Carl Sagan's, "The Rules of the Game"

His thirtieth and final book is titled, Billions & Billions. It is subtitled, “Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium”. It is a collection of nineteen essays that illuminate his strongly held belief that, We have the ability to change the world and our lives for the better.

I've selected the sixteenth essay/chapter, "The Rules of the Game", not because it is representative of the entire volume, but because it addresses a question for which there seems to be no one correct answer. There are several almost correct answers, but what about a general, unified solution to the problem of ethical conduct?

As do all the chapters, this one begins with a poignant quote from the first century BCE. One might think that over the span of twenty-plus centuries, humankind would have developed the wisdom to determine what is the best way to conduct one's self... for the benefit of self and everyone else. You might have thought that. I know I have. Why is this such a conundrum?

Charles M. Fish, Sr. 23 July 2004

Everything morally right derives from one of four sources:
It concerns either full perception or intelligent development of what is true;
or the preservation of organized society, where every man is rendered his due and all obligations are faithfully discharged;
or the greatness and strength of a noble, invincible spirit;
or order and moderation in everything said and done, whereby is temperance and self-control.
CICERO,
De Officiis, I, 5 (45-44 B.C.E)

     I remember the end of a long ago perfect day in 1939... a day that powerfully influenced my thinking, a day when my parents introduced me to the wonders of the New York World's Fair. It was late, well past my bedtime. Safely perched on my father's shoulders, holding onto his ears, my mother reassuringly at my side, I turned to see the great Trylon and Perisphere, the architectural icons of the fair, illuminated in shimmering blue pastels. We were abandoning the future, the "World of Tomorrow,", for the BMT subway train. As we paused to rearrange our possessions, my father got to talking with a small, tired man carrying a tray around his neck. He was selling pencils. My father reached into the crumpled brown paper bag that held the remains of our lunches, withdrew an apple, and handed it to the pencil man. I let out a loud wail. I disliked apples then, and had refused this one both at lunch and at dinner. But I had, nevertheless, a proprietary interest in it. It was my apple, and my father had just given it away to a funny-looking stranger... who, to compound my anguish, was now glaring unsympathetically in my direction.
     Although my father was a person of nearly limitless patience and tenderness, I could see he was disappointed in me. He swept me up and hugged me tight to him.
     "He's a poor stiff, out of work," he said to me, too quietly for the man to hear. "He hasn't eaten all day. We have enough. We can give him an apple."
     I reconsidered, stifled my sobs, took another wistful glance at the World of Tomorrow, and gratefully fell asleep in his arms.

Moral codes that seek to regulate human behavior have been with us not only since the dawn of civilization but also among our precivilized, and highly social, hunter-gatherer ancestors. And even earlier. Different societies have different codes. Many cultures say one thing and do another. In a few fortunate societies, an inspired lawgiver lays down a set of rules to live by (and more often than not claims to have been instructed by a god... without which few would follow the prescriptions). For example, the codes of Ashoka (India), Hammurabi (Babylon), Lycurgus (Sparta), and Solon (Athens), which once held sway over mighty civilizations, are today largely defunct. Perhaps experience from one epoch or culture is not wholly applicable to another.
     Surprisingly, there are today efforts... tentative but emerging... to approach the matter scientifically; i.e. experimentally.
     In our everyday lives as in the momentous relations of nations, we must decide: What does it mean to do the right thing? Should we help a needy stranger? How do we deal with an enemy? Should we ever take advantage of someone who treats us kindly? If hurt by a friend, or helped by an enemy, should we reciprocate in kind; or does the totality of past behavior outweigh any recent departures from the norm?
     Examples: Your sister-in-law ignores your snub and invites you over for Christmas dinner; should you accept? Shattering a four-year-long worldwide voluntary moratorium, China resumes nuclear weapons testing; should we? How much should we give to charity?

Serbian soldiers systematically rape Bosnian women; should Bosnian soldiers systematically rape Serbian women? After centuries of oppression, the Nationalist Party leader F. W. de Klerk makes overtures to the African National Congress; should Nelson Mandela and the ANC have reciprocated? A coworker makes you look bad in front of the boss; should you try to get even? Should we cheat on our income tax returns? If we can get away with it? If an oil company supports a symphony orchestra or sponsors a refined TV drama, ought we to ignore its pollution of the environment? Should we be kind to aged relatives, even if they drive us nuts? Should you cheat at cards? Or on a larger scale? Should we kill killers?

