https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=S0SQLQMLi8Q
There is this very, very simple thing that was happening in the 1990s when I wrote that book, which was the people were playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma game on computers and finding out which strategy worked. The Prisoner’s Dilemma game is simply a game in which if both players agree to remain silent, then they benefit each other, but you can make a bigger game by betraying the other one. But then if he betrays you as well, you both end up with nothing. You’ve got to find a way of trusting each other enough to cooperate. You’re being held in separate cells and interrogated separately is the sort of story that’s being told. It turned out that the best strategy in a repeated business dilemma game is tip for tat. That is to say, be nice first time around, cooperate on the first play, and then simply do whatever the other guy did on the previous play so as to punish or reward the other guy for behaving badly or well. And that’s not a sucker with using that strategy. You’re cooperative, but you’re not a sucker. Yeah. And in a sense, we are engaged in iterative, repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma games all the time. You don’t say, well, I’m not going to bother paying for this loaf of bread. I’m just going to grab it and run because then I’m better off. Because then you can’t go back to the shop the next day. You’ll be recognized by the police. Yeah. So it’s morality as the shadow of the future in some sense. Right. And again, this all comes back to Adam Smith, I think, because his previous book, his book in 1759, not The Wealth of Nations, but The Theory of Moral Sentiments, seems to me to have a very profound insight in me and it’s taken a long time for me to understand it. And that is that morality isn’t, as it were, taught to us by priests and other people. It’s essentially a calculation by us as to what works in the society we’re in. And you kind of calibrate your behavior to find out what is moral, what is ethical, and so on. And, you know, 500 years ago, the right ethical thing to do when somebody snubbed you was to, you know, challenge them to a duel and run them through with a sword. Well, that doesn’t get you very far today. So we’ve learned that actually, we’ve evolved a higher form of morality society, sort of gradually by standing back and saying, in this society, what’s going to get me the best rewards, given how other people are behaving? Because of course, everything’s a moving target. It seems to me too, that that’s deep enough now. So imagine that the landscape that human beings occupy is a social landscape, but it’s a social landscape that extends across time. And we’ve been conscious of that for a long time, at least 150,000 years. So that’s about when we changed into the genetic, we changed genetically into the subspecies that we are now. And so you can imagine that given the utility of perceiving the future and the clear benefits of reciprocal action, that that’s altered us enough neurologically so that even conscience speaks to us internally in terms of reciprocity. So it and that goes that goes along with the idea that this isn’t something taught by priests, it might be something that priests and other ethicists remind us of. Yes. So we can have an inbuilt moral sense that’s got a biological basis that still requires cultural activation and modification. And the analog to that would be our instinct for language. You can’t teach chimpanzees language, because they don’t have the biological capacity for it, or not to the degree that we do, although some parrots can perform remarkable stunts in that regard. But we still have to be taught language, or we have to be at least put in an environment where it’s happening. So exactly. And yeah, so yeah, it just because you know, there’s a language instinct, but that doesn’t mean that every child is born speaking Hebrew as James, the second King of England supposed to have. James the first is supposed to have thought was going to be the case. So I would say that I’ve studied archetypal representations of moral behavior, because I think that dramatic stories represent various they represent various pathways through life like pathways writ large, right? Drama is life with all the boring bits edited out. And what drama is trying to present to us are different modes of behavior, some of them unsatisfactory, and those would be the bad guys and some of them highly satisfactory. And I would say the central hero in dramatic representations is someone who’s as fully reciprocal as possible. That’s what the drama is aiming at. And, and I think that’s also what you’re doing with your children, when you teach them to be good sports, when they’re playing a game, you basically say to them something like, although you don’t know this, you say something like, it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game. And the reason that matters, and this is the part you don’t say, because you don’t know it is that life is a never ending series of diverse games. And your goal, as if you want to be a winner is to be invited to play as many games as possible. And what that means is that you have to you have to have a morality that works across the set of all possible games. And it has to trump the morality that drives you to win a single game. Yeah, and the phrase for that is enlightened self interest as opposed to short term self interest. And I think it’s a very important insight.