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Advantageous Altruism:
Egalitarian, Magnanimous, Forgiving, Sympathetic, and Servant Leadership
Abstract
A pessimistic conclusion that can be drawn from the celebrated Prisoner’s Dilemma
game is that since socially valuable altruism is costly for the altruist, altruists can only endure if
they can find other altruists and reward them while punishing egoists. The aim of this paper is to
tell a more optimistic story about how selective altruism in regard to some of the payoffs of
another person is helpful to the selective altruist in one-shot as well as repeated games. Selective
altruists can finish first in one-shot Leadership games and Trust games, which correspond to
some of the most common and important situations in business and in social life. Advantageous
selective altruism can be usefully divided into five major categories, each of which can be
identified with major styles of leadership, as well as with major historical and contemporary
schools. The first form of advantageous altruism, egalitarian leadership, can be related to Plato’s
vision of shared property and family life among a ruling class of guardians. The second type,
magnanimous leadership, can be connected to Aristotle’s vision of ethics as social and his
description of the great-souled man. The third type, forgiving leadership, can be connected to the
teachings of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The fourth type, sympathetic leadership, can be
related to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The fifth and final type, servant
leadership, can be connected to Carol Gilligan’s description of the ethic of care. All of these
selectively altruistic types, it will be suggested, enhance value for their egoistic followers as well
as for themselves and are significant and valuable presences in contemporary society and
contemporary organizations.
Sometimes nice guys do indeed finish last. The Prisoner’s Dilemma (Luce & Raiffa,
1957; Rapoport & Chammah, 1965), the basis of thousands of conceptual and empirical works
from the 1950s to the present, provides a formal basis for that basic insight. In the Dilemma as
typically told, the best outcome collectively comes if both players cooperate. But the nice guy
loses to the defector. In a repeated Dilemma, the nice guy can do fine, but only by being not
nice: The famous “Tit for Tat” strategy (Axelrod, 1984), even in its more forgiving versions,
involves punishing defectors.
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The original Dilemma story and the many variations of it spun out over the years capture
some highly important parts of the truth about human nature in general and about altruism in
particular. Altruistic behavior that flourishes in a community of altruists can indeed be
vulnerable to exploitation by egoists (Frank, 1987). Knowing their vulnerability, righteous
altruists can indeed be prone to punish and to discriminate against presumptively non-altruistic
outsiders (Bowles & Gintis, 2011; Haidt, 2012).
At the same time, the web of theory and empiricism spun from the Dilemma does not
capture nearly all of human altruism in its snares. That in brief is a secondary claim of this
paper, negatively stated. Positively stated, that secondary claim is that many situations in the
real world involve Leadership games or Trust games, not Dilemmas. The central claim of the
paper is that in these common Leadership and Trust situations, certain types of selective altruism
with respect to some of the other player’s payoffs are helpful to the altruist in a one-shot
situation. When it comes to leadership and trust games, altruists of certain kinds do better than
egoists for themselves, as well as for society.
The paper will use non-technical game theory to identify and analyze five major kinds of
selective altruism. All of these types enhance the ability of the altruist to lead egoists openly or
subtly, and in doing so to receive higher payoffs than the egoist. The first type is egalitarian
leadership that values other people’s payoffs when an equal outcome is reached. The second is
magnanimous leadership that values the payoffs of others when one leads, whether or not they
follow you. The third is forgiving leadership that values the payoffs of other people not only
when you lead, but also when you trust the other player to do what is best for him or her as well
as for you. The fourth is sympathetic leadership that feels for the other when you lead in
situations in which doing so is best for all, and also in situations when you trust the other. The
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fifth and final type is servant leadership that values the payoffs of others when one follows and
the other leads.
The third major claim of the paper is that these five different forms of advantageous
selective altruism correspond well to the teachings of significant past and present thinkers,
preachers, and schools within ethics and religion. Egalitarian leadership and magnanimous
leadership, though hardly concepts limited to the classical Greek context, can usefully be traced
to that tradition and its great expositors Plato and Aristotle. Forgiving leadership—“forgive
them, Father, for they know not what they do”—though by no means exclusively derived from
Jesus, the Jewish tradition he embodied and partially rebelled against, or the Christian and
Western traditions in which he is the single leading figure—can be related to his Sermon on the
Mount and its apparently self-sacrificing counsel of turning the other cheek. Sympathetic
leadership in which the leader is simultaneously practical and emotionally connected to other
people can be traced to both Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), in which he
delineates an emotion-based approach to ethics, and to his Wealth of Nations (1776), with its
powerful utilitarian analysis of the logic of social affairs. Finally, servant leadership, though not
limited to modern difference feminism, can be identified with Carol Gilligan’s response (1982)
to Kohlberg’s theory of moral development (1973), and more broadly with the rise of an
alternative type of leadership in contemporary organizations in which the leader prevails through
being accommodating rather than masterful.
The organization of the paper will be roughly chronological in terms of schools of
thought, treating the five major varieties of selective altruism in the order just described. The
chronology corresponds to an historical story that this paper will imply rather than state, a story
in which over the past few millennia, and especially over the last few centuries, humans have
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increasingly benefited individually and collectively from the development and growth of
selective altruism. Greek generals commanding hoplites; medieval abbots running monasteries;
organization men managing on behalf of invisible owners; servant leaders moving people and
their organizations through facilitation rather than direction: All of these social types can be
understood as part of a large, unfolding story of individuals, organizations, and society
harnessing selective altruism. To be told properly, with all of its equivocal and negative
elements as well as its many positive ones, that historical story would need a very much larger
canvas than this paper. The hope is that the account of selective altruism provided here,
incomplete though it necessarily will be, will be of value in tracing the intricate ways in which
concern for the feelings of others is not simply a way in which the group turns individuals to
work its will, but also a way in which partially altruistic individuals flourish and prevail over
egoists in business and other social contexts.
The paper has a presiding spirit in the form of Thomas Schelling, who developed the
analysis of credible commitment (1960) on which this paper centrally relies, and who in a
college seminar years ago introduced me to a game-theoretic way of thinking about the world
that I have brooded over, moved away from, and returned to in the subsequent years. One of
Schelling’s outstanding features over the years has been his ability to couch his analytical points
in nice prose; in the interests of flow and in emulation of the spirit if not necessarily the specifics
of his work, the text here will dispense with matrices, which are reserved for the Appendices. 1
1
Nontechnical game theory should be analytically rigorous as well as accessible, as Schelling’s
was, and this paper is written in emulation of his method. The broader academic project I am
engaged in of which this paper is a part is to use the basic 1950s game theory of two-person, 2 x
2 matrices employed by Schelling (1960) to illuminate the role of social preferences in business,
politics, law, and other forms of human social behavior. See [present author], The Ethics of
Evolved Human Nature, Paduano Business Ethics Seminar presentation (2010).
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Schelling’s creative insights into the sometimes counterintuitive consequences of egoistic
calculation in nuclear strategy, neighborhood racial patterns, organized crime, helmet wearing in
hockey, climate change, and a host of other topics (1960, 1969, 1978, 1984) often upset
conventional wisdom, but did not necessarily give offense to the very large majority of us
(myself included) who believe that morality is not reducible to egoistic calculation. By contrast,
the analysis of altruism as a strategically useful property that is undertaken in this paper may
well give offense if such an analysis is taken to be an assertion that morality is reducible to
egoistic calculation.
