Homines morales—A Game-Theoretic Analysis of the Evolutionary Fitness of Moral Philosophies

Honors Interdisciplinary Thesis in Philosophy and Economics, Northeastern University

Advised by Dr. Rory Smead, Philosophy and Dr. Robert Triest, Economics

This paper formalizes John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism, Immanuel Kant’s deontology, and Adam Smith’s sympathy-based ethics as transformations of material payoff functions in rational choice theory, and subjects them to evolutionary game-theoretic replicator dynamics against the homo economicus to test their respective evolutionary fitness and intergenerational stability. Building on Alger (2013), which first formalized Kantian morality against the homo economicus, this work employs a Python simulation to determine long-run dominant or stable moral strategies in all configurations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Hawk-Dove Game.