11 - Moral commitment and rational cooperation

Summary

Ranking preference orderings

In this chapter we want to discuss how our perspective on rational cooperation fits in with the ‘meta-ranking’ framework, which was developed by Amartya Sen in the seventies. The analysis of motives and consistent preferences extends this framework, and applies it to environmental dilemmas. Sen has done much to defend the idea that cooperation in social dilemmas can be rational, not only in the philosopher's sense of being motivated by coherent reasons, but also in the economist's narrower sense adopted here, where choice follows the dominance rule. In pursuing this theme, Sen was concerned to show that morally committed rational behaviour is not easily accommodated by the standard account of utility maximization or preference satisfaction. But he convincingly argued that one can make good analytic sense of moral behaviour within a somewhat more complex structure of decision-making.

The last chapter interpreted the motives and preferences of respondents as reflecting gradations of agreement or disagreement with the environmental ethos, using the definition of consistency between motives and preferences that we developed in chapter 6. This exercise is closely related to Sen's account of moral commitment. The key concept in that account is a ‘meta-ranking’, a rank order of preference orderings which is based on an underlying structure of moral considerations. We introduce the concept in the next two sections, and then go on to compare it to our definition of consistent preferences in the context of the two-person Prisoner's Dilemma, as originally used by Sen.