One may find a game-theoretic analysis of selective altruism logically persuasive, but at
the same time have a troubled feeling about what that analysis implies for morality. The gametheoretic mode of thinking about strategic interaction that was pioneered by Schelling (1960) and
Nash (1950) can in my judgment unlock the logic of human nature in a way that other
approaches cannot. At the same time, the game-theoretic approach, and the concept of
advantageous altruism in particular, present ethical difficulties and conundrums (Solomon, 1999;
Binmore, 1999),. I will suggest at the end of the paper that the analysis of advantageous
altruism, although troubling when viewed in relation to certain major past and present
approaches to ethics, accords very well with Adam Smith’s ethics of sympathy and with his
practical spirit, and to a considerable degree as well with Aristotle’s quite different but similarly
practical spirit.
The organization of the paper is as follows: After a brief introductory discussion of
current Prisoner’s Dilemma-based research on leadership and altruism in Part I, Part II
introduces the Leadership and Trust games that are the focus of this paper. Parts III-VII explain
and describe the five different types of selective altruism that give the altruist an individual
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advantage as well as contributing to the social weal in Leadership and Trust games. Parts VII
and VIII discuss the plausibility and the ethics of the game-theoretic analysis of advantageous
altruism. Part VII includes a discussion of a “Prisoner’s Dilemma worldview,” using Steven
Pinker’s recent excellent book on violence (2011) as a jumping-off point. I will suggest that an
alternative “Leadership and Trust worldview” that I will relate to Schelling (1960) as well as to
this paper’s argument is also important and needs to be more widely understood and analyzed.
Part IX concludes.
I. GAME-THEORETIC WORK ON LEADERSHIP AND ALTRUISM
The idea that effective leadership is connected to having a feeling for something beyond
one’s own welfare, whether that “something” is the feelings of the subordinate, the values of the
group, or a set of overarching values that transform the group, is a theme that can be traced in
various strands of the leadership literature, including those on transformational leadership,
functional leadership, participatory leadership, and servant leadership. The theory of
transformational leadership (Burns, 1978) distinguishes between transactional leaders who
administer systems according to a logic of calculation and transformational leaders who
transform their groups with a vision that transcends calculation. The contrasting approach of
functional leadership (Fleishman, et al, 1991), with its more prosaic notion of leaders
implementing the needs of the group, has its own notion of feeling for the group and individuals
within it on the part of the leader as a contributor to success for the leader personally as well as
for the group. Similarly, practitioner-oriented approaches to leadership that emphasize
participation by followers and the leader serving followers—the latter, servant-leader approach is
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one we shall return to later—have their own connection to the idea that leaders in one way or
another are motivated by feeling for others and for a cause beyond themselves.
Turning to literature with a particular game-theoretic focus, there is a flourishing subgenre that uses the Prisoner’s Dilemma in its original and variant forms to study the central topic
of this paper, leadership and altruism. A nice and highly relevant example of conceptual work
along those lines is Hardy & Van Vugt (2006), whose title (“Nice Guys Finish First”) could be
the title of this paper, but who couch their case in terms of the repeated Dilemma, rather than the
one-shot Leadership and Trust games relied upon here. Their basic argument is that apparently
self-sacrificial altruism can pay off in repeat games not only for previously recognized reasons
such as kin selection (Hamilton, 1966) and reciprocity (Trivers, 1971), but also because others in
a group reward the altruist with leadership.
The scholarly school that uses the Dilemma to examine altruism and leadership features a
strong empirical wing, reflected in annual conferences and professional groups devoted
specifically to social dilemmas; the International Conference on Social Dilemmas will be holding
its fifteenth annual event in summer 2012 in Zurich. 2 A good recent example of empirical
Dilemma-based research related to Hardy and Van Vugt’s conceptual inquiry into altruism and
leadership is Halevy, et al (2011), who found that subjects were more likely to support others for
leadership positions when the others showed in-group altruism, as opposed to either selfishness,
out-group altruism, or out-group malice. More broadly, a canonical starting point for many
conceptually-grounded empirical studies of altruism in leadership and other situations has been
2
www.socialdilemma.com/content/future
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Axelrod (1984) and his delineation of the success of the simultaneously nice, simple, retaliatory,
and forgiving Tit for Tat strategy in computer tournaments of an iterated Dilemma.
The study of altruism as related to Leadership games and Trust games has not had the
same currency as the study of altruism as related to the Dilemma. The relevance of altruism to
the Dilemma, where egoism involves following a dominant strategy that leads to a worse
outcome, is fairly obvious. The connection between altruism and outcomes in Leadership and
Trust games, on the other hand, is a subtler matter. Leadership and Trust games—which
together can be called coordination games--much as they have generated their own theoretical
and empirical literature (Schelling, 1960; Cooper, 1998; Skyrms, 2004), have not generated a
sub-genre of literature that relates the games to altruism in the way that has been done
extensively for the Dilemma. That is the sub-genre that this paper explores, and in which its
potential contribution lies.
II. LEADERSHIP AND TRUST GAMES
In the Prisoner's Dilemma, the egoist has a dominant strategy of defecting. Given that,
there is no way that altruism in the Dilemma can ever help an altruist who values the other
player’s payoffs and cooperates in a one-shot game. The egoist will defect regardless, and the
altruist will wind up with either his or her worst payoff.
Among the symmetrical two-person,
one-shot games of interest, the Dilemma is very unusual, though—in fact unique--in that regard. 3
3
There are five additional basic games in which the egoist also has a dominant strategy and thus
cannot be affected by altruism on the part of the other player. In those games, though, unlike the
Prisoner's Dilemma, the dominant strategy for the egoist is either clearly optimal for both players
or very likely optimal. Accordingly, these five games--which can be termed Harmony games
because of their benevolent payoff structure--do not present the significant difficulties for egoism
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In all the other two-person games of interest, the egoist has no dominant strategy. In these
games, selective altruism can be useful to the altruist, not simply to the two players together, for
the reasons I describe shortly.
The two-person matrices in which neither player has a dominant strategy fall into two
basic categories: Leadership games and Trust games. 4 In a Leadership game, the best outcome
occurs if the players can coordinate on a combination of strategies in which one player—the
leader—receives a higher payoff and the other player—the follower—receives a lower payoff. 5
If they fail to do so, with both trying to lead or neither stepping up to do so, the outcome will be
worse for both players than with one leading and the other following. Coordinating may be
tricky, though, given that both players have an interest in leading rather than following.
Coordinating in Leadership games is especially tricky if the players only know their
relative, ordinal payoffs. In that case, there is no clear collectively best outcome with one
leading and the other following that they can coordinate on as a focal point (Schelling, 1960).
Even if there is a focal point—suppose both players know the absolute, cardinal payoffs for A
that the Prisoner's Dilemma does. For a typology of games, see [present author], The Ethics of
Evolved Human Nature, Paduano Business Ethics Seminar presentation (2010).
4
A nuance is that one of the Leadership games, Chicken, in some cases is a game in which the
highest joint payoff comes from both players yielding or following, which could also be
described as both players cooperating. That type of Chicken plus the basic Dilemma can both be
described as Cooperation games, which along with Leadership games, Trust games, and the
comparatively uninteresting though pleasant Harmony games comprise the universe of all basic
two-person one-shot games. A further nuance is that in some cases the Dilemma and the five
Harmony games are Leadership games, in that the best collective outcome is for one player to
lead and the other to follow. That means that there are five Harmony games, two Cooperation
games, three Trust games, and nine Leadership games. Id.
5
Formally, the player receiving the higher payoff could be the follower rather than the leader.
That raises interesting methodological and normative issues; in this paper, in keeping with the
standard understanding of the relationship between leadership and followership, it will be
assumed that the leader is the player receiving the higher payoff and the follower is the player
receiving the lower payoff in a leader-follower dyad.
