ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the idea behind meta-ranking and asks why Amartya Sen relates meta-ranking to morality. It looks at a field of application of meta-ranking and offers an account of the moral psychology of a person who makes and keeps commitments and of a person who makes but breaks commitments, and parallels between such people and the moral characters that Aristotle depicts in his ethics are drawn. The chapter explores Sen’s concept of personhood or identity and asks where personhood is to be located amidst the multiple rankings and meta-rankings which an agent is able to construct. Sen applies the apparatus of moral meta-ranking to the possibility of overcoming the social inoptimality associated with the prisoners’ dilemma. The fillip which meta-ranking provides to people’s reasoning comes from opening up two possibilities, both of which can overcome the social inoptimality of non-cooperative conduct.
