What I don’t understand is why there should be a link between trapped priors and an moral philosophy.
I mean, if moral realism was correct, i.e. if moral tenets such as “don’t eat pork”, “don’t have sex with your sister”, or “avoid killing sentient beings” had an universal truth value for all beings capable of moral behavior, then one might argue that the reason why people’s ethics differ is that they have trapped priors which prevent them from recognizing these universal truths.
This might be my trapped priors talking, but I am a non-cognitivist. I simply believe that assigning truth values to moral sentences such as “killing is wrong” is pointless, and they are better parsed as prescriptive sentences such as “don’t kill” or “boo on killing”.
In my view, moral codes are intrinsically subjective. There is no factual disagreement between Harry and Professor Quirrell which they could hope to overcome through empiricism, they simply have different utility functions.
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My second point is that if moral realism was true, and one of the key roles of religion was to free people from trapped priors so they could recognize these universal moral truths, then at least during the founding of religions, we should see some evidence of higher moral standards before they invariably mutate into institutions devoid of moral truths. I would argue that either, our commonly accepted humanitarian moral values are all wrong or this mutation process happened almost instantly:
Whatever Jesus thought about gender equality when he achieved moral enlightenment, Paul had his own ideas a few decades later.
Mohammed was clearly not opposed to offensive warfare.
Martin Luther evidently believed that serfs should not rebel against their lords.
On the other hand, for instances where religions did advocate for tenets compatible with humanitarianism, such as in Christian abolitionism, do not seem to correspond to strong spiritualism. Was Pope Benedict XIV condemning the slave trade because he was more spiritual (and thus in touch with the universal moral truth) than his predecessors who had endorsed it?
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My last point is that especially with regard to relational conflicts, our map not corresponding to the territory might often not be a bug, but a feature. Per Hanson, we deceive ourselves so that we can better deceive others. Evolution has not shaped our brains to be objective cognitive engines. In some cases, objective cognition is what it advantageous—if you are alone hunting a rabbit, no amount of self-deception will fill your stomach—but in any social situation, expect evolution to put the hand on the scales of your impartial judgement. Arguing that your son should become the new chieftain because he is the best hunter and strongest warrior is much more effective than arguing for that simply because he is your son—and the best way to argue that is to believe it, no matter if it is objectively true.
The adulterer, the slave owner and the wartime rapist all have solid evolutionary reasons to engage in behaviors most of us might find immoral. I think their moral blind spots are likely not caused by trapped priors, like an exaggerated fear of dogs is. Also, I have no reason to believe that I don’t have similar moral blind spots hard-wired into my brain by evolution.
I would bet that most of the serious roadblocks to a true moral theory (if such a thing existed) are of that kind, instead of being maladaptive trapped priors. Thus, even if religion and spirituality are effective at overcoming maladaptive trapped priors, I don’t see how they would us bring closer to moral cognition.
The adulterer, the slave owner and the wartime rapist all have solid evolutionary reasons to engage in behaviors most of us might find immoral. I think their moral blind spots are likely not caused by trapped priors, like an exaggerated fear of dogs is.
I don’t think the evopsych and trapped-prior views are incompatible. A selection pressure towards immoral behavior could select for genes/memes that tend to result in certain kinds of trapped prior.
My second point is that if moral realism was true, and one of the key roles of religion was to free people from trapped priors so they could recognize these universal moral truths, then at least during the founding of religions, we should see some evidence of higher moral standards before they invariably mutate into institutions devoid of moral truths. I would argue that either, our commonly accepted humanitarian moral values are all wrong or this mutation process happened almost instantly:
This is easy to research.
I will name a few ways the Buddha was ahead of his time in terms of ‘humanitarian moral values’ (which I do not personally buy into, and I don’t claim the Buddha did either, but if it helps shed light on some things):
He cared about environmentalism and not polluting shared natural resources, such as forests and rivers. I don’t have specific examples in mind about how he advocated for this, but I believe the evidence is out there.
Soon upon getting enlightened, his vow included a flourishing women monastic sangha. For the time, this was completely unheard of. People did not believe women could get enlightened or become arhats or do spiritual practice. With the Buddha’s blessing and support, his mother and former wife started a for-women, women-led monastic sangha. It was important that men did not lead this group, and he wisely made that clear to people. The nuns in this sangha had their lives threatened continuously, as what they were doing was so against the times.
Someone who digs into this might find places where things were not ‘equal’ for women and men and bring those up as a reason to doubt. But from my own investigation into this, I think a lot of reasonable compromises had to be made. A delicate balancing between fitting into the current social structures while ensuring the ability of women to do spiritual practice in community.
I do not personally buy into ‘equality’ in the way progressive Westerners do, and I think our current takes on women/men are “off” and I don’t advocate comparing all of our social norms and memes with the Buddha’s implementation of a complex, context-dependent system. I do not think we have “got it right”; we are still in the process of working this out.
The Buddha’s followers were extremely ethical people, and there are notes of people being surprised and flabbergasted about this from his time, including various kings and such. Ethical here means non-violent, non-lying, non-stealing, well-behaved, calm, heedful, caring, sober, etc.
Also extremely, extremely taboo for his time, the Buddha ordained from the slave caste. Ven. Upali is the main example. He became one of the Buddha’s main disciples. The Buddha firmly stood on grounds that people are not to be judged by their births. Race, class, gender, etc. There are some inspiring stories around this.
I think it can be reasonably argued that Buddhists continue to be fairly ethical, relatively speaking. The Buddha did a good job setting things up.
Unfortunately, Jesus died soon after he started teaching. The Buddha had decades to set things up for his followers. But I would also claim Jesus just wouldn’t have done as good a job as the Buddha, even with more time. Not throwing shade at Jesus though. Setting things up well is just extremely difficult and requires unimaginable spiritual power and wisdom.
I would also argue against the claim religious institutions are “devoid of moral truths”. I think this is mostly coming from secularist propaganda. In fact these institutions are still some of the most charitable, generous institutions that provide humanitarian aid all over the world. Their centuries-old systems are relatively effective at rooting out evil-doing in their ranks.