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leading and B following are 3 for A and 2 for B and those for B leading and A following are 4
for B and 2 for A, making the latter combination collectively best--their shared interest in being
the leader rather than the follower continues to make the game hard to solve.
In a Leadership game, if one player can convince the other that he or she is committed to
leading no matter what, the best response of the other player is to follow. So, for example, in the
Leadership game Chicken, if you are convinced that the other player has mechanically set his
steering wheel so he is incapable of swerving, you as a calculating egoist should swerve yourself
to avoid a crash that will kill you both (Schelling, 1960). Commitment can be based on
character, not simply on contraptions like a rigged steering wheel. For example, if you are
playing Chicken with someone you are convinced is not an egoist but a competitive psychopath
who does not care about his life and values only beating you, you should swerve, just as in the
rigged steering wheel case. Or—to turn to the basic story of another Leadership game, Battle of
the Sexes--if you are convinced that your husband (or wife) is an incorrigible pig who will go to
the boxing match no matter what you do, you as a calculating egoist should go to the boxing
match as well, despite your own preference to see the opera. You will be reasonably happy at
being together at the boxing match, while following your preference for the opera will leave the
two of you separated and give you, not just your incorrigible spouse, a lower payoff (Schelling,
1960).
The commitment that will lead to prevailing in a Leadership game boils down to valuing
the Lead-Lead outcome in which both you and the other try to lead—the two cars crashing, in a
game of Chicken; the spouses separated, with you at your preferred activity, in Battle of the
Sexes—more than the Follow-Lead outcome in which you follow and the other leads—you
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swerve while the other does not in Chicken; you and the other go to the other’s preferred event in
Battle of the Sexes.
In the outré canonical Chicken story of a ridiculous honor showdown, valuing a fatal
crash more than survival would of course be bizarre. In the also outré though less extreme Battle
of the Sexes story, a character type with a dogmatic commitment to doing what it wants
regardless of a spouse’s preferences is hardly bizarre, but is decidedly unpleasant and
unadmirable. But—as will be discussed in some detail in Parts III-VII—in many Leadership
games with much more plausible stories than the Chicken or Battle of the Sexes stories there are
reasonable accounts one can give of character types with rather admirable, or even highly
admirable, altruistic or quasi-altruistic qualities that cause a person of that type to value the
Lead-Lead outcome highly.
The easiest definition of altruism to operationalize, but not the most plausible one
psychologically, is one in which a player knows the payoffs of the other and adds those to his or
her own to get an adjusted payoff that governs his or her actions. So, for example, if both
spouses wind up leading in Battle of the Sexes and going to their own preferred activity, which
gives them their second worst payoffs with a value of, let us say, 2, the Lead-Lead payoff for the
altruistic spouse would be 4, the sum of both spouse’s payoffs. Assuming that, as detailed in the
Appendix, the altruistic spouse’s Lead-Lead payoff of 4 exceeds his or her payoff of, say, 3 for
Follow-Lead, the altruistic spouse who selectively values the other’s payoffs for Lead-Lead only
will get the egoistic spouse to follow him or her. A more psychologically plausible if harder to
operationalize way to think of altruism or quasi-altruism is that the spouse who highly values the
outcome from both players trying to lead is not directly channeling the other’s payoff of 2 into
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his or her own utility function as much as he or she is feeling a heightened or elevated state of
happiness at the Lead-Lead tension that her egoistic spouse does not feel. The outcome—that
the selectively altruistic spouse gets to lead--is the same either way, but the mechanism is
different.
A central—perhaps the central--character type that fits the bill of valuing the Lead-Lead
outcome highly can be described as a masterful leader, and will be examined in Part IV, which
uses Aristotle and his great-souled man as a jumping-off point. The masterful leader feels strong
and genuine empathy with the other’s successes and happiness, but only when he or she is
leading, not when he or she is following. One may of course dispute whether that type is
admirable or not, or genuinely altruistic or not, and those questions will be taken up further in
Part IV. For present purposes, the point is simply that partial or selective altruism that values the
other’s payoffs if and only if you lead can be very useful in establishing a credible commitment
to leading and inducing an egoist to follow.
A second character type that on the face of it seems opposed to the masterful leader but
that can lead to the same result of highly valuing the Lead-Lead outcome is a leader who is ultraforgiving, to the extent of positively reveling in the slaps he or she receives as a leader from
others who are also trying to lead. A forgiving leader who is genuinely unfazed by—and who
even paradoxically rejoices in—the slings and arrows of challenges to her or his leadership, has a
powerful basis for valuing Lead-Lead and hence for committing to leadership, just as the
masterful leader does. In Part V, which uses the Sermon on the Mount as a point of reference,
that type will be considered.
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The second category of two-person symmetrical games of interest that have no dominant
strategy consists of Trust games. In these games, there is less inherent conflict than in
Leadership games, because the best outcome for both players results from Trust-Trust. But
coordinating on that outcome may be difficult, because if the other player plays Distrust, one’s
best response is Distrust. One hopes the other will play Trust, in which case one’s best response
is Trust. But one fears the other will play Distrust.
The key commitment that will lead to ensuring a Trust-Trust outcome that will benefit the
trusting player, and also the egoist, works as follows: You need to value Trust-Distrust—the
outcome in which you trust and the other skunks you by not trusting—more than you value
Distrust-Distrust. For the egoist, that useful commitment is impossible, since the egoist’s payoff
for Trust-Distrust is lower than his or her Distrust-Distrust payoff. For a selective altruist,
though, it is possible.
The specifics of the successful character types for Trust games as for Leadership games
will be explored in the sections to come. To anticipate the discussion a bit: While all of the five
selectively altruistic character types examined in this paper work well for Leadership games,
only the forgiving, sympathetic, and servant leader types work well for Trust games. In
particular, the masterful leader, who enjoys conspicuous success in Leadership games, does not
do well in Trust games. The masterful type’s empathy is contingent on being the leader, which
is not a readily applicable concept in a Trust game. By contrast, the forgiving leader’s empathy
translates well to forgiving not only the slaps he or she receives when leading, but also to
forgiving the ones he or she receives when trust is returned with distrust.
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IV. THE EGALITARIAN LEADER:
PLATO’S GUARDIANS AND THEIR SUCCESSORS
And is not that the best-ordered State in which the greatest number of persons apply the
terms 'mine' and 'not mine' in the same way to the same thing? Or that again which most
nearly approaches to the condition of the individual --as in the body, when but a finger of
one of us is hurt, the whole frame, drawn towards the soul as a center and forming one
kingdom under the ruling power therein, feels the hurt and sympathizes all together with
the part affected, and we say that the man has a pain in his finger; and the same
expression is used about any other part of the body, which has a sensation of pain at
suffering or of pleasure at the alleviation of suffering…
And this agrees with the other principle which we were affirming, --that the guardians
were not to have houses or lands or any other property; their pay was to be their food,
which they were to receive from the other citizens, and they were to have no private
expenses; for we intended them to preserve their true character of guardians.
-- Plato, The Republic, Book 5 [Jewett translation]
In this section, I will trace out a case that egalitarianism of a certain kind can help the
egalitarian get his or her way in Leadership games. If the claim is right, Platonic guardians as
described above, with their communal property, their lack of regard for personal possessions, and
their strong empathic feeling for the group, are not simply the fever dream of a brilliant but
impractical philosopher-dreamer—much as that indeed may be the case—but are also people
whose qualities are well-suited to gaining deference from the ordinary people of the polis who
are committed to the egoistic pursuit of getting and spending that the guardians disdain.
