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Natural Social Contracts

  • Thematic Issue Article: Strategic Interaction
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“For they (philosophers) conceive of men, not as they are, but as they themselves would like them to be. Whence it has come to pass that, instead of ethics, they have generally written satire…”—Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus (1677).

Abstract

There are two fundamental problems for instituting a social contract. The first is cooperating to produce a surplus; the second is deciding how to divide this surplus. I represent each problem by a simple paradigm game, a Stag Hunt game for cooperating to produce a surplus, and a bargaining game for its division. I will discuss these simple games in isolation, and end by discussing their composition.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Brian Skyrms

  2. Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Brian Skyrms

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  1. Brian Skyrms
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Correspondence to Brian Skyrms.

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Skyrms, B. Natural Social Contracts. Biol Theory 8, 179–184 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-013-0113-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-013-0113-3

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