Volume 31, Number 11 · June 28, 1984
Winner Take Less
By Ian Hacking
The Evolution of Cooperation
by Robert Axelrod
Basic Books, 241 pp., $17.95
It is so hard to make important decisions that we have a great urge to reduce them to rules. Every moral teacher or spiritual adviser gives injunctions about how to live wisely and well. But life is so complicated and full of uncertainty that rules seldom tell us quite what to do. Even the more analytically minded philosophers leave us in quandaries. Utilitarians start with Jeremy Bentham's maxim, that we should strive for the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. How do we achieve that? Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules of conduct that we would want everybody to follow. Few find this generalization of the golden rule a great help. It may seem that there is one kind of person or group that has no problem: the entirely selfish. Utilitarians find selfish people more interesting than one might expect, for it has been argued that the way to 'maximize everyone's utility' is to have a free market in which everyone acts in his own interests.
Review, 4440 words
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