The nature of competition

The nature of competition

The nature of competition

Morality arises in response to the fact that human affairs, when left to their own devices,
have a tendency to go very badly. Thomas Hobbes summed it up best with his observation that the
unbridled pursuit of individual self-interest generates a “natural condition” in which life is
“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” This is because individuals who refuse to exercise any
restraint in the pursuit of their self-interest rapidly become embroiled in collective action
problems – interactions in which, despite acting in a self-interested fashion, each individual
winds up with an outcome that is much worse than some other feasible outcome, which might
have been achieved had they all chosen to act differently. Furthermore, a collective action
problem can easily degenerate into a race to the bottom, in which each individual, responding to
the actions of the others, generates an outcome that is successively worse, but where each
iteration of the interaction only intensifies their incentive to act in the same way. An arms race is
the most clear-cut example.
One of the primary functions of morality (and of social institutions more generally) has
always been to impose constraints that prevent individuals from falling into these sorts of
collectively self-defeating patterns of behavior (see Gauthier, 1986; Schotter, 1981). A simple
golden rule, for example, which asks individuals to consider, before embarking upon a particular
course of action, how they would feel if others acted the same way, has the potential to resolve
the overwhelming majority of collective action problems, and thus to promote mutually
beneficial forms of cooperation. Consider, for the example, the rule against littering. When
leaving a subway car, it is tempting to leave one’s newspaper behind, rather than carry it along in
search of a trash can. At the same time, people generally don’t like riding in messy subway cars
– the only reason they are tempted to leave the newspaper behind is that they are exiting the
train. This creates a collective action problem (or a prisoner’s dilemma).

From “An Adversarial Ethic for Business or When Sun-Tzu met the Stakeholder” by Joseph Heath