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Crucially for this chapter, because our behaviors are mediated by moral intuitions and ideologies, if our moral behaviors converge to Nash, so must the intuitions and ideologies that motivate them. The resulting intuitions and ideologies will bear the signature of their game theoretic origins, and this signature will lend clarity on the puzzling, counterintuitive, and otherwise hard-to-explain features of our moral intuitions, as exemplified by our motivating examples.
In order for game theory to be relevant to understanding our moral intuitions and ideologies, we need only the following simple assumption: Moral intuitions and ideologies that lead to higher payoffs become more frequent. This assumption can be met if moral intuitions that yield higher payoffs are held more tenaciously, are more likely to be imitated, or are genetically encoded. For example, if every time you transgress by commission you are punished, but every time you transgress by omission you are not, you will start to intuit that commission is worse than omission.
Rights and the Hawk—Dove Game
In this section we will argue that just as the Hawk—Dove model explains animal ter- ritoriality (Maynard Smith & Price, 1973, to be reviewed shortly), the Hawk—Dove model sheds light onto our sense of rights (Descioli & Karpoff, 2014; Gintis, 2007; Myerson, 2004).
Let us begin by asking the following question (Myerson, 2004): “Why [does] a passenger pay a taxi driver after getting out of the cab in a city where she is visiting for one day, not expecting to return?” If the cabby complains to the authorities, the passenger could plausibly claim that she had paid in cash. The answer, of course, is that the cabby would feel that the money the passenger withheld was his—that he had a right to be paid for his service—and get angry, perhaps making a scene or even starting a fight. Likewise, if the passenger did in fact pay, but the cabby demanded money a second time, the passenger would similarly be infuriated. This example illustrates that people have powerful intuitions regarding rightful owner- ship. In this section, we explore what the Hawk—Dove game can teach us about our sense of property rights.
The reader is likely familiar with the Hawk—Dove game, a model of disputes over contested resources. In the Hawk—Dove game, each player decides whether to fight over a resource or to acquiesce (i.e. play Hawk or Dove). If one fights and the other does not, the fighter gets the resource, worth v. If both fight, each pays a cost c and split the resource. That is, each gets v/2—c. If neither fights, they split the resource and get v/2. As long as v/2 <c, then in any stable Nash equilibrium, one player fights and the other acquiesces. That is, if one player expects the other to fight, she is better off acquiescing, and vice versa (see Fig. 2).
Crucially, it is not just a Nash equilibrium for one player to always play Hawk and the other to always play Dove. It is also an equilibrium for both players to con- dition whether they play Hawk on an uncorrelated asymmetry—a cue or event that
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