The puzzle of unconditional cooperation

Rational cooperation from unconditionally cooperative motives and preferences is a fairly common response of the people whom we have interviewed. While Sen might perhaps not be overly surprised about these results, given his belief in the efficacy of unconditional norms of cooperation, the results are likely to be viewed with some suspicion by many others in the field of rational choice theory. In this chapter, we shall not be restating our position in the debate with those who support the thick-theory of self-interested rationality. Rather, we want to comment on a more sophisticated thesis concerning the role of morality in collective action. This thesis is supported by a lot of empirical work. It says that in so far as morality has real force in overcoming social dilemmas, it will tend to be a morality of conditional reciprocity, rather than a morality of unconditional cooperation. The preference orderings that correspond to norms of reciprocity are ones like the ‘Assurance Game’-ordering QPRS. Such orderings, which are not associated with a dominant strategy, were discussed in the two previous chapters.

As we shall first argue, the empirical plausibility of the reciprocity thesis depends on circumstances in which rational actors are able to monitor each other's behaviour closely, unlike in the large-scale environmental dilemmas we have been studying. Secondly, we defend our view that many of the motives and preferences that we have observed in these dilemmas actually reflect the social force of an unconditional morality.