In making such decisions, we're concerned not only with doing right but also with what works... what makes us and the rest of society happier and more secure. There's a tension between what we call ethical and what we call pragmatic. If, even in the long run, ethical behavior were self-defeating, eventually we would not call it ethical, but foolish. (We might even claim to respect it in principle, but ignore it in practice.) Bearing in mind the variety and complexity of human behavior, are there any simple rules... whether we call them ethical or pragmatic... that actually work?

How do we decide what to do? Our responses are partly determined by our perceived self-interest. We reciprocate in kind or act contrary because we hope it will accomplish what we want. Nations assemble or blow up nuclear weapons so other countries won't trifle with them. We return good for evil because we know that we can thereby sometimes touch people's sense of justice, or shame them into being nice. But sometimes we're not motivated selfishly. Some people seem just naturally kind. We may accept aggravation from aged parents or from children, because we love them and want them to be happy, even if it's at some cost to us. Sometimes we're tough with our children and cause them a little unhappiness, because we want to mold their characters and believe that the long-term results will bring them more happiness than the short-term pain.

Cases are different. Peoples and nations are different. Knowing how to negotiate this labyrinth is part of wisdom. But bearing in mind the variety and complexity of human behavior, are there some simple rules, whether we call them ethical or pragmatic, that actually work?

Or maybe we should avoid trying to think it through and just do what feels right. But even then how do we determine what "feels right"?

The most admired standard of behavior, in the West at least, is the Golden Rule, attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. Everyone knows its formulation in the first-century Gospel of St. Matthew: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Almost no one follows it. When the Chinese philosopher Kung-Tzi (known as Confucius in the West) was asked in the fifth century BC his opinion of the Golden Rule (by then already well-known), of repaying evil with kindness, he replied, "Then with what will you repay kindness?" Shall the poor woman who envies her neighbor's wealth give what little she has to the rich? Shall the masochist inflict pain on his neighbor? The Golden Rule takes no account of human differences. Are we really capable, after our cheek has been slapped, of turning the other cheek so it too can be slapped? With a heartless adversary, isn't this just a guarantee of more suffering?

The Silver Rule is different: Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you. It also can be found worldwide, including, a generation before Jesus, in the writings of Rabbi Hillel. The most inspiring twentieth-century exemplars of the Silver Rule were Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. They counseled oppressed peoples not to repay violence with violence, but not to be compliant and obedient either. Nonviolent civil disobedience was what they advocated... putting your body on the line; showing, by your willingness to be punished in defying an unjust law, the justice of your cause. They aimed at melting the hearts of their oppressors (and those who had not yet made up their minds).

King paid tribute to Gandhi as the first person in history to convert the Golden or Silver Rules into an effective instrument of social change. And Gandhi made it clear where his approach came from: "I learnt the lesson on nonviolence from my wife, when I tried to bend her to my will. Her determined resistance to my will on the one hand, and her quiet submission to the suffering my stupidity involved on the other, ultimately made me ashamed of myself and cured me of my stupidity in thinking that I was born to rule over her."

Nonviolent civil disobedience has worked notable political change in this (the 20th) century... in prying India loose from British rule and stimulating the end of classic colonialism worldwide, and in providing some civil rights for African-Americans... although the threat of violence by others, however disavowed by Gandhi and King, may have also helped. The African National Congress (ANC) grew up in the Gandhian tradition. But by the 1950s it was clear that nonviolent noncooperation was making no progress whatever with the ruling white Nationalist Party. So in 1961 Nelson Mandela and his colleagues formed the military wing of the ANC, the Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation, on the quite un-Gandhian grounds that the only thing whites understand is force.

Even Gandhi had trouble reconciling the rule of nonviolence with the necessities of defense against those with less lofty rules of conduct: "I have not the qualifications for teaching my philosophy of life. I have barely qualifications for practicing the philosophy I believe. I am but a poor struggling soul yearning to be... wholly truthful and wholly nonviolent in thought, word, and deed, but ever failing to reach the ideal."

