The Selfish Gene remains one of my favorite books of all time and although published in 1976 it remains a compelling and insightful introduction to the brute mechanics of natural selection. Richard Dawkins later acknowledged that his book's title may give a misleading impression of its thesis, erroneously ascribing conscious motivations or agentic properties to non-sentient strands of DNA. The core argument is dreadfully simple: genes (as opposed to organisms or species) are the primary unit of natural selection, and if you leave the primordial soup brewing for a while, the only genes that can remain are the ones with a higher proclivity towards replication than their neighbors. "Selfish" genes therefore are not cunning strategists or followers of some manifest destiny, but rather simply the accidental consequence of natural selection favoring their propagation. Nothing more.
Dawkins is responsible for coining the word 'meme' in the book to describe how the same principles behind gene replication can apply to ideas replicating. I thought about this when I read WoodFromEden's post about the origin of patriarchy.[1] Their explanation for why male dominance persisted historically for so long is elegantly tidy:
Men make war. Or rather, groups of men make war. The groups that were good at making war remained. The groups that were less good at making war perished. That way, human history is a history of successful male military cooperation. Groups with weak male bonding were defeated by groups where men cooperated better.
Here too, there is no dirigible trajectory mapped out ahead of time. Cultural values which valorize physical male violence and facilitate its coordination at scale will become the dominant paradigm purely as a result of the circumstances' ruthless logic. Any deviation from this set of values would lead your tribe towards extinction, which accidentally also meant your bards wouldn't be around to write songs and poems extolling the virtues of sex equality. At least not until there have been an extensive change in circumstance.
This "security dilemma" may have been borne out of petty squabbles over hunting grounds in the Serengeti but its ramifications persisted throughout history. Military service today may be seen as a low-status and distasteful profession — quite literally grunt work — but it used to be venerated deeply as a path to honor and a cornerstone of civic duty. This philosophy is epitomized by the recurring and central portrayal of military men in stories from a long time ago (Homeric heroes of ancient Greece, Genghis Khan, Jedi knights, etc.), their deeds forming the backbone of societal narratives and cultural mythologies.
The historian Bret Deveraux analyzed the grand strategy video game Europa Universalis 4 to illustrate the war-hungry reality of the late medieval period:
Military power requires revenue and manpower (along with staying technologically competitive) and both come from the same source: the land. While a player can develop existing provinces, taking land in war is far cheaper and faster. The game represents this through both developing old land and seizing new land requiring similar resources [but compared to incorporating newly conquered land, development is about 4x as expensive while providing only marginal improvements]. That may seem like the developer has placed their thumb a bit unfairly on the scale, but, as Azar Gat notes in War in Human Civilization (2006) for pre-industrial societies that is a historically correct thumb on the scale. Until the industrial revolution, nearly all of the energy used in production came out of agriculture one way or another; improves in irrigation, tax collection and farming methods might improve yields, but never nearly so much as adding more land. Consequently, as Gat puts it, returns to capital investment (hitting the development button) were always wildly inferior to returns to successful warfare that resulted in conquest.
For most of history, living the good life meant killing people and taking their shit. The men of martial prowess — those exceptionally good at killing people and taking their shit — were appropriately exalted and deified for the base survival and material gain they were able to provide to their community. Fundamental to this community's well-being is a male's ability to commit acts of horrific physical violence in his individual capacity and to coordinate others to do the same (this too with violence if necessary). Any folklore or morality code which facilitated this core mission will replicate, spread, and become enshrined as humanity's unquestioned zeitgeist. Not because it's the "right" thing to do, but solely because no pacifist egalitarian civilization could have possibly survived to say otherwise.
I've written before about slavery, along a similar vein of Devereaux-inspired historical analysis. Although subject nowadays to some quixotic revisionism about why it existed, there is nothing at all remarkable about slavery's near-universal historical pervasiveness. The only justification anyone ever needed to press another into bondage is the universal desire to have someone else do all the work. Any mythology pasted on top (including institutionalized racism) was always just set dressing. When industrialization made slavery increasingly politically and economically untenable, the moral and legal consensus conveniently caught up.
