Beware Moral Confidence
Predators naturally try to kill as many prey as they can eat. But if they could reflect on what is in their collective interest, the set of all predators on an isolated island should want to avoid killing all of the island’s prey. And even in a famine, all the farmers on such an island should want to avoid eating all of their seed corn.
Human cultures naturally try to give members strong attachments to and confidence in those culture’s morals. This confidence helps in fighting rival cultures. For example, it makes members disgusted at other cultures, and so willing to fight them and not be converted to them. Also, culture members can show loyalty to each other via their confidence in its morals.
But, as with animal predators, if predatory cultures, and the people in them, could step back and reflect on their collective interest, they should want to avoid killing off all other cultures. As that would result in too little cultural variety to make for a healthy cultural evolution environment. That one winning culture would then drift and decay into maladaption. And this seems to actually be happening today; most of the world is merging into a global monoculture that is drifting badly.
The biggest way that cultures induce member confidence is via moral overconfidence. We are reasonably well-calibrated about the relative value of our culture’s manners, languages, laws, buildings, food, art, institutions, etc. We understand that these are complicated and have context dependent value. And we get that our versions may not be best, and that a lot of context and randomness went into which versions our cultures chose.
But when it comes to morals, we forget most of this subtly. We see our culture’s morals as simple, clearly better, with a value that depends little on context. Instead of seeing our culture’s morals as practical context-dependent and rather-random evolved strategies to make our culture more biologically adaptive, we instead see them as sacred truths the universe has revealed to us. We just ignore what the complex context dependent and changing history of our morals suggests about the confidence we can reasonably place in them.
If people were rational, we might cut cultural drift just by explaining to them that they are badly mistaken on one key fact: they are crazy overconfident in their morals. Different cultures have different morals, and you have at best only weak reasons to see your culture’s versions as best. Your naive predator instinct is have your culture’s morals conquer the world, and get everyone to share them, but the world needs far more moral variety than that if it is to continue to evolve and adapt to its many challenges and changes.
I try to tell my students in cross-cultural psychology, you will encounter many obstacles and traps if you try to debate or prove that one culture's set of practices, beliefs, values (etc) is correct or superior to those of another culture. But what you can always do, in full sincerity, is to acknowledge what problems are being solved by that culture's practices. And then you can decide, for yourself, whether you want to live with those practices and values.
An argument for moral relativism on the grounds of the adaptive value of diversity. But we don’t look to the gods for guidance on universal truths, we look to centuries of struggle to overcome arbitrary violence and suppression through both the expression of radical ideas of what it means to be human and the sacrifice of thousands or millions of individuals in the idea of some better version of human relations. This is true, at least, for we in the parts of the world that have in one form or another enshrined the sovereignty and dignity of the individual into the heart of our societies. However flawed these societies are in many respects. Murder is wrong everywhere; but only in a perhaps minority of societies is murder by the state severely proscribed. Now, if you’re mostly talking about anodyne yet important concepts of culture, like art, food, family structures, and so on, then yes. We should be open-hearted and prepared to adapt. But we should retain moral clarity where it matters.