Modelling the social dynamics of moral enhancement: social strategies sold over-the-counter and the stability of society

Journal article

How individuals tend to evaluate the combination of their own and other’s payoffs – Social Value Orientations – is likely to be a potential target of future moral enhancers. However, the stability of cooperation in human societies has been buttressed by evolved mildly prosocial orientations. If they could be changed, would this destabilize the cooperative structure of society?
We simulate a model of moral enhancement where agents play games with each other and can enhance their orientations based on maximizing personal satisfaction. We find that given the assumption that very low payoffs lead agents to be removed from the population, there is a broadly stable prosocial attractor state. However, the balance between prosociality and individual payoff-maximization is affected by different factors. Agents maximizing their own satisfaction can produce emergent shifts in society that reduce everybody’s satisfaction. Moral enhancement considerations should take the issues of social emergence into account.

Authors: Fabiano, J; Sandberg, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Journal: Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics
• Volume: 26
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 431-445
• Publication date: 2017-05-25
• Acceptance date: 2017-01-17
• DOI: 10.1017/S0963180116001109
• EISSN: 1469-2147
• ISSN: 0963-1801
• Keywords: altruism; selfishness; game theory; prosociality; social value orientation; moral enhancement; computer simulation; emergence