The Prisoner's Dilemma and Morality

Consider the following description of the "Prisoner's Dilemma", taken from Wikipedia:

Two suspects, A and B, are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal: if one testifies for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both stay silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a two-year sentence. Each prisoner must make the choice of whether to betray the other or to remain silent. However, neither prisoner knows for sure what choice the other prisoner will make. So this dilemma poses the question: How should the prisoners act?

The dilemma arises when one assumes that both prisoners only care about minimizing their own jail terms. Each prisoner has two options: to cooperate with his accomplice and stay quiet, or to defect from their implied pact and betray his accomplice in return for a lighter sentence. The outcome of each choice depends on the choice of the accomplice, but each prisoner must choose without knowing what his accomplice has chosen to do.

Let's assume the protagonist prisoner is working out his best move. If his partner stays quiet, his best move is to betray as he then walks free instead of receiving the minor sentence. If his partner betrays, his best move is still to betray, as by doing it he receives a relatively lesser sentence than staying silent. At the same time, the other prisoner's thinking would also have arrived at the same conclusion and would therefore also betray.

If reasoned from the perspective of the optimal outcome for the group (of two prisoners), the correct choice would be for both prisoners to cooperate with each other, as this would reduce the total jail time served by the group to one year total. Any other decision would be worse for the two prisoners considered together. When the prisoners both betray each other, each prisoner achieves a worse outcome than if they had cooperated.

There is a myth in the modern secular Western World that it is in the best interest of all people to be moral not because G-d commands us to be moral but because it is logical to be moral. In order to debunk this myth, let us examine the Prisoner's Dilemma: It is demonstrated above by pure logic that the rational choice for both prisoners to make is to betray each other, since betrayal always wins less jail time than silence, regardless of what the other prisoner does. Yet, if it were known to both prisoners that they were both innocent, then the moral choice would certainly be for both of the prisoners to remain silent. Therefore, it is not always logical to be moral, even if everyone would be better off if everyone were moral than if everyone were immoral! The truth of the matter is that the only reason for us to be moral is because G-d commands us to be moral.