We Must Change How We Source Morality
Consider three sources of opinions or habits:
(A) Inherit - passed down via DNA or culture, mostly sit in background unquestioned, give assumptions for B,C.
(B) Consider - personally think own thoughts, conscious or otherwise. Influenced by what hear, debates join.
(C) Specialize - people sit at niches in a structure, learn skills to contribute there, defer to outputs from other niches. Hear, debate near niche. Different types of structures: hierarchies, professions, speculative markets.
Before big brains, A dominated most everything. Then with big brains, A dominated stuff that was pretty constant over space and time, while B dominated the rest. And as we learned more kinds of abstractions, we collected more kinds of A that could help with B. While C has long been a thing, the modern world arose mainly due to a huge increase in C, mostly in orgs, markets, and professional networks. As our lives started to change faster and to get more specialized, that also induced a big increase in B to help us adapt to local context.
Looking more particularly at morality, norms, and adjacent culture, we see a relatively sudden jump from A to B at the modernism transition ~1900. People felt morality should change as fast as other habits were changing, and youth movements led the charge. But people also rejected C on such topics; it felt important that everyone “think for themselves”.
In adjacent areas of policy, sometimes C has been deferred to, but the ideology of democracy opposes doing too much of this. Over the last half century, we’ve seen a general decline in respect for and deference to C sources, especially near morals and politics, plausibly due to a long slow drift toward forager styles.
Alas, our civilization now plausibly suffers maladaptive cultural drift, in part from this new habit of setting morals and norms via B instead of A. And our civilization will fall unless we somehow fix this. (Even if we make AGI.) Yes, some C-like structures often feed indirectly into this B, but they don’t seem very adaptive. But short of returning to a stable low-tech highly-fragmented pre-modern world, it seems quite hard to return to A. So key question is: can we find an adaptive-enough C to source our morals?
I’ve explored a number of possible options here. While none seem especially promising, at least there’s some hope. But in this post I want to note that all of them will require us to accept no longer sourcing our morals mainly via “thinking for ourselves”. Maybe some people can be fooled into seeing themselves as vibing their morals, but there will in fact have to be a big effective structure that sets and changes morals, where people specialize on their small part and while deferring to other parts.