Consider the chasm with how much material circumstances changed. Promises of milk and honey used to serve as the bounty of divine compacts, but today I can performatively buy entire vats of the stuff and barely notice the financial hit. Cheap and abundant electricity is part of the reason I have trivial access to luxuries ancient royalty could only dream about. Buckminster Fuller coined the term energy slave as a way to contextualize energy consumption by calculating the equivalent kilowatt-hours a healthy human could provide through labor. It's a crude equivalence for sure but with some basic assumptions [2] we can calculate the average American relies on the "labor" of about 150 energy slaves. Well what do you know, that happens to be around how many slaves George Washington owned.[3]
The most fascinating book I've never read is The Secret Of Our Success which essentially argues humans succeeded because we're uniquely adept at making shit up — social conventions, cultural norms, religious mythology, etc. — which happens to be directionally useful.
One of the reasons stone tool technology languished for millions of years is likely a result of the brute limitations of a then-human's cognitive capacity. It took about 3 million years of evolution for the human brain to triple in size; a pace too glacial to contemplate but still remarkably fast for natural selection. By contrast, the pace of cultural memetic evolution is not constrained by the corporeal cycle of birth and death. Once the human brain got swole enough, the jet fuel that really powered the next few thousand years of technological advancement was almost entirely a result of cultural advancement. Our ability to create viral memes, in other words.
I'm an atheist who believes religion is a fiction, but I happily recognize it as a materially useful fiction. The Dunbar limit normally would make us dreadfully wary of any interactions with Person No. 151, a hurdle which would have otherwise foreclosed the already impossibly long alloy trade routes necessary to start the bronze age. BUT if you make some shit up about how Person No. 151 is actually totally cool to trade with because they're of the same religion or K-pop fandom or whatever, the cultural fiction is soothing enough for your flighty lizardbrain to let its guard down. Keep this up long enough and maybe pencils can exist.
Our mind's rational capacity to observe patterns, question assumptions, and test hypotheses provides us with an envious advantage in mastering the physical world with everything from tracking game to optimizing steam turbines. But paradoxically as Gurwinder notes in his highly-recommended essay Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things, the very same intelligence can become an effective source of delusion:
As a case in point, human intelligence evolved less as a tool for pursuing objective truth than as a tool for pursuing personal well-being, tribal belonging, social status, and sex, and this often required the adoption of what I call "Fashionably Irrational Beliefs" (FIBs), which the brain has come to excel at. Since we're a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being.
Unlike George Washington, I don't support slavery (please clap). But also unlike Washington, I conveniently happen to benefit from a dense tapestry of infrastructure and tendinous globe-spanning supply chains affording me near-immediate satisfaction of my most trivial of whims. Based on the evident historical record, without the environmentally deleterious bounty fossil fuels facilitated, most of us would be conjuring up creatively compelling excuses for why forcing your neighbor to work for free is the Moral thing to do. Gurwinder cites exactly such an example with the 19th century physician Samuel A. Cartwright:
A strong believer in slavery, he used his learning to avoid the clear and simple realization that slaves who tried to escape didn't want to be slaves, and instead diagnosed them as suffering from a mental disorder he called drapetomania, which could be remedied by "whipping the devil" out of them. It's an explanation so idiotic only an intellectual could think of it.
The cynical ramifications of my argument might be impossible to avoid completely. Perhaps acknowledging how much our technological milieu guides our moral spirit could beckon us to intensify our agentic nature. To the extent the field of evolutionary psychology can be deployed to shed light on past and present mysteries, perhaps it can shed insight into the future too?
But ultimately, how scary is it to know your deeply held convictions are subject to materialistic opportunism?
[1] As Scott Alexander noted: "If you're allergic to the word "patriarchy", reframe it as the anthropological question of why men were more powerful than women in societies between the Bronze and Industrial Age technology levels."