"Repay kindness with kindness," said Confucius, "but evil with justice." This might be called the Brass or Brazen Rule: Do unto others as they do unto you. It's the lex talonis, "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," plus "one good turn deserves another." In actual human (and chimpanzee) behavior it's a familiar standard. "If the enemy inclines toward peace, do thou also incline toward peace," President Bill Clinton quoted from the Qur'an at the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. Without having to appeal to anyone's better nature, we institute a kind of operant conditioning, rewarding them when they're nice to us and punishing them when they're not. We're not pushovers but we're not unforgiving either. It sounds promising. Or is it true that "two wrongs don't make a right"?

Of baser coinage is the Iron Rule: Do unto others as you like, before they do it unto you. It is sometimes formulated as "He who has the gold makes the rules," underscoring not just its departure from, but its contempt for the Golden Rule. This is the secret maxim of many, if they can get away with it, and often the unspoken precept of the powerful.

Finally, I should mention two other rules, found throughout the living world. They explain a great deal: One is Suck up to those above you, and abuse those below. This is the motto of bullies and the norm in many nonhuman primate societies. It's really the Golden Rule for superiors, the Iron Rule for inferiors. Since there is no known alloy of gold and iron, we'll call it the Tin Rule for its flexibility. The other common rule is Give precedence in all things to close relatives, and do as you like to others. This Nepotism Rule is known to evolutionary biologists as "kin selection."

Despite its apparent practicality, there's a fatal flaw in the Brazen Rule: unending vendetta. It hardly matters who starts the violence. Violence begets violence, and each side has reason to hate the other. "There is no way to peace." A. J. Muste said, "Peace is the way." But peace is hard and violence is easy. Even if almost everyone is for ending the vendetta, a single act of retribution can stir it up again: A dead relative's sobbing widow and grieving children are before us. Old men and women recall atrocities from their childhoods. The reasonable part of us tries to keep the peace, but the passionate part of us cries out for vengeance. Extremists in the two warring factions can count on one another. They are allied against the rest of us, contemptuous of appeals to understanding and loving-kindness. A few hotheads can force-march a legion of more prudent and rational people to brutality and war.

Many in the West have been so mesmerized by the appalling accords with Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938 that they are unable to distinguish cooperation and appeasement. Rather than having to judge each gesture and approach on its own merits, we merely decide that the opponent is thoroughly evil, that all his concessions are offered in bad faith, and that force is the only thing he understands. Perhaps for Hitler this was the right judgment. But in general it is not the right judgment, as much as I wish that the invasion of the Rhineland had been forcibly opposed. It consolidates hostility on both sides and makes conflict much more likely. In a world with nuclear weapons, uncompromising hostility carries special and very dire dangers.

Breaking out of a long series of reprisals is, I claim, very hard. There are ethnic groups who have weakened themselves to the point of extinction, because they had no machinery to escape from this cycle, the Kaingang of the Brazilian highlands, for example. The warring nationalities in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, and elsewhere may provide further examples. The Brazen Rule seems too unforgiving. The Iron Rule promotes the advantage of a ruthless and powerful few against the interests of everybody else. The Golden and Silver Rules seem too complacent. They systematically fail to punish cruelty and exploitation. They hope to coax people from evil to good by showing that kindness is possible. But there are sociopaths, who do not much care about the feelings of others, and it is hard to imagine a Hitler or a Stalin being shamed into redemption by good example. Is there a rule between the Golden and the Silver on the one hand and the Brazen, Iron, and Tin on the other which works better than any of them alone?

With so many different rules, how can you tell which to use, which will work? More than one rule may be operating even in the same person or nation. Are we doomed just to guess about this, or try to rely on intuition, or just to parrot what we've been taught? Let's try to put aside, just for the moment, whatever rules we've been taught, and those we feel passionately... perhaps from a deeply rooted sense of justice... must be right.

Suppose we seek not to confirm or deny what we've been taught, but to find out what really works. Is there a way to test competing codes of ethics? Granting that the real world may be much more complicated than any simulation, can we explore the matter scientifically?

We're used to playing games in which somebody wins and somebody looses. Every point made by our opponent puts us that much further behind. "Win-lose" games seem natural, and many people are hard-pressed to think of a game that isn't win-lose. In win-lose games, the losses just balance the wins. That's why they're called "zero-sum" games. There's no ambiguity about your opponent's intentions: Within the rules of the game, he will do anything he can to defeat you.

