robert Paul Wolff (who seems to be entirely incapable of stopping writing, bless his soul) ran a tutorial on formal methods in political philosophy which I found very useful, especially its introduction to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem concerning social choice theory. (The tutorial is archived along with his autobiography, which I heartily recommend, and some other bits and pieces here.) However, I thought that Wolff was rather harsh on the prospects of the prisoner's dilemma as a topic for serious philosophy, largely because the suppositions behind the case are harshly disconnected from the conditions of the actual world. Contrary to Wolff's harsh evaluation, I think there is something to be said for the prisoner's dilemma as an analytic tool. Heaven knows a lot of people make ridiculous claims regarding it (for instance, I was told once that it shows that ethics is impossible), but there are at least two reasons to take it seriously, if only as an analytical device. The prisoner's dilemma might be a good tool for cutting to the heart of various hypotheses, even if we agree with what Wolff has said about its limitations (as we should).

If I may remind the reader of what the prisoner's dilemma (hereafter, PD), I'll quote the description from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry:

Tanya and Cinque have been arrested for robbing the Hibernia Savings Bank and placed in separate isolation cells. Both care much more about their personal freedom than about the welfare of their accomplice. A clever prosecutor makes the following offer to each. “You may choose to confess or remain silent. If you confess and your accomplice remains silent I will drop all charges against you and use your testimony to ensure that your accomplice does serious time. Likewise, if your accomplice confesses while you remain silent, they will go free while you do the time. If you both confess I get two convictions, but I'll see to it that you both get early parole. If you both remain silent, I'll have to settle for token sentences on firearms possession charges. If you wish to confess, you must leave a note with the jailer before my return tomorrow morning.”

We can represent the options in a little pay-off matrix, mapping out all the possibilities:

	Cinque stays silent	Cinque confesses
Tanya stays silent	Tanya is jailed very briefly / Cinque is jailed very briefly	Tanya is jailed for a long time / Cinque goes free
Tanya confesses	Tanya goes free / Cinque is jailed for a long time /	Tanya is is jailed for a short time/ Cinque is jailed for a short time

Each of the pair can see that, whatever the other does, they get less time in jail if they confess and hang the other prisoner out to dry. But, that would lead both of them confessing, leading to a situation that is worse for both than if they had stayed silent. That is the prisoner's dilemma.

Wolff complains that discussing the PD in terms of this story distorts our understanding of the picture, because there are a number of assumptions about how players in such a game would act which maps very badly indeed with how actual people in real situations act. For instance, it is very hard indeed to imagine someone only caring about how little time they spend in jail, with no regard for the other's welfare, and any other concern. Wolff's point is well-taken, but I want to say that even if we accept what he says, we can mine some interesting results from using this scenario as an analytic tool: in particular, in seeing what it tells us about the types of reasoning decision-theorists and the like would like us to do (Perhaps I am better disposed towards the PD than Wolff is because I didn't need to wade through the thousand-odd journal articles written on this subject in the 60s and 70s, when nobody could shut up about this thing). To that end, it is useful to consider the in its most general and useful form the PD as game described by the following pay-off matrix (one agent choosing a row, the other choosing a column, like Tanya and Cinque had above) where the options are either to co-operate with the other agent (staying silent, in the prisoner's case) or defecting (confessing to the crime and selling the other prisoner up the river):

	Co-operate	Defect
Co-operate	Good / Good	Worst / Best
Defect	Best / Worst	Bad / Bad

Any situation which has a pay-off matrix like this in it can be analysed in terms of the prisoner's dilemma.

Having done the throat-clearing, let me now present the two reasons why I think we should pay attention to the PD. The second is far and away the most important, but the first helps to lead us there.

The first reason is that there are simply so many theoretically interesting cases which can be modelled as some variation of the PD, that is, where situations arise with the payout matrix I described above. There are traveller's dilemmas, the centipede game, the ultimatum game, etc. I'll leave it up to the reader to investigate these cases, and their link to the PD, on their own. But note that understanding any situation which can be modelled in this way is going to necessitate understanding the implications of the PD (which includes, as Wolff stresses, knowing what it doesn't entail).