The nub of why egalitarians of a certain kind do very well in leadership games goes like
this: To prevail in a Leadership game, the key is a credible commitment to lead, which requires
that you value Lead-Lead more highly than the egoist does and also more than you value FollowLead. Compared to the egoist, the egalitarian is in a good position to make such a credible
commitment, because in a Lead-Lead outcome, both players are in the same boat. They both
may be doing relatively badly, but their fate is shared in a way that appeals to the egalitarian, but
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not to the egoist. Accordingly, Lead-Lead has significantly higher payoffs to the egalitarian than
the egoist, which makes it more likely that the egalitarian will be credibly committed to playing
Lead in a given situation than the egoist is.
As always with game-theoretic accounts, a story helps. As opposed to the implausible
and ethically dubious Chicken and Battle of the Sexes stories, consider instead a plausible and
ethically palatable Boar Hunt version of the leadership story, shown as a matrix in the Appendix,
in which the best results of a two-person hunt depend on either player leading and the other
following, and worse outcomes result if there is either a Lead-Lead clash or a Follow-Follow
abnegation by both.
The egalitarian in the Boar Hunt game values both Lead-Lead and Follow-Follow more
heavily than the egoist does, since both of these weak outcomes leave the players up the same
tree. We can conceptualize the egalitarian as literally channeling and incorporating the egoist’s
payoffs as well as his or her own in these two situations. Alternatively and more plausibly if less
precisely, we can think of the egalitarian simply as having an elevated state of satisfaction in
those two equal outcome cases that exceeds that of the egoist.
For the reasons just described, the egalitarian’s high valuation of Lead-Lead is
advantageous to the egalitarian in the Boar Hunt game. The egoist reasons, “She just doesn’t
mind the mess-up that occurs when we both decide to lead and the boar gets away in the same
way that I do—so I’d better decide to follow.”
The egalitarian’s high valuation of Follow-Follow relative to the egoist is not helpful to
the egalitarian’s prospects of leading in Boar Hunt. It is not harmful, though, as long as the
egoist believes that Follow-Follow is a worse outcome for the egalitarian than Lead-Follow:
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“Sure, she is okay with neither of us taking the lead and the boar getting away in a way that I’m
not, but I’m sure she likes being the leader while I follow and our catching the boar with her
getting the perks of leading. And I’m sure she likes that more than she likes having the boar get
away when neither of us steps up to lead.”
A way to counter the possibility that the egalitarian’s high valuation of Follow-Follow
will undermine a credible commitment to leading in some situations is to follow Plato in
postulating a leader-ruler-guardian type that is not only egalitarian but also fierce and highspirited, with a strong general preference for leading over following. That type brings us to the
next section, and to an analysis of Aristotle’s magnanimous or great-souled man as another kind
of selective altruist.
Before turning to the masterful leadership of the great-souled man, though, a word as to
the enduring possibilities for egalitarian leadership: For a credible commitment to lead to be
sustainable in a given social environment, whether that of ancient Greece or 21st century
America, that commitment must be judged by society and by the leader’s peers and followers as
ethically acceptable, if not necessary praiseworthy. Commitments to lead that are viewed as
unacceptable ethically, like those of the psychopath in Chicken or the incorrigible spouse in
Battle of the Sexes, cannot succeed as a social type over time, much as they may prevail in
individual one-shot showdowns.
The egalitarian leader’s high valuation not of his or her leadership per se, but of equal
outcomes in a Leadership game, passes a screen of ethical acceptability in a way that is not
necessarily the case for a masterful leader’s high-spirited reveling in his or her own leadership.
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Egalitarian personal preferences are less likely to generate a credible commitment to lead than
masterful ones, but are at the same time more likely to be understood as ethically valid.
V. THE MAGNANIMOUS LEADER:
ARISTOTLE’S GREAT-SOULED MAN AND HIS DESCENDANTS
It is characteristic of the great-souled man never to ask help from others, or only with
reluctance, but to render aid willingly; and to be haughty towards men of position and
fortune, but courteous towards those of moderate station, because it is difficult and
distinguished to be superior to the great, but easy to outdo the lowly, and to adopt a high
manner with the former is not ill-bred, but it is vulgar to lord it over humble people: it is
like putting forth one's strength against the weak.
He will be incapable of living at the will of another, unless a friend, since to do so is
slavish, and hence flatterers are always servile, and humble people flatterers. He is not
prone to admiration, since nothing is great to him. He does not bear a grudge, for it is not
a mark of greatness of soul to recall things against people, especially the wrongs they
have done you, but rather to overlook them. -- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 4,
ch. 3 [Rackham translation]
Whatever one thinks of the great-souled man, one thing is clear: there cannot be very
many of him in a community. I do not mean merely in the general sense in which there
are not likely to be many virtuous men, on the ground that virtue is difficult; what I mean
is that the virtues of the magnanimous man depend largely on his having an exceptional
social position. – B. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1948): 176.
Of the five partially altruistic types examined in this paper, the great-souled or
magnanimous man as depicted by Aristotle is by far the easiest to identify with the image and
reality of a person with a strong credible commitment to lead, with a Jack Welch or Steve Jobs
who is relentless in his commitment to being the boss. While the interesting issue with some of
the five types is showing how the type can prevail over an egoist, with the masterful leader the
tricky issues are in what sense the type is altruistic and whether the type should be considered
ethically acceptable.
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First, though, the analysis, which here is straightforward: The egalitarian leader gets to
lead because he or she values the equal payoffs from Lead-Lead as much or more than the payoff
from following when the other player leads. For the magnanimous or great-souled leader, the
bottom line is the same, but the psychology is different. The magnanimous leader also values his
or her payoff from both players leading as much or more than his or her payoff from following
the other's leadership. But that is because the magnanimous leader values the payoffs of others
when he or she is leading, not because of egalitarianism. The magnanimous leader is
paternalistic (or maternalistic), not egalitarian.
In the Boar Hunt game and other Leadership games, the different psychologies of the
egalitarian leader and the magnanimous leader wind up producing the same results. Like the
egalitarian leader, the magnanimous leader values his or her payoff from Lead-Lead more than
the egoist does. Faced with the magnanimous leader, the calculating egoist reasons, “Compared
to me, he feels fine about the boar getting away as long as he leads. In fact, he’s great as long as
he leads—he cares about me in his own way, even though he sometimes screams at me, and he
genuinely wants me to do my best in making the hunt work. But if he doesn’t lead, watch out—
sulking in his tent is the best I can expect then from the great hero. So there’s really no
question—I’m going to follow.”
The issue of whether the elevated state the great-souled man experiences from leading or
not is ethically tricky substantially for the reason identified by Russell: Only a few of us can be
great-souled men, and accordingly a judgment of the ethics of the type is inextricably intertwined
with controversial matters of egalitarianism, elitism, and whether a trait must be universalizable
to be morally worthy. What should be clear, though, is that the great-souled man can reasonably
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be described as altruistic in a selective sense: He (or she) feels strongly for the welfare of others
as long as he is on top. The masterful leader as described by Aristotle and in his or her modern
form is anything but a “suck up and punish down” manager. He is in fact the reverse: highly
considerate of the welfare—if not necessarily the immediate feelings or the individual
situations—of his or her followers, with the vital qualification that this genuine altruism is
contingent upon the magnanimous man being the leader.
V. THE FORGIVING ALTRUISTIC LEADER:
ADDING THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT TO THE ALTRUISTIC MIX
Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say
unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn
to him the other also.
Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that
hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. --Matthew
5: 38-39, 43-44 (King James Version)
Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. –Luke 23:34
(King James Version)
If it was a matter of hunting a deer, everyone well realized that he must remain faithfully
at his post; but if a hare happened to pass within the reach of one of them, we cannot
doubt that he would have gone off in pursuit of it without scruple and, having caught his
own prey, he would have cared very little about having caused his companions to lose
theirs. – Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (1755)
If your enemy hits you on the cheek, turning your other cheek, rewarding as it may well
be in giving one a satisfying sense of moral superiority, does not seem to have much potential as
a way of getting ahead in the world. The fact that a preacher of a gospel of turning the other
cheek and loving one's enemy became the central figure of the world's most widely followed
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religion, though in some sense a confirmation of the idea that self-sacrificial altruism can in the
very long haul redound to one's benefit, is also a profound challenge to that idea. Compared to
Plato and Aristotle, with their highly successful and prominent lives and their notion of a
virtuous character whose self-interest lies in being just and following the good, Jesus with his
obscure life, disastrous end, and notion of radical self-sacrifice is on the face of it a great rebuke
to the notion of advantageous altruism. Think not of the morrow...be not like unto the
Pharisees...it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter
the kingdom of God: All of these maxims attributed to Jesus as well as in those quoted at the
beginning of this section manifest a spirit that appears radically opposed to calculation and to a
morality of egoistic prudence and self-advancement.
And yet, the logic of relative success and resultant advantage in cultural reproduction is
not simple. It can be the case that the way to get ahead is to disdain getting ahead, and that the
way to win is to disdain winning and indeed to embrace outcomes in which one loses. In what
follows, I will trace out a claim that the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount can be reasonably
understood as advocating not only self-sacrifice that loses in practical if not moral terms, as he
indeed does, but also as advocating a form of forgiving leadership—and Jesus was among things
a leader--that turns out to be highly advantageous to the forgiver in his interactions with an
egoist. Further, I will suggest that this advantageous form of forgiving leadership has a signal
virtue compared to the egalitarian altruism of Plato and the masterful altruism of Aristotle.
Forgiving leadership, reasonably understood, solves Trust games that are not solved by the
Platonic or Aristotelian forms of altruism. Because that is so, forgiving leaders do well with
others of the same type as well as with egoists. Not everyone can be an egalitarian guardian or a
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great-souled man, but everyone in a given society can be successful together as forgivers playing
Trust games with other forgivers and with egoists.
The basic idea of advantageous forgiving leadership in Leadership games can be stated as
follows: You as the forgiving altruist have a deep positive feeling for the other's payoff, for
yourself, and for the situation when you as the forgiving leader lead and the other challenges
you—slaps you--by also trying to lead. Forgiving leadership thus understood amounts to
another way to value the Lead-Lead option highly. Faced with it, the egoist in the Boar Hunt
game reasons as follows: “Jesus is absolutely fine with my trying to be the big boss boar hunter
when he’s trying to lead and with my smacking him around. In fact—go figure!—he seems to
absolutely love it. So it just makes sense for me to assume that he’s going to lead, since he’s
good with the outcomes no matter what I do. Given that, I’ve got to follow him.”
Now, let’s turn from the analysis of how forgiving leadership helps the forgiving leader
prevail in Leadership games to the analysis of how forgiveness helps both players to achieve
their best results in Trust games. The key to ensuring a jointly optimal outcome in a Trust
game—recall that in Trust, unlike in Leadership, we are not talking about one player getting a
better payoff than the other but about both players getting their best payoffs—is that at least one
of the players values the Trust-Distrust outcome over the Distrust-Distrust option. A player who
forgives the other’s distrust will motivate an egoist who does not to trust, and for both to achieve
their best outcomes.
The basic idea of advantageous forgiveness in Trust games, in which the highest payoff
for both players comes from Trust-Trust, is succinctly expressed in the “Father, forgive them; for
they know not what they do" concept. If one can rise above anger at people who respond to
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one’s own trust of them with distrust that hurts you in favor of a serene and happy state that feels
warmly for them as people in error who “know not what they do” rather than as evildoers, one
values the Trust-Distrust outcome more than the egoist can.
As usual, a story helps. It is easy to tell a Hunt story in Trust terms rather than the
Leadership terms used in the earlier sections; in fact, the most famous of all Trust stories is the
Stag Hunt, drawn from the passage from Rousseau cited at the beginning of this section. In the
Stag Hunt, you and the other do best if you can collaborate by hunting stag, the big game. But
you are tempted to abandon that higher valued pursuit and to pursue the lower-valued hare. If
you were sure that the other would resist that temptation and pursue the stag no matter what, you
would, too. But you’re not sure, and so you wonder whether you should go for the hare, given
that if he does that and you futilely stick to hunting for stag alone, you will wind up a big loser.
What changes the Stag Hunt for the better is a belief that the other player is committed to
trust regardless of what you do. The egoist hunting with Jesus reasons as follows: “He’s good
with the outcome in which I run away and hunt hare and he gets skunked—he really feels for me
for making a mistake and feels great about the whole situation. That’s not me at all—I can’t
stand it when I put myself out there and the other guy doesn’t and I feel like a sucker. But the
thing is, I can rely on Jesus in a way I can’t rely on myself or someone like me. He may be
crazy, but he’s going to hunt for that stag regardless. And knowing that, I will, too.”
VII. THE SYMPATHETIC LEADER:
ADDING ADAM SMITH TO THE ALTRUISTIC MIX
Howsoever selfish man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in nature,
which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him,
though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. –Smith, The Theory of
Moral Sentiments (1759)
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Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was
suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in
Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon
receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express
very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people...[a]nd when all this
fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly
expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion,
with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened. The most
frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If
he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he
never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred
millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an
object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent,
therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to
sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen
them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest
depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of
entertaining it. But what makes this difference? When our passive feelings are almost
always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so
generous and so noble?... –Id.
Adam Smith is the one figure in the Plato-Aristotle-Jesus-Smith-Gilligan pantheon of this
paper whose own worldview, with its striking blend of clear-eyed scientific analysis and
optimistic belief in a largely though by no means entirely benevolent human nature wellendowed with sympathetic social passions that serve the sympathizer as well as others, 6 could be
taken as a charter for the analysis of advantageous selective altruism undertaken here. At the
end, I will return to that point in considering the ethics of the game-theoretic approach to
altruism. In this section, the aim will be showing how Smithian sympathy can simultaneously
help the sympathizer to prevail over the egoist in Leadership games and to support optimal
Trust-Trust outcomes in Trust games through having a character that is in some ways akin to, but
6
That science-optimism blend is well evidenced in the very long paragraph that is only partially
quoted above, and that concludes with a peroration to providence that one may regard as
persiflage Smith needed to express to his students and readers but did not truly believe in or as
another component of Smithian sympathy and the Smithian worldview.
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is far more openly practical and realistic than, the forgiving altruistic character type described in
the previous section.
First, a basic overall take on how the sympathetic Smithian character is related to but
different from the forgiving character in its state of mind in Leadership and Trust games: Instead
of truly forgiving another for messing up, as the Jesus character type does, one can experience a
less elevated but likely more readily attainable Smithian combination of fellow feeling with the
presumed regret of the other for making a mistake that harms both players, along with a moral
superiority glow for having not messed up oneself. The results of sympathy for the other who
makes a mistake combined with a sense of superiority to the other turn out to be the same as
those of forgiveness for the other who makes a mistake, as we shall now see.
