Yes I like morality as good cooperation definitely much more than as following strange unbalanced imperatives which harm the morally acting individual!
I have a fundamental problem with basing moral principles on the notion that they should be universal imperatives because so many problems we have are a matter of scalability. If you have a handful of people with a problem that you can fix with money, paying out the money is often your best choice. But now you have created an incentive for more people to behave in ways that produce the problem. If people respond to the incentive, then at some point you will have to say "enough is enough". That doesn't mean that your initial payout was a bad idea. Or that stopping it was when you did. Being flexible is necessary for being moral, but that doesn't seem to fit very well with moral absolute oughts.
Re universality: The Illinois constitution requires laws to be of general applicability. So the legislature used to (and for all I know, still does) pass laws applicable to "all cities over 500,000 people." That universe consisted on one place: Chicago.
People have been pretending to refute Kantian deontology using rational choice theory for a century. But a prerequisite to refuting an argument is rendering it correctly, which hasn't been done here, unfortunately. I have nothing against a game theoretic account of morality offered as an alternative to Kant's account, indeed, it is even a helpful comparison for bringing out what is unique about Kant's view of the moral law.
From Kant's point of view, the game theoretic cooperative rule is just a hypothetical imperative: if I want to cooperate then I must adopt a universal maxim. But as Kant argues in Groundwork chapters one and two, morality deals with categorical imperatives.
At the end of the day, what the game theorist cannot account for, by Kant's lights, is the unconditional authority of the law, a feature of its modality that Kant thinks no reflective person can honestly deny. You can reject this premise and the argument which it grounds; but to reject an argument is not to refute it.
A more compelling way to frame your argument from a game theoretic perspective than the one presented here would be to start by summarizing Kant's position on the interest we take in the moral law, which he takes to be an interest we have a priori -- tackled in Groundwork III and the Fact of Reason argument in the Analytic of the Second Critique -- and then you could attempt to explain away this pro tanto interest we take in the moral law by citing evolutionary pressures toward prosociality. This would amount to denying that the interest we take in the categorical imperative is a priori. Kant himself considers this possibility -- he says such a thought would reduce moral necessity to "physical necessity", i.e. 'psychological necessity'. But because he equates morality with unconditional obligation, he suggests that such a possibility, if true, would render morality an empty subject.
Thanks a lot for this thoughtful answer. Here are some comments.
You write that “from Kant’s point of view, the game theoretic cooperative rule is just a hypothetical imperative”. I should be clear that, if by a “game theoretic cooperative rule” you mean a rule like “cooperate in order to get the benefits from cooperation and avoid the punishments of defection”, then I completely agree: that is a hypothetical imperative. My point in the post is precisely that all the “oughts” that rational choice theory gives us are of that form. There are only hypothetical imperatives; there are no categorical imperatives that are imposed on us by rationality in this thin, decision-theoretic sense.
I take the crux of your comment to be the claim that “what the game theorist cannot account for, by Kant’s lights, is the unconditional authority of the law, a feature of its modality that Kant thinks no reflective person can honestly deny.” Here it seems to me that the Kantian move is simply to assume what is at issue: to say, in effect, “come on, you cannot seriously reject unconditional moral authority”. My answer is that, actually, I can—and many arguably reflective people have done so: Hume, Nietzsche, contemporary error theorists, Binmore, and I would place myself in that camp. The idea that “no reflective person can honestly deny” unconditional obligation is not a neutral starting point, it is precisely what needs to be argued for.
I appreciate your suggestion to frame the argument more explicitly within Kant’s conceptual framework—starting from our interest in the moral law and then denying that this interest is a priori. There are two reasons I don’t do this in the post. First, I do not sacralise past philosophers. They said interesting things, but it makes sense to question their categories in the light of our modern knowledge. In particular, I follow Binmore in challenging the claim that “rationality” leads to the categorical imperative, using our modern (and laboriously constructed) understanding of rationality as coherence of choice under uncertainty and strategic interaction. If Kantians want to say that Kant is using a different, thicker notion of rationality, that is fair enough, but then the burden is on them to spell out that alternative and show why we should accept it.