Many children are aghast the first time they really come face to face with the "lose" side of win-lose games. On the verge of bankruptcy in Monopoly, they plead for special dispensation (forgoing rents, for example), and when this is not forthcoming may, in tears, denounce the game as heartless and unfeeling... which of course it is. (I've seen the board overturned, hotels and "Chance" cards and metal icons spilled onto the floor in spitting anger and humiliation... and not only by children.) Within the rules of Monopoly, there's no way for players to cooperate so that all benefit. That's not how the game is designed. The same is true for boxing, football, hockey, basketball, baseball, lacrosse, tennis, racquetball, chess, all Olympic events, yacht and car racing, pinochle, potsie, and partisan politics. In none of these games is there an opportunity to practice the Golden or Silver Rules, or even the Brazen. There is room only for the rules of Iron and Tin. If we revere the Golden Rule, why is it so rare in the games we teach our children?

After a million years of intermittently warring tribes we readily enough think in a zero-sum mode, and treat every interaction as a contest or conflict. Nuclear war, though ( and many conventional wars), economic depression, and assaults on the global environment are all "lose-lose" propositions. Such vital human concerns as love, friendship, parenthood, music, art, and the pursuit of knowledge are "win-win" propositions. Our vision is dangerously narrow if all we know is win-lose.

The scientific field that deals with such matters is called game theory, used in military tactics and strategy, trade policy, corporate competition, limiting environmental pollution, and plans for nuclear war. The paradigmatic game is the Prisoner's Dilemma. It is very much non-zero-sum. Win-win, win-lose, and lose-lose outcomes are all possible. "Sacred" books carry few useful insights into strategy here. It is a wholly pragmatic game.

Imagine that you and a friend are arrested for committing a serious crime. For the purpose of the game, it doesn't matter whether either, neither, or both of you did it. What matters is that the police say they think you did. Before the two of you have any chance to compare stories or plan strategy, you are taken to separate interrogation cells. There, oblivious of your Miranda rights ("You have the right to remain silent..."), they try to make you confess. They tell you, as policemen sometimes do, that your friend has confessed and implicated you. (Some friend!) The police might be telling the truth. Or they might be lying. You're permitted only to plead innocent or guilty. If you're willing to say anything, what's your best tack to minimize punishment?

Here are the possible outcomes:

If you deny committing the crime and (unknown to you) your friend also denies it, the case might be hard to prove. In the plea bargain, both your sentences will be very light.

If you confess and your friend does likewise, then the effort the State had to expend to solve the crime was small. In exchange you both may be given a fairly light sentence, although not as light as if you had both asserted your innocence.

But if you plead innocent and your friend confesses, the state will ask for the maximum sentence for you, and the minimal punishment (maybe none) for your friend. Uh-oh. You're very vulnerable to a kind of double cross, what game theorists call "defection." So's he.

So if you and your friend "cooperate" with one another... both pleading innocent (or both pleading guilty)... you both escape the worst. Should you play it safe, and guarantee a middle range of punishment by confessing? Then, if your friend pleads innocent while you plead guilty, well, too bad for him, and you might get off scot-free.

When you think it through, you realize that whatever your friend does you're better off defecting than cooperating. Maddeningly, the same holds true for your friend. But if you both defect, you're both worse off than if you had both cooperated. This is the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Now consider a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma, in which the two players go through a sequence of such games. At the end of each they figure out from their punishment how the other must have pled. They gain experience about each other's strategy (and character). Will they learn to cooperate game after game, both always denying that they committed any crime? Even if the reward for finking on the other is large?

You might try cooperating or defecting, depending on how the previous game or games have gone. If you cooperate overmuch, the other player may exploit your good nature. If you defect overmuch, your friend is likely to defect often, and this is bad for both of you. You know your defection pattern is data being fed to the other player. What is the right mix of cooperation and defection? How to behave then becomes, like any other question in Nature, a subject to be investigated experimentally.

This matter has been explored in a continuing round-robin computer tournament by the University of Michigan sociologist Robert Axelrod in his remarkable book The Evolution of Cooperation. Various codes of behavior confront one another and at the end we see who wins (who gets the lightest cumulative prison term). The simplest strategy might be to cooperate all the time, no matter how much advantage is taken of you, or never to cooperate, no matter what benefits might accrue from cooperation. These are the Golden Rule and the Iron Rule. They always lose, the one from a superfluity of kindness, the other from an overabundance of ruthlessness. Strategies slow to punish defection lose... in part because they send a signal that noncooperation can win. The Golden Rule is not only an unsuccessful strategy; it is also dangerous for other players, who may succeed in the short term only to be mowed down by exploiters in the long term.

