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Geoffrey Brennan's Course Description
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The Prisoners’ Dilemma and Distributive Justice
PPE Gateway Course
Spring Semester 2005
Instructor: Geoffrey Brennan

This course falls into two rather distinct parts. The first occupying the period up to Spring Break will be concerned with the prisoners’ dilemma (both in its two-person and more socially relevant n-person variants). The second part will be concerned with distributive justice – emphasizing the similarities and differences between the philosophical, economic, and political approaches to this issue.

The Prisoners’ Dilemma:

To understand “social cooperation” one needs to understand the problems that social cooperation has to overcome. In this respect, the prisoners’ dilemma is a foundational element in the study of social institutions. In this course, we will begin with the PD in its simplest form and then extend to the iterated case and the more relevant many-person version. We shall deal with the theory of public goods, and offer several applications of PD reasoning, including the Hobbesian account of the origin of the state. We will consider the experimental evidence in relation to PD and social dilemma games.

We shall also consider the related “trust problem” and its implications for the possibility of pre-commitment.

Distributive Justice:

The object of this part of the course is two-fold: first to examine an issue that is of enormous interest in its own right: second, to isolate the disciplinary differences and complementarities in the philosophical, political and economic approaches to this issue. So we shall consider the pure ‘ethics’ of distributive justice as understood say by Marx, Rawls and Nozick; and the recent literature on “equality of what?” We shall also deal with the feasibility of various distributive schemes, focusing on “incentive effects” and their implications. Finally, we shall contrast three different models of the politics of redistribution, drawing to some extent on the problems of social cooperation examined in the first part of the course.

Reading Material:

There will be no single textbook for this course. The range of topics and disciplines is too broad to make that feasible. Instead there will be a range of articles and papers and where relevant excerpts from longer works

Projected Timetable (by week):

1. social cooperation and the two-person pd
2. iteration and backward induction
3. the n-person pd and public goods
4. trust and commitment
5. the experimental record and applications
6. origins of the state: Hobbes in rational reconstruction
7. other applications – military tactics; environmental degradation
8. ethical theories of distributive justice – Marx, Rawls
9. Nozick; egalitarianism and prioritarianism
10. economics of distributive justice – “incentive effects”
11. politics of redistribution – collective altruism
12. politics of redistribution -- the median voter account and cycling
13. expressive voting and the voters’ dilemma
14. summary