Second, my Substack is not about doing arcane academic philosophy. I try to keep things as simple and easy to understand as possible, and this post might already be testing the limits of that goal. That being said, I am happy to discuss these issues here with you.
Very briefly, on the a priori/a posteriori point: I think Kant’s distinction is intuitively appealing at a superficial level, but much less helpful once we take modern cognitive science seriously. To be fair to Kant, he was working without two centuries of work on the brain and cognition. From a naturalistic perspective, organisms making decisions face informational problems: they must use available information to choose as well as they can in their environment. Some information is “a posteriori” in the everyday sense – we observe things. But what looks like “a priori” structure in our thinking is, on this view, information encoded in us by evolution, which has “learnt” from trial and error over very long periods.
So, for example, as a baby, my DNA has already encoded that I should stay close to my mother and call for attention if she moves away. There is no mysterious vacuum in which pure a priori knowledge floats; there are embodied, evolved solutions. On this picture, the sharp question “is morality a priori or a posteriori?” loses much of its bite. Like Binmore, I think the right answer is: it is both. Some of our morality is learned in our current environment (family, society, culture), but some fundamental aspects are likely deeply encoded in our cognitive architecture because they solved very general problems for social animals. The near-universality of golden-rule-type norms across cultures is suggestive in this respect: it looks more like a deeply entrenched solution than a theorem of pure reason.
So I am not denying that we feel a special kind of authority in moral demands. I am denying that this feeling is best explained as the “unconditional authority of an a priori moral law”. My broader project is to explain that felt authority in naturalistic terms, and to show why, from that standpoint, Kant’s attempt to derive a categorical imperative from “rationality” in his sense is not something we need to accept.
This is a nice critique of a Kant-flavored moral philosophy, but it is not a critique of Kant's moral philosophy. Kant's argument for the categorical imperative is not based on mere consistency or rationality in any thin sense, and it's absolutely not based on rational self-interest or even social benefit. So the point that the categorical imperative does not solve the prisoner's dilemma, and that it's not in the self-interest of the individual to act on the categorical imperative, given that this cannot cause others to do the same, is irrelevant to Kant's argument.
His actual deduction of the categorical imperative is presented in section III of the Groundwork. His premises are as follows:
-A thick conception of rational agency, including the properties of theoretical and practical spontaneity, meaning that from the first-person perspective agents must regard their judgements and actions as products of spontaneous choice, not passive causal determination.
-Given this spontaneity, the membership of agents not merely in the sensible world of everyday experience, but also in an intelligible world, that is, a world of things as they are in themselves, independent of affectation by sensible incentives.
-The possession by agents considered as members of the intelligible world of transcendental freedom, or the capacity to determine the will independently of sensible incentives as such.
The deduction of the categorical imperative from these premises is complex, so I won't go through it here, but I wrote my most recent article on the topic. I think that Kant's deduction ultimately fails, but it's a much more interesting, compelling, and philosophically sophisticated argument than the one attributed to him here.
I agree with you on something important: my post does not try to engage with Kant’s metaphysical scaffolding: transcendental idealism, intelligible world, transcendental freedom, and so on. Like you, I think that whole picture is ultimately misguided. It is not my goal to reconstruct that deduction step by step and show where it fails; you do that much better, and I’m happy to refer readers to your work for that internal critique.
What I do instead is look at the end result Kant wants and the label he puts on it. He says, in effect: a rational being, as such, must act on the categorical imperative; the moral law is “rationally necessary” for any rational will. My reaction is simply: wait a minute, why should we accept that claim about rationality?
Here the point isn’t that, over the last two centuries, through a lot of hard work in decision theory, economics, game theory, psychology, etc., our thinking about “rational behaviour” has been tamed and disciplined. We now have a widely used, operational notion of rationality (coherence of preferences, consistency of choice, best response to others, etc.) which is not just a philosopher’s stipulation. It’s the notion that underpins how multiple disciplines actually analyse choice and interaction. Kantians may say “that’s not what Kant meant by rationality”, but the fact remains: we do not have a serious, worked-out alternative that plays the same role across domains.
