We are not non-consequentialist, we are meta-consequentialist.
That is we are playing an imperfect, impartial information game. Not everyone has the same level of finiteness in their analysis of outcomes, so we resort to proxy heuristics. In network theory, the level of reputation or memory-depth layer or Theory-of-mind-of-mind-of-mind becomes the scope over which we find ourselves having conscience rules like never kill-- because we lived over centuries to be in hierarchies, and we trust authority, or there is a bunch of less valuable and more valuable people but we can use comparative advantage, and indirectly benefit better instead of wasting energy trying to kill each other the moment someone becomes one unit of less worthiness in a strict utilitarian sense for whatever metric. There is intra-group, inter-group and inter-individual dynamics at play that all unify to codify such rules and it has mainly to do with not defecting, or situationally defecting in an adaptive social sense. That said we do so well, that we consume all the resources and more intelligent people, especially psychopaths that bypass this empathy gradient of closeness can do even better because the degree or extent to which you depend on the extrinsic value of a group or individual is inversely proportional to the extent of innate extrinsic value you possess-- that is if you can do everything, you do not need others at all, especially if the distribution of energy of all tasks can be done by a set of technologies or tools you invented. Although humans have finite time and specializations.
There is no such thing as a non-consequentialist rule, it is merely an approximative meta-heuristic that was abstracted away to work better than usual like a phobia from falling from heights. Or deciding the voting age was 18 even when a precocious genius at 12 would have a greater capacity of informational awareness to make better judgements than a low-intelligence 25 year old.
Deception games play an important role in keeping the social entropy low, in terms of strategic ambiguity. This is simply another second-order depth-of-mind rule. It's like tit for tat works well, but it stops working well when white collar crime, or abstracted slow-slavery incrementalism policies are implemented to steal your time/wealth -- you can see all these moral rules are something that is done at the first-order of observable effects-- feeling more cognitive pain for immediate violence than being forced to submit as a slave or being misled into some series of decisions under the guise of an illusion by a more complex and abled schemer. That said there is also descendence-mechanics, where you are just playing against yourself if you inherit that part of the set of social strategies you play against others; like in China, everyone is just lowering their standard of living through, defection-maximizing heuristics "cheating is winning" mentality. The reason we impose variable punishments is the degree of culpability varies with the aptitude of the person to make cognitive judgements, and again we boiled it down to meta-heuristics that are implemented inside our cognition, as most 30 year olds are more longer-term oriented than 6 year-olds at the 99.99 percentile of effect, especially considering we lived in villages and whatnot. If by happenstance everyone was a 6 year old genius tomorrow, we would see evolutionary pressures for allele work overnight and our complex-set of moral judgement rules inoculated from repeated play against ourselves and others would be re-shaped. There is no such thing as a consequentialist-free judgement; like you can claim we say an action is wrong in itself, but it is wrong because historically it led to bad consequences, for the group or the individual, because of the nature of the norm itself and not the action in particular, and the sequences of violative acts is as you say a second-hand form of signalling. Just like the correspondence to proportionality of harm or benefit, free-loading or negligence -- forgiveness and discounted emotions are there because humans cannot infinitely waste their energy on warring eachother or being bothered, and we are just not good at small-scale observations or simple-deception in a perceived high-trust environment due to the regularization schema inside our brains.
Realistically, you can never say, someone is useless, someone has less worth, or any set of negation of being statements without retribution-- hence the negative feelings from ostracization, being put down or whatever. The more complex dynamics with envy, jealousy, resentment, numerical superiority of inferior people are right up the ally with moral judgements. Everything at the end is simply the preservation of the self vs the group and the balancing of reciprocal benefits and harms, with the accorded informational processing capability of the former vs the latter. A higher level of informational processing tends to collective utilitarianism or better, as you stop needing to rely on empathy or conscience to make decisions that will be good for yourself, and the group, unitarily. The ability level of the group in terms of competences, cognitive and physical, the distribution of them determine the appropriate level of heuristics to use. Force is always utilized against lower IQ because that is all they know, deception at slightly higher IQ, schemes at higher IQ, and then I suppose there is cooperation at even higher IQ due to the relativizing nature of systemization, realizing that there is a need for group-level chaos occurring at an individual level to enhance the capabilities of the self within a group.