Secondly, the most important reason to look at the PD (which I was surprised to see get no mention at all in the tutorial) is that it gives a very embarrassing and problematic result for the mass of people who believe that decision theory, etc., provide the gold standard for human reasoning. That is, the PD shows that utility maximisation doesn't lead to Pareto-optimal situations (which was a bit of a surprise, since under similar suppositions the free market, which is driven entirely by utility-maximisation, does lead to Pareto-optimal distributions of resources – a bit more on that later in this paragraph). Utility maximisation is the procedure whereby at each point you need to make a procedure you take whatever course of action has the best prospects for getting you what you want (after taking into consideration all the likely future effects of your actions), and Pareto-optimality is the idea that one situation is preferable to another if every person involved finds the first one to be at least as good as the latter. In non-wonk terms, the PD demonstrates that if everybody tries at every step to take the action with consequences they'd most prefer, they are quite likely to end up in a situation they find less preferable than one they would have reached had they acted differently. It in fact does even more, in that the situation of the two prisoners if both defect is worse for both of them, whereas it's Pareto-suboptimal if only one person reaches a situation they don't prefer. This is embarrassing and problematic to the decision theorist, because Pareto-optimality is a very low bar indeed. There are a range of terrible situations that are Pareto-optimal – for instance, a fiefdom with its range of landlords and impoverished serfs is a Pareto-optimal distribution of land, since to give any land to a serf you need to take it away from a landlord, which means that changing the distribution of land would always be against the preferences of at least one person. If utility-maximisation can't even ensure reaching situations with that low level of goodness, then the decision theorist has reason to worry.

It's this feature of the PD which gives force to the tragedy of the commons (as Garrett Hardin described it in 1968, though only later was this analysed as a PD). Each member of a community who tends sheep and has access to the common pasture always has the incentive to put one more sheep in the field: though this lowers the total productivity of the commons through being overloaded, the individual's gains of having the extra sheep outweigh the marginal loss to each sheep. But if everybody follows this incentive (as utility-maximisation demands) then the commons will soon be exhausted and every farmer will be worse off in the end. The lesson to be learn here isn't that co-operation in such situations is impossible (as some people bizarrely claim, showing off a staggering confusion about the structure of human purposive action) but that utility-maximisation – the hard-nosed pragmatism which makes the prisoner defect every time – is untenable as a general guide to action. In scenarios with PD pay-offs (and the insights of the countless writers on this topic indicate just how many there might be) utility-maximisation turns out to lead us by the nose to our downfall. And that is what we should learn from the prisoner's dilemma.

Today's Entry in the Annals of Unresponsive Academic Journals

I received the following sardonic comment on one of the philosophic mailing lists I'm subscribed to which caters to the academic community:

List members,

Tomorrow will mark the first anniversary of one of my papers being submitted to the Journal of Global Ethics. As I have not received any feedback on the content of my paper as yet, I have been prompted to mark the occasion with a lunchtime discussion of the question:

'What are the responsibilities of editors in relation to peer review?'

Findings will be fed back to the lead editor of the journal in question.

I hope that some of you will be able to join us.

Year-long waits for responses regarding articles submitted for review are, unfortunately, not unheard of, though normally they're from more prestigious journals who perhaps feel more like they could afford to string authors along. What I'm saying is that the Journal of Global Ethics isn't quite the Journal of Philosophy. It's not like JPhil have an excuse, it's more that you wouldn't expect the same thoughtless neglect from a journal without the same air of exclusivity.

Today that post received this reply:

List members,

A propos of the delay in responding to a submitted manuscript as remarked by colleague from Newcastle, on 9th September 2010 I sent a bank draft to the Journal of Global Ethics in response to their prompting for me to renew my subscriptons, and I received no acknowledgement of receipt of the bank draft up through seven months later in April 2011.  Meanwhile I have not received any of the issues of the journal in 2010 for the period of the paid-for renewal, so I couldn't send manuscripts for peer-review on the current topics in the first instance.