In the Stag Hunt, the quintessential Trust game, the sympathetic Smithian player feels for
the other who makes a mistake by gadding off to hunt hare and thus causes both players to lose
their best payoffs for lower payoffs. Because of that feeling of sympathy for and superiority to
the player who makes a mistake, trust for the sympathetic altruist is a dominant strategy in the
hunt. Knowing that, a calculating egoistic player will also trust, reasoning: “That guy feels okay
if I scoot in a way that I don’t. I’m not sure I’m crazy about his sympathy for me—it seems
more than a little patronizing. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that unlike me, he’s
going to feel better by trusting me and hunting stag, regardless of whether I do or not. Given
that, the only sensible thing for me to do is trust, too, and stick with him in going for the stag.”
The result--a useful commitment to trust that engenders trust in the other--is the same for
the sympathetic player as it is for the forgiving player, but the psychological mechanism is quite
different. The "Jesus" player experiences an exalted "forgive them Father" glow when the other
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messes up that makes her fine with that outcome. The "Smith" player experiences a more
prosaic blend of sympathy and superiority. The bottom line, though, is the same. The Smithian
is fine with the outcome in which he or she trusts and the other player does not, just as the Jesus
player is. Accordingly, the egoist who knows the type he is playing with trusts in a game with
the sympathetic Smithian, just as he does in a game with the forgiving player.
In Leadership games, the Smithian sympathizer’s practical nature allows some reasonable
accommodations between people that are difficult not only for the elitist Greek egalitarian and
great-souled leaders, but also for the impractical forgiving leader. In the Leadership version of
the Hunt game, the sympathetic and practical Smithian player can reasonably be understood as
feeling positively for the other who deviates from the lead and follow combination that is the
best for the two together and that also gives the sympathizer his or her highest payoff. As a
result of sympathy, the sympathizer's payoff for Lead-Lead is greater than his or her payoff for
following when the other leads. That means that leading is dominant for the sympathizer when
the combination of the sympathizer leading and the other player following is the best overall for
both players. Knowing that, the other player will follow the sympathizer when doing so is the
highest joint value choice: “He’s going to lead for sure as long as he genuinely thinks the best
thing overall is for him to lead and me to follow. I’m not so pure as all that, but no problem—
whenever it looks like that’s the case, or it looks like he thinks it is the case, I’ll follow.”
Once again, although there are parallel outcomes for the Smithian player and for the
Jesus-like player, but with a quite different psychological mechanism. For "Jesus," a (partial)
indifference to the things of the material world supports valuing the outcome when the other
player messes up by failing to follow. For the practical "Smith," on the other hand, what makes
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that outcome fine is the combination of fellow feeling for the presumed regret of the other and a
warm feeling of being better than the other, a feeling that the practical "Smith" is not likely to be
internally conflicted about to the same degree that the idealistic "Jesus" is.
Though the empirical issues lie beyond the scope of this paper, I would suggest that
"Smith" is likely a much more common type in wealthy modern societies with high levels of day
to day, routine trust among strangers than "Jesus" is. The idealistic and universalizing bent of
"Jesus" makes the type's altruism hard to cabin and confine to advantageous forms. Why
exactly, an introspective and self-doubting "Jesus" type may wonder, should he be so made that
he only has a powerful feeling of forgiveness in Leadership and Trust games when doing so is
helpful or neutral to him? Why not have it in Prisoner's Dilemma situations in which altruism is
harmful to him? By contrast, the practical Smithian type can look at himself and pronounce his
or her mixed blend of egoism, altruism, and competitiveness good, much as the real Smith does
in his analysis in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
The sympathetic Smithian character type can come in different versions. A nicer type of
Smithian sympathizer than the basic type as defined here can feel a warm glow of sympathy in
Leadership games when following as well as when leading. Specifically, he or she feels
sympathy when the other messes up by following when he or she should lead because doing so
produces the highest joint value outcome. That nicer type of Smithian sympathizer, unlike the
basic type, winds up being committed to playing the highest joint value outcome in leadership
games in general, which may mean a commitment on his or her part to following as well as to
leading. The nice sympathizer does not beat the egoist in Leadership games, though his
commitment to lead when doing so is highest joint value also means he does not lose to the
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egoist. Combined with the fact that the highly sympathetic type as defined here does not beat the
egoist in assurance games, the result is that the nicer variant on sympathy does not prevail over
egoism overall. But it also does not lose, and hence constitutes an evolutionarily stable strategy
(Maynard Smith & Price, 1973) that can endure over time in competition with the egoist.
On the other side of the spectrum from the nice sympathizer is the tough sympathizer,
who might also be described as a composite of Smith and Aristotle. That player feels the
Smithian glow of sympathy any time he is leading, regardless of whether his leadership produces
a better outcome than the other player’ does, and never feels it when he is following. That makes
him or her an elite type, like the two Greek types, 7 and not a candidate for being universalized
the way the basic and nice Smithian types are. One may reasonably imagine that this un-nice
Smith-Aristotle type that gets both to lead and to inspire trust flourishes in organizations
alongside, and perhaps in advance of, the basic and nice types of Smithian sympathizer.
VII. THE ALTRUISTIC SERVANT-LEADER:
PREVAILING BY SERVING THE OTHER
So after he had washed their feet, and had taken his garments, and was set down again, he
said unto them, Know ye what I have done to you?
Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am.
If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one
another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.
–John 13:12-15 (King James Version)
7
And also like the version of the Jesus type that feels the exalted glow of forgiving the slaps of
the others all the time he leads, and only when he leads.
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As we have listened for centuries to the voices of men and the theories of development
that their experience informs, so we have come more recently to notice not only the
silence of women but the difficulty in hearing what they say when they speak. Yet in the
different voice of women lies the truth of an ethic of care, the tie between relationship
and responsibility, and the origins of aggression in the failure of connection. –Gilligan,
1982: 174.
The game-theoretic logic for the first four types of selectively altruistic character is a
straightforward and (I trust) relatively transparent application of Schelling’s half-century old
concept of credible commitment. Partial altruism allows the egalitarian, masterful, forgiving,
and sympathetic leaders to gain an edge in Leadership games by valuing Lead-Lead outcomes
highly, and thus committing to lead. Similarly, in Trust games, forgiving and sympathetic
leaders engender trust and the best outcomes for both themselves and for egoists by valuing
Trust-Distrust outcomes highly, and thus committing to trust.
By contrast, for the fifth and final type of selectively altruist character, the servant leader,
the advantage obtained by the servant leader over the egoist rests not on Schelling’s commonsense if also inspired commitment concept but on the enduringly paradoxical, even spooky, logic
of mixed Nash equilibrium (1950). Although one may well wonder and worry about the
underlying logic of mixed Nash—is it the end an optimization concept? A reduction of search
costs concept? A Schelling-style focal point concept?—something else?—and its applicability to
reality, in this paper all such complexities will be eschewed in favor of assuming the concept
basically works in the real world (Camerer, 2003) as well as in John Nash’s beautiful mind, and
simply applying the concept; the appendices have a bit of detail, sans philosophical reflection.
Given that the logic of mixed Nash unlike that of credible commitment is opaque, this section is
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accordingly more counterintuitive and opaque than the previous ones, especially because the
servant leader type, like the forgiving type, is apparently destined to be a doormat, not a leader.
So, here goes: While all the other selectively altruistic types get their way by valuing
Lead-Lead highly, whether dogmatically as in the case of the great-souled man or in a more
nuanced, flexible way as with the Smithian sympathizer, the servant leader employs a very
different approach. In Leadership games, she or he values Follow-Lead highly. That is, the
servant leader who follows takes in the other’s happiness and satisfaction at leading either
directly, through simply adding the other’s payoff to her own, or in a more plausible if less
precise mechanism of feeling her own powerful glow of happiness as she washes the feet of the
other.