Should you defect at first, but if your opponent cooperates even once, cooperate in all future games? Should you cooperate at first, but if your opponent defects even once, defect in all future games? These strategies also loose. Unlike sports, you cannot rely on your opponent to be always out to get you.

The most effective strategy in many such tournaments is called "Tit-for-Tat." It's very simple: You start out cooperating, and in each subsequent round simply do what your opponent did last time. You punish defections, but once your partner cooperates, you're willing to let bygones be bygones. At first, it seems to garner only mediocre success. But as time goes on the other strategies defeat themselves, from too much kindness or cruelty, and this middle way pulls ahead. Except for always being nice on the first move, Tit-for-Tat is identical to the Brazen Rule. It promptly (in the very next game) rewards cooperation and punishes defection, and has the great virtue that it makes your strategy absolutely clear to your opponent. (Strategic ambiguity can be lethal.)

TABLE OF PROPOSED RULES TO LIVE BY
The Golden Rule	Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The Silver Rule	Do not unto others what you would not have them do unto you.
The Brazen (Brass) Rule	Do unto others as they do unto you.
The Iron Rule	Do unto others as you like, before they do it to you.
The Tit-for-Tat Rule	Cooperate with others first, then do unto them as they do unto you.

Once there get to be several players employing Tit-for-Tat, they rise in the standings together. To succeed, Tit-for-Tat strategists must find others who are willing to reciprocate, with whom they can cooperate. After the first tournament in which the Brazen Rule unexpectedly won, some experts thought the strategy too forgiving. Next tournament, they tried to exploit it by defecting more often. They always lost. Even experienced strategists tended to underestimate the power of forgiveness and reconciliation. Tit-for-Tat involves an interesting mix of proclivities: initial friendliness, willingness to forgive, and fearless retaliation. The superiority of the Tit-for-Tat Rule in such tournaments has been recounted by Axelrod.

Something like it can be found throughout the animal kingdom and has been well-studied in our closest relatives, the chimps. Described and named "reciprocal altruism" by the biologist Robert Trivers, animals may do favors for others in expectation of having the favors returned... not every time, but often enough to be useful. This is hardly an invariable moral strategy, but it is not uncommon either. So there is no need to debate the antiquity of the Golden, Silver, and Brazen Rules, or Tit-for-Tat, and the priority of the moral prescriptives in the Book of Leviticus. Ethical rules of this sort were not originally invented by some enlightened human lawgiver. They go deep into our evolutionary past. They were with our ancestral line from a time before we were human.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a very simple game. Real life is considerably more complex. If he gives our apple to the pencil man, is my father more likely to get an apple back? Not from the pencil man; we'll never see him again. But might widespread acts of charity improve the economy and give my father a raise? Or do we give the apple for emotional, not economic rewards? Also, unlike the players in an ideal Prisoner's Dilemma game, human beings and nations come to their interactions with predispositions, both hereditary and cultural.

But the central lessons in a not very prolonged round-robin of Prisoner's Dilemma are about strategic clarity; about the self-defeating nature of envy; about the importance of long-term over short-term goals; about the dangers of both tyranny and patsydom; and especially about approaching the whole issue of rules to live by as an experimental question. Game theory also suggests that a broad knowledge of history is a key survival tool.

finis

BILLIONS & BILLIONS by Carl Sagan ISBN 0-679-41160-7 Copyright © 1997 by The Estate of Carl Sagan
Contents
List of Illustrations..................................... xi
PART I THE POWER AND BEAUTY OF QUANTIFICATION
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.	Billions and Billions............................. The Persian Chessboard............................ Monday-Night Hunters.............................. The Gaze of God and the Dripping Faucet........... Four Cosmic Questions............................. So many Suns, So many Worlds......................	3 11 22 31 45 53
PART II WHAT ARE CONSERVATIVES CONSERVING?
7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.	The World That Came in the Mail............................. The Environment: Where Does Prudence Lie?........ Croesus and Cassandra............................ A Piece of the Sky is Missing........... Ambush: The Warming of the World.................... Escape from Ambush...................... Religion and Science: An Alliance....................	63 69 77 83 98 117 136
PART III WHERE HEARTS AND MINDS COLLIDE
14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.	The Common Enemy............................. Abortion: Is It Possible to Be Both "Pro-Life" and "Pro-Choice"? (cowritten with Ann Druyan)........ The Rules of the Game...................... Gettysburg and Now (cowritten with Ann Druyan)........ The Twentieth Century.................... In the Valley of the Shadow................	149 163 180 192 204 214

