this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
130 points (82.2% liked)
Asklemmy
54622 readers
460 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Morality, whether based on game theory or not, has little to do with law.
You should learn more about game theory.
Game theory is about extracting personal good from cooperation. Game theory has nothing to say against boiling your cat alive as it has no leverage on you.
In societies where things like slavery existed for centuries or even millennias, owners had great evolutionary benefit from owning slaves. Their descendants hold some privileges to this day. Game theory was on their side.
Did you watch “86”? In this show, San-Magnolia was a country populated exclusively with blonde people, referred as “alba”. People with non-white hair (referred as “colorata”) were sent to internment camps outside the state walls and conscripted to fight in a war in a hope to regain at least some rights.
It was later revealed that over 10 million colorata and zero alba were killed in the later stage of the war, and if original prognosis on enemy forces ceasing to operate in a few years would be correct, alba people would totally win the evolutionary race and no game theory would bring justice. Doesn't sound great if your hair happens to be brown or red.
So far every response to be has been straw man args.
Nobody is talking about boiling cats alive, I'm not arguing for the morality of that.
I'm not saying game theory can be used to justify anything, I'm saying it's the basis for morality, it's how morality came to be in our species IMHO. I think agents (things with agency, which are subject to game theory) develop strategies, and morality is based on these strategies. Harming other beings unnecessarily often puts one at risk, therefore harming other beings without need is often bad strategy. I'm not saying that anything that can create benefit is morally OK, this is a straw man, know what that is?
You're speaking as if there's a global, cosmic morality in which harming others is wrong, this is a religious belief, I'm not talking about religion. There are many moralities with different foundations, I explained the basis for mine.