From that standpoint, the claim that a rational agent must act on the CI simply does not follow. In cases like the Prisoner’s Dilemma or mutual deterrence, the CI tells you to act as if your individual choice could move you into the “everyone cooperates” world, even though our best understanding of rational choice under strategic interdependence says that is not how incentives work. So my critique is not: “Kant failed to solve the PD, therefore he’s wrong.” It is: given what we now mean by rationality, there is no categorical imperative that rationality itself forces on us.
In that sense, I see our criticisms as complementary rather than conflicting. I had a look at your careful post on his arguments. You take Kant’s own premises about spontaneity, intelligible world and transcendental freedom as seriously as possible, and argue from within that system that the deduction of the CI does not succeed. I largely set that system aside and ask a different question: if we use the notion of rationality that has emerged from our best current work on decision and interaction, does Kant’s claim that the CI is “rationally necessary” survive? My answer is no, not because I deny that his deduction is sophisticated, but because I do not grant a special status to his metaphysical starting point.
Will all due respect, applying the economic notion of rationality to Kant’s Categorical Imperative means not to have understood at all his moral philosophy.
Moreover, he proposed several versions of the Imperative, e.g. the one based on autonomy, a notion ignored in the article.
It is autonomy that connects the individual dimension of self-determination with the universal dimension of a kingdom of end: the notion of social contract is not at all present in the Critique of Practical Reason.
Ken Binmore, beyond totally misunderstanding Kant’s moral philosophy, applying to it some concepts developed centuries later, has also been proven wrong in his own field - economics - for instance by behavioural economics.
is this overly emphasising 'what is realistic', especially by emphasising game theory? would you not consider morality to be referring to something ideal to pursue?
Yes I like morality as good cooperation definitely much more than as following strange unbalanced imperatives which harm the morally acting individual!
I have a fundamental problem with basing moral principles on the notion that they should be universal imperatives because so many problems we have are a matter of scalability. If you have a handful of people with a problem that you can fix with money, paying out the money is often your best choice. But now you have created an incentive for more people to behave in ways that produce the problem. If people respond to the incentive, then at some point you will have to say "enough is enough". That doesn't mean that your initial payout was a bad idea. Or that stopping it was when you did. Being flexible is necessary for being moral, but that doesn't seem to fit very well with moral absolute oughts.
Re universality: The Illinois constitution requires laws to be of general applicability. So the legislature used to (and for all I know, still does) pass laws applicable to "all cities over 500,000 people." That universe consisted on one place: Chicago.
Excellent
People have been pretending to refute Kantian deontology using rational choice theory for a century. But a prerequisite to refuting an argument is rendering it correctly, which hasn't been done here, unfortunately. I have nothing against a game theoretic account of morality offered as an alternative to Kant's account, indeed, it is even a helpful comparison for bringing out what is unique about Kant's view of the moral law.
From Kant's point of view, the game theoretic cooperative rule is just a hypothetical imperative: if I want to cooperate then I must adopt a universal maxim. But as Kant argues in Groundwork chapters one and two, morality deals with categorical imperatives.
At the end of the day, what the game theorist cannot account for, by Kant's lights, is the unconditional authority of the law, a feature of its modality that Kant thinks no reflective person can honestly deny. You can reject this premise and the argument which it grounds; but to reject an argument is not to refute it.
A more compelling way to frame your argument from a game theoretic perspective than the one presented here would be to start by summarizing Kant's position on the interest we take in the moral law, which he takes to be an interest we have a priori -- tackled in Groundwork III and the Fact of Reason argument in the Analytic of the Second Critique -- and then you could attempt to explain away this pro tanto interest we take in the moral law by citing evolutionary pressures toward prosociality. This would amount to denying that the interest we take in the categorical imperative is a priori. Kant himself considers this possibility -- he says such a thought would reduce moral necessity to "physical necessity", i.e. 'psychological necessity'. But because he equates morality with unconditional obligation, he suggests that such a possibility, if true, would render morality an empty subject.