If I got it right, you said that moral law is not arbitrary, but a...heuristic relic. I.e. incest is bad for my clan fitness, I develop a despise for my kin incest, then a general despise for incest develop for side-taking - even for out-group incest (Haidt's vignette).
Then, this does not refute Kurzman's argument, that is morals are heuristics for side-taking: you simply add that those morals are not arbitrary but relics (so sometimes non-consequentials) of older, useful heuristics.
"Morality Police" is more accurately "Immorality Police', since it is immorality they are policing. For example in modern western societies it's a crime to steal from charities, but not to refrain from donating to charities. As for the harmful consequences issue; it isn't always necessary to have a clear negative outcome for every instance of an act, because it may be a pattern of behavior that is being discouraged that can be reasonably expected to lead to negative outcomes. Such as incest, underage sex, or public drunkenness. This does mean that such prohibitions should have carefully nuanced punishments; we shouldn't impose the same punishment on two 15 year-olds having sex as on a 30 year-old having sex with a 6 year-old.
Thanks for an article discussing a rather complex subject like morality.
I believe pushing someone off a bridge in front of an oncoming train is murder or attempted murder.
There is a difference between believing in morality and supporting a morality law or morality police. For one's conscience, individuals should follow their moral principles...they should not be dictated by authority. In general, it is immoral under the law to physically harm someone, except in self-defense, abscond with property, or destroy property.
I would add, as Nietzsche noted, questioning one’s morals is key to overcoming. Maybe those who believe violence is only justified in self defense are just weak. Maybe they their instinct is cowardliness? But yes when in doubt go with your gut.
I like your hypothesis. It would seem Haidt's example of communes being more successful if restrictions on alcohol, dancing, or similar are involved suggests he would generally agree too.
A quote from your post shared on Arnold Kling's substack makes it sound like you think the moral choice has no benefit beyond choosing sides. I doubt you mean that but it seems important to consider what else moral rules provide.
I’ll let Jon chime in on whether he agrees with me since I of course don’t want to speak for him.
In terms of the quote, my claim is that morality is an open system. A more precise way to put it is that moral rules are equilibria and there are many many possible equilibria. So the claim is that they are arbitrary in the sense that the system is open and many contents are possible. This results in odd rules. At the same time, there are strong equilibrium selection processes at work, which lead to similar norms across time and culture. But I certainly don’t think that moral choice has no benefit beyond choosing sides. My position is that moral judgment evolved for choosing sides. But there are other benefits, as a proximate matter, for condemnation. I will be posting a series on coordination addressing these issues on The Living Fossils in the weeks to come. Thanks for the comment!
The real begin of history of Morality at my point of view is biological.
But in the end everything resumes at DNA replication.
Is a indirect form of replication when you joins with people who are genetically similar and give then advantages. The mirror neurons of your brain make internalize and feel some of pain that people similar to you.
But nowadays some aspects of Morality is also a mechanism of subjugation of some classes and some groups of people, slowing trying to extinct then perhaps.
I think that modern Morality is little to much dogmatic because of the religious fundations, people should stop of thinking about what is moral and more about how to make a more efficient society, and prolong human existence as long as possible, the true morality should be a Existential Maxima.
"I think that modern Morality is little to much dogmatic because of the religious fundations, people should stop of thinking about what is moral and more about how to make a more efficient society,..."
To some extent, that is correct, but an immoral, efficient society would be hell on earth.
We are not non-consequentialist, we are meta-consequentialist.