[2] The average per capita consumption in the US is 300 million BTUs. A human can sustain 75 watts of work over 8 hours, which translates to 2,047 BTUs of energy per day. If we generously also give our energy slaves the weekends off, that's 260 days times 2,047 BTUs, or 532,220 BTUs of energy per year. I very likely fucked this up but I stopped caring hours ago.
[3] Another crude equivalence, but Washington's net worth in today's dollars is around $700 million, far outstripping every other US president until Trump showed up.
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Notes -
Being a blank screen of a persona upon which you let others project their ideas of you, by willful abstinence from almost all forms of social media, has been an interesting experiment in developing intuitions about the inner world, but it also has completely destroyed my faith in ostensibly "liberal," "diverse," and "accepting" communities when the self-identified members of the same harbour nothing but the very same discriminatory behaviour, snap judgments, attitudes, and stereotypes they claim to have left behind along with all the rest of their cognitive biases, all while showing complete lack of awareness into their own hypocrisy. It's illuminating to play deaf, silent, and pretend not to hear what is being said between the lines, to let others continue their attempt to fill in the gaps; "the quieter you become, the more you are able to hear."
Spending time in the third-world has made it clear just how much victimhood on the left is manufactured, primarily through left-aligned media, regarding treatment of primarily left-aligned people, to distract from what Liam Kofi Bright calls above "a material inequality that no one is seriously trying to fix." The standards of living and simply the amount of resources available here in the west are both so high that it beggars belief how anyone could consider themselves a victim when, relatively speaking, they live like absolute kings compared to ethnic minorities and the rest of the world.
This story of victimhood in the face of material wealth and abundance, buttressed by other stories about how earnestly the left is working to render a more equitable society manifest, is just that - a story, a useful fiction, a bedtime story to soothe the left into believing that it is not morally culpable for this very state of affairs, while still doing nothing to actually correct the situation. Something to quiet the dissonance of the "ideology-reality" mismatch that Bright alludes to.
I am beginning to feel that the utility of this fiction (if any existed) is starting to run out, and that the ideology of the left is starting to approach calcified dogma, "fashionably irrational beliefs," or "identity-protective cognition" as Gurwinder & Kahan have termed it, acquiring, indeed, a very religious character. There is no need to go out and be a good Christian; you can simply purchase some Indulgences, say a few Hail Mary's, and both the material inequalities you have wrought and your karmic debt will be wiped out. Just say the words, and you too can magically become a good person without having to do any actual work to modify your own internal narratives or realize those narratives on the plane of action (the "real world"). Don't think about it too hard, just retweet, like, and subscribe. After all, we're good people just trying to do the right thing, right?
I regard the whole situation of biased, discriminatory people calling themselves "liberal" and "inclusive" in an Orwellian twist of words, of "Repenters" in Bright's terminology struggling with their "ideology-reality" mismatch, the same way an evolutionary biologist may view a creationist. A fourth-order simulacrum, where the same dogmas and memes circulate, refer to themselves, and justify each other in a self-referential circlejerk that has become completely untethered from the real-world.
-- Liam Kofi Bright, "White Psychodrama."
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A very nice post, thankyou.
When it come to morality, memes, culture, and ideas that are at least directionally correct, or beneficial, for the people with them, how do we reconcile that with the culture war topics of immigration, lgbt stuff, net zero,etc?
I can't escape, or reason my way out of, what I can recognise are in many countries illegal, and extremely emotionally repugnant, conclusions on these. This is based on thinking about directionally adaptive ideas that have the cold hard logic of behaviour X leads to outcome Y, outcome Y is where people Z don't exist anymore. Behaviour X must therefore not be a great idea and people encouraging it should not be treated well, no matter how much they claim X is mandated by tolerance and empathy, or by environmental necessity.
This basic concept is a radicalisation pipeline, with no off ramp that I can see.
