54 Comments

This is true. However, people care most passionately non-moral actions which have rw components. For instance, there's almost tribalism in consumer choices which feature network externalities such as Xbox vs Playstation or Android vs iPhone.

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Hmm, let's say morals are about the things that we still care about even when they happen to other people? My point is Robin is trivially correct in that what kind of shoes I wear may have a big "impact", if we measure impact in square inches of matter affected, because my shoe choice changes my footprint. Robin's post is meaningless unless you specify how you measure impact. Morals, especially what I would consider "rational morals" (rather than, say, religous proscriptive morals), mean something close to how you measure the impact of your actions on other people.

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And morals means something like "things we care about".

There are many nonmoral things we care about. In fact, I bet there are things you care about much more than any morals!

As to what morals really are, see my habit theory. ( http://tinyurl.com/7dcbt7y )

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It isn't a question of the size of impact. It's a question of its importance. Choosing to get a new haircut style may have a large impact by some ways of measuring, but we don't care. It's morally random. And morals means something like "things we care about".

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Because they are structural changes to the background assumptions rather than detail changes to day-to-day operations (who cuts your hair...)

And because fear of being cast out is a HUGE motivator to human being. So fear of being on the wrong side of moral questions (and thus risking being cast out) makes for bigger changes than merely choosing who you go to do your hair.

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But why would changes to current in/out dynamics be more likely to have lasting influence?

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"When I put my social-science thinking cap on, I can’t find good reasons to expect big-group moral actions to have much stronger long term influence."

In group dynamics. Except for very limited circles, disagreement over which hairdresser you use won't risk ostracism for being on the wrong side of the disagreement. Moral questions are part of how we define who counts as the good "us" and who counts as the barbarian "them". Taking a public stand on a moral question is more likely (though perhaps still very very unlikely) to change the in/out dynamic than hairdresser choice because people fear being on the wrong side of that divide.

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But big-group moral acts are not usually framed primarily in terms of their long term influence.

CLT predicts that people will tend to frame big-group moral acts in terms of their long-term influence; their doing so "primarily" isn't required to distinguish the alternatives by degree of long-term orientation.

You can't rely on CLT only when it suits you!

our inability to identify a plausible causal path to more influence should cause us to doubt

It should affect your "priors" somewhat adversely, but not necessarily enough to cause "doubt" (assuming, of course, there was other reason for belief).

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Interesting, but I think could use more examples.

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Seems right. Folk's *positive* social beliefs sway with fashion more than evidence. On *positive* racial equality, the evidence is little different today than 100 years ago, but conventional wisdom has radically inverted. Moral claims are obviously more arbitrary than positive ones, so if positive claims are so fashion prone, then moral claims are even more so; maybe just as much as hairstyles.

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Good post Robin. Thoughtful as always.

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But big-group moral acts are not usually framed primarily in terms of their long term influence. People usually give other reasons for them. And even if they did usually give that reason, our inability to identify a plausible causal path to more influence should cause us to doubt, if we would have predicted people giving that reason anyway.

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Isn't the simplest explanation for certain types of acts, such as those involving the more distant future and bigger groups, seeming far is that such acts *are* far? That's usually why things seem one way or another. Acts *aiming* to produce an effect of a given sort (e.g. an effect on the long term future) seem, on priors, much more likely to produce such effects, while acts aiming to produce effects on hair length, for instance, seem more likely to produce effects on hair length

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I agree that the expectations of long-term effectiveness of large-group moralism are based on illusion; but I don't think CLT explains it so directly. You write:

longer-term influence is also more strongly associated with a far view.

Not so fast! Of the two, the far is the more permanent. To test your explanation, you should consider far matter that isn't moral. We are more prone to see a certain far future as predetermined than we are, in that manner, to see tomorrow.

It isn't, really, that we are prone to think that humans have long term-moral influence. The "we" is particular: "we" (each) think "our" moral acts (and those of others who agree with "us") will be influential ... because "we" believe "our" morals are true. Naive moral realism explains the moral presumptuousness you describe. (For an anti-realist approach to morality, see "Why do what you "ought"?—A habit theory of explicit morality" http://tinyurl.com/7dcbt7y )

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Are you really claiming that we care more about the hair of our far-future descendants than about their morals? In any mode?

It sounds like you're retreating to the claim that we care more about our own, current hair than about the morals of our descendants.

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It is in far mode that we think we care much more about morals than about other future things. In near mode we might well care more about things like hair.

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