That is we are playing an imperfect, impartial information game. Not everyone has the same level of finiteness in their analysis of outcomes, so we resort to proxy heuristics. In network theory, the level of reputation or memory-depth layer or Theory-of-mind-of-mind-of-mind becomes the scope over which we find ourselves having conscience rules like never kill-- because we lived over centuries to be in hierarchies, and we trust authority, or there is a bunch of less valuable and more valuable people but we can use comparative advantage, and indirectly benefit better instead of wasting energy trying to kill each other the moment someone becomes one unit of less worthiness in a strict utilitarian sense for whatever metric. There is intra-group, inter-group and inter-individual dynamics at play that all unify to codify such rules and it has mainly to do with not defecting, or situationally defecting in an adaptive social sense. That said we do so well, that we consume all the resources and more intelligent people, especially psychopaths that bypass this empathy gradient of closeness can do even better because the degree or extent to which you depend on the extrinsic value of a group or individual is inversely proportional to the extent of innate extrinsic value you possess-- that is if you can do everything, you do not need others at all, especially if the distribution of energy of all tasks can be done by a set of technologies or tools you invented. Although humans have finite time and specializations.
There is no such thing as a non-consequentialist rule, it is merely an approximative meta-heuristic that was abstracted away to work better than usual like a phobia from falling from heights. Or deciding the voting age was 18 even when a precocious genius at 12 would have a greater capacity of informational awareness to make better judgements than a low-intelligence 25 year old.
Deception games play an important role in keeping the social entropy low, in terms of strategic ambiguity. This is simply another second-order depth-of-mind rule. It's like tit for tat works well, but it stops working well when white collar crime, or abstracted slow-slavery incrementalism policies are implemented to steal your time/wealth -- you can see all these moral rules are something that is done at the first-order of observable effects-- feeling more cognitive pain for immediate violence than being forced to submit as a slave or being misled into some series of decisions under the guise of an illusion by a more complex and abled schemer. That said there is also descendence-mechanics, where you are just playing against yourself if you inherit that part of the set of social strategies you play against others; like in China, everyone is just lowering their standard of living through, defection-maximizing heuristics "cheating is winning" mentality. The reason we impose variable punishments is the degree of culpability varies with the aptitude of the person to make cognitive judgements, and again we boiled it down to meta-heuristics that are implemented inside our cognition, as most 30 year olds are more longer-term oriented than 6 year-olds at the 99.99 percentile of effect, especially considering we lived in villages and whatnot. If by happenstance everyone was a 6 year old genius tomorrow, we would see evolutionary pressures for allele work overnight and our complex-set of moral judgement rules inoculated from repeated play against ourselves and others would be re-shaped. There is no such thing as a consequentialist-free judgement; like you can claim we say an action is wrong in itself, but it is wrong because historically it led to bad consequences, for the group or the individual, because of the nature of the norm itself and not the action in particular, and the sequences of violative acts is as you say a second-hand form of signalling. Just like the correspondence to proportionality of harm or benefit, free-loading or negligence -- forgiveness and discounted emotions are there because humans cannot infinitely waste their energy on warring eachother or being bothered, and we are just not good at small-scale observations or simple-deception in a perceived high-trust environment due to the regularization schema inside our brains.
Realistically, you can never say, someone is useless, someone has less worth, or any set of negation of being statements without retribution-- hence the negative feelings from ostracization, being put down or whatever. The more complex dynamics with envy, jealousy, resentment, numerical superiority of inferior people are right up the ally with moral judgements. Everything at the end is simply the preservation of the self vs the group and the balancing of reciprocal benefits and harms, with the accorded informational processing capability of the former vs the latter. A higher level of informational processing tends to collective utilitarianism or better, as you stop needing to rely on empathy or conscience to make decisions that will be good for yourself, and the group, unitarily. The ability level of the group in terms of competences, cognitive and physical, the distribution of them determine the appropriate level of heuristics to use. Force is always utilized against lower IQ because that is all they know, deception at slightly higher IQ, schemes at higher IQ, and then I suppose there is cooperation at even higher IQ due to the relativizing nature of systemization, realizing that there is a need for group-level chaos occurring at an individual level to enhance the capabilities of the self within a group.