Can anyone give me contact numbers or addresses for people currently responsible for JGE's admin and management, to see what can I can do?  In this part of the world 70 dollars plus the cost of the bank draft, 25 dollars, is a great deal of money. Such negligence is ironic given the title of the journal, eh what?

That list member is posting from the University of Ghana. Global Ethics, indeed.


UPDATE: One of the ex-editors of the journal has stepped in and done her best to address the issues named above, which is commendable both because it isn't her job anymore and also because she actually is on vacation. As encouraging as that is, I note that she is the one doing what she can to raise the journal's name out of the mud, and not any of the current editors.

Langton - Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts

As I occasionally do, I'll use this blog as a place to keep a store something I wrote for a conversation somewhere else: in this case (as with the Swanton piece I did last year) it's a summary of a favourite paper of mine: Rae Langton - 'Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts'.

Langton sets out to to defend a claim by MacKinnon's that pornography constitutes a harm to women, in particular that it represents acts of subordination and thereby is an act of subordination. MacKinnon says lots of other things as well, but that is the only claim Langton is engaging with here. The problem with MacKinnon's claim is that something isn't automatically an act of subordination merely in virtue of portraying subordination (which is a fair point). Langton sets out to see whether portrayals could also constitute harms to women, and she comes up with two ways in which it could.

The first, more familiar, way is that, if pornography were to be an authoritative voice in sexual matters, then it would spread and validate an image of sexual relations wherein women are demeaned and degraded. Langton doesn't try to prove that pornography doesn't have such authority -- she admits that it is often taken not to by wider society -- but she suggests that in certain audiences, especially among adolescent men, it very well might. If that were the case, that would mean that people in that audience would follow the example that pornography sets them, with harmful effects.

The second, very original, analysis of how pornography might constitute a harm to women Langton presents is that an environment infused with pornography is one wherein certain speech acts would be unperformable. In such an environment, if a woman would attempt, amongst other things, certain refusals or protests, she couldn't make herself be understood as doing so. The outward signs of refusals and protests (Langton's examples) are understood in such an environment as part of the role women play in normal sexual activity ('when she says no she means yes' is the most familiar example of this thought), so while a women could say exactly the things which would count as a refusal or protest normally, they couldn't count as such in that environment. This is the most important contribution of the paper.

I especially admire how carefully Langton lays out the scope of her analysis: the first part succeeds if pornography is authoritative in its portrayals of sex (at least among some audiences), the second part succeeds if pornographic portrayals of sex don't allow scope for women to do certain things, like refuse advances or sincerely protest them (and be taken seriously). It is worth quoting Langton on what here analysis is supposed to establish (from right near the end of here essay):
The claims that pornography subordinates and silences women make perfect  sense; they are not sleight of hand, not philosophically indefensible, not confused. Moreover, if pornographic speech is indeed authoritative, the claims may well be true. The premise about pornography's authority is an empirical one. If you think it is false, you  will disagree with the conclusion about the truth of the claims, but not, I hope, with the conclusion about their coherence.

The difference democratic challenge: why the communicative challenge fails

Today we move onto the meaty part of this project, where I lay out my case against what I have called the communicative challenge. That interpretation of what the difference democratic complaint is claims that the problem with deliberative democracy is that it neglects the different ways different cultures advance and discuss claims. Because the deliberative process is the product of one culture rather than another, this official culture is benefited to the disadvantage of all the unofficial cultures that might be part of the society. The problem with this claim is that, ultimately, the manner in which claims are discussed is just window-dressing, as I endeavour to show.

I take the follow quote from Iris Marion Young to state the communicative challenge: “Understanding the role of rhetoric in political communication is important precisely because the meaning of a discourse, its pragmatic operation in a situation of communicative interaction, depends as much on its rhetorical as its assertoric aspects.” This would mean that we are missing something of importance if we take deliberations to just be the weighing of reasons that are given in the forms of assertions or propositions. But this can't be right. The 'communicative interaction' at issue here is collectively coming to a decision, and the 'pragmatic operation' here must be something that brings the participants towards an agreement on what the right course of action is. The pragmatic operation must be something which picks our right rather than wrong courses of action, if it is to have any pragmatic value at all. But rhetoric is incapable of pointing out anything at all, if it is going to be understood as communication which isn't assertoric. There is nothing which is signified by an utterance's rhetoric. Because it performs no signification, it can't point anybody in any direction, never mind the right one. Thus, it can't play the role Young is claiming for it here.