Compared to modern corporations, they’re acting out of a much clearer sense of morality than capitalist institutions. Compared to modern secular governments, such as that of the US, they’re doing less violence and harm to the planet. They did not invent nuclear weapons. They are not striving to build AGI. Furthermore, I doubt they would.
When spiritual teachers were asked about creating AI versions of themselves, they were not interested, and one company had to change their whole business model to creating sales bots instead. (Real story. I won’t reveal which company.)
I’m sad about all the corruption in religious institutions, still. It’s there. Hatred against gay people and controlling women’s bodies. The crusades. The jihads. Using coercive shame to keep people down. OK, well, I can tell a story about why corruption seeped into the Church, and it doesn’t sound crazy to me. (Black Death happened, is what.)
But our modern world has become nihilistic, amoral, and vastly more okay with killing large numbers of living beings, ecosystems, habitats, the atmosphere, etc. Pat ourselves on the back for civil rights, yes. Celebrate this. But who’s really devoid of moral truths here? When we are the ones casually destroying the planet and even openly willing to take 10%+ chances at total extinction to build an AGI? The Christians and the Buddhists and even the jihadists aren’t behind this.
OK, well, I can tell a story about why corruption seeped into the Church, and it doesn’t sound crazy to me. (Black Death happened, is what.)
The Mediaeval Christian church’s power-seeking and hypocrisy precedes the Black Death.
Charlemagne led campaigns against the Saxon pagans in the late 8th century, to convert them by force, with the blessing of the papacy.
Medieval popes very regularly got into power-conflicts with Medieval kings.[1]
Church leaders got into into conflicts with each other, often declaring each other illegitimate. [2]
The papacy ordered the first Crusade in 1095.
Admittedly it does seem like like there might have been an uptick in Church hypocrisy around the 1300s (I’m thinking of the schism (which results in a period where there are three people claiming to be Pope for decades), Pope Alexander VI’s many illegitimate kids, and the whole indulgences thing.)
But overall, the church does not look like a beacon of ethics to me. It’s looks like just about what I would expect: an institution of considerable power, lead by people who defending and expanding their power, with various spiritual narratives pasted on top. (Indeed, it doesn’t look like most popes were particularly selected for their spiritual aptitude or insight at all, compared to their political savvy.)
Compared to modern corporations, they’re acting out of a much clearer sense of morality than capitalist institutions. Compared to modern secular governments, such as that of the US, they’re doing less violence and harm to the planet. They did not invent nuclear weapons. They are not striving to build AGI. Furthermore, I doubt they would.
I think this is an unfair comparison. Religions, while still non-trivial entities, have been waning in power since the 1500s. They do less harm in these particular ways 1) because they’re less powerful and so have less big effects overall, and 2) because they now select primairly for leadership that’s motivated by signaling moral superiority rather than motivated by desire for power or wealth.
(In the same way that the US government is less capable than it was in the 1950s, because many of the competent people who would have gone into public service can now get an exponentially better deal in tech and finance.)
I agree that most religions are not making war the way powerful nations do. But I don’t buy that that’s because they’re more ethical. They don’t have the wealth and resources of the superpowers any more. They can’t make war, even if they wanted to.
But that wasn’t always the case. When regions were more powerful, they did in fact instigate wars to defend their interests.
Islam, uniquely of western religions, still holds this kind of sway, and...notably, religious leaders do order guerrilla war and terrorist acts.
Catholicism never would have collected the intelligence necessary to invent a nuke. Their worldview was not compatible with science. It was an inferior organizing principle. (“inferior” meaning less capable of coordinating a collective intelligence needed to build nukes.)
You believe intelligence is such a high good, a high virtue, that it would be hard for you to see how intelligence is deeply and intricately causal with the destruction of life on this planet, and therefore the less intelligent, less destructive religions actually have more ethical ground to stand on, even though they were still fairly corrupt.
But it’s a straightforward comparison.
Medieval “dark” ages = almost no technological progress, very little risk of blowing up the planet in any way; relatively, not inspiring, but still—kudos for keeping us from hurtling toward extinction, and at this point, we’re fine with rewarding this even though it’s such a “low bar”
Today = massive, exponential technological progress, nuclear war could already take us all out, but we have a number of other x-risks to worry about. And we’re so identified with science and tech that we aren’t willing to stop, even as we admit OUT LOUD that it could cause extinction-level catastrophe. This is worse than the Crusades by a long shot. We’re not talking about sending children to war. We’re talking about the end of children. Just no more children. This is worse than suicide cults that claim we go to heaven as long as we commit suicide. We don’t even think what we’re doing will necessarily result in heaven, and we do it anyway. We have no evidence we can upload consciousnesses at all. Or end aging and death. Or build a friendly AI. At least the Catholics were convinced a very good thing would happen by sending kids to war. We’re not even convinced, and we are willing to risk the lives of all children. Do you see how this is worse than the Catholics?
I agree that religions mostly don’t cause x-risk, because (for the most part) they’re not sufficiently good at organizing intellectual endeavor. (There might be exceptions to that generalization, and they can coopt the technological products of other organizational systems.)
I agree that the x-risk is an overriding concern, in terms of practical consequences. If any given person does tons of good things, and also contributes to x-risk, its easy for the x-risk contribution to swamp everything else in their overall impact.
But yeah, I object to calling a person or an institution more ethical because they are / it is too weak to do (comparatively) much harm.
I care about identifying which people and institutions are more ethical so that 1) I can learn from them ethics from them 2) so that I can defer to them.
If a person or institution avoids causing harm because they’re weak, they’re mostly not very helpful to learn from (they can’t help me figure out how to wield power ethically, at least) and defering to them or otherwise empowering them is actively harmful because doing so removes the feature that was keeping them (relatively) harmless.
A person who is dispositionally a bully, but who is physically weak, but who would immediately start acting like a bully if he were bigger, or if he had more social power, is not ethical on account of his not bullying people. An AGI that is “aligned”, until it is much more powerful than the rest of the world, is not aligned. A church that does (relatively) less harm unless and until it is powerful enough to command armies or nukes, is likewise not very trustworthy.
