On seeing and being seen

The paper addresses John Roemer’s recent work on Kantian optimization and Kantian equilibria. Roemer argues that the standard economic theory of Nash equilibria is incapable of accounting for cooperative behavior such as recycling, reporting one’s income honestly, and voting in national elections. Instead we should assume that a cooperator is motivated to do what would most benefit her if all did the same. In commenting on this proposal, the first section of the paper summarizes Kant’s original formulation of the categorical imperative and relates it to psychological and historical studies of magical thinking. The next section distinguishes between unconditional and conditional norms of behavior and, within the latter, between the social norms of cooperation that can be triggered when what the agent does is being observed by others and the quasi-moral norms of cooperation that can be triggered when an agent observes what others do. To illustrate these ideas, the paper cites many experiments and historical case studies, the most important being the non-consumption, non-importation, and non-exportation movements in the American revolution. The concluding section summarizes Roemer’s own empirical work, and discusses critically his argument that his findings can be explained by assuming that agents are conditional Kantians.