...if the way we think in general about philosophical matters is based on a giant fallacy or some underhanded move, there’s no need to attend to the conclusions drawn while using that mode of thought. You could explain morality as a competition between strategies, and I could insist that while that conclusion follows from game theory, I reject the scientistic pretensions behind the mere literary (metaphor-based) extension of game theory beyond its proper domain of formal games.

And that would be a giant fallacy. Abstractions are not literary extensions even if they use literary devices. A metaphor is just a type of algebra:

Let ship=country

Let captain=president

Let fearful trip = civil war

O Captain, my Captain, our fearful trip is done =

O President, my President, the civil war is done.

Do you reject the scientistic extension of the literary metaphor beyond the domain of formal sea voyages? Are those woods that are lovely, dark, and deep really woods? You have no more basis to reject the game metaphor for morality than you would have for rejecting any other metaphor for any other thing. You need to show how the metaphor fails to map to reality, and you have not done that. Calling the metaphor names like "scientistic" is at best a genetic fallacy. But I'm inclined to go with the wag's comment about String theory: It's not even wrong.

I switched topics from the superficial to the heart of the matter in the good old philosophical matter. If that’s wrong, sue me.

No, I can just say it's wrong.

If game theory can be so misused in politics and economics, why couldn’t it be misused in morality?

I'm sure it could be. But you have not shown that I am misusing it. I have said repeatedly that the hard part of applying game theory is measuring the pay-offs. That's how it can be misused. We may disagree on what a "plus sum" outcome looks like.

You cheerfully agree that game theory can be misused because, as you point out, anything can be, but that’s not the point. I’m talking about a specific potential for misuse based on the overextension of this theoretical framework. The whole thing is just a metaphor dressed up with rigorous math.

That's really the heart of the matter. I would argue that your approach to philosophy is the metaphor, that God is the metaphor, that metaphysics and "morality" are narratives like "If I had four apples," or "If I had a switch that controlled a trolley..." God knows -pardon the expression - that philosophy can be misused. Look at "morality" under the Taliban. And you want to worry that game theory can be misused? Yikes.

If game theory is indeed a theory in the scientific sense, that math should be used in models that have real-world applications. Where are the nontrivial predictions born out by experimental tests of game theory in biology or economics?

Assuming for the nonce that absence of evidence would be evidence of absence, Dawkins's book is full of such predictions. And the Google machine can find many more. Game theory predicts virtually all of the bad economic behavior that you condemn. Is that a misuse of it? Remember, game theory is not prescriptive, even if morality is. Game there describes why morality prescribes: Prescription is a coordinating strategy in a plus-sum game.

The cold warrior’s and the neoliberal’s uses of game theory don’t bode well for its scientific status outside its proper domain.

If so, GIGO. Next.

I have no trouble conceding that strategic games can have a “geometry” or logic, or even that we can abstract from such games to generalize about analogous matters. But the further we extend those analogies, the weaker they’ll be.

Do you have a laser that measures the distance? How does that metaphor work? Where do you come off applying geography to logic? How scientistic! Ditto the metaphoric dynamometer you've attached to the game theory abstraction to measure its "strength." Literary hooey if you ask me. That metaphor doesn't map.

That doesn’t sound right to me at all. Darwin’s theory already explains why certain species survive by saying they’re the fittest to the environment.

Which is circular. "Fitness" is determined post hoc, by survival. I haven't read Dawkins in a while, but I don't make appeals to authority, so no matter. I use what I take to be his metaphors to make my points. If he defines fitness as something other than survivability, he is wrong about that. But his game theory examples stand on their own feet.

As the environment changes, so do species as they adapt. The fittest aren’t just the ones that survive, but the ones that adapt best to the environment.

Adaptation is a trait. Some adaptation is genetic, some is mimetic. But mimetic adaptation is really epigenetic. Necessity is the mother of invention only because our genes enable us to form memes. The fittest are the ones that survive, because that's what the word means in Darwin's lexicon.

I don’t see how such a game theoretic explanation of natural selection or of the emergence of morality would have scientific authority.

More inferences from the absence of evidence and arrogation of the burden of proof. You are free not to believe things that have not been proved to your satisfaction. They may nevertheless be true. I'd be interested in the scientific authority behind your metaphysics.