To reason well in these domains, I need a concept of ethics that can be discussed independently of power. And therefore I need to be able to evaluate ethics independently of actualharm caused.
Not just “how much harm does this institution do?” but “how much harm would it do, in other circumstances?”. I might want to ask “how does this person or institution behave, if given different levels or different kinds of power over the world?”
Given that criterion.
The Catholic Church causes less overall harm than OpenAI. (I think, as always it’s hard to evaluate.)
It causes less overall harm than the US government.
It’s unclear to me if it causes more or less harm than Coca-cola.
Harm-caused is certainly relevant evidence about the ethics of an institution, but not most of the question.
Considering the comparison with the US government:
The US government seems to me to be overall more robust to the stresses imposed by power, than the Catholic Church.
I think the organizations are probably about equally trustworthy in terms of how much you can rely on them to follow their agreements when you don’t have particular power to enforce those agreements?
I think they’re about equally likely to cover up the illegal or immoral actions of their members?
I would prefer that the US government and the Catholic hierarchy to have their current relative distributions of power rather than to have them reversed. I don’t think that the world would get better if the Catholic hierarchy was a the leading world superpower, instead of the US.
As a shorthand for that, I might say that the US government, while not ethical by any means, is more ethical than the the Catholic Church.
There is a bit of an out here where people or institutions that do less harm because they are less powerful, and which are less powerful by their own choice, might indeed be ethically superior. They might be safe to give more power to, because they would not accept the power granted, and they might be worth learning from.
I would be interested in examples of religious institutions declining power granted to them.
From my read of history, the Catholic Hierarchy has never done this?
We’re not even convinced, and we are willing to risk the lives of all children. Do you see how this is worse than the Catholics?
Absolutely. I definitely think there’s something awful about being willing to risk the future, and even more awful about being willing to risk the future for no particular ideal.
I’d probably agree that that’s worse than Catholicism. Catholicism seems unlikely to metastasize into an actively ominicidal worldview to me. Though I think if it were more powerful and relevant, and it’s incentives were somewhat different, it would totally risk omnicide in a holy war against heresy (extrapolating from the long history of Christian holy wars causing great destruction, short of omnicide, because omnicide wasn’t technologically on the table yet.)
But, I don’t know who you’re referring to when you say “we”. It sounds like something like “moderns” or “post-enlightenment societies” or maybe “cultures based on ‘scientific materialism’”?
I mostly reject those charges. Mostly it looks to me like there are a small number (~10,000 to 100,000) of people who are willing to risk all the children, unilaterally, while most people broadly oppose that, to the extent that they’re informed about it.
Almost everyone does oppose the destruction of all life (though by their revealed preferences, almost everyone is fine with subsidising factory farming).
You believe intelligence is such a high good, a high virtue, that it would be hard for you to see how intelligence is deeply and intricately causal with the destruction of life on this planet, and therefore the less intelligent, less destructive religions actually have more ethical ground to stand on, even though they were still fairly corrupt.
I mean, it’s obviously hard for me to say definitively if I have a cultural blindspot.
But, FYI, while I would say that intelligence is “a good”, I am unlikely to call it a “virtue” or a “high good” (which connotes a moral good, as opposed to eg an economic good).
Intelligence is a force multiplier. More intelligent agents are more capable. They do a better job of doing whatever it is that they do.
And yeah, it’s pretty obvious to me that “intelligence is deeply and intricately causal with the destruction of life on this planet”. Humans might destroy the biosphere, specifically by dint of their collective intelligence. No other species is even remotely in the running to do that, except for the AIs we’re rushing forward to create. If you remove the intelligence and you don’t get the omnicide.
I think you mean something more specific here. Not just that destroying all life is a big action, and so is only possible with a big force multiplier, but that intelligence is the motivating factor, or actively obscures moral truth, or something.
What do you mean here?
and therefore the less intelligent, less destructive religions actually have more ethical ground to stand on, even though they were still fairly corrupt.
Yeah, I don’t buy this, for the reasons outlined above.
If you’re less destructive because you’re weak, you don’t get “moral points”. You get “moral points” based on how you behave, relative to the options and incentives presented to you.
I’m not sure about the rest of it, but this caught my eye:
if moral realism was true, and one of the key roles of religion was to free people from trapped priors so they could recognize these universal moral truths, then at least during the founding of religions, we should see some evidence of higher moral standards before they invariably mutate into institutions devoid of moral truths.
I had a similar thought, and was trying to figure out if I could find a single good person to formally and efficiently coordinate with in a non-trivial pre-existing institution full of “safely good and sane people”.
I’m still searching. If anyone has a solid lead on this, please DM me, maybe?
Something you might expect is that many such “hypothetically existing hypothetically good people” would be willing to die slightly earlier for a good enough cause (especially late in life when their life expectancy is low, and especially for very high stakes issues where a lot of leverage is possible) but they wouldn’t waste lives, because waste is ceteris paribus bad, and so… so… what about martyrs who are also leaders?
This line of thinking is how I learned about Martin The Confessor, the last Pope to ever die for his beliefs.
Since 655 AD is much much earlier than 2024 AD, it would seem that Catholicism no longer “has the sauce” so to speak?
Also, slightly relatedly, I’m more glad that I otherwise might be that in this timeline the bullet missed Trump. In other very nearby timelines I’m pretty sure the whole idea of using physical courage to detect morally good leadership in a morally good group would be much more controversial than the principle is here, now, in this timeline, where no one has trapped priors about it that are being actively pumped full of energy by the media, with the creation of new social traumas, and so on...
...not that elected secular leaders of mere nation states would have any obvious formal duties to specifically be the person to benevolently serve literally all good beings as a focal point.
To get that formula to basically work, in a way that it kinda seems to work with US elections, since many US Presidents are assassinated in ways they could probably predict were possible (modulo this currently only working within the intrinsically “partial” nature of US elections, since these are merely elections for the leader of a single nation state that faces many other hostile nation states in a hobbesian world of eternal war (at least eternal war… so far!) ) I think one might need to hold global elections?
And… But… And this… this seems sorta do-able?!? Weirdly so!
We have the internet now. We have translation software to translate all the political statements into all the languages. We have internet money that could be used to donate to something that was worth donating to.
