"Philosophers have been very interested in such unstable attempts at cooperation which eventually break down and leave all participants worse off than they might otherwise be. (They've been baptized Prisoner's Dilemma situations.) What's of perennial fascination is that the breakdown is caused not by participants' failing to reason correctly about what would be in their self-interest, but rather precisely by their correct reasoning about the situation. Reasoning well can leave one less well off than one might otherwise have been. And such a situation attracts philosophers like moths to a flame." , Alexander George, in an answer to an ethical question about traffic, on AskPhilosophers.com

TAGS: philosophy, ethics