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Mathematical game theory – developed starting from the publication of The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern – aims to outline an ideal model of behaviour of rational agents involved in some interaction with other rational agents. For this reason, game theory has immediately attracted the attention of philosophers dealing with practical rationality and, since the fifties, has been applied to the analysis of several issues concerning ethics and philosophy of politics. Here we will focus on one of the most interesting applications of game theory to ethical-political inquiry, i.e., with the game theoretic analysis of some problems related to the evolution of moral norms. Firstly, we will provide a short outline of the development of game theory, which has lead to the formulation of a plurality of different game theories. It will be shown that such theories can be classified in two main groups: rationalistic game theories –in two different versions: classical and epistemic – and evolutionary game theories. Moreover, some basic elements of classical game theory will be introduced and the key ideas of epistemic and evolutionary game theories will be illustrated. Afterwards, the main approaches developed within the ethical-political applications of game theory will be shortly described. Finally, some results obtained in the last twenty years by the researchers who have analysed the evolution of moral norms by the conceptual tools of evolutionary and epistemic game theories, will be examined.

Should philosophers speak about Aids? In this contribution, which is intended to open a forum for the readers of 'Etica e politica', it is argued that not only philosophers but all the responsible members of community have the duty to discuss the procedures which rules the funding of Aids research. The underlying idea is that scientific progress in this field is better guaranteed by supplying an adequate support to competing seriously proposed programmes of research.

AbstractThe basic problem of a theory of truth approximation is defining when a theory is "close to the truth" about some relevant domain. Existing accounts of truthlikeness or verisimilitude address this problem, but are usually limited to the problem of approaching a "deterministic" truth by means of deterministic theories. A general theory of truth approximation, however, should arguably cover also cases where either the relevant theories, or "the truth", or both, are "probabilistic" in nature. As a step forward in this direction, we first present a general characterization of both deterministic and probabilistic truth approximation; then, we introduce a new account of verisimilitude which provides a simple formal framework to deal with such issue in a unified way. The connections of our account with some other proposals in the literature are also briefly discussed.

The provision of public goods is an important problem in economics and the social sciences. It is often claimed that this problem has the structure of the well-known Prisoner's Dilemma so that rational and self-interested individuals would not be able to provide any public good by spontaneous cooperation. In this paper, we argue that this pessimistic view of the possibility spontaneous cooperation is largely unjustified, since the game theoretic analysis of public goods shows how their voluntary provision is indeed feasible in a number of circumstances. We conclude by considering the implications of the game theoretic approach to the problem of public goods for political philosophy and, in particular, for the possibility of "ordered anarchy" as defended in the works of Anthony de Jasay.