Why not create a “United Persons Alliance” (to play the “House of Representatives” to the UN’s “Senate”?) and find out what the UPA’s “Donation Weighted Condorcet Prime Minister” has to say?
I kinda can’t figure out why no one has tried it yet.
Maybe it is because, logically speaking, moral realism MIGHT be true and also maybe all humans are objectively bad?
If a lot of people knew for sure that “moral realism is true but humans are universally fallen” then it might explain why we almost never “produce and maintain legibly just institutions”.
Under the premises entertained here so far, IF such institutions were attempted anyway, and the attempt had security holes, THEN those security holes would be predictably abused and it would be predictably regretted by anyone who spent money setting it up, or trusted such a thing.
So maybe it is just that “moral realism is true, humans are bad, and designing secure systems is hard and humans are also smart enough to never try to summon a real justice system”?
Regarding your second point, I’m leaving this comment as a placeholder to indicate my intention to give a proper response at some point. My views here have some subtlely that I want to make sure I unpack correctly, and it’s getting late here!
I mean, if moral realism was correct, i.e. if moral tenets such as “don’t eat pork”, “don’t have sex with your sister”, or “avoid killing sentient beings” had an universal truth value for all beings capable of moral behavior, then one might argue that the reason why people’s ethics differ is that they have trapped priors which prevent them from recognizing these universal truths.
This might be my trapped priors talking, but I am a non-cognitivist. I simply believe that assigning truth values to moral sentences such as “killing is wrong” is pointless, and they are better parsed as prescriptive sentences such as “don’t kill” or “boo on killing”.
In my view, moral codes are intrinsically subjective. There is no factual disagreement between Harry and Professor Quirrell which they could hope to overcome through empiricism, they simply have different utility functions.
I don’t claim to be a moral realist or any other -ist that we currently have words for. I do follow the Buddha’s teachings on morals and ethics. So I will share from that perspective, which I have reason to believe to be true and beneficial to take on, for anyone interested in becoming more ethical, wise, and kind.
“Don’t eat pork” is something I’d call an ethical rule, set for a specific time and place, which is a valid manifestation of morality.
“Avoiding killing” and “Avoid stealing” (etc) are held, in Buddhism, as “ethical precepts.” They aren’t rules, but they’re like…
a) Each precept is a game in and of itself with many levels
b) It is generally considered good to use this life and future lives to deepen one’s practice of each of the precepts (to take on the huge mission of perfecting our choices to be more in alignment with the real thing these statements are pointing at). It’s also friendly to help others do the same.
c) It’s not about being a stickler to the letter of the law. The deeper you investigate each precept, you actually have to let go of your ideas of what it means to “be doing it right.” It’s not about getting fixated on rules, heuristics, or norms. There’s something more real and true being pointed to that cannot be predicted, pre-determined, etc.
Moral codes are not intrinsically subjective. But I would also not make claims about them being objective. We are caught in a sinkhole dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity. Western thinking needs to find a way out of this. Too many philosophical discussions get stuck on these concepts. They’re useful to a degree, but we need to be able to discard them when they become useless.
“Killing is wrong” is a true statement. It’s not subjectively true; it’s not objectively true. It’s true in a sense that doesn’t neatly fit into either of those categories.
The connection to moral systems could be due to the fact that curing people of trapped priors or other narcissism-like self-defending pathologies is hard and punishing and you won’t do it for them unless you have a lot of love and faith in you.
I wonder if it also has something to do with certain kinds of information being locally nonexcludable goods, they have a cost to spread, but the value of the information is never obvious to a potential buyer until after the transfer has taken place. A person only pays their teacher back if the teacher can convey a sense of moral responsibility to do so.
Finally, harari’s definition of religion is just a system of ideas that brings order between people. This is usually a much more useful definition than definitions like “claims about the supernatural” or whatever. In this frame, many truths, “trade allows mutual benefit”, or [the english language] or [how to not be cripplingly insane] are religious in that it benefits all of us a little bit if more people have these ideas installed.
In response to your third point, I want to echo ABlue’s comment about the compatibility of the trapped prior view and the evopsych view. I also want to emphasize that my usage of “trapped prior” includes genetically pre-specified priors, like a fear of snakes, which I think can be overriden.
In any case, I don’t see why priors that predispose us to e.g. adultery couldn’t be similarly overriden. I wonder if our main source of disagreement has to do with the feasibility of overriding “hard-wired” evolutionary priors?
In response to your first point, I think of moral codes as being contextual more than I think of them as being subjective, but I do think of them as fundamentally being about pragmatism (“let’s all agree to coordinate in ABC way to solve PQR problem in XYZ environment, and socially punish people who aren’t willing to do so”). I also think religions often make the mistake of generalizing moral codes beyond the contexts in which they arose as helpful adaptations.
I think of decision theory as being the basis for morality—see e.g. Critch’s take here and Richard Ngo’s take here. I evaluate how ethical people are based on how good they are at paying causal costs for larger acausal gains.
‘I simply believe that assigning truth values to moral sentences such as “killing is wrong” is pointless, and they are better parsed as prescriptive sentences such as “don’t kill” or “boo on killing”. ’
Going to bring in a point I stole from David Friedmann: If I see that an apple is red, and almost everybody else agree that the apple is red, and the only person who disagrees also tend to disagree with most people about all colors and so is probably color blind, then it makes sense to say that it is true that the apple is red.
-Jesus, Muhammed and Luther:
Muhammed did support offensive warfare, but apart from that his religious rules might have been a step up from earlier arabic society. I have noticed that modern Islamic countries actually doesn’t have a lot of peacetime violence or crime, compared to equally rich or developed countries. And Martin Luther was opposed to rebellions exactly because he thought anarchy and violent religious movements were worse than the status quo. He did support peaceful movements for peasant rights.
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Finally, why would spirituality only help you overcome ‘maladaptive’ trapped priors? Might it not just as well cure adaptive, but unwanted ones?
What I don’t understand is why there should be a link between trapped priors and an moral philosophy.
