Empathy revisited: Game theory, evolution, dialogue and morality

This dissertation offers a game-theoretical account of empathy as a behavioral trait described by reference to cooperative mechanisms of evolutionary biology. I propose to distinguish from each other: (1) An adaptive rule-empathy. It is based on rules founded in past record of reciprocity and conformity with the Hamiltonian rule of preferring the closest kin. Accordingly, it tends to reinforce norms of conformity and coalition formation in cooperative games, by strengthening parochial sympathetic preferences; (2) A quasi-spontaneous act-empathy. Based in a non-specified cooperative drive independent of kinship relations, it extends also to moral strangers. It manifests itself through the language exploration and consensus building activities that in any game serve to make it ethically inclusive. This inclusiveness means in game-theoretical terms that individual autonomous persons collectively constitute one single player ("team") of humanity. Such act-empathic understanding requires altruism as a key strategy of commitment among team-members for mutually building understanding. It is heavily dependent upon dialogue, which, self-referentially, becomes a medium and a manifestation of ethical behavior through signaling games. I suggest that such a signaling game might perhaps be interpreted as aligned with the basic tenets of discourse ethics.;In Part I of this dissertation, I introduce game theory as offering a handy theoretical basis for the conceptualization of empathy, and for its philosophical analysis, emphasizing a contrast between standard and evolutionary game theory in modeling cooperation. This conceptualization focuses on the role of rule-empathy in the evolution of normative systems, both in local context where agents act in the interest of in-groups or in coalitions, and in the global context of humanity.;In Part II, I discuss how act-empathy can avoid or mend implementation errors and biases in the pragmatics of conversation, through a choice of altruistic clariflcatory strategies. Such strategies enhance the payoffs of the interlocutors as team-mates in the cooperative game of ethics, according to a discourse ethic. In this framework I take Grice's conversational implicatures and his value construction and likewise Habermas' communicative action and discourse ethics also to constitute contributions to the philosophical understanding of the pragmatics of ethical cooperation.