Once you accept things like, E.g., greater military organisation and cooperation amongst men leads to not getting conquered and wiped out, as well as more land and resources for you, those trying to propogate ideas that explicity prevent such organisation and denegrate it look literally like enemy saboteurs trying to slow burn exterminate you. I can't see how to "unsee" this.
One of the common complaints about evolutionary psychology is that it presents unfalsifiable "just so" explanations (I linked this above). There's a risk that my argument veers into similarly unfalsifiable territory if I add the disclaimer that my theory is severely under equipped to deal with short-term cultural changes. We're just way too immersed within the soup to be able to tell "why" a cultural trait is spreading.
Similar to genetic natural selection, there are too many possibilities for harmful traits to nevertheless replicate just through random chance. Or sometimes harmful traits replicate because the debilitation they cause make them a reliable signal, known as handicap principle.
Can you be more specific about which ideas you view as similar to sabotage? You're referring to immigration but I'm not quite sure what the contours of your concerns are.
Immigration replacement of populations with the populations in liew of addressingow fertility, as is occurring in many developed countries. This seems to be a blatantly obvious case of a harmful cultural practice, literally replacing yourself, those genetically similar to you, etc.
There are the other obvious cultural practices that fit into the culture war, trans and homosexuals also being on the top of the obviously harmful cultural practice list, as literally sterilising yourself selects itself out of existince at an individual level rather strongly, and 2 people of the same sex can't have children without expensive and uncertain experimental medical intervention (that isn't bale to be used at civilisation supporting scale).
I understand your point better now, thanks for clarifying. The thing to keep in mind here is "memes > societies" have the same tension as "genes > organisms". Genes have an interest in replicating and their "interests" often align with the "interests" of the organism insofar as a healthy organism is more likely to replicate the genes, but not always. Similarly, the interests of memes/ideas and societies will often align insofar as a healthy society is more likely to replicate its driving ideas, but not always. It's important to avoid confusing what the driving force is in each scenario is.
So in your trans/gay example, I agree with you that the sterilization seems like self-sabotage but only if you're considering genes as the unit of inheritance. If you shift your framework to consider the idea as the unit of inheritance, then it doesn't matter if the idea's carrier ends up being a genetic dead-end. Mechanically this is not that different from how deadly viruses work; the goal for the virus is to spread, if the host dies in the process oh well.
That said, I have no idea if that's what's happening in this instance. Trans is too recent a phenomenon to study properly from an evolutionary lens, but homosexuality has been posited to exist because it must confer some indirect advantages (basically, the childless gay uncle becomes free to help raise his nephews). Regarding the topic of immigration, I'm largely in agreement with @atokenliberal6D_4 's take:
Regarding the immigration argument it is not the case that outlier talent and ability is being selected for, but in many cases and in many (non US) countries the opposite including optimising for net negative contributors, outliers at the bottom, etc. E.g.,.Immigration as a force to lower wages, something implicitly being called for by the bank of England recently under the guise of reducing rising income caused inflationary pressures. In that regard it is also a meme tic payload that damages the host. It being the idea of accepting immigration or increasing it, and the host being the whole wider society, of course this changes when the unit of proposition is an individual or smaller sub group within that society.
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As other comments have pointed out, this is not such a painful bullet to bite and the idea isn't so novel that it hasn't already been more-or-less the thesis of a New York Times Bestseller. There's even an SCC article touching on these themes.
It's quite comforting actually---instead of stressing over confusing discussions about somehow justifying terminal values, there's an objective best morality and culture for any given environment/level of technological development. Right now, that happens to be egalitarian, individualistic, diversity-focused-melting-pot meritocracy. A modern society's most important resource is it's human talent, the more extreme-outlier the talent is---the Von Neumanns, the Einsteins, the Edisons---the more important. Therefore, the society's values should be focused as much as possible on developing this talent within and converting it from outside. Make sure it can rise from as large a percentage of the population as possible, make sure it's motivated and rewarded as much as possible, make sure that it's as attractive as possible for talent from outside to convert and join, make sure you're looking in varied enough places that you don't miss unexpected sources of talent, etc.
