Game Theory
Given two actors, oneself and someone else, there are four types of possible behavior directly impacting the welfare of the actors: selfishness, altruism, spite, and cooperation. Selfishness is harming someone else in order to help oneself; altruism is harming oneself in order to help someone else; spite is harming oneself in order to harm someone else; cooperation is helping someone else and also helping oneself.
The implications of selfishness have inspired divergent views within religious, philosophical, psychological, economic and evolutionary contexts. For example, Roman Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, in The Person and the Common Good, made the Aristotelian argument that framing the fundamental question of politics as a choice between altruism and selfishness is a basic and harmful mistake of modern states. Rather, cooperation in a sense similar to the game theory usage above ought to be the norm: human beings are by nature social animals, and so individual persons can only find their full good in and through pursuing the good of the community.
Read more about this topic: Selfishness
Famous quotes containing the words game and/or theory:
“There are no accidents, only nature throwing her weight around. Even the bomb merely releases energy that nature has put there. Nuclear war would be just a spark in the grandeur of space. Nor can radiation “alter” nature: she will absorb it all. After the bomb, nature will pick up the cards we have spilled, shuffle them, and begin her game again.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.”
—Charles Lamb (1775–1834)