Here is an argument to the effect that rhetoric and non-assertoric features of communication feature beside the substantive parts of deliberation, rather than playing a part in it. Let us suppose that there is some communicative act C which displays rhetorical feature R, and that C presents significant and important reason that needs to be considered in the deliberation. Is C's importance dependent on R? That is, would C be any less weighty if R was different? The answer is no. There is a dilemma here: either R has to the power to make some C more important than it would be otherwise; or C's importance is independent of R. You can't take the first option, because then R itself would confer importance in its own right: some C would be more weighty just for displaying R. This is wrong, because there are constraints on when some R can count as a good feature: even if some R is appropriate in one context, that same rhetorical aspect might confer no importance at all in another. For instance, Young points to the case of Carol Mosley Braun's impassioned address to the US senate urging her colleagues not to renew the patent on, and therefore endorse, the Confederate flag insignia. Young claims that Mosley's “extreme and even disruptive speech contributed positively to a deliberative process by motivating officials to discuss an important issue.” But, of course, those exact same rhetorical features which ignited a debate could have been used to draw attention to any topic. And it is clear that Mosley's actions wouldn't attract the praise it has if she had done if she has protested similarly against, say, the continued acknowledgement of a day to commemorate Martin Luther King Jnr. My point is that there are constraints on when such rhetorical features are appropriate, and they are appropriate or not in light of the substantive claims that they are attached to. But it is the content and status of the substantive claims, of the assertoric (propositional) content of C, in virtue of which some rhetorical feature R is appropriate or not. The dependency works the wrong way round for R to be an importance-conferring feature of C: for some C, the importance of R is dependent on the importance of that C. Thus, in the dilemma, we must take the second option: C's importance is independent of R. Thus, while rhetoric might accompany deliberation, the deliberation carries the weight and importance it has independently of that rhetoric.

My claim is that the rhetoric with which a point is advanced plays no part in whether that point is something we need to take seriously. Rhetoric paradigmatically plays a role in what we as a matter of fact do pay attention to, but, as I argue, it has no power to determine what we should pay attention to. It simple isn't a substantive enough part of communication to do so. Nor can Young and other difference democrats claim that rhetoric still carries weight in accompanying assertoric claims, for the following reasons. Young rightly goes to great pains to stress that rhetoric can't replace argumentation, and points out that the predominant views on how communication work allows a space for non-assertoric communication in all speech acts. But we can divvy up quite neatly the relevant work that the speech acts do, as my argument above has: whether a piece of rhetoric is worthy of attention or not is based upon the importance of the assertoric claims that it accompanies. Rhetoric might accompany all statements, but, for our purposes at least, as a passenger rather than a driver. There is a practical goal which our political deliberation works towards, surveying the range of possible courses of action and choosing the right rather than wrong ones, and rhetoric can only play an incidental part in that task.

I believe that trying to find a substantive deliberative role for non-assertoric communication in political deliberation rests on a confusion. It is true and worth noting that actual presentation of a position inside a deliberation is going to come in a package with rhetoric – as Young and others have stressed, 'dispassionate' is a rhetorical mode as well. But it is not true that the rhetoric in some way constitutes the argument. I am not targeting just the very strong claim that all (political) communication is strategic, where all the force the statement of a position might have is supposed to be rhetorical. I am pointing towards the weaker claim that the argument isn't whole without the rhetoric. The argument I gave earlier targets just this second claim, and criticises it for placing an independent value to the rhetoric of a statement which simply isn't there. Non-assertoric features of communication piggyback on the assertoric significance of the issues they are attached to. The clear and level-headed statement of assertions and propositions which so many deliberative democrats take as their paradigm comes with rhetorical, non-assertoric aspects, but those aspects also piggyback on the significance of the claims they accompany, just like all rhetoric does.