I mean, if moral realism was correct, i.e. if moral tenets such as “don’t eat pork”, “don’t have sex with your sister”, or “avoid killing sentient beings” had an universal truth value for all beings capable of moral behavior, then one might argue that the reason why people’s ethics differ is that they have trapped priors which prevent them from recognizing these universal truths.
This might be my trapped priors talking, but I am a non-cognitivist. I simply believe that assigning truth values to moral sentences such as “killing is wrong” is pointless, and they are better parsed as prescriptive sentences such as “don’t kill” or “boo on killing”.
In my view, moral codes are intrinsically subjective. There is no factual disagreement between Harry and Professor Quirrell which they could hope to overcome through empiricism, they simply have different utility functions.
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My second point is that if moral realism was true, and one of the key roles of religion was to free people from trapped priors so they could recognize these universal moral truths, then at least during the founding of religions, we should see some evidence of higher moral standards before they invariably mutate into institutions devoid of moral truths. I would argue that either, our commonly accepted humanitarian moral values are all wrong or this mutation process happened almost instantly:
Whatever Jesus thought about gender equality when he achieved moral enlightenment, Paul had his own ideas a few decades later.
Mohammed was clearly not opposed to offensive warfare.
Martin Luther evidently believed that serfs should not rebel against their lords.
On the other hand, for instances where religions did advocate for tenets compatible with humanitarianism, such as in Christian abolitionism, do not seem to correspond to strong spiritualism. Was Pope Benedict XIV condemning the slave trade because he was more spiritual (and thus in touch with the universal moral truth) than his predecessors who had endorsed it?
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My last point is that especially with regard to relational conflicts, our map not corresponding to the territory might often not be a bug, but a feature. Per Hanson, we deceive ourselves so that we can better deceive others. Evolution has not shaped our brains to be objective cognitive engines. In some cases, objective cognition is what it advantageous—if you are alone hunting a rabbit, no amount of self-deception will fill your stomach—but in any social situation, expect evolution to put the hand on the scales of your impartial judgement. Arguing that your son should become the new chieftain because he is the best hunter and strongest warrior is much more effective than arguing for that simply because he is your son—and the best way to argue that is to believe it, no matter if it is objectively true.
The adulterer, the slave owner and the wartime rapist all have solid evolutionary reasons to engage in behaviors most of us might find immoral. I think their moral blind spots are likely not caused by trapped priors, like an exaggerated fear of dogs is. Also, I have no reason to believe that I don’t have similar moral blind spots hard-wired into my brain by evolution.
I would bet that most of the serious roadblocks to a true moral theory (if such a thing existed) are of that kind, instead of being maladaptive trapped priors. Thus, even if religion and spirituality are effective at overcoming maladaptive trapped priors, I don’t see how they would us bring closer to moral cognition.
I don’t think the evopsych and trapped-prior views are incompatible. A selection pressure towards immoral behavior could select for genes/memes that tend to result in certain kinds of trapped prior.
This is easy to research.
I will name a few ways the Buddha was ahead of his time in terms of ‘humanitarian moral values’ (which I do not personally buy into, and I don’t claim the Buddha did either, but if it helps shed light on some things):
He cared about environmentalism and not polluting shared natural resources, such as forests and rivers. I don’t have specific examples in mind about how he advocated for this, but I believe the evidence is out there.
Soon upon getting enlightened, his vow included a flourishing women monastic sangha. For the time, this was completely unheard of. People did not believe women could get enlightened or become arhats or do spiritual practice. With the Buddha’s blessing and support, his mother and former wife started a for-women, women-led monastic sangha. It was important that men did not lead this group, and he wisely made that clear to people. The nuns in this sangha had their lives threatened continuously, as what they were doing was so against the times.
Someone who digs into this might find places where things were not ‘equal’ for women and men and bring those up as a reason to doubt. But from my own investigation into this, I think a lot of reasonable compromises had to be made. A delicate balancing between fitting into the current social structures while ensuring the ability of women to do spiritual practice in community.
I do not personally buy into ‘equality’ in the way progressive Westerners do, and I think our current takes on women/men are “off” and I don’t advocate comparing all of our social norms and memes with the Buddha’s implementation of a complex, context-dependent system. I do not think we have “got it right”; we are still in the process of working this out.
The Buddha’s followers were extremely ethical people, and there are notes of people being surprised and flabbergasted about this from his time, including various kings and such. Ethical here means non-violent, non-lying, non-stealing, well-behaved, calm, heedful, caring, sober, etc.
Also extremely, extremely taboo for his time, the Buddha ordained from the slave caste. Ven. Upali is the main example. He became one of the Buddha’s main disciples. The Buddha firmly stood on grounds that people are not to be judged by their births. Race, class, gender, etc. There are some inspiring stories around this.
I think it can be reasonably argued that Buddhists continue to be fairly ethical, relatively speaking. The Buddha did a good job setting things up.
Unfortunately, Jesus died soon after he started teaching. The Buddha had decades to set things up for his followers. But I would also claim Jesus just wouldn’t have done as good a job as the Buddha, even with more time. Not throwing shade at Jesus though. Setting things up well is just extremely difficult and requires unimaginable spiritual power and wisdom.
There are also amazing stories about Christians.
I would also argue against the claim religious institutions are “devoid of moral truths”. I think this is mostly coming from secularist propaganda. In fact these institutions are still some of the most charitable, generous institutions that provide humanitarian aid all over the world. Their centuries-old systems are relatively effective at rooting out evil-doing in their ranks.
Compared to modern corporations, they’re acting out of a much clearer sense of morality than capitalist institutions. Compared to modern secular governments, such as that of the US, they’re doing less violence and harm to the planet. They did not invent nuclear weapons. They are not striving to build AGI. Furthermore, I doubt they would.
When spiritual teachers were asked about creating AI versions of themselves, they were not interested, and one company had to change their whole business model to creating sales bots instead. (Real story. I won’t reveal which company.)
I’m sad about all the corruption in religious institutions, still. It’s there. Hatred against gay people and controlling women’s bodies. The crusades. The jihads. Using coercive shame to keep people down. OK, well, I can tell a story about why corruption seeped into the Church, and it doesn’t sound crazy to me. (Black Death happened, is what.)
