Strategic Justice: Convention And Problems Of Balancing Divergent Interests

Description

In Strategic Justice, Peter Vanderschraaf argues that justice can be properly understood as a body of special social conventions. The idea that justice is at bottom conventional has ancient roots, but has never been central in philosophy because convention itself has historically been so poorly understood. Vanderschraaf gives a new defense of this idea that integrates insights and arguments of past masters of moral and political philosophy together with recent analytical and empirical concepts and results from the social sciences. One of the substantial contributions of this work is a new account of convention that is sufficiently general for summarizing problems of justice, the social interactions where the interests of the agents involved diverge. Conventions are defined as equilibrium solutions to the games that summarize social interactions having a variety of possible stable resolutions and a corresponding plurality of equilibria. The basic idea that justice consists of a system of rules for mutual advantage is explored in depth using this game-theoretic analysis of convention. Justice is analyzed as a system of conventions that are stable with respect to renegotiation in the face of societal changes such as resource depletion, technological innovation and population decline or growth. This new account of justice-as-convention explains in a cogent and natural way what justice is and why individuals have good reason to obey its requirements. Contrary to what many have thought, this new account shows how the justice-as-convention view can give a good account of why justice requires that the most vulnerable members of society receive protections and benefits from the cooperative surplus created by general compliance with justice. Cover......Page 1 Half title......Page 2 Series......Page 3 Strategic Justice......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Dedication......Page 6 Contents......Page 8 Preface......Page 12 Acknowledgments......Page 18 Introduction......Page 24 1.1. Five Motivating Problems......Page 26 1.2. Noncooperative Game Theory......Page 41 1.3. Revisiting the Motivating Problems......Page 48 Conclusion......Page 66 Introduction......Page 67 2.1. A Sampling of Earlier Discussions of Convention......Page 69 2.2. The Arbitrariness of Conventions......Page 82 2.3. Convention and Correlated Equilibrium......Page 90 2.4. Defining Convention......Page 100 Conclusion......Page 106 Introduction......Page 108 3.1. The Standard Account......Page 110 3.2. The Standard Account Meets Leviathan......Page 114 3.3. The Standard Account Meets Hume’s Account......Page 117 3.4. Playing Instruments and Hunting Stags......Page 123 3.5. An Alternative Account......Page 133 Conclusion......Page 138 Introduction......Page 141 4.1. Two Accounts of Anarchy......Page 143 4.2. Hybrid A Priori Models of Anarchy......Page 154 4.3. A Dynamical Model of Anarchy......Page 160 Conclusion......Page 168 Introduction......Page 172 5.1. Fair Division......Page 182 5.2. Costly Punishment and Joint Cooperation......Page 198 Conclusion......Page 207 Introduction......Page 213 6.1. Two Problems......Page 216 6.2. Hobbes’ Attempt to Justify Commonwealth......Page 221 6.3. A Governing Convention......Page 233 6.4. Democracy via Salience......Page 239 Conclusion......Page 244 Introduction......Page 249 7.1. The Reconciliation Project and the Foole’s Challenge......Page 253 7.2. Glaucon and Adeimantus’ Challenge......Page 259 7.3. Hobbes’ Response to the Foole Interpreted as a Folk Theorem Response......Page 265 7.4. An Invisible Foole......Page 276 7.5. Combining the Social-​Sanctions and the Inseparable-​Goods Approaches......Page 282 Conclusion......Page 288 Introduction......Page 294 8.1. Necessary Conditions for Justice as Mutual Advantage......Page 296 8.2. The Vulnerability Objection......Page 303 8.3. Three Unsatisfactory Responses......Page 305 8.4. The Indefinitely Repeated Provider-​Recipient Game......Page 310 8.5. Setting the Boundaries......Page 315 8.6. Too Many Equilibria?......Page 327 Conclusion......Page 342 Appendix 1. Formal Definition of Convention......Page 348 Appendix 2. Computer Simulations of Inductive Learning in Games*......Page 356 Appendix 3. Folk Theorems for the Indefinitely Repeated Covenant Game......Page 372 Appendix 4. Humean Conventions of the Humean Sovereignty Game and the Repeated Provider-​Recipient Game......Page 383 References......Page 392 Index......Page 404