Chapter 12.Moral Progress
It is human nature to tinker with nature to see if we can do better.We have been repurposing natural resources and changing the course of rivers for about as long as we have been keeping records.Many drugs are now synthesized.Human eugenics is generally off limits, but making plants and animals that are better for us is a massive undertaking of long standing.Self-help book continue to be good sellers.We may argue with each other over which improvements are needed most and how to distribute the costs, but the prevailing mindset is progress rather than perfection of the status quo (Diamond 1997; Morris 2012).
But making things better can be tricky business.Consider the story of the Polypay sheep. [1]Some breeds, such as the Dorset, have a high rate of twinning.Columbias and Merinos are renowned for the quality of their wool.Cheviots are hardy keepers in rough terrain. Suffolks have large frames, although they do not put on meat as efficiently as the Southdown.In the late 1960s several shepherds decided they would pool the genes of these and other breeds and put Darwin on steroids to produce a superbreed combining the best characteristics of each.Many goods = Polypay.
Within a few generations, the dream had faded to a few herds.The genetics of the project were successful in the sense that a hybrid with the desired characteristics was created.We really can manipulate biology to an amazing extent.But the project collapsed on practical grounds.Those who intended to help nature along forgot one thing.The reason there are so many different breeds of sheep is that there are so many environments, and market demands drift.The ideal environment for the ideal sheep does not exist.Thus there is no “ideal” sheep. The Polypay was an antinomy: a combination of individual good ideas that makes no sense when put together.Ethical perfection on a single ideal is also an antinomy.
Morality as an Emergent Process
The various parts of the book can now be brought together.Morality is the name of the actions we take to build common better futures.The basic unit of analysis is an engagement involving two or more moral agents, individuals nested within communities or communities themselves, facing a range of circumstances.The possible futures depend on a combination of the constraints of the facts on the ground, the way these are framed or negotiated by the agents, and the decision rules used by both agents.This is a complex process, but, except for the framing process, there are a finite number of combinations to consider.Given such engagements, any solution that leaves a better mutual alternative on the table is immoral.No other decision rule has a better prospect of advancing moral community than does reciprocal moral agency, where agents accord each other the same moral standing and capacity for identifying and acting to promote mutually preferred futures they expect for themselves.This is the only guaranteed stable approach to solving moral conflict. Neither agent has reason to act differently under the circumstances. This means no external enforcement is required.We have an imperative to continuous, personal, small-scale moral improvement.
Although we often bring in theoretical justifications, such as the Golden Rule, charity, utilitarianism, revealed religion, or the categorical imperative, these are primarily convenient summaries that aid discussion.They may all be appropriate elements in a framing matrix, even to the point that conflicting principles can be included in the same matrix.In the end however, we pickprinciplesonly as they are thought to influence us and in their relative rank order in real contexts.The principles do not dictate behavior.[2]Every-day moral incontinence demonstrates that. The individual has yet to be found whose actions are perfectly consistent with his or her principles or whose principles do not wander.Making it aprecondition that others should shift their ethical principles to at least an overlap with ours before common moral action is possible is largely an all-purpose justification for wanting to have things our own way.Morality is a “push” process to be evaluated based on whether the course of action in hand would produce a better outcome than any available previously.It is not a “pull” process where we judge success against a fixed future standard.After all, ideal standards do not exist in the future: they are our current, personal projections.
Morality is also an emergent process.This means that the results of individual moral actions feedback to change the context for future moral engagements.Trust and suspicion are created or modified in the very acts of moral engagement.They then influence future framing.Communities are mass moral agents that provide more general and stable contexts.But communities are not “given” or created arbitrarily or by those who write political philosophy or sociology.They take multiple and evolving forms; they overlap; they have varying and perhaps conflicting influences on individuals.Communities are emergent characteristics of individual moral engagements repeatedly reiterated over roughly common circumstances. When communities fail to enhance the moral fitness of their participants, they adjust or go out of business.Moral communities are the vehicle for continuous moral progress.