But our modern world has become nihilistic, amoral, and vastly more okay with killing large numbers of living beings, ecosystems, habitats, the atmosphere, etc. Pat ourselves on the back for civil rights, yes. Celebrate this. But who’s really devoid of moral truths here? When we are the ones casually destroying the planet and even openly willing to take 10%+ chances at total extinction to build an AGI? The Christians and the Buddhists and even the jihadists aren’t behind this.
The Mediaeval Christian church’s power-seeking and hypocrisy precedes the Black Death.
Charlemagne led campaigns against the Saxon pagans in the late 8th century, to convert them by force, with the blessing of the papacy.
Medieval popes very regularly got into power-conflicts with Medieval kings.[1]
Church leaders got into into conflicts with each other, often declaring each other illegitimate. [2]
The papacy ordered the first Crusade in 1095.
Admittedly it does seem like like there might have been an uptick in Church hypocrisy around the 1300s (I’m thinking of the schism (which results in a period where there are three people claiming to be Pope for decades), Pope Alexander VI’s many illegitimate kids, and the whole indulgences thing.)
But overall, the church does not look like a beacon of ethics to me. It’s looks like just about what I would expect: an institution of considerable power, lead by people who defending and expanding their power, with various spiritual narratives pasted on top. (Indeed, it doesn’t look like most popes were particularly selected for their spiritual aptitude or insight at all, compared to their political savvy.)
I think this is an unfair comparison. Religions, while still non-trivial entities, have been waning in power since the 1500s. They do less harm in these particular ways 1) because they’re less powerful and so have less big effects overall, and 2) because they now select primairly for leadership that’s motivated by signaling moral superiority rather than motivated by desire for power or wealth.
(In the same way that the US government is less capable than it was in the 1950s, because many of the competent people who would have gone into public service can now get an exponentially better deal in tech and finance.)
I agree that most religions are not making war the way powerful nations do. But I don’t buy that that’s because they’re more ethical. They don’t have the wealth and resources of the superpowers any more. They can’t make war, even if they wanted to.
But that wasn’t always the case. When regions were more powerful, they did in fact instigate wars to defend their interests.
Islam, uniquely of western religions, still holds this kind of sway, and...notably, religious leaders do order guerrilla war and terrorist acts.
Claude lists:
Pope Gregory VII vs. Henry IV (Investiture Controversy, 1075-1122):
This was one of the most famous conflicts between papal and royal authority.
Gregory VII asserted the pope’s right to appoint church officials, challenging Henry IV’s traditional role.
Henry attempted to depose Gregory, who in turn excommunicated Henry.
Henry famously performed penance at Canossa in 1077 to lift his excommunication.
Pope Innocent III vs. King John of England (1205-1213):
Dispute arose over the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Innocent placed England under an interdict and excommunicated John.
John eventually submitted, accepting England as a papal fief and paying tribute.
Pope Boniface VIII vs. Philip IV of France (1296-1303):
Conflict over taxation of clergy and papal authority.
Boniface issued the bull “Unam Sanctam” asserting papal supremacy.
Philip’s agents attacked Boniface (the “Outrage of Anagni”), leading to the pope’s death shortly after.
Pope Alexander III vs. Frederick Barbarossa (1159-1177):
Long-standing dispute over papal authority and control of northern Italy.
Frederick supported a series of antipopes against Alexander.
The conflict ended with the Peace of Venice, where Frederick acknowledged Alexander as pope.
Pope Urban II vs. William II of England (1088-1099):
Conflict over church appointments and authority in England.
William refused to acknowledge Urban as pope for several years.
[There was at least one more. This is a sample.]
Again, Claude lists:
Hippolytus of Rome (217-235 AD):
Considered one of the earliest antipopes.
He opposed Pope Callixtus I and subsequent popes, setting himself up as a rival bishop of Rome.
Novatian (251-258 AD):
Declared himself pope in opposition to Pope Cornelius.
This schism was based on disagreements over how to treat Christians who had lapsed during persecution.
Arian Schism (4th century):
While not strictly a papal schism, this theological dispute led to rival bishops in many cities, each declaring the other illegitimate.
Laurentian Schism (498-506 AD):
After the death of Pope Anastasius II, both Symmachus and Laurentius were elected pope by rival factions.
This led to a period of conflict until Symmachus was finally recognized as the legitimate pope.
Cadaver Synod (897 AD):
Pope Stephen VI had the corpse of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, exhumed and put on trial.
He declared Formosus’s papacy illegitimate and his acts invalid.
Investiture Controversy (late 11th—early 12th century):
While not a direct antipapacy, this conflict between the papacy and secular rulers led to periods where rival popes were appointed.
For instance, Henry IV of Germany appointed Clement III as antipope against Pope Gregory VII.
Anacletan Schism (1130-1138):
Both Innocent II and Anacletus II claimed to be the rightful pope, dividing Europe’s loyalty.
Catholicism never would have collected the intelligence necessary to invent a nuke. Their worldview was not compatible with science. It was an inferior organizing principle. (“inferior” meaning less capable of coordinating a collective intelligence needed to build nukes.)
You believe intelligence is such a high good, a high virtue, that it would be hard for you to see how intelligence is deeply and intricately causal with the destruction of life on this planet, and therefore the less intelligent, less destructive religions actually have more ethical ground to stand on, even though they were still fairly corrupt.
But it’s a straightforward comparison.
Medieval “dark” ages = almost no technological progress, very little risk of blowing up the planet in any way; relatively, not inspiring, but still—kudos for keeping us from hurtling toward extinction, and at this point, we’re fine with rewarding this even though it’s such a “low bar”
Today = massive, exponential technological progress, nuclear war could already take us all out, but we have a number of other x-risks to worry about. And we’re so identified with science and tech that we aren’t willing to stop, even as we admit OUT LOUD that it could cause extinction-level catastrophe. This is worse than the Crusades by a long shot. We’re not talking about sending children to war. We’re talking about the end of children. Just no more children. This is worse than suicide cults that claim we go to heaven as long as we commit suicide. We don’t even think what we’re doing will necessarily result in heaven, and we do it anyway. We have no evidence we can upload consciousnesses at all. Or end aging and death. Or build a friendly AI. At least the Catholics were convinced a very good thing would happen by sending kids to war. We’re not even convinced, and we are willing to risk the lives of all children. Do you see how this is worse than the Catholics?