Thanks a lot for this thoughtful answer. Here are some comments.
You write that “from Kant’s point of view, the game theoretic cooperative rule is just a hypothetical imperative”. I should be clear that, if by a “game theoretic cooperative rule” you mean a rule like “cooperate in order to get the benefits from cooperation and avoid the punishments of defection”, then I completely agree: that is a hypothetical imperative. My point in the post is precisely that all the “oughts” that rational choice theory gives us are of that form. There are only hypothetical imperatives; there are no categorical imperatives that are imposed on us by rationality in this thin, decision-theoretic sense.
I take the crux of your comment to be the claim that “what the game theorist cannot account for, by Kant’s lights, is the unconditional authority of the law, a feature of its modality that Kant thinks no reflective person can honestly deny.” Here it seems to me that the Kantian move is simply to assume what is at issue: to say, in effect, “come on, you cannot seriously reject unconditional moral authority”. My answer is that, actually, I can—and many arguably reflective people have done so: Hume, Nietzsche, contemporary error theorists, Binmore, and I would place myself in that camp. The idea that “no reflective person can honestly deny” unconditional obligation is not a neutral starting point, it is precisely what needs to be argued for.
I appreciate your suggestion to frame the argument more explicitly within Kant’s conceptual framework—starting from our interest in the moral law and then denying that this interest is a priori. There are two reasons I don’t do this in the post. First, I do not sacralise past philosophers. They said interesting things, but it makes sense to question their categories in the light of our modern knowledge. In particular, I follow Binmore in challenging the claim that “rationality” leads to the categorical imperative, using our modern (and laboriously constructed) understanding of rationality as coherence of choice under uncertainty and strategic interaction. If Kantians want to say that Kant is using a different, thicker notion of rationality, that is fair enough, but then the burden is on them to spell out that alternative and show why we should accept it.
Second, my Substack is not about doing arcane academic philosophy. I try to keep things as simple and easy to understand as possible, and this post might already be testing the limits of that goal. That being said, I am happy to discuss these issues here with you.
Very briefly, on the a priori/a posteriori point: I think Kant’s distinction is intuitively appealing at a superficial level, but much less helpful once we take modern cognitive science seriously. To be fair to Kant, he was working without two centuries of work on the brain and cognition. From a naturalistic perspective, organisms making decisions face informational problems: they must use available information to choose as well as they can in their environment. Some information is “a posteriori” in the everyday sense – we observe things. But what looks like “a priori” structure in our thinking is, on this view, information encoded in us by evolution, which has “learnt” from trial and error over very long periods.
So, for example, as a baby, my DNA has already encoded that I should stay close to my mother and call for attention if she moves away. There is no mysterious vacuum in which pure a priori knowledge floats; there are embodied, evolved solutions. On this picture, the sharp question “is morality a priori or a posteriori?” loses much of its bite. Like Binmore, I think the right answer is: it is both. Some of our morality is learned in our current environment (family, society, culture), but some fundamental aspects are likely deeply encoded in our cognitive architecture because they solved very general problems for social animals. The near-universality of golden-rule-type norms across cultures is suggestive in this respect: it looks more like a deeply entrenched solution than a theorem of pure reason.
So I am not denying that we feel a special kind of authority in moral demands. I am denying that this feeling is best explained as the “unconditional authority of an a priori moral law”. My broader project is to explain that felt authority in naturalistic terms, and to show why, from that standpoint, Kant’s attempt to derive a categorical imperative from “rationality” in his sense is not something we need to accept.
