While an alien (or a human) could in principle object to literally any rule (No Universally Compelling Arguments), I think “players who contribute nothing get nothing” is very reasonable on purely pragmatic grounds, because those players have nothing to bargain with. They are effectively non-players.
If you give free resources to “players” who contribute nothing, then what stops me from demanding additional shares for my pet rock, my dead grandparents, and my imaginary friends? The chaa division of resources shouldn’t change based on whether I claim to be 1 person or a conglomerate of 37 trillion cells that each want a share of the pie, if the real-world actions being taken are the same under both abstractions.
Also, I think you may be confusing desiderata with assumptions. “Players who contribute nothing get nothing” was taken as a goal that the rules tried to achieve, and so it makes sense (in principle) to argue about whether that’s a good goal. Stuff like “players have utility functions” is not a goal; it’s more like a description of what problem is being solved. You could argue about how well that abstraction represents various real scenarios, but it’s not really a values statement.
While an alien (or a human) could in principle object to literally any rule (No Universally Compelling Arguments), I think “players who contribute nothing get nothing” is very reasonable on purely pragmatic grounds, because those players have nothing to bargain with. They are effectively non-players.
If you give free resources to “players” who contribute nothing, then what stops me from demanding additional shares for my pet rock, my dead grandparents, and my imaginary friends? The chaa division of resources shouldn’t change based on whether I claim to be 1 person or a conglomerate of 37 trillion cells that each want a share of the pie, if the real-world actions being taken are the same under both abstractions.
Also, I think you may be confusing desiderata with assumptions. “Players who contribute nothing get nothing” was taken as a goal that the rules tried to achieve, and so it makes sense (in principle) to argue about whether that’s a good goal. Stuff like “players have utility functions” is not a goal; it’s more like a description of what problem is being solved. You could argue about how well that abstraction represents various real scenarios, but it’s not really a values statement.