Equilibrium Ethics

A new ethic is needed to replace obsolete religious values on the wane (Voss, 1997). He argues rational self-interest is the key to optimal living. Yet I am not convinced that self-interest alone is enough or optimal. Does rational ethics dictate that if another man is competing with me for something --a lover, an apple-- and I can kill him and get away with it without any consequences (we are alone at sea without evidence), that I should? I don't think that is optimal living, because I like an ethics system to be evaluated from the perspective of more than one individual. I think the life of someone else is worth more than an extra apple for me, and that that's true even if the person desiring the extra apple does not agree.

A game-theoretical variant on Voss' rational ethics that lives in a Nash-like equilibrium can solve this issue. Something along the lines of perfect matching of couples (a matching where no two people would want to leave their assigned couple for each other). Optimal living in this definition is living in a way such that nobody would want to change your actions enough that they'd be able to convince you. For example, if you kill someone for an apple, that person would be willing to give you much more than an apple for their life. So that murder does not lie in an equilibrium, and the world is better with a different action. On the other hand, two people competing for the same life-saving scarce resource may not be able to convince each other to cede it to the other, so self-interest is optimal in that case.

Now one might argue that in the non-equilibrium example above, rational self-interest would dictate that you get the person to pay you for his right to live instead, but this is not always in self-interest. For example, trying to extort payment in exchange for someone's life may expose me to too many risks to make it a rational choice, and yet I still think that killing them is the wrong answer, and that the principle above allows you to make the right choice. In brief, I think rationality and self-interest are two important elements of a better ethics, but that rational ethics is missing an element: what other people want --bad enough that they are willing to give the person behind the behavior in question enough to change his/her mind.

In brief, equilibrium ethics dictates that the ethical, and optimal, course of action is that which no individual would be able and willing to convince the actor(s) --the person(s) taking the action-- to change.

There are several pleasing consequences of this principle:

1. Every relevant person's (being's) desires are considered in each person's ethical behavior
2. It is a personal ethics, where the ranking of outcomes of my behavior is ultimately done by me, rather than somebody else's values
3. Ethical behaviors are those which cannot be altered without making somebody unhappier
4. Unethical behaviors are those that can be replaced with an alternative that makes the set of all people equal or happier, and nobody unhappier.