	Epilogue by Ann Druyan............................. Acknowledgments............................ References................................. Index......................................	223 229 231 235

The Golden Rule

from Dear Abby, Spring '01

Brahmanism: This is the sum of duty: Do naught unto others which would
cause you pain if done to you. (Mahabharata 5:1517)

Buddhism: Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.
(Udana-Varga 5:18)

Confucianism: Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindess: Do not do unto
others what you would not have them do unto you. (Analects 15:23)

Taoism: Regard your neighbor's gain as your own gain and your neighbor's
loss as your own loss. (Tai Shang Kan Ying P'ien)

Zoroastrianism: That nature alone is good which refrains from doing
unto another whatsoever is not good for itself. (Dadistan-I-dinik 94:5)

Judaism: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. That is the
entire law; all the rest is commentary. (Talmud, Shabbat 31a)

Christianity: All things whatsoever ye would that man should do to you,
do ye even so to them; for that is the law and the prophets. (Matthew
7:12)

Islam: No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that
which he desires for himself. (Sunnah)

Prisoner's Dilemma
"A New Way To Think About Rules To Live By"

by Carl Sagan, Parade magazine, 28 Nov 93

Moral codes that seek to regulate human behavior have been with us not only since the dawn of civilization but also among our pre-civilized, and highly social, hunter-gatherer ancestors. And even earlier. Different societies have different codes. Many cultures say one thing and do another. In a few fortunate societies, an inspired lawgiver lays down a set of rules to live by. But many revered codes have failed to establish a long-lived moral order. For example, the codes of Ashoka (India), Hammurabi (Babylon), Lycurgus (Sparta) and Solon (Athens), which once held sway over mighty civilizations, are today largely defunct. Perhaps they misjudged human nature and asked too much of us. Perhaps experience from one epoch or culture is not wholly applicable to another.

In this article, I describe an early effort - tentative but emerging - to approach the matter scientifically.

In our every day lives, as in the momentous affairs of nations, we must decide: What does it mean to do the right thing? How do we deal with an enemy? Should we ever take advantage of someone who treats us kindly? If hurt by a friend, or helped by an enemy, should we reciprocate in kind?

Examples are all around us: Your sister-in-law ignores your snub and invites you over for Christmas dinner. Should you accept? A co-worker makes you look bad in front of the boss. Should you try to get even? Should you cheat at cards? On a larger scale: Should we kill killers? If a power company supports a symphony orchestra, ought we to ignore its destructive, although legal, pollution of the environment? Shattering a worldwide voluntary moratorium, China resumes its testing of nuclear weapons. Should we?

In making such decisions, we're concerned not only with doing right but also with what works - what makes us and the rest of society happier and more secure. There's a tension between what we call ethical and what we call pragmatic. If, even in the long run, ethical behavior were self-defeating, we would not call it ethical, but foolish. (We might even claim to respect it but in practice ignore it.) Bearing in mind the variety and complexity of human behavior, are there any simple rules - whether we call them ethical or pragmatic - that actually work? Let's look at some of the rules we're taught:

THE GOLDEN RULE. The most admired standard of behavior in the West is the Golden Rule. Its formulation in the first-century Gospel of St. Matthew is: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Almost no one follows it consistently. When the Chinese philosopher K'ung-Tzu (known as Confucius in the West) was asked in the sixth century B.C. his opinion of the Golden Rule - of repaying evil with kindness - he replied, "Then with what will you repay kindness?"

THE SILVER RULE. The Silver Rule is different: "Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you." The most inspiring 20th-century exemplars of the Silver Rule are Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They counseled oppressed peoples not to repay violence with violence, but not to be compliant and obedient either. Non-violent civil disobedience was what they advocated - putting your body on the line and showing, by your willingness to be punished in defying an unjust law, the justice of your cause. They aimed at melting the hearts of their oppressors. It worked, up to a point. But even Gandhi had trouble reconciling the rule of nonviolence with the necessities of defense against those with less lofty rules of conduct.

