I always try my best to recognize babies and young children as very intelligent and internally thorough and complete.
I've found that as I've gotten older, my internal world and emotions and what I want to say really hasn't changed. The biggest thing that's changed is that I'm more articulate, able to better say what I need or how I'm feeling. Meanwhile, when I was young, I lacked the vocabulary or social know-how to articulate what I was feeling, and that adults would just about never sit down and try to work with me to figure out what I'm feeling, and they'd try to invalidate how I'm feeling because they're better at using words, or just generally don't take me very seriously.
When I work with kids, especially ones that can't speak, I've found a little bit of respect and empathy goes a very long way. They almost always want to communicate something to me and express autonomy. A toddler whose parents insisted was very ill-behaved was very, very nice to me because I recognized that what they wanted was to handle their food on their own, go to the bathroom without being escorted, stuff like that.
I get that you're not talking about toddlers or young children, and I recognize that functionally they're essentially on a permanent escort mission and can't do anything on their own, and that's what I believe you mean by "object". I find that line of thinking to be, I dunno, maybe a bit disrespectful? Like, certainly I can see why it's "correct" from some definitions, but it's not something that I'd let enter my heart. To me, babies have deeply complicated and involved inner worlds. They've spent their entire life in this strange, alien world with massive people and brand new, unpleasant sensations. They can't do anything on their own, but they think, and they want to communicate, and they're so overjoyed when they can do something and get recognition from it.
Then the optimal thing to do is to just coordinate with the other person and have one person pull the lever and one person not pull the lever. The point of the prisoner's dillema is that it's always "better" to "betray" the other person, but it's going to be worse for everyone if everyone acts in a self interested manner.