Sublime

that people—or, if you like, automata, algorithms—can and do act in situations that are not well defined.

I can summarize a thousand years of moral philosophy in a few sentences: pre–Hobbes and Bentham, human nature was viewed as a battle between our desire to be good and our temptations to behave badly, and the gist of moral philosophy and religious faith was that we should treat each other as we want to be treated ourselves—the golden rule—and we

Conventional economics asks how agents’ behaviors (actions, strategies, forecasts) would be upheld by—would be consistent with—the aggregate patterns these cause. It asks, in other words, what patterns would call for no changes in microbehavior, and would therefore be in stasis or equilibrium.

People are not monads. A real, live human self is always already partial to certain, select others. Morality needs to take this essential fact about human selfhood into account rather than pretend to override it.