I defend the position that the world is becoming more moral.More of us are achieving the futures we favor.Depending on which date in history we went back to we would experience more slavery; famine, war, plague, and genocide on massive scales; oppression of women; pedestry; absence ofproperty rights; caste systems and serfdom; corruption so obvious that it need not be excused; nearly universal illiteracy; tribal anarchy; no monetary exchange system; and multiple other degradations.Naturally, the mind runs quickly to some current-day abuses that still need to be addressed.That is a sound argument for wanting to improve what we have, but not a good justification for going backwards.I have asked many people to tell me what historical period they would like to live in as a randomly selected individual in a randomly selected condition.There is often a half-hearted attempt to negotiate a better choice: “I have always imagined myself as a famous Renaissance painter or a personal follower of Jesus of Nazareth.”When forced to drop the pretense that we select rather than make our role in life, the answer is always “I am happy to be living today.”And for everyone other than privileged Western, white, males the response is immediate and vigorous.[3]
The technical name for believing that the world is getting better as a result of human activity is meliorism.This is not the “best of all possible worlds” tautology of Gottfreid Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, who got such a wonderful send up in Voltaire’s Candide.Meliorism is a continuous and potentially emergent process, not a state.It is most obvious in the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism and was something like national policy in the Progressive Era at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the United States (Buenker 1973; Ekirch 1974; Gould 1974).This needs to be distinguished from the various forms of ideologyand religious eschatology with their visions of soon-to-appear perfect worlds that have so far been revealed to only the chosen few.
New understanding in social psychology and the psychology of social perception, neurobiology, quantum mechanics and related indeterminacy theories, and agent-based computer modeling all point in this direction. Without these relatively recent theoretical developments, morality as an emergent community process could not be clearly seen.
The Wisdom of Weak Systems
A perfectly effective system of universal ethical principles would stifle moral progress.A slightly sloppy one would tend to work better. [4] Fortunately, human nature is appropriately flawed. Imagine would civilization had one of the Roman emperors or any other historical leader been able to enforce perfect conformity to the ethical standards at some time in the past in such a way that no one every deviated. Imagine that we never changed the rules.
As evidence I present the lowly gold fish. [5] Like the lab rat that enjoys more notoriety, these animals can be trained to play a game where making the right choice between two alternatives improves their futures.A typical test of lab learning involves finding where the food is hidden.In one version, the prize is stashed randomly, perhaps 70% of the time behind Door A and 30% of the time behind Door B.Even gold fish can learn an effective rule such as “I should always go with Door A.” Animals other than humans invariably adopt the strategy of choosing the alternative with the best general record 100% of the time.If Door A is even just a little better in the long run, always choose Door A.This would be comparable to the theory of moral choice advanced in this book.Use therma moral choice rule, even if it does not always work.It will do the job more often than any other choice, so it is the best policy.[6]
Children are somewhat like the gold fish, but adults are more complex.We like to exercise our higher rational powers and, although we match the split in the long run (say 70:30), we tend to vary our choices because we think we have detected a hidden pattern. We might reason, “It has been Door A four times in a row so it must be Door B this time.”[7]We also seem to have a sense of entitlement about beating the odds. Humans do not believe in luck – we believe in “good luck.”We divide our choices 70:30 rather than 100:0.To excuse ourselves from blindly following the path to the most likely payoff, we like to add a little something to the framing matrix.Some people have special insight; and that certainly includes us.This logic is common among those who play the stock market, hire employees, or sit on committees that choose policy (Taleb 2004).Humans seem to believe they have a rational capacity for analyzing choice situations that exceeds that of both lower animals and the most rational of all beings (Makridakis, Hogarth, and Gaba 2009).
Throughout this book, I have been defending a system with holes in it.I know there are individuals and committees working as you read this trying to find more to them.But the gaps will not sink the ship.In fact being incomplete is an advantage.America’s Cup contenders are all catamarans, with more hole than boat.Incompleteness is a necessary condition for continuous, self-generating improvement.We are Homo sapiens – the wise ones.Sapience is the Latin equivalent of the Greek wordsophia, as in philosophy or love of wisdom.But sophia or sapience mean wisdom, not rationality, and certainly not strict adherence to principle.We are the creatures that can collectively make a better world, not the ones who spin theories about worlds that always work.No one outside of a small circle of philosophers and economists believes that we are Homo rationalis.Neither are we Asinus callidus – know-it-alls.
Irrationality
Let’s do the arithmetic to see which is smarter, gold fish or humans.Gold fish will get feed 70% of the time based on their fixed strategy and a 70:30 randomization.This is the product of choice probabilities multiplied by outcomes -- 1.00 * .70 + 0.00 * .30 = .70.Humans, who use their superior cognitive capacity, will match the distribution of choice to the distribution of outcomes resulting in a .70 * .70 + .30 * .30 distribution of rewards.Now who is smarter? .49 + .09 = .58.