This is a nice critique of a Kant-flavored moral philosophy, but it is not a critique of Kant's moral philosophy. Kant's argument for the categorical imperative is not based on mere consistency or rationality in any thin sense, and it's absolutely not based on rational self-interest or even social benefit. So the point that the categorical imperative does not solve the prisoner's dilemma, and that it's not in the self-interest of the individual to act on the categorical imperative, given that this cannot cause others to do the same, is irrelevant to Kant's argument.
His actual deduction of the categorical imperative is presented in section III of the Groundwork. His premises are as follows:
-A thick conception of rational agency, including the properties of theoretical and practical spontaneity, meaning that from the first-person perspective agents must regard their judgements and actions as products of spontaneous choice, not passive causal determination.
-Given this spontaneity, the membership of agents not merely in the sensible world of everyday experience, but also in an intelligible world, that is, a world of things as they are in themselves, independent of affectation by sensible incentives.
-The possession by agents considered as members of the intelligible world of transcendental freedom, or the capacity to determine the will independently of sensible incentives as such.
The deduction of the categorical imperative from these premises is complex, so I won't go through it here, but I wrote my most recent article on the topic. I think that Kant's deduction ultimately fails, but it's a much more interesting, compelling, and philosophically sophisticated argument than the one attributed to him here.
Thanks a lot for your thoughtful comment.
I agree with you on something important: my post does not try to engage with Kant’s metaphysical scaffolding: transcendental idealism, intelligible world, transcendental freedom, and so on. Like you, I think that whole picture is ultimately misguided. It is not my goal to reconstruct that deduction step by step and show where it fails; you do that much better, and I’m happy to refer readers to your work for that internal critique.
What I do instead is look at the end result Kant wants and the label he puts on it. He says, in effect: a rational being, as such, must act on the categorical imperative; the moral law is “rationally necessary” for any rational will. My reaction is simply: wait a minute, why should we accept that claim about rationality?
Here the point isn’t that, over the last two centuries, through a lot of hard work in decision theory, economics, game theory, psychology, etc., our thinking about “rational behaviour” has been tamed and disciplined. We now have a widely used, operational notion of rationality (coherence of preferences, consistency of choice, best response to others, etc.) which is not just a philosopher’s stipulation. It’s the notion that underpins how multiple disciplines actually analyse choice and interaction. Kantians may say “that’s not what Kant meant by rationality”, but the fact remains: we do not have a serious, worked-out alternative that plays the same role across domains.
From that standpoint, the claim that a rational agent must act on the CI simply does not follow. In cases like the Prisoner’s Dilemma or mutual deterrence, the CI tells you to act as if your individual choice could move you into the “everyone cooperates” world, even though our best understanding of rational choice under strategic interdependence says that is not how incentives work. So my critique is not: “Kant failed to solve the PD, therefore he’s wrong.” It is: given what we now mean by rationality, there is no categorical imperative that rationality itself forces on us.
In that sense, I see our criticisms as complementary rather than conflicting. I had a look at your careful post on his arguments. You take Kant’s own premises about spontaneity, intelligible world and transcendental freedom as seriously as possible, and argue from within that system that the deduction of the CI does not succeed. I largely set that system aside and ask a different question: if we use the notion of rationality that has emerged from our best current work on decision and interaction, does Kant’s claim that the CI is “rationally necessary” survive? My answer is no, not because I deny that his deduction is sophisticated, but because I do not grant a special status to his metaphysical starting point.
Will all due respect, applying the economic notion of rationality to Kant’s Categorical Imperative means not to have understood at all his moral philosophy.
Moreover, he proposed several versions of the Imperative, e.g. the one based on autonomy, a notion ignored in the article.
It is autonomy that connects the individual dimension of self-determination with the universal dimension of a kingdom of end: the notion of social contract is not at all present in the Critique of Practical Reason.
Ken Binmore, beyond totally misunderstanding Kant’s moral philosophy, applying to it some concepts developed centuries later, has also been proven wrong in his own field - economics - for instance by behavioural economics.
is this overly emphasising 'what is realistic', especially by emphasising game theory? would you not consider morality to be referring to something ideal to pursue?