Now, let’s relate the servant leader’s high valuation of Follow-Lead to the Boar Hunt
game that is our prototypical Leadership story. The servant leader is exceptionally happy when
she follows and the other leads. But—and this point is crucial—this does not give her a
commitment to follow, or in fact make her any more likely to follow in a strategic interaction
than the egoist is. One needs to bear in mind that for the egoist following is a best response to
the other player leading the hunt for boar; the servant leader differs only in degree from the
egoist in that regard. Also crucially, the servant leader does not revel in following when the
other player follows and a Follow-Follow breakdown in the hunt ensues; she is unhappy in that
case, just as the egoist is. The result is that servant leader, like the egoist, has no dominant
strategy in the Boar Hunt. 8
8
Unlike the other selective altruists,
who to varying degrees tilt toward a fixed commitment to
lead.
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So why does the servant leader come out ahead of the egoist in the Boar Hunt? In what
follows, I’ll convert mixed Nash equilibrium into prose; the reader is advised that this will *not*
make the Nash reasoning transparent in the way it does for the Schelling commitment examples.
Faced with another egoist, the ultra-calculating Nashian egoist in the Boar Hunt reasons: “If I
lead, she gets a pretty good payoff, say 3, if she follows and a worse one, say 2 if she leads too
and we clash. The difference in her payoffs is quite a lot larger if I follow instead. That is, she
gets a very good payoff, say 4, if she leads and a very bad one, say 1, if she follows also and no
one takes responsibility. Now, if I want to ensure that she gets the same payoff no matter what
she does, I should lead most of the time. In fact, I should lead ¾ of the time, which corresponds
to the 3:1 ratio between the difference in her responses to my following (4 – 1) compared to my
leading (3 – 2).”
Now, let’s turn to the ultra-calculating Nashian egoist’s reasoning when he is faced not
with an egoist but with a servant leader in the Boar Hunt: “If I lead, she gets a great payoff, say
7, if she follows, because she’s got this crazy thing of loving to see good ole me be the great boar
hunting leader. Otherwise, it’s just the same as if I were playing with a good ole egoist like moi.
She gets 2 if I lead and she leads too and we clash. If I follow, she gets a very good payoff, say
4, if she leads and a very bad one, say 1, if she follows too and the damn boar gets away. Now,
let me do the math. To ensure she gets the same payoff no matter what she does, I should follow
most of the time. In fact, I should follow 5/8 of the time. That corresponds to the 5: 3 ratio
between the difference in her responses to my leading (7 – 2) compared to my following (4 – 1).”
Meanwhile, the servant leader playing with an egoist leads in Boar Hunt ¾ of the time,
following the Nashian logic that prevails when the other is an egoist. With the egoist following
5/8 of the time, the servant leader winds up doing considerably better in terms of an egoistic
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payoff than the egoist does; as detailed in the Appendix, she gets a payoff of 2.875, compared to
the 2.5 payoff for the egoist.
The servant leader’s advantage is subtle, compared to the obvious advantage the other
types of selective altruist gain by their commitments to lead. But it is real—as real as the realworld-logic of mixed Nash, which has by and large (though the story is a complex one) been
confirmed experimentally numerous times (Camerer, 2003)--and it has the very real practical
advantage of being on the face of it as or more ethically worthy than any of the other types of
selective altruism.
As a matter of Nashian game-theoretic logic, servant leadership works for the servant
leader. One might say that it’s like magic, including more than a tincture of the dark magic that
marked the first half of the twentieth century from its beginning with Einstein’s e = mc2 to its
conclusion in 1950, the annus mirabilis in which Nash published his greatest concepts.
VIII. A TRUST AND LEADERSHIP WORLDVIEW
COMPARED TO A PRISONER’S DILEMMA WORLDVIEW
It is interesting that this problem [of surprise attack], though it arises most dramatically in
situations that would usually be characterized as conflict, like that between the Russians
and us or between the burglar and me, is logically equivalent to the problem of two or
more partners who lack confidence in each other. –Schelling, 1960: 207.
The first part of our behavior hypothesis is that, if the two players both perceive that a
joint policy of no-attack is the best of all possible outcomes for both of them, they will
recognize this solution and elect to abstain…The second part of the hypothesis is that
there is some probability…that the player will in fact attack when he elects (or should
elect) a strategy of no-attack…Just what this parameter represents we shall leave open: it
may be taken to be the probability that the player is irrational, or the probability that the
payoff matrix is misconceived and he “really” prefers unilateral surprise attack, or the
probability that somebody will make a mistake and inadvertently send off the attacking
force. –Id: 210-211
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To make the claims of the preceding sections about the value of selective altruism of
interest, all one needs to do is believe that Leadership games and Trust games—whether in their
formal game-theoretic version or in the looser, applied Boar Hunt and Stag Hunt versions in
which they are told in the text--are important in at least some significant real-world situations.
If Leadership and Trust situations are much less common and important in practice than Prisoner
Dilemma situations (in which selective altruism is of no use in one-shot games), the former
situations are arguably still of interest; if they are as important in practice as Dilemma situations,
all the more so; and finally, if Leadership and Trust situations are substantially more pervasive
and important in practice than Dilemma situations, then assertions about the value of selective
altruism in Leadership and Trust scenarios are decidedly of interest.
The “less important/equally important/more important” issue as to different games is
laden with subjectivity, and is not readily subject to clear empirical or conceptual resolution.
What is much clearer than the relative importance of the different types of games is the balance
of academic and practitioner attention devoted to them. From the 1950s to the present, there has
been a vast amount of academic and practitioner work that studies and applies the Prisoner’s
Dilemma, along with its social dilemma, public goods, and Tragedy of the Commons variants.
Leadership games and Trust games have generated their own substantial empirical and
conceptual literature (Schelling, 1960; Cooper, 1998; Skyrms, 2004), along with their own
advocates; for example, Skyrms (2004) champions the Stag Hunt over the Prisoner’s Dilemma as
the most important two-person game. Still, the Dilemma together with its multi-person spinoffs
is clearly the emblematic game of the decades since Nash and Schelling came up with the
fundamental mathematical and applied concepts of two-person games.
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In additional to a very large body of analytical and empirical work, the Dilemma-based
approach to understanding how altruism can endure and prosper has spawned a powerful
overarching “strong reciprocity” framework for explaining human nature (Bowles and Gintis
2011). Under that framework, people are simultaneously altruistic and punitive; vengefulness
selectively exercised against the selfish is the necessary stick that allows communities of altruists
to flourish over the long haul.
Given the power of what may be termed a Prisoner’s Dilemma worldview that
incorporates a great and growing volume of analytical and empirical work along with a powerful
narrative about human nature, it is hardly surprising that in his recent and excellent general
interest book on trends over time in violence, Steven Pinker (2011) illustrates the basic problem
of violence with a matrix that he calls “The Pacifist’s Dilemma” (id: 679) and that has Prisoner’s
Dilemma payoffs, with the best outcome for a person who gets away with violence against a
peaceful other, the second best for mutual peace, the third best for mutual hostility, and the worst
for a person who is the undefended victim of an attack by the other.
Let’s relate Pinker’s account of violence to Schelling’s account of surprise attack, as
encapsulated in the quotes at the beginning of this section. I believe that Schelling’s account,
which models attack as a non-dominant option in a Trust game, makes more sense in the real
world most of the time than Pinker’s modeling of attack as a dominant strategy in a Dilemma.