I agree that religions mostly don’t cause x-risk, because (for the most part) they’re not sufficiently good at organizing intellectual endeavor. (There might be exceptions to that generalization, and they can coopt the technological products of other organizational systems.)
I agree that the x-risk is an overriding concern, in terms of practical consequences. If any given person does tons of good things, and also contributes to x-risk, its easy for the x-risk contribution to swamp everything else in their overall impact.
But yeah, I object to calling a person or an institution more ethical because they are / it is too weak to do (comparatively) much harm.
I care about identifying which people and institutions are more ethical so that 1) I can learn from them ethics from them 2) so that I can defer to them.
If a person or institution avoids causing harm because they’re weak, they’re mostly not very helpful to learn from (they can’t help me figure out how to wield power ethically, at least) and defering to them or otherwise empowering them is actively harmful because doing so removes the feature that was keeping them (relatively) harmless.
A person who is dispositionally a bully, but who is physically weak, but who would immediately start acting like a bully if he were bigger, or if he had more social power, is not ethical on account of his not bullying people. An AGI that is “aligned”, until it is much more powerful than the rest of the world, is not aligned. A church that does (relatively) less harm unless and until it is powerful enough to command armies or nukes, is likewise not very trustworthy.
To reason well in these domains, I need a concept of ethics that can be discussed independently of power. And therefore I need to be able to evaluate ethics independently of actual harm caused.
Not just “how much harm does this institution do?” but “how much harm would it do, in other circumstances?”. I might want to ask “how does this person or institution behave, if given different levels or different kinds of power over the world?”
Given that criterion.
The Catholic Church causes less overall harm than OpenAI. (I think, as always it’s hard to evaluate.)
It causes less overall harm than the US government.
It’s unclear to me if it causes more or less harm than Coca-cola.
Harm-caused is certainly relevant evidence about the ethics of an institution, but not most of the question.
Considering the comparison with the US government:
The US government seems to me to be overall more robust to the stresses imposed by power, than the Catholic Church.
I think the organizations are probably about equally trustworthy in terms of how much you can rely on them to follow their agreements when you don’t have particular power to enforce those agreements?
I think they’re about equally likely to cover up the illegal or immoral actions of their members?
I would prefer that the US government and the Catholic hierarchy to have their current relative distributions of power rather than to have them reversed. I don’t think that the world would get better if the Catholic hierarchy was a the leading world superpower, instead of the US.
As a shorthand for that, I might say that the US government, while not ethical by any means, is more ethical than the the Catholic Church.
There is a bit of an out here where people or institutions that do less harm because they are less powerful, and which are less powerful by their own choice, might indeed be ethically superior. They might be safe to give more power to, because they would not accept the power granted, and they might be worth learning from.
I would be interested in examples of religious institutions declining power granted to them.
From my read of history, the Catholic Hierarchy has never done this?
Absolutely. I definitely think there’s something awful about being willing to risk the future, and even more awful about being willing to risk the future for no particular ideal.
I’d probably agree that that’s worse than Catholicism. Catholicism seems unlikely to metastasize into an actively ominicidal worldview to me. Though I think if it were more powerful and relevant, and it’s incentives were somewhat different, it would totally risk omnicide in a holy war against heresy (extrapolating from the long history of Christian holy wars causing great destruction, short of omnicide, because omnicide wasn’t technologically on the table yet.)
But, I don’t know who you’re referring to when you say “we”. It sounds like something like “moderns” or “post-enlightenment societies” or maybe “cultures based on ‘scientific materialism’”?
I mostly reject those charges. Mostly it looks to me like there are a small number (~10,000 to 100,000) of people who are willing to risk all the children, unilaterally, while most people broadly oppose that, to the extent that they’re informed about it.
Almost everyone does oppose the destruction of all life (though by their revealed preferences, almost everyone is fine with subsidising factory farming).
I mean, it’s obviously hard for me to say definitively if I have a cultural blindspot.
But, FYI, while I would say that intelligence is “a good”, I am unlikely to call it a “virtue” or a “high good” (which connotes a moral good, as opposed to eg an economic good).
Intelligence is a force multiplier. More intelligent agents are more capable. They do a better job of doing whatever it is that they do.
And yeah, it’s pretty obvious to me that “intelligence is deeply and intricately causal with the destruction of life on this planet”. Humans might destroy the biosphere, specifically by dint of their collective intelligence. No other species is even remotely in the running to do that, except for the AIs we’re rushing forward to create. If you remove the intelligence and you don’t get the omnicide.
I think you mean something more specific here. Not just that destroying all life is a big action, and so is only possible with a big force multiplier, but that intelligence is the motivating factor, or actively obscures moral truth, or something.
What do you mean here?
Yeah, I don’t buy this, for the reasons outlined above.
If you’re less destructive because you’re weak, you don’t get “moral points”. You get “moral points” based on how you behave, relative to the options and incentives presented to you.
I’m not sure about the rest of it, but this caught my eye:
I had a similar thought, and was trying to figure out if I could find a single good person to formally and efficiently coordinate with in a non-trivial pre-existing institution full of “safely good and sane people”.
I’m still searching. If anyone has a solid lead on this, please DM me, maybe?
Something you might expect is that many such “hypothetically existing hypothetically good people” would be willing to die slightly earlier for a good enough cause (especially late in life when their life expectancy is low, and especially for very high stakes issues where a lot of leverage is possible) but they wouldn’t waste lives, because waste is ceteris paribus bad, and so… so… what about martyrs who are also leaders?
This line of thinking is how I learned about Martin The Confessor, the last Pope to ever die for his beliefs.
Since 655 AD is much much earlier than 2024 AD, it would seem that Catholicism no longer “has the sauce” so to speak?
