Angels and Devils on Our Shoulders : Modeling Moral Agency

This article presents a general framework for modeling moral agency explicitly. The framework can be incorporated into any non-cooperative game. It allows players to be morally autonomous, i.e., players in the framework are modeled as having the ability to simultaneously choose not just their action strategies but also their moral principles. We demonstrate the framework by developing an example where agents can choose whether to empathize or not while playing a one-shot simultaneous prisoner’s dilemma. We find that if agents are given the agency to choose whether to empathize or not, the resulting symmetric Nash equilibrium involves a mixed strategy such that players are more likely to cooperate if cooperating results in a larger benefit to the other player and less likely to cooperate if cooperating imposes a larger cost on themselves. Based on our findings as well as other theoretical and empirical justifications, we present several compelling reasons to recommend a broader adoption of our framework