In the past it was different and in the future it might be different again.
I appreciate the links, I wasn't aware of them. I didn't think that I hit upon anything especially novel but I was surprised that I wasn't able to find a name for this concept (chatGPT kept claiming this is an example of the Marxist idea of "historical materialism" which is not accurate at all).
I agree with your assessment about the current optimal state of affairs, and the potential for that to change.
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I think with this same set of facts we can actually assert that morality is intrinsically objective, natural, and more foundational than many people believe. If morality and its evolutionary antecedents are what permits human civilization to thrive and progeny to continue, then it’s a remarkably important tool for guiding your group. This could also reinforce the importance of the death penalty, because if our instincts demand it then our instincts are probably correct for what matters most (the proliferation of our culture, community, progeny, and so on).
Wouldn't this mean morality is what allows your to reproduce, prosper, thrive, and most importantly continue to exist?
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This assumes that we generate fictions after the fact, rather than as a primary task. Our sentiments may have some canonical form, of which our various religions are variants of, created in lieu of the real thing. We want to believe, whether in spiritual beings or something like authoritative ethical codes.
It might be that justice has a structure, along with many somewhat-functional counterfeits, and the longings for a justice whose existence was either intellectually intuited or implicitly present in our biology were what first animated us. Materialistic opportunism (as well as viewpoint) would then be an influence applied after the fact which distorts the picture, but perhaps only in relative terms depending on which motive demands dominance (eg. killing for your family's survival). Besides, so long as one doesn't have full understanding, many things may seem plausible which will later be labelled as objectively evil.
Edit: I would add that viewpoint might also be a positive influence, in attempting to harmonize our moralizing (which can easily go off the rails given the lack of a clear standard) with social reality. I think it fits with history: morality has often been an art form which emerges out of dream-like correlations, measurements, and hard-won revitalizing efforts. It goes without saying that small errors in cohesion can lead to terrible consequences- I do not see this as a clear cause for disillusionment.
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That is not accidental.
It naturally follows from biology. Not an accident, intrinsic to nature of terrestrial life, and probably most others too due to physical laws. Energy on a planetary scale always comes from the sun, which makes holding territory to harvest energy from it crucial, and you're back to unfashionable map-painting.
You could say it's "accidental" if you were sure the existence of this universe and its physical laws is accidental, but that's not an answerable question.
So far sex equality has resulted in a unsustainable birth rates in the parts of the population that reject it, so perhaps by "extensive change in circumstance" you also mean "changing innate human psychology" so that women are less likely to transfer their maternal impulses on cute animals and such.
Honestly, I'm a bit suspicious of you. No, morality isn't 'accidental', and painting it as such makes me guess the person saying "it's accidental" has their own untested, untried, pie-in-the-sky morality they'd like to impose on others.
I think you're interpreting my use of "accidental" too narrowly, I don't mean it in the sense that things just randomly happen but simply stating that some consequences are collateral and not the central intent. A military conquest doesn't have as its core mission "make sure to kill all the bards and poets that espouse pacifism so that this idea doesn't spread", but nevertheless it will remain a collateral consequence.
I don't think my morality system is opaque, you're welcome to test that by asking me questions. I didn't have any untried/untested morality in mind when I wrote this, primarily I was contemplating how convenient and easy it is for me to oppose slavery given the material comforts I am afforded.
If you're a member of a species whose brains are as big as they are probably mostly due to intra-species conflict, whose civilizations all evolved out of military necessity, advocating for pacifism seems rather against the grain of.. well... everything.
Do you think it's immoral that corporal punishment has been outlawed?
Exactly, I don't disagree. For pacifism as an idea to ever stand a chance to replicate, the circumstances surrounding the necessity of conflict had to change significantly. That was my point.
