Formal Models and Ethics
June-July 2008

Jonathan A. Zvesper

[ Description | Assessment | Organisation | Reading | Meetings ]

Description

As its name suggests, participants in this ILLC June project will examine relations between formal models and ethics. By "formal models" we mean mathematical or logical models; examples of relevant formal models are: Games from game theory, and Kripke Models from modal logic.

The research aim is to address both directions of such relations. That is, we will consider the questions:

• "How can formal models and methods inform moral philosophy?"
• "How can a theory of ethics inform game theory or decision theory?"

(Possible answers might be "not at all".)

Assessment

Each student will produce one or more short papers each addressing a very specific question relevant to the course content. (Note that while i will happily give advice about questions i do not plan to give a list of questions: one of the hard(est) parts of such a task can sometimes be working out a well-defined question, and that will be taken into account when deciding grades.) Each student will present their work in addition to submitting a paper, but note that the final grade will depend only on the papers submitted and not on the presentation.

Meetings

• Tuesday 3rd June, 14h00

In this introductory meeting i presented how i wanted the course to proceed, and you told me what you were interested in working on, on the basis of the reading list circulated earlier. As well as a number of other interesting ideas from the students, we had a discussion about the Zuboff paper. We also discussed organisational matters.

• Thursday 5th June, 14h00

This was a lecture-style meeting, with a handout and everything. I presented parts of Binmore's "Natural Justice". We started from the statement of Binmore's that "human ethics arose from Nature's attempt to solve certain equilibrium selection problems" (op. cit. p. 140). The first half of the class can be seen as providing the background to understanding this statement.

After a brief description of how the process of evolution might naturally be considered to respect principles of equilibrium and efficiency (Binmore adds fairness), we defined:

• strategic games;
• Nash equilibrium;
• Pareto efficiency;
• the particular class of strategic games Binmore considers;
• the Nash bargaining solution;
• the utilitarian outcome;
• the egalitarian outcome;
• the "original position".

After all that, we looked at Binmore's statements that the utilitarian outcome is the Nash bargaining solution from the original position when the agreement is enforceable; and that the egalitarian outcome occurs when the Nash agreement is not enforceable (and we saw why the game depends on whether or not the agreement is enforceable). Although it was beyond the scope of one class to give the formal details of these results, we looked at a "slave" example that illustrates the general idea.

• Wednesday 11th June; 14h00

By popular demand (well, two of you), in this class we looked at some more of the fundamental concepts from game theory.

• Further are being announced only by e-mail

 

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