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Suicide as an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy

  • ️Mon Jan 01 2001

Abstract

Ethics has traditionally been the domain of philosophers, pursuing their investigations a priori, since social experimentation is not an option. After Axelrod’s work, artificial life (ALife) methods have been applied to social simulation. Here we use an ALife simulation to pursue experiments with ethics. We use a utilitarian model for assessing what is ethical, as it offers a computationally clear means of measuring ethical value, based on the utility of outcomes. We investigate the particular action of altruistic suicide fostering the survival of others, demonstrating that suicide can be an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash University, VIC, 3800, Australia

    Steven Mascaro, Kevin B. Korb & Ann E. Nicholson

Authors

  1. Steven Mascaro

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  2. Kevin B. Korb

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  3. Ann E. Nicholson

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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Philosophy and Science Institute of Computer Science, Silesian University, 74601, Opava, Czech Republic

    Jozef Kelemen  & Petr Sosík  & 

© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Mascaro, S., Korb, K.B., Nicholson, A.E. (2001). Suicide as an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy. In: Kelemen, J., Sosík, P. (eds) Advances in Artificial Life. ECAL 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2159. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44811-X_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44811-X_12

  • Published: 30 August 2001

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42567-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44811-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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