Your Conscience Is Not A Moral Oracle

I’ve previously outlined three ways we might fix cultural drift. But each way seems quite a big ask, and I’ve been pondering what is our biggest obstacle here. What I’ve come up with is this: we will need to learn to stop treating conscience as if it were direct evidence on morality.

Evidence can be more vs less direct. For example, in a murder trial, direct evidence may include bodies, bullets, or videos, while testimony of people about these things, or by those who saw the murder, is indirect. Still less direct is testimony on what an accused murderer said. And far less direct are rumors that spread on the murder and who might be responsible.

When we use gossip and crowds to enforce norms, such as in cancel culture, we rely more on indirect evidence. Which often goes badly. So we’ve organized law to focus on direct evidence. Judges are to wait to rule until after they hear the most direct evidence available, and to mostly judge for themselves, rather than deferring to crowds. This avoids many pathologies.

We similarly defer to experts, not popular opinion, in areas of life near the professions. At least when we think expert groups can be trusted to have better access than us to direct evidence, to select members in ways correlated with such access, and to advise outsiders mainly on the basis of their better evidence. In such areas, we rely less on popularity, or on our personal feelings, intuitions, or reasoning.

On topics of “personal taste”, in contrast, like food or music, we focus on more direct evidence: how we feel about various options, both in anticipation and in retrospect. Yes, we may sometimes find advisors whose taste is close enough to ours to make their advice informative, but we see this situation as often hard to arrange.

So far, these seem like sensible ways to adjust epistemic habits to context. Now let’s consider how such habits have changed in the modern world. The Protestant Reformation encouraged Christians to rely on personal judgement, not priests, when interpreting the Bible. Many democracy advocates have warned voters against deferring to elite policy experts. And a new prestige of innovation makes us eager to join new fashions, and think more for ourselves on such things, rather than deferring to experts. We now treat such topics more like personal taste, and less like topics where expertise matters.

Such new modern attitudes may help us to promote innovation and avoid repressive authorities. But we should admit that, taken literally and locally, they seem epistemically flawed. Experts probably are quite a bit better than most people at interpreting the Bible, judging policy, and choosing change ideas. These are not mostly matters of taste.

Modernity has also changed our epistemic habits re morality. The ancients, like most everyone always, put great weight in judging morality on indirect evidence like popularity among ordinary people, elites, and moral authorities. They also put great weight on the somewhat more direct evidence of embodiment in custom, ritual, artistic expression, and formal law; these all suggest that a moral practice has at least passed a test of time. Finally, the ancients put weight on their feelings of conscience, on how much happiness or suffering was induced by a moral stance, and on how successful were the societies who adopted particular moral stances.

Compared to most ancients, when judging morality, we moderns put far less weight on custom and ritual. Since the rise of Christianity, we have put great weight on positions advocated by exemplar “saints” who make great sacrifices for their causes. Since the enlightenment we have also put more weight on positions argued for by our most impressive intellectuals. We also put more weight on stances that support narratives of moral progress, and we have come to embrace fast fashion changes in customs, and among artists and intellectuals, that embody moral stance changes.

Furthermore, much like our modern stances on Bible interpretation, democracy, and innovation, we moderns, compared to the ancients, put far more weight on what we each feel internally via our moral conscience, intuitions, and feelings. We weight such feelings as if they were strong direct evidence on morality.

Now our personal lives do give us some direct evidence on policy and innovations. But if morality is not actually a matter of personal taste, then our personal experience tells us little direct about morality. Yes, experience can show us a bit about the happiness or suffering that moral stances induce in people near us, but this is usually far from sufficient to settle most moral debates. While we need to obey conscience for our cultures to function, such feelings are mostly caused by our DNA, and by the morality of our parents, teachers, and other role models, and so feelings mainly only show that such views have passed a test of time. Feelings have no direct access to moral truth.

Furthermore, fast modern changes in customs, and in artistic and intellectual practice, make such sources even less useful as signs that associated moral stances have passed tests of time. True, the fact that a stance change was driven by impressive intellectuals might in principle suggest that it had become more logically consistent, but alas this effect seems to typically be rather weak.

Thus far I have been somewhat agnostic on the standard I’m using to evaluate “moral truth”. To argue further, let me now invoke my usual standard of Darwinian adaptiveness, re both DNA and cultural evolution. Re that standard, it seems quite hard to produce a community of moral experts. Even so, we still have two big ways that we can rely on somewhat direct signs of adaptiveness. As discussed above, we can judge the happiness or suffering a moral stance induces, which is plausibly a weak indicator of adaptiveness. But, alas, this indicator seems far from sufficient; culture and morality are complicated, and not easily reduced to simple calculations.

Second, we are influenced by how successful are the societies who adopted particular moral stances. In fact, this copy-the-successful-cultures habit has probably been the main cause of adaptive gains in the modern era. Alas, as such copying also caused a great cultural convergence, and so has by now mostly run out of potential for further gains. To the extent that a single (or a few) monoculture rules the world, copying successful cultures won’t help much anymore.

My bottom line here is that the main processes which are driving our big fast changes to our modern moral stances, such as random walks or drifts back toward natural human decadence or forager styles, do not seem much aligned with adaptive pressures. Suggesting that our key moral stances are decaying into maladaption, via the key modern failure of cultural drift.

The modern world seems quite unwilling to restart the traditional way we evolved cultures, via high cultural variety, strong selection pressures, and low rates of change of our contexts and values. So I have concluded:

I can only think of three solutions [to cultural drift], each quite hard to achieve: let capitalism run everything, govern small groups by number-go-up tied to adaption futures markets, or govern a big-enough group by number-go-up tied to futures market estimates re a civ goal in conflict w/ civ fall, like when 1M live in space. (Maybe assisted by futarchy.) (more)

Each of these solutions requires us to, when choosing our moral stances, in effect give much more weight to market proxies of future societal success, and much less weight to our consciences, and to bids by artistic, intellectual, and cultural activists to push moral changes that appeal to such consciences. We must accept that moral truth is not something that any of us have much direct evidence on, beyond the easy truth that suffering tends to be bad.

This would require a huge cultural change, one we don’t at all seem ready to make. But until we do, our civ will likely fall, the successor civ after ours will discard much of what we value of our civ, our descendants will continue to suffer in the troughs between civs, and we may never achieve our potential to reach the stars, and more.