* action x is legal, but results in a worse world for everyone. * doing action x benefits the first 1000 people who do it. * much more than 1000 are capable of doing x, including me. * if I do it now, I will be one of the first 1000.
If these are true, I think one should do action x. I believe one would be completely justified in doing it.
I think the answer is inherent to the question of whether it's "justified", and the fact that you're being downvoted.
If Prisoner's Dilemma is played once, the optimal strategy is to defect. If it's repeated an unknown number of times, the optimal strategy is tit-for-tat.
Now, if you're an identifiable actor in a pool of tit-for-tat-players, and you have a history of defecting first, you're going to face opponents who normally play tit-for-tat start to defect against you first, too. In the end, you will end up as one of the worst peformers in the player pool.
So when you're asking if it is "justifiable" to defect in a game like this, it is the same as asking "will I be treated worse if I defect in this game". The downvote confirms this, I think. It means that in this population pool, bad behavior is punished (or people pretend it is)
Now, if defecting can either be done secretly or if you're in a popluation pool where everyone defects anyway, then always-defect is probably the nash equillibrium. In that case, defecting will be seen as justifiable.
> (...)In that case, defecting will be seen as justifiable.
Exactly! My argument basically boiled down to this. In certain situations, defecting may be the way to go. I would not blame the defector for doing what is in their best interest.
And “someone would have done this anyway” could very well be what's turning a situation into a prisoner's dilemma, so it could actually be a valid justification in some cases.
But yeah, it could depend on what is meant by "justification" exactly.
I absolutely would. The defector is willingly harming unconsenting others. That the harm would have been caused by someone else anyway doesn't suddenly make it OK.
Rather, one could argue, morality is a set of emotions, norms, beliefs and rules we have gained through culture and evolution in response to certain behavior patterns. And these can be seen as having a game-theoretical foundation. The rules that assigns the label Evil to someone tends to select people that we (or our ingroup) are in an existential conflict with, at a level where it's either us or them.
For instance, we can have rules that define some patterns of behavior as Evil, and have different set of moral rules for treating people depending on whether they are classified as Evil or not.
I realize that this could also apply to lower rank soldiers involved in some war crimes, etc. so I guess it is not that clear cut. But would you blame a random soldier of lowest rank for carrying out terrible orders and not risking himself(or his family)? Well I don't know. I guess I would not.
Of course, the stakes are rarely that high, but the harm done is also rarely that high also.
- If I catch this escaped slave, I can get the bounty instead of someone else!
- One of us Auschwitz guards will shoot that escaping prisoner; why shouldn’t I get rewarded for it?
So on and so forth.
If a piece of technology is going to be 90% bad 10% good and you can push it to 80% bad then it is completely justifiable to go for it.
