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:
“Vanessa wanted to be a ballerina. Dad had such hopes for her.... Corin was the academically brilliant one, and a fencer of Olympic standard. Everything was expected of them, and they fulfilled all expectations. But I was the one of whom nothing was expected. I remember a game the three of us played. Vanessa was the President of the United States, Corin was the British Prime Minister—and I was the royal dog.”
—Lynn Redgrave (b. 1943)
“There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case.”
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955)