Beware Moral Confidence

In a review of Robert Edgerton’s ’92 book Sick Societies, Mr. & Mrs. Psmith quote many examples of sick primitive societies, including this “most dramatic” one:

despite the fact that the Marind-anim were known as ferocious headhunters who raided enemies as far away as 100 miles, their population was dwindling. … They also married quite young, and to assure the bride’s fertility, she too had to be filled with semen. On her wedding night, therefore, as many as ten members of the husband’s lineage had sexual intercourse with the bride, and if there were more men than this in the lineage, they had intercourse with her during the following night. That this intercourse was not merely a symbolic act is indicated by the fact that when the night ended, the bride was so sore that she could not walk. Nevertheless, a similar ritual was repeated at various intervals throughout a woman’s life. Instead of enhancing a woman’s fertility as intended, this practice apparently led to severe pelvic inflammatory disease that produced infertility.

They then conclude:

There’s a certain kind of person who likes to talk about Chesterton’s Fence, and who will tell you that you should obey tradition because, being the distillation of centuries of human experience, it encodes tacit knowledge and gives you truths you couldn’t possibly reach on your own. This person, whom we may call the utilitrad, is rarely from a society that burns its widows. …

The utilitrad isn’t quite wrong, … But … it has actual no content. … point at good things and say “look, the wisdom of the ages!”… but if you’re not willing to defend them as being actually good you’ll have no defense against bad things that have managed to persist. (And Sick Societies is surely proof that bad things can persist virtually indefinitely.) A pure adherence to tradition would lead us to endorse the Carthaginians’ sacrifice of their infants — after all, it had the stamp of antiquity!

No, if you’re trying to figure out what’s actually good, you can’t just rely on heuristics like “has it been this way for a long time” — and certainly not “do primitive societies do it.” I regret to inform you that you actually have to do the hard work of making actual moral judgements. And to do that you need a robust anthropology — not in the sense of living for several years with people who wear bones in their noses, but a theory of what a human being is and what one is for. (more)

I am reacting to this review as it reflects a common pattern of strong cultural moral confidence.

Yes, if you are sure you disagree greatly with the values of whomever made Chesterton’s Fence, you can more confidently take it down. And yes, if you understand fertility facts much better than a group like the Marind-anim, you might see that their acts work contrary to their fertility values.

However, practices existing is more evidence that they are adaptive, less that they are good by your current values. If you are more sure that you want to be adaptive than you are of which values and morals best achieve adaptiveness, it can make a lot more of sense to defer to traditional practices. Adaptiveness is usually hard to calculate.

If you want your values to be pursued in the future, you will need creatures there who pursue them, and those creatures will need to be sufficiently adaptive to continue to exist then. If you instead insist on pursuing your moral values now with full vigor, regardless of their adaptive consequences, your descendants may just disappear.

Added Oct11: Several of the reports from Sick Societies are doubted in the comments.