In Schelling’s Trust game modeling of surprise attack, violence may arise because both
sides fear that the other may attack; it is fear-based or Hobbesian rather than predatory. That
perspective accords with what a great majority of modern humans (and I suspect a majority of
ancient and current hunter-gatherers as well (Henrich, et al, 2004)) would describe as their
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payoffs. Successfully raiding a neighboring band to kill the men and steal the sheep and the
women, or bombing the Russians into smithereens and taking their country over, is not a higher
payoff outcome than living in peace. By contrast, the Dilemma weighing of violent victory that
Pinker’s basic matrix 9 adopts as the most preferred outcome defies what people would claim
about themselves--which I believe is true most though not all of the time for the vast majority of
humans.
Or, to put it in terms of the Republic and one possible answer to Glaucon's persistent
questioning of Socrates: For most of us most of the time, the best outcome is not to do injustice
to another successfully, but to live justly with another who lives justly with us. The psychopath's
perspective that a violence game based on the Dilemma implicitly adopts is one very important
reality of human nature in the past and the present. But the ordinary person's perspective that
most of the time deeply fears the worst outcome of being killed and robbed and that does not
value killing and robbing the other over peace is a much more common and also highly
important feature of human nature.
I leave for another day and a venue with more available space the extension of the
arguments just made for Trust as a generally better representation than the Dilemma of the
negative-sum Violence game to a Leadership framework for understanding violence, and also to
the relative merits of the Dilemma, Trust, and Leadership frameworks in the relation to positivesum games such as hunt games. I would simply note that the time has perhaps come for a
change in emphasis in conceptual and applied game theoretic work on altruism away from a
9
As opposed to his “Gentle Commerce” matrix (id.: 682), which converts Violence into Trust.
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strong predominance for the Dilemma framework to a new balance in which the Leadership and
Trust frameworks are far more salient than they have been.
VIII. DOES ALTRUISM STILL SHINE IF IT IS ADVANTAGEOUS?
The question of whether the advantageous altruism with which this paper is concerned is
morally valuable or not cannot be elided, whether or not it can be answered. From a practicallyoriented ethical perspective that can be identified with Smith (1759) and Hume (1740), I take it
that the answer to the question of whether advantageous altruism is morally worthy is yes, at
least as a general proposition. Morality only makes sense if in some broad sense it aligns with
interest, and historical growth in respect for others, to the extent it has indeed occurred, as Pinker
(2011) suggests, is a function of respect, trust, and benevolence being in people's interest now in
a way that they once were not. From a idealistic perspective that can be identified with Kant
(1785) and Jesus, though, the answer seems to be no. The beauty, truth, and supreme goodness
of morality inheres in its challenge to mere common sense, complacency, and calculation as well
as to outright evil. Only if one is as a little child, or as a god-like follower of duty who kills
inclination and evil even to point of killing himself can one truly reside at the right hand of the
father in the Kingdom of Heaven or the kingdom of ends.
The differences between the Smith/Hume and the Jesus/Kant perspectives are intensely
felt by partisans on both sides. Not only is there the contempt of the idealist for the seeker of
advantage; there is also the contempt of the practical man for an idealism that the practical man
sees as a cover for the power-seeking that the practical person suspects is the actual meaning or
"cash value", to borrow William James's phrase, of the Kantian moralist's idealism.
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My personal sympathies in the ideological opposition between the practical person and
the idealist lie mostly on the former side. I believe that future progress not only in practical
standards of living and everyday morality but also in scaling the pinnacles of theoretical ethics is
much more likely to come from developments on the Smithian side than the Kantian side of
modern ethics, and I have a similar belief about the generally impressive if highly zig-zag
progress our species has achieved over the past several hundred years (Pinker, 2011).
At the same time, I as one who is on the Smithian side both as a matter of methodology
and as a matter of sympathy have an apologia to make to Kantian friends and opponents who
may well be offended by the calculating spirit of this paper: You are right, in a very important
sense. Absent a clear disclaimer, you are warranted in believing that the Smithian argument of
this paper is one little piece in a bigger claim that the truth, goodness, and beauty of morality lies
on the Smithian side. Accordingly, for what it is worth, I disclaim any such belief. I affirm on
the contrary a belief that the bulk of the truth, goodness, and beauty of morality lies on the
Kantian side, not on my own Smithian side. Lest this be taken as a much stronger renunciation
than it is actually is, I also hasten to affirm a belief that morality is only piece of life, and not
necessarily the most important piece at that.
To put the point another way: I agree with and affirm Joshua Greene’s claim that
Kantianism gets the human moral gut right in a way that utilitarianism does not (Greene, 2007).
I also empathize with what I take to be Greene's bent toward utilitarianism, which I share. But-although I may be reading him wrong--I do not agree with what seems to me his implicit Kantian
argument that utilitarianism is nobler for philosophers (though not for merchants) because it rises
above our guts just as Kant counseled, while Kant himself does not. I'm with Smith, or where I
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take Smith to be, all the way down. Human nature is okay, and even pretty good. To the extent
it's not, let's imagine that it's a bit better than it is and use our moral imagination as a basis for
our getting along a bit better with each other. Being pretty decent along with other people who
are pretty decent is pretty good indeed. And yet: A moral type who is truly impelled by duty,
love, self-sacrifice, justice, etc. is indeed a finer moral type than me and thee and the selective
altruists of this paper. Jesus and Kant not only rule the moral world; they deserve to.
Appendix A—The Dilemma, Leadership, and Trust matrices and their Nash solution concepts
The Prisoner’s Dilemma (B’s payoffs in upper L, A’s in lower R). In the PD, Defect-Defect is
the only Nash equilibrium because defection is the best response to either cooperation (4 vs. 3)
or defection (2 vs. 1). That is, defection is a dominant strategy.
Leadership—The Boar Hunt (or the Battle of the Sexes; different stories, same payoffs; B’s
payoffs are before As). There is no dominant strategy. Follow-Lead and Lead-Follow are both
Nash equilibria because Lead is the best response to Follow and Follow is the best response to
Lead. Playing Lead ¾ and Follow ¼ of the time is also a Nash equilibrium (“mixed Nash”)
because neither player has an incentive to deviate given that randomization by the other.
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A
Lead
A
Follow
B
Follow
3,4
1,1
B
Lead
2,2
4,3
Trust—The Stag Hunt (B’s payoffs are before As). There is no dominant strategy. Stag-Stag
and Hare-Hare are both Nash equilibria because Stag is the best response to Stag and Hare is the
best response to Hare. Playing Stag ½ and Hare ½ of the time is also a Nash equilibrium
(“mixed Nash”) because neither player has an incentive to deviate given that randomization by
the other.
A-Stag
A-Hare
B-Stag
4, 4
1, 3
B-Hare
3, 1
2, 2
Appendix B—The Boar Hunt Matrix for the Servant Leader and the Egoist (Egoist’s
payoffs first, Servant-Leader’s second. The analysis is the same as for the Egoist-Egoist Boar
Hunt shown above, except that for Egoist, the mixed Nash equilibrium strategy that guarantees
Sevant-Leader has no incentive to deviate is playing Lead 3/8 and Follow 5/8 of the time. With
that strategy combined with Servant-Leader’s mixed Nash equilibrium strategy of Lead ¾ and
Follow ¼, Egoist receives (15/32 x 3) + (5/32 x 1) + (9/32 x 2) + (3/32 x 4) = 2.5 and ServantLeader receives payoffs to herself (not including her altruistic payoff of 3 for Follow-Lead) of
(15/32 x 4) + (5/32 x 1) + (9/32 x 2) + (3/32 x 3) = 2.875.
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S-L
Lead
S-L
Follow
E
Follow
3,4
1,1
E
Lead
2,2
4,7
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