Excessive Morality

It occurred to me that there was a very interesting connection between two posts I wrote last week. The first post was the Problem With Game Theory and the second was my somewhat controversial post The Curse of Moses. In the first post, I argued that non-cooperative game theory ignores ethics which I defined as a rule which if violate would lead to self-punishment. We have a conscience and we would feel bad if we knew that we hurt others. In the second post, I argued that too many rules spoil the religion, especially if they are very old obsolete rule that no one in the present generation had any role in creating. My idea was that maybe the problem of “too many old rules” is essentially a problem of useless self-punishment. That morality (which is just the ethics of a particular religion) could be a bad thing if it becomes excessive.

Let me clarify this idea with some examples. The first example would be typical prisoner's dilemma type game. Suppose you are dropped into world where you play lots of games with strangers that you will never meet again. The game is this: if you both cooperate, you both get $1000, but if you defect, you get an extra $100 but the other player gets $1000 less. So these are the possible outcomes:

1. (c,c): $1000; $1000
2. (d,c): $1100; $0
3. (c,d): $0; $1100
4. (d,d): $100; $100

Now looking at these outcomes, it is clear that it would be a nasty thing to play “defect” on the other guy. But, hey, you’re going to get an extra $100 if you play “defect” instead of “cooperate” regardless of what the other guy does. You don’t know him, and you don’t know what he is going to do. It might be tempting.

Now here is where morality comes in handy. Suppose the two players are devoutly religious in the same religion (both Muslim, both Catholics, both something). No way will they cheat a fellow believer. It wouldn’t be worth $100 to risk Hell and the self-torment that would come from knowing that you let down your fellow believer. Religion has it uses: you both get $1000.

This is why people are so bigoted against unbelievers: they’re bad people who might play "defect" in the cooperate-defect game. I can trust my fellow believer but not the infidel. In general, most of us would not be very comfortable in a day at “Non-Cooperative Game Theory Land” if we had to spend it with people who really played these games non-cooperatively.

However, morality doesn’t necessary lead to good outcomes. Morality could just as easily lead to bad outcomes. Let us just change the payoffs to the cooperate-defect game above:

1. (c,c): $100; $100
2. (d,c): $1100; $0
3. (c,d): $0; $1100
4. (d,d): $1000; $1000

In this case, playing “defect” hurts the other guy, but not too much. Both of you would be better off playing “defect”. But moralists would never be comfortable with the idea that hurting others might be acceptable if it passes some sort of cost-benefit test. So two devout believers would end up playing “cooperate,cooperate” and wind up with only $100 each instead of $1000 each. Morality really failed them here.

Let me give a real world example: beer. Society is much better off with beer than without it. I agree with Benjamin Franklin who said, “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” But while drinking beer make the drinker happy; some drinkers (if they overindulge) might do stupid things that hurt others. So many religions ban all alcohol (Islam does). Clearly the Muslims are not happy people, but they are following the morals of their religion.

I should stress that the problem of “too much morality” is really not a problem of any one religion. Perhaps every religion, if practiced in the way that the zealots would approve, would lead to a problem with excessive morality, and too little freedom and tolerance. It would seem that Islam, as practice by the horrible Taliban or the Iranian regime or the Saudi regime, or many other Islamic fundamentalist state, would be the best recent examples of “excessive morality”. But the communist societies (communism qualifies as an atheistic religion in my opinion) may have yielded similar examples. It is really an issue of totalitarianism vs. freedom. All beliefs can degenerate into totalitarianism if the zealots gain power.

My hope is that people will sense that the zealots of the world are essentially immoral. Then the zealots will be ignored, and people will be free to practice their religions in a more commonsense way.

And if you are of age, by all means, drink beer (if you like it).