Good evening.
I did not get your point.
If I got it right, you said that moral law is not arbitrary, but a...heuristic relic. I.e. incest is bad for my clan fitness, I develop a despise for my kin incest, then a general despise for incest develop for side-taking - even for out-group incest (Haidt's vignette).
Then, this does not refute Kurzman's argument, that is morals are heuristics for side-taking: you simply add that those morals are not arbitrary but relics (so sometimes non-consequentials) of older, useful heuristics.
"Morality Police" is more accurately "Immorality Police', since it is immorality they are policing. For example in modern western societies it's a crime to steal from charities, but not to refrain from donating to charities. As for the harmful consequences issue; it isn't always necessary to have a clear negative outcome for every instance of an act, because it may be a pattern of behavior that is being discouraged that can be reasonably expected to lead to negative outcomes. Such as incest, underage sex, or public drunkenness. This does mean that such prohibitions should have carefully nuanced punishments; we shouldn't impose the same punishment on two 15 year-olds having sex as on a 30 year-old having sex with a 6 year-old.
LGBTQ & online pornography like hard drugs should be technically illegal due to the harm they cause on society.
Thanks for an article discussing a rather complex subject like morality.
I believe pushing someone off a bridge in front of an oncoming train is murder or attempted murder.
There is a difference between believing in morality and supporting a morality law or morality police. For one's conscience, individuals should follow their moral principles...they should not be dictated by authority. In general, it is immoral under the law to physically harm someone, except in self-defense, abscond with property, or destroy property.
Social science is an oxymoron.
I would add, as Nietzsche noted, questioning one’s morals is key to overcoming. Maybe those who believe violence is only justified in self defense are just weak. Maybe they their instinct is cowardliness? But yes when in doubt go with your gut.
I like your hypothesis. It would seem Haidt's example of communes being more successful if restrictions on alcohol, dancing, or similar are involved suggests he would generally agree too.
A quote from your post shared on Arnold Kling's substack makes it sound like you think the moral choice has no benefit beyond choosing sides. I doubt you mean that but it seems important to consider what else moral rules provide.
I’ll let Jon chime in on whether he agrees with me since I of course don’t want to speak for him.
In terms of the quote, my claim is that morality is an open system. A more precise way to put it is that moral rules are equilibria and there are many many possible equilibria. So the claim is that they are arbitrary in the sense that the system is open and many contents are possible. This results in odd rules. At the same time, there are strong equilibrium selection processes at work, which lead to similar norms across time and culture. But I certainly don’t think that moral choice has no benefit beyond choosing sides. My position is that moral judgment evolved for choosing sides. But there are other benefits, as a proximate matter, for condemnation. I will be posting a series on coordination addressing these issues on The Living Fossils in the weeks to come. Thanks for the comment!
The real begin of history of Morality at my point of view is biological.
But in the end everything resumes at DNA replication.
Is a indirect form of replication when you joins with people who are genetically similar and give then advantages. The mirror neurons of your brain make internalize and feel some of pain that people similar to you.
But nowadays some aspects of Morality is also a mechanism of subjugation of some classes and some groups of people, slowing trying to extinct then perhaps.
I think that modern Morality is little to much dogmatic because of the religious fundations, people should stop of thinking about what is moral and more about how to make a more efficient society, and prolong human existence as long as possible, the true morality should be a Existential Maxima.
"I think that modern Morality is little to much dogmatic because of the religious fundations, people should stop of thinking about what is moral and more about how to make a more efficient society,..."
To some extent, that is correct, but an immoral, efficient society would be hell on earth.
Research Ed Dutton’s “Spiteful Mutant Theory”. Really explains biological foundations of leftist morality.