I don't understand the context you're asking about, the phrase is most often used to refer to school discipline but corporal punishment there remains legal in much of the US. Did you mean for adults? Compared to incarceration, I'm partial to the idea that it can be just as effective a deterrent at a significantly cheaper cost, as evidenced by the use of caning in Singapore.
This is a niggling point but it's hard to wrap my mind around evaluating whether a restriction imposed on the government (outlawing corporal punishment) can be evaluated as a question of morality. It's less about whether it's right or wrong and more about what's effective policy in that case.
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This seems awfully monocausal and deterministic. Eg, the claim that "When industrialization made slavery increasingly politically and economically untenable, the moral and legal consensus conveniently caught up" seems inconsistent with the timing; the Somerset case was 1772, and the slave trade was banned by Great Britain in 1807, still quite early in the industrial period, and by the US in 1808 (though the law barring it was passed in 1807), at a time when the US was far from being industrialized.
Also, you say that slavery became "politically .., untenable." Why did it become not just economically untenable, but also politically untenable?
Also, your argument does not explain other phenomena, such as the increase in concern with the human rights of people in far off lands whose oppression, if anything, benefited Western interests economically.
Finally, your argument is premised on the assumption that humans are motivated solely by instrumental rationality, when it is clear that value rationality also plays a role in human behavior.
Of course, it is certainly true that self-interest and values often conflict, and humans are more than capable of rationalizing self-interested behavior that violates professed (and even sincerely believed) values. It is also reasonable to say that the maintenance of practices which fly in the face of established values is possible only when those practices serve the interests of powerful actors, and that when those actors become less powerful, or when those practices become less valuable, the practices will fall into disuse. But that can happen even when values do not change at all. So, the evidence that values change as a result in changes in what serves one's self-interest is not as strong as you say.
The counterpoint is that it didn’t just happen once, but several times. Slavery is a good example, but there are lots of others. Wars of conquest for the most part stopped once the region industrialized and therefore didn’t need to annex more land to get more food. Animal welfare and animal rights began once food became plentiful enough that people would be able to be choosy about food. Environmentalist ideas came at the beginning of globalization when it was possible to simply import industrial output.
I don’t think such a pattern proves a monocausal system, but it’s common enough that I find the idea to hold a bit of water. In fact, I think the lack of such concerns before the technology to replace those things came into existence is equally compelling. There are no ancient civilizations that opposed slavery. There were none that respected the idea of human rights as we know them until the last 500 years. To put it bluntly, until 500 years ago, the ideas that would make you a war criminal or a despot were mainstream. The Romans thought very little about walking the roads and seeing (and hearing) the moans of men nearly flogged to death before being nailed to pieces of wood. They thought nothing of watching people die in an arena for entertainment. We not only don’t publicly execute, but we make it as painless as possible and are squeamish about that. Human nature didn’t change, our ability to maintain control without brutality made it possible to consider a world in which the events depicted in the Passion of Christ were no longer necessary.
No one says human nature changed. But ideas have changed. Why? If you are drawing the line at 500 years ago, then the Enlightenment enters the picture (and of course the standard argument is that the Enlightenment was a driver of notions of human rights). Lynn Hunt argues that the rise of the the epistolary novel led to expansion of circles of empathy. Similar arguments have been made re more modern forms of media. Also, some have credited increased scientific knowledge leading to the realization that all humans are essentially the same. In other words, human nature (specifically the capacity for empathy) has not changed, but the scope of empathy has expanded for reasons unrelated to instrumental advantage.
I would also point out that this was probably the first time in history that printing presses and art and written law codes were common enough that you didn’t need to torture as much. We also generally had enough surplus food that prison as punishment (at least for the nobility) was plausible.
Although, I’d ask the question in reverse. If human nature always had the capacity for such empathy, where were the people who were protesting the cruelty? If (and I agree it’s true) a Roman could consider torture cruel, where were the counter-voices. Where was the Roman Peter Singer writing against using animals for food or beasts of burden? Where were the people protesting or writing against public executions?