THE BRAZEN RULE. "Repay kindness with kindness," said Confucius, describing relations between individuals, "but evil with justice." This might be called the Bronze or Brazen Rule: "Do unto others as they do unto you." It's "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," plus "one good turn deserves another." In actual human (and chimpanzee) behavior, it's a familiar standard. Without having to appeal to anyone's better nature, we institute a kind of operant conditioning, rewarding others when they're nice to us and punishing them when they're not. We're not pushovers, be we're not unforgiving either.

THE IRON RULE... AND OTHERS. Of baser coinage is the Iron Rule: "Do unto others as you like, before they do it unto you." It's sometimes formulated as, "He who has the gold makes the rules," underscoring not just its rejection of, but also its contempt for, the Golden Rule. This is the secret maxim of many, if they can get away with it, and often the unspoken precept of the powerful.

Finally, I should mention two mixed rules, found throughout the living world. They explain a great deal. One is: "Suck up to those above you, and intimidate those below." This is the motto of bullies. It's really the Golden Rule for superiors, the Iron Rule for inferiors. Since there is no known alloy of gold and iron, we'll call it the Tin Rule for its flexibility. The other common rule is: "Give precedence in all things to close relatives, and do as you like to others" - the Golden Rule for relatives, the Iron rule for others. This Nepotism Rule is known to evolutionary biologists as "kin selection."

Despite its apparent practicality, there's a fatal flaw in the Brazen Rule: unending vendetta. Each act of justifiable retribution triggers another. Violence begets violence. The reasonable part of us tries to keep the peace, but the passionate part of us cries out for vengeance. Extremists in the two warring factions can count on one another. They are allied against the rest of us, contemptuous of appeals to understanding an loving kindness. A few hotheads can force-march a legion of more prudent and rational people to brutality and war.

WHAT GAMES TEACH US. Clearly, the Brazen Rule is too unforgiving. But the Golden and Silver Rules seem too complacent. They systematically reward cruelty and exploitation. It is hard to imagine a Hitler or a Stalin being shamed into redemption by good example. The Iron Rule promotes the advantage of a ruthless and powerful few against the interest of the many. So is there a rule between the Golden and the Silver, on the one hand, and the Brazen and Iron, on the other, which works better than any of them?

Suppose we seek not to confirm or deny what we've been taught but to find out what really works. Is there a way to test alternative codes of ethics?

We're used to playing games in which somebody wins and somebody loses. Every point made by our opponent puts us that much farther behind. "Win-lose" games seem so natural that many people are hard-pressed to think of a game that isn't win-lose. In win-lose games, the losses just balance the wins - that's why they're also called "zero-sum" games.

Many children are appalled the first time they really come face to face with the "lose" side of win-lose games. On the verge of bankruptcy in the game Monopoly (tm), for example, they plead for special dispensation. When this is not forthcoming, they may, in tears, denounce the game as heartless and unfeeling - which, of course, it is. Within the rules of Monopoly, there's no way for players to cooperate so that all benefit. That's not how the games is designed. The same is true for boxing, football, hockey, basketball, baseball, lacrosse, tennis, racquetball, pinochle, chess, all Olympic events, yacht and car racing, potsy and partisan politics. There may be rewards for teamwork, but not for teamwork with the opponent. In none of these games is there an opportunity to practice the Golden or Silver Rule, or even the Brazen. There is room only for the Rule of Iron.

Nuclear war, however (and many conventional wars), economic depression and assaults on the global environment are all "lose-lose" propositions. Such vital human concerns as love, friendship, parenthood and the pursuit of knowledge are "win-win" propositions. Everyone gains from the creation of great music, art, architecture and literature, wise and just laws and, indeed, far-seeing moral codes. Our vision is dangerously narrow if all we know is "win-lose."

THE PRISONER'S DILEMMA. The scientific field that deals with such matters is called "game theory." It's used in military strategy, trade policy, corporate competition and the limiting of environmental pollution. The Defense Department has its own gaming agency. The paradigmatic game is the Prisoner's Dilemma. It is not zero-sum. Win-win, win-lose and lose-lose outcomes all are possible. It is wholly pragmatic and amoral:

Imagine that you and a friend are arrested for committing a serious crime. Before the two of you have any chance to compare stories or plan strategy, you are taken to separate interrogation cells. There, oblivious of your Miranda rights ("You have the right to remain silent..."), the police try to make you confess. They tell you, as police sometimes do, that your friend has confessed. The police might be telling the truth. Or they might be lying. If you're willing to say anything, what's your best tack to minimize punishment?

