We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2015
The Prisoner's Dilemma teaches many lessons about individuals interacting. A very prominent lesson, the one I treat and call its lesson, concerns standards of rationality. This lesson reveals profound points about the relationship between rationality's standards for individuals and its standards for groups.
14.1 Rationality
Rationality is a normative and evaluative concept. Agents should act rationally, and their acts, if free, are evaluable for rationality. Rationality considers an agent's abilities and circumstances before judging an act. Because rationality recognizes excuses, acting irrationally is blameworthy. If an agent has an excuse for a defective act so that the act is not blameworthy, then it is not irrational. These points pertain to the ordinary, common conception of rationality, which I use, rather than a technical conception that offers precision but has less normative interest.
A general theory of rationality with explanatory power covers rational action in possible worlds besides the actual world. A model for a theory of rationality constructs a possible world with features that control for factors in the explanation of a rational choice. For instance, a model may specify that agents are fully informed despite agents' ignorance in the actual world. A model's assumptions may be either idealizations or just restrictions. An idealization states a condition that promotes realization of goals of rationality, which rational agents want to attain, such as making informed choices. Because an idealization facilitates attaining a rational agent's goals, rational agents want its realization too. For example, because a rational agent wants to make informed choices, she also wants to gather information. Full information about relevant facts is thus an ideal condition for a decision problem. In contrast, a mere restriction states a condition that does not promote goals of rationality but may simplify explanations of rational action. For example, that an agent has a linear utility function for amounts of money is a restriction rather than an idealization because a rational agent need not want to have such a utility function either as a goal or as a means of attaining a goal of rationality.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