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Obviously there were some "pioneers" on the question of slavery, and nothing I wrote should imply that morality evolves in uniform homogenous stages. The whole premise of natural selection is variance within the pool.
I should've specified this but when I said slavery became politically untenable I meant it from the standpoint of enforcement costs. Slavery isn't totally "free" and any state that implements it has to wrangle with the serious risk of mass uprising and devote resources to police it. When John Brown conducted his raid in 1859 that was strong evidence that the viral meme of abolition was spreading to infect crazy white guys too, a sign that enforcement costs will continue to mount.
Signaling behavior tends to be more compelling the costlier it is, so that could explain this and value rationality. But similar to genetic evolution, we can apply concepts like spandrels or genetic drift to explain why useless or harmful ideas nevertheless replicate. That's always a possibility when you don't have an intelligent designer at the helm.
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If the genes are all sitting around in the primordial soup, sure. But the genes organise into, well, organisms, and then another layer of complexity gets added.
Our genes may want to reproduce, but we find all kinds of ways around that. Kids are expensive, it's not the right time, it would kill my career, I don't want to be a housewife, etc. So we use tricks to outwit the blind evolutionary pressure of getting us to pop out babies by making sex a strong appetite drive and very pleasurable and tied up with all kinds of social cohesion, by keeping the pleasure and social cohesion and preventing the babies.
We dodge the consequences of natural selection, accidental or not, by medicine and treatment for conditions that would otherwise kill us, and our defective offspring, off. We eat the wrong things in the wrong amounts. We find ways to fill ourselves to the gills with substances that make us feel good, even if those would kill us, and then we find ways around how they kill us so we can keep on filling ourselves up to the gills.
Once you get organisms, you get species. And once you get species, you get groups. And once you get groups, you get societies. And once you get societies, you get morality.
The Romans and Washington may have kept slaves while we (ostensibly) don't, but we all agree "murder is wrong". Morality may well be self-congratulatory and accidental, but given the kind of creatures we are, we will end up finding the same kind of conglomerations in space that work for the cohesion of the group.
We're in a race with our genes, and we're winning.
Agreed, but I think OP would also agree with you. Genes are the primary reproductive unit right now. The secondary reproductive unit right now is the ideas on top of genes. Genes are currently the smallest reproductive unit, the recursive loop of evolution. Memes form on top of them and are influenced by them (see Idiocracy for fictional evidence), but in the future with bio-electronics or large matrices the ideas could create a new primary reproductive unit whose behavior would begin influencing the ideas instead of genes.
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This is probably going to come across as uncharitable, but I can't help but suspect that you hold this position because you are a lawyer. and that because you as a Lawyer you are obliged to be impartial you are constitutionally inclined to treat guilt and innocence as equivalent and thus you live in a world where live in a world where it is quite literally impossible for any moral claim to be anything other than "Accidental & Self-Congratulatory".
Liberals with a capital L, market enthusiasts and lawyers all sort of hew closely to this line.
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I clearly have many strong opinions on a range of subjects, so I don't know why you would think that I'm impartial or prone to equivocation.
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Do lawyers commit the majority of moral anti-realism despite being only a minority of the population?
Possibly, how would one ever be able to know?
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I'm excited to see you pointed in this direction and greatly anticipate whatever you come up with next.
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It's a very strong argument against naive whiggish presentism. You've given good argument that some moral principles merely followed in the wake of technological abundance, and weren't "self evidently" adapted until the economics changed. Perhaps the average morality as practiced is accidental and self congratulatory.
Something hinted in this post is that an individual "weak" morality is a strong meme, and can convert others faster than they destroy the carriers. The "go kill people and take their shit" meme builds a large empire through conquer. When material conditions improve it seems like "tithe to the poor and hungry" gains a footing and starts taking over though. Either through Fashionably irrationality or through moral discovery who knows. A prime case study of this is the spread of Christianity through Rome. Or the final boss Fukuyama.