You're permitted only to plead guilty or not guilty; you cannot implicate or clear your friend. These are the possible outcomes:

* If you deny committing the crime, and (unknown to you) your friend also denies it, the case might be hard to prove. In the ensuing plea bargain, both your sentences will be very light.

* If you confess, and your friend does likewise, then the effort the State must expend to solve the crime is small. In exchange, you both will be given a fairly light sentence, although not so light as if you both had asserted your innocence.

* If you plead not guilty, and your friend confesses, the State will ask for a maximum sentence for you and minimal punishment (maybe none) for your friend. Uh-oh. You're very vulnerable to a kind of double cross. So's he.

So if you and your friend both plead innocent, you both escape the worst. But each must be sure of the other.

Should you play it safe and guarantee no worse than a middle range of punishment by confessing? Then, if your friend pleads innocent while you plead guilty - well, too bad for him, and you might get off scot-free.

When you think it through, you realize that, whatever your friend does, you're better off confessing. Maddeningly, the same holds true for your friend. But if both of you confess, you both are worse off than if both of you had pleaded innocent. This is the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Robert Axelrod, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, has pioneered the study of a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma in which the two players go through a sequence of such games with no direct communication between them. At the end of each, they figure out from their punishment how the other must have pleaded. They gain experience about each other's strategy (and character). Will they learn to "cooperate" game after game - both always denying that they committed any crime - even if the reward for finking on the other (or "defecting") is very large?

If you cooperate overmuch, the other player may exploit your good nature. If you defect overmuch, your friend is likely to retaliate often, which will be bad for both of you. What is the right mix of cooperation and defection? How to behave then becomes, like any other question in Nature, a subject to be investigated experimentally.

This matter has been explored by Axelrod in a continuing round-robin computer tournament. Various codes of behavior confront one another, and at the end we see who wins (who gets the lightest cumulative prison term). The simplest strategies might be to cooperate all the time, no matter how much advantage is taken of you; or never to cooperate, no matter what benefits might accrue from cooperation. Both the Golden Rule and the Iron Rule always lose - the one from an excess of kindness, the other from an overabundance of ruthlessness. Strategies that are slow to punish defection lose, in part because they send a signal that non-cooperation works.

A RULE THAT WORKS. The most effective strategy in many such tournaments is called "Tit-for-Tat." It's very simple: You start out cooperating and, in each subsequent round, simply do what your opponent did last time. You punish defections, but once the other player cooperates, you're willing to let bygones be bygones. At first it seems to garner only mediocre success. But as time goes on, the other strategies defeat themselves - from too much kindness or too much cruelty - and this middle way pulls ahead.

Except for always being nice on the first move, Tit-for-tat is identical to the Brazen Rule. It promptly (in the very next game) rewards cooperation and punishes defection, and it has the great virtue that it makes its strategy absolutely clear.

To succeed, Tit-for-tat strategists must find others who are willing to reciprocate - players with whom to cooperate. Once there get to be several players employing Tit-for-tat, they rise in the standings together. After the first tournament, in which the Brazen Rule unexpectedly won, some experts thought it would pay to be less forgiving. Next tournament, they tried to exploit the Brazen Rule by defecting more often. They did poorly. Even experienced strategists tended to underestimate the power of forgiveness and reconciliation.

The superiority of the Brazen Rule in such tournaments was discovered by Axelrod and described in his remarkable book "The Evolution of Cooperation." A variant of Tit-for-tat that forgives other players for defecting occasionally - say 10 percent of the time - does even better if there's any chance of misunderstanding. We might call it the Goldplated Brazen Rule. Among other virtues, it breaks out of unending vendetta.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a very simple game. Real life is considerably more complex. But its central lessons are striking: Be friendly at first meetings. Do not envy. Be generous; forgive your enemy if he forgives you. Be neither a tyrant or a patsy. Retaliate proportionately to an intentional injury (within the constraints of the rule of law). And make your behavior fairly (although not perfectly) clear and consistent. What would the world be like if more of us, individuals as well as nations, lived by these rules?

shirey@acm.org 12 Sep 2001
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