I still vote for humans on two grounds.First, we are the only species capable of offering an excuse such as “That was a trick question; let me tell you how smart I would have appeared if you had asked a question for which I knew the answer!”Related to this is the second point that we want good policy as well as good choice behavior.When the question is which species is more likely to score in a one-off contrived game, it might be good to think like a rat.When the question is which species has the capacity for flourishing in the long run, I am enthusiastically human.Our sometimes and usually unpredictable fallibility, in fact our natural goofing around in hope of scoring big time or just for the fun of it, is not a deficiency in our moral nature.As long as everyone does not act this way most of the time, this is necessary to our higher functioning and our more rapid evolution as a species.[8]
It might be appropriate to rethink the many examples of apparent irrationality introduced in Chapter 8 regarding the challenges of framing.We are systematically overly optimistic about our chances for success.We also tend strongly toward being oversensitive to losses relative to gains.If engineers set about designing a machine to profit maximally from the potential in its environment, they would certainly not want to use a rule that said, “After your first success, keep doing the same thing” (a version of tit-for-tat). “Dabble around the best outcome, but be careful” would be a wiser design standard.Epileptic fits are not caused by random or erratic neural fringing.They happen when there is near synchrony.Texture in the context is necessary for fitness.We could make money betting on gold fish and against humans, but only a human could make it meaningful to set up such a game.
Ants are an interesting case in point (Beekman et al. 2010).They can find food better that humans can, given an ant understanding of what constitutes a good meal.When a forager is successful and returns to the nest, it leaves a chemical, pheromone trail.It leaves the same trail when unsuccessful, but the aggregate strength of the good trail is greater because more ants come back the same way after having found food than from the random destinations in which nothing was found.Outbound ants follow the strongest trail, but are allowed to make a few random mistakes.It turns out that these mistakes are critical to the survival of the colony.If ants only went with the previous trail because it had been strong in the past, everyone would starve.Sooner or later there is more food at the end of one of the randomly chosen new trails than the one with the exhausted food supply.Most ants switch, but random probing still takes place.This system does not protect the occasional ant that starves when exploring, but it does protect the colony.
From the perspective of the moral community, some balance between conformity to traditional patterns and probing, even random probing, contributes to long-range and overall fitness better than does either strategy pursued exclusively.The moral community may regret the victim of a moral misadventure, but it seldom provides a place of privilege to members who claim to be ethically superior.
Adult humans have another advantage over all other animals (Vonk and Shackelford 2012).We can plan as a group to change our behavior – independent of our instincts.Ants can only search for food using the pheromone network.They cannot search using solar, geomagnetic, MapQuest, or language mechanisms.Further, they cannot use the pheromone system to search for safer environments, better mates, or good recordings of Bach masses.Both means and ends are fixed for the ant by instinct.Only the human group has the neurological capacity to hypothetically vary both the process and the goal and to agree on this as a group before taking action. [9] Subhumans extend the past into the future.But each individual organism is locked into a species-determined and unalterable goal and method match.Humans are the only species that can collectively decide not to do something.That is a requirement for group decision making.It is also the foundation for morality.We can collectively agree that it is not appropriate to arrest and detain individuals without formally announcing charges consistent with published law (habeas corpus).We can decide not to use chemical weapons. We can even decide to change such rules.Only adult humans have the capacity to form moral communities (Giedd et al 1999).That does not mean we do it consistently or brilliantly.But no other living thing can do it at all.In a fundamental sense, immorality is a denial of what makes us uniquely human.
Now we have found two naturalistic foundations for morality.First, humans are quintessentially social.We would suffer extinction within a century if we did not help each other.The basis of morality is in the relationships among individuals, not in the relationship between an individual and a norm.Second, humans have a unique neurological capacity related to how we interact with each other.We can understand how others, acting as agents, can affect us in ways that resemble how we affect them. No other species is capable of reciprocal moral agency.
Short-Sightedness
The fact that the 2 x 2 moral engagements based on rma can be used to analyze every possible instance of moral engagement, including engagements across levels of social organization from individuals to nations, is both a strength and a potential shortcoming.Over-steering is a distinct possibility.So is getting trapped in local maxima. Incrementalism runs the risk of sitting down where no nearby switch is more attractive, while if we were to start over we might reach a greater peak of perfection that is in a different region.And of course, if we had a God’s-eye view we would be able to escape being trapped in petty preferences altogether.How can we ever be certain that we are going in the right direction without seeing the overall picture?Certainly there are any number of examples of communities -- such as the Nazis, the KKK, and the “other” political party -- that are coherently moral by their own standards and are both bad masters and bad neighbors by ours.The rma model cannot claim to be superior just because it is consistent.