The core question is what happens to morality over time when material conditions don't improve. Do the social structures remain static? Or do they develop on the same converging fixed points but more slowly. You mention George Washington was a strong supporter of slavery during a time it was seems as economically necessary, and yet during that time there were also abolitionists, who opposed it purely for moral reasons. This seems contrary to the simple thesis you've presented,
For me, I think the nature of morality is too early to call, and depends on deeper studying patterns of history and some questions about how consciousness exists and such.
Even in the "go kill people and take their shit" cultures, there are still social rules around how you should treat others. Maybe mostly it's around kin, and "look after your parents in their old age" rules, but it's not totally "all to the strong and let the weak go under". Such principles may often be breached, but so are principles under Christianity. Yet they exist in the first place.
I suspect that a great complication comes from the layering of hierarchical structures.
A platoon of ten men can do the "kill people and take their stuff" thing to individuals
A company of one hundred men can do the "kill people and take their stuff" things to platoons of ten men
A battalion of one thousand men can do the "kill....stuff" thing to a company of one hundred men.
And yet a battalion of one thousand men has internal structure, it is ten companies of one hundred men coordinating and not fighting among themselves. While each company of one hundred men is ten platoons of ten men each. Somehow no platoon of ten goes rogue and kills a member of a company due to seeing them as an individual.
Mutinies, rebellions, revolutions, I think elaborate structures of rules are going to arise, just because of the numbers involved. Ethical principles about say "look after you parents in their old age" are an extra complication, perhaps enabled by by getting rules for large numbers of violent young men in place.
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Yeah I think this is an example of early forms of local "dove" behavior out-competing the hawk memes for how to treat those around you.
So civilization is the process of expanding the moral circle (I've heard that one before) through competition: brothers outcompete loners. Families outcompete brothers. Tribes outcompete families. etc etc etc.
I'm reminded of the fremen mirage blogpost, which argues that throughout history the expanded (decadent) civs have outcompeted the more spartan "fremen" go-kill-and-take-their-stuff gangs. https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
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It's affected both by the changes in the environment and the balance between "hawks" and "doves" (which, I think, was the subject of another chapter of The Selfish Gene). When the environment changes to reward dovish behavior more, the population becomes more dovish, but population genetics aren't controlled by a finely-tuned PID-regulator, so the number of doves overshoots the new equilibrium and before you know it, hawkish behavior becomes the more rewarding one. If the equilibrium was stable, the whole system would gradually stabilize again, but as it is not, the population is always either too soy or too bloodthirsty than it "should" be.
This makes sense to me, even if I don't fully agree. There's some truth to how these "hawks" and "doves" will have a overpopulation life-cycle.
On the other hand I suspect there's an underlying structure to these positions (motte) that would suggest that there are stable "optimal" environment behaviors (bailey) that suggests an underlying weak-ordering to how moral a system is (double bailey)
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When material conditions that were sufficient to sustain the concept of (Roman) "citizenship" collapse, the principles of slavery re-assert themselves (we called it "serfdom", and it persisted in Europe for 1000 years). It's probably significant that the name "slavery" wasn't reapplied here, though what passed as States back then were sufficiently ethnically and religiously homogeneous at that time where it would have felt weird to make slaves of "fellow Christians" (something that was notably absent in colonial powers' slave drives, including the US). The only other minority at that point would have been Jews, and... they're complicated.
Morals change, ethics don't. Or maybe it's the other way around, nobody seems to have a straight answer because they're usually in the same breath claiming you should adopt theirs. Weird how that remains constant too.
Both serfdom and slavery existed in the Middle Ages, the latter usually applied to pagans captured in war (hence the name "slave", from Slavs, who were pagan until around 1000 AD). Actual serfs (as opposed to slaves) were called "coloni" (basically, tenant farmer). The word "serf", on the other hand, derives directly from the Roman word for slave (servus) via Old French; this word was during the Middle Ages applied only to slaves, but as slavery disappeared, it was applied to the coloni instead.
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