The real problem with game theory, in my view, is the "Texas Sharpshooter" problem - the claim that you were aiming at whatever you hit. The issue arises often in medical research. A clinical trial fails, and the promoter "notices" that if the trial had been limited to a particular subset of patients, it would have succeeded, so the drug should be approved for that subset. The FDA's statisticians recognize that selecting categories that way is bogus. In the same way, one can argue that any persistent strategy must be plus-sum by some calculus, because, with the right pay-offs, it will be.

Let's go back to the Taliban and assume that the highest pay-off in Afghan society is for a man to be sure that his wife's (or wives'!) children are his offspring. Almost any constraint on female behavior becomes "moral" if the highest possible pay-off is elimination the "papa's maybe" from the old line. I submit that this game-theoretical analysis explains - but does not justify - the oppression of women in that culture. And you say what? That there's not enough scientific authority to make the claim? I'm just saying that our morality differs from theirs only in how we rate the pay-offs.

If a game theoretic explanation of morality is philosophical rather than scientific, so be it.

I'm pretty sure I took a course in college called "Philosophy of Science." It's a blur, now., like the line between your categories.

I would happily include competition between strategies for plus-sum outcomes as a factor in the natural emergence of morality.

I don’t think that factor suffices to account for all forms of morality, though. Certainly, it doesn’t account for duty-based kinds.

Of course it does. Absent a sense of duty among its members, a society dies. We're watching this play out right now in the Southern US, where defecting cowards are refusing to recognize their duty to get vaccinated. Those cowards and, more important to our discussion, people who catch a variant that emerges from the cowards' failure to get vaccinated, will die precisely because the cowards are not doing their duty. So, yes, the plus-sum benefits of cooperation, explained by game theory, account for altruism. Duty is game-theoretical coordination at its finest.

You’re talking about utilitarianism and the interest in maximizing happiness.

Not that I'm aware of. I thought I was talking about survival. But be that as it may, you are merely positing a disagreement as to payoffs between yourself and people (who may or may not exist) with whom you claim to disagree.

That’s an interesting choice of words when you say the abstraction doesn’t trivialize. The question I’m raising is whether an abstraction can be so overstretched as to be unfalsifiable and thus itself a triviality.

OK, then the answer is "I don't know, but applying game theory to morality is not such a case." Why would the mere possibility that some abstraction can be overdone prove anything about any particular abstraction? More important, abstraction might better be understood as deconstruction. In bowling, the pins are reality, and the spots on the lane are the metaphor. In life, the plus-sum opportunity needing coordination is the reality, and morality is the metaphor, one that, like all metaphors, must map or fail. (I way prefer the binary test to your fuzzy distance/strength version.)

What predictions does game theory make in the domain of morality?

Again, you're just screwing with the burden of proof. How would you test such a prediction? Can you show where morality is not explainable as coordination to a plus-sum end? Isn't Leviathan just a Great Coordinator? Isn't God a non-governmental Leviathan?

If all you’re saying is that morality is a matter of trying out different ways to live together while avoiding absolute chaos, and while having no prediction about how these strategies coalesce into a final solution, it sounds trivial to me.

What, then does your philosophy seek to do that is any different? Are you not constrained by the need for a morality that enables us to live together while avoiding total chaos? That just leaves details to be worked out. Game theory doesn't predict outcomes, because game theory needs inputs, and game theory is completely agnostic on what those inputs will be. If a society values liberty, a plus-sum outcome is tolerant. If a society values bloodlines, then the society locks up its daughters. Those are "predictions" that explain but don't predict, if there can be such a thing.

If you’re saying that the ultimate goal of moralists is to reach plus-sum outcomes, I hold out duty-based conceptions of morality as counterexamples.

I am saying that, and I have tried to show how that counterexample is in fact an example. What else have you got?

Or if what you’re saying is that the natural basis of morality (what it is) makes nonsense of the myths and delusions that occupy the mainstream discourse about morality, I’d agree. But that’s a consequence of naturalistic philosophy in general.

No, not "nonsense." METAPHOR.A very valuable metaphor, because using coordinated metaphors (myths) to persuade is a winning strategy in the plus-sum game of life.