Young makes a further claim about the role of the non-assertoric aspects of communication: “Rhetoric always accompanies argument, by situating the argument for a particular audience and giving it embodied style and tone.” I deny that either of these aspects is as substantive as Young claims. Firstly, while messages might indeed be catered to their audiences, they are still meaningful and significant for people outside of the audiences, because the propositional content of statements respect no in-group/out-group boundaries. If the claim is that those outside of the target audience somehow can't make sense of the communication, then counterexamples abound: the fact that we not only can make sense of but also take great interest in the private correspondents of people we have never met, though they never intended to say those things to us; the fact that a book like Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics was squarely aimed at a certain audience (well-off young men of ancient Athens) and is awash with idiosyncrasies of its time, but still garners prime attention in our current debates on its issues; people from one group being chilled to hear the  members on another group among each other inciting violence against them; and so on. There simply is no deeper significance to whom a statement is directed: it still means what it means. The same goes for how those points are stated: by now I hope to have convincingly shown that the importance of our deliberation is not hostage to how we phrase it. Again, I conclude, it isn't the idiom that is at issue, but rather what the things we say mean.

I have done my best to show during political deliberation there is a point that is being worked to, and that only the assertoric content of the discussion on that point can play a substantial part in determining its weight. Rhetoric is unable to affect the importance of an issue, because it doesn't have any substance of it own, instead, rhetoric can at best come attached to matters of substance. What this amounts to is saying that the difference democratic challenge is not a verbal issue: if it is going to be deserving of our attention, that challenge must turn out to be squarely addressing substantive political states of affairs. To provide an account of how that would go, we need to evaluate the representative, as opposed to the communicative, challenge to deliberative democracy.

The difference democratic challenge: introduction

What follows is one of the more significant pieces of research I did in the past year, as part of my MA in applied ethics. I'm revisiting it currently, and in the process of doing so will post it up (in edited form) over three blog posts (three for reasons of length). It was an attempt to make sense of one of the more prominent challenges to the delibrative model of democracy, that of the difference democrats. Deliberative democrats, like Rawls and Habermas and other figures in the current mainstream in democratic theory, believes that the characteristic and good-making feature of democracy is that it involves the constituents of government to be involved in the procedures in whichs the laws and institutions of a society are made. So, democracy is good because it allows everybody to have their say, which in turn allows people to have their interests advanced. The fairer the way different people are heard, the fairer the government. Difference democrats aren't convinced, however. They believe that the above account leaves out a very important element of the make up of actual political societies, and that is that they often have more than one culture represented in them. Difference democrats point to this fact as something which the model of deliberative democracy struggles to accomodate: different cultures leads to different political cultures, with their own political procedures (conventional structures, ways of dispute resolution, traditional concerns, etc.). Since the deliberative procedures of a society are always going to be placed within one political culture rather than another, the difference democrat advances the challenge that the deliberative model is a de facto disempowerment of anybody who is a member of a political culture which isn't the official culture of the society.

The deliberative democratic idea is that we can create a just society by giving all the constituents of that society a worthwhile chance to contribute to its decision-making process. Because everybody has an opportunity to have their say when a matter is under discussion, any perceived injustices can be addressed and dealt with. On this theory, the justice of the society is predicated upon the justice of the decision-making process. What exactly the process is and how the constituents play a part in it differs from theory to theory, but I take the following parts of John Rawls's two principles of justice to be a good representative: 'each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all'; and, 'social and economic inequalities are to are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity' (Rawls also adds the famous minimax distributive principle to these principles). That is to say, under deliberative democracy the powers of any office of government is constrained by certain inalienable considerations of the government's constituents, like basic rights and liberties (to be spelt out by the theory), and those offices must in principle be open to every member of society.

In trying to make sense of the difference democratic challenge, I distinguish between two different claims that it could be making, which I call the 'communicative' and the 'representative' challenges. According to the communicative challenge, there is a shortcoming in deliberative democracy in its reliance upon a single type of discourse. This allows for the possibility that the members of some political cultures rather than others are advantaged in virtue of having the decision-making process cast in their political idiom. The representative challenge is that the substance of the claims of the unofficial cultures isn't afforded the appropriate attention by the decision-making process, in virtue of that process being a product of one political culture rather than another. So, in the communicative challenge it is supposed to be the way people present and discuss views among each other which unfairly advantages the official culture, whereas in the representative challenge it is only the claims that fall within the remit of the official culture that gets given full attention, while the claims distinctive of unofficial cultures get short shrift. The linchpin of my account is that independently of what cultural idiom one uses in political deliberation, there is always a fact of the matter of what is at issue. The upshot is that the weight of a political claim is independent of the manner in which it is made. Accordingly, I argue here that the communicative challenge fails. That will be the second post in this series. In the final post, I will discuss why the representative challenge can't easily be dismissed. My conclusion is, if we are to do justice to the difference democratic challenge, we must understand it in terms of the representative challenge.

Resilience to counterfactuals

One project that I have been pottering away at recently is an attempt to cash out what could be meant with something like Phillip Pettit's theory of 'freedom as non-domination' (meaning that we are free to the extent in that we can do what we go about our affairs without the arbitrary intervention of another party). To do so I develop a framework for highlighting some important modal considerations that are involved in our political deliberation. One of the dimensions on which we evaluate courses of action is on how likely they are to achieve their aims. I believe that we could provide a framework, perhaps even a semantics, of this evaluative dimension. My proposal is to discriminate amongst courses of action according to their 'resilience to counterfactuals' (as I call it), meaning the range of contingencies wherein they would succeed. One course of action is more resilient to counterfactuals than another if there are more possible worlds (within some specified degree of similarity to the actual world) where that course could successfully be pursued. The idea is that this might be a useful way to articulate how we distinguish between secure state of affairs and precarious ones – in the secure state of affairs, there are more contingencies in which we can accomplish what we might set out to do. Secure state of affairs lead to plans with greater resilience to counterfactuals.

An application of the project, a straightforward and I hope informative one, is that it would allow us to discriminate between the status of different political rights based on how secure those rights are (meaning, how resilient to counterfactuals they are). I also think, and am willing to defend, that considerations of this type is one of the reasons why political rights are such a central feature of our social lives (and would be even if there were no natural rights): legal protections of those kind cut down the range of contingencies that you need to secure yourself against, and thus gives you a greater safety margin within which to deliberate towards your chosen end.

This approach has important advantages over the decision-theoretic approach for judging among possible courses of action. Attempts to do feasibility studies in the usual decision-theoretic way -- looking at the probability that certain situations would arise, assigning outcomes to the situations and deriving their expected utilities -- run into serious problems, given that the result of such studies depends on what people intend to do, but that people very often radically change their courses of action given the circumstances. This means that you have to redo the feasibility study for each change in plan of anybody in the environment, leading to a combinatorial explosion of things to consider (if re-doing the sums is even possible at all), very quickly making the results of such a study intractable. The resilience-to-counterfactuals approach handles this feature of situations much better, since the fact that there are a number of different ways someone could try to achieve their goals is a premise of the analysis.

There is more to be said here, like how a formal semantics for such a framework might look -- a possible-worlds semantics is very suggestive here, but there are kinks to work out. I also want to see how this compares to other approaches in the literature. I have a decent idea of how it relates to Pettit's proposal, but given the influence of the 'freedom as non-domination' theory, there is a lot of different ways this gets cached out in the literature. One development in particular I want to take a closer look at is Dowding and Van Hees on 'counterfactual success', which seems similar but importantly different. There is also the question of how much we can conclude about some particular plan's resilience to counterfactuals. If A has a plan to acquire X that is relatively resilient to counterfactuals, does this have significance beyond just that particular plan? Does it tell us something about all A's possible X-involving plans? (I would hope so.) Does it tell us something about A's security in general? Or, perhaps only of A's security in his or her X-involving domains. (What is an X-involving domain, then?) These questions are so suggestive to me that I've proposed this as a possible PhD project. However it might turn out, this is something I've spent some time thinking on in the past, and I'm likely to keep coming back to this issue for the foreseeable future.