Also, slightly relatedly, I’m more glad that I otherwise might be that in this timeline the bullet missed Trump. In other very nearby timelines I’m pretty sure the whole idea of using physical courage to detect morally good leadership in a morally good group would be much more controversial than the principle is here, now, in this timeline, where no one has trapped priors about it that are being actively pumped full of energy by the media, with the creation of new social traumas, and so on...
...not that elected secular leaders of mere nation states would have any obvious formal duties to specifically be the person to benevolently serve literally all good beings as a focal point.
To get that formula to basically work, in a way that it kinda seems to work with US elections, since many US Presidents are assassinated in ways they could probably predict were possible (modulo this currently only working within the intrinsically “partial” nature of US elections, since these are merely elections for the leader of a single nation state that faces many other hostile nation states in a hobbesian world of eternal war (at least eternal war… so far!) ) I think one might need to hold global elections?
And… But… And this… this seems sorta do-able?!? Weirdly so!
We have the internet now. We have translation software to translate all the political statements into all the languages. We have internet money that could be used to donate to something that was worth donating to.
Why not create a “United Persons Alliance” (to play the “House of Representatives” to the UN’s “Senate”?) and find out what the UPA’s “Donation Weighted Condorcet Prime Minister” has to say?
I kinda can’t figure out why no one has tried it yet.
Maybe it is because, logically speaking, moral realism MIGHT be true and also maybe all humans are objectively bad?
If a lot of people knew for sure that “moral realism is true but humans are universally fallen” then it might explain why we almost never “produce and maintain legibly just institutions”.
Under the premises entertained here so far, IF such institutions were attempted anyway, and the attempt had security holes, THEN those security holes would be predictably abused and it would be predictably regretted by anyone who spent money setting it up, or trusted such a thing.
So maybe it is just that “moral realism is true, humans are bad, and designing secure systems is hard and humans are also smart enough to never try to summon a real justice system”?
Maybe.
Regarding your second point, I’m leaving this comment as a placeholder to indicate my intention to give a proper response at some point. My views here have some subtlely that I want to make sure I unpack correctly, and it’s getting late here!
I don’t claim to be a moral realist or any other -ist that we currently have words for. I do follow the Buddha’s teachings on morals and ethics. So I will share from that perspective, which I have reason to believe to be true and beneficial to take on, for anyone interested in becoming more ethical, wise, and kind.
“Don’t eat pork” is something I’d call an ethical rule, set for a specific time and place, which is a valid manifestation of morality.
“Avoiding killing” and “Avoid stealing” (etc) are held, in Buddhism, as “ethical precepts.” They aren’t rules, but they’re like…
a) Each precept is a game in and of itself with many levels
b) It is generally considered good to use this life and future lives to deepen one’s practice of each of the precepts (to take on the huge mission of perfecting our choices to be more in alignment with the real thing these statements are pointing at). It’s also friendly to help others do the same.
c) It’s not about being a stickler to the letter of the law. The deeper you investigate each precept, you actually have to let go of your ideas of what it means to “be doing it right.” It’s not about getting fixated on rules, heuristics, or norms. There’s something more real and true being pointed to that cannot be predicted, pre-determined, etc.
Moral codes are not intrinsically subjective. But I would also not make claims about them being objective. We are caught in a sinkhole dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity. Western thinking needs to find a way out of this. Too many philosophical discussions get stuck on these concepts. They’re useful to a degree, but we need to be able to discard them when they become useless.
“Killing is wrong” is a true statement. It’s not subjectively true; it’s not objectively true. It’s true in a sense that doesn’t neatly fit into either of those categories.
The connection to moral systems could be due to the fact that curing people of trapped priors or other narcissism-like self-defending pathologies is hard and punishing and you won’t do it for them unless you have a lot of love and faith in you.
I wonder if it also has something to do with certain kinds of information being locally nonexcludable goods, they have a cost to spread, but the value of the information is never obvious to a potential buyer until after the transfer has taken place. A person only pays their teacher back if the teacher can convey a sense of moral responsibility to do so.
Finally, harari’s definition of religion is just a system of ideas that brings order between people. This is usually a much more useful definition than definitions like “claims about the supernatural” or whatever. In this frame, many truths, “trade allows mutual benefit”, or [the english language] or [how to not be cripplingly insane] are religious in that it benefits all of us a little bit if more people have these ideas installed.
In response to your third point, I want to echo ABlue’s comment about the compatibility of the trapped prior view and the evopsych view. I also want to emphasize that my usage of “trapped prior” includes genetically pre-specified priors, like a fear of snakes, which I think can be overriden.
In any case, I don’t see why priors that predispose us to e.g. adultery couldn’t be similarly overriden. I wonder if our main source of disagreement has to do with the feasibility of overriding “hard-wired” evolutionary priors?
In response to your first point, I think of moral codes as being contextual more than I think of them as being subjective, but I do think of them as fundamentally being about pragmatism (“let’s all agree to coordinate in ABC way to solve PQR problem in XYZ environment, and socially punish people who aren’t willing to do so”). I also think religions often make the mistake of generalizing moral codes beyond the contexts in which they arose as helpful adaptations.
I think of decision theory as being the basis for morality—see e.g. Critch’s take here and Richard Ngo’s take here. I evaluate how ethical people are based on how good they are at paying causal costs for larger acausal gains.
‘I simply believe that assigning truth values to moral sentences such as “killing is wrong” is pointless, and they are better parsed as prescriptive sentences such as “don’t kill” or “boo on killing”. ’
Going to bring in a point I stole from David Friedmann: If I see that an apple is red, and almost everybody else agree that the apple is red, and the only person who disagrees also tend to disagree with most people about all colors and so is probably color blind, then it makes sense to say that it is true that the apple is red.
-Jesus, Muhammed and Luther:
Muhammed did support offensive warfare, but apart from that his religious rules might have been a step up from earlier arabic society. I have noticed that modern Islamic countries actually doesn’t have a lot of peacetime violence or crime, compared to equally rich or developed countries. And Martin Luther was opposed to rebellions exactly because he thought anarchy and violent religious movements were worse than the status quo. He did support peaceful movements for peasant rights.
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Finally, why would spirituality only help you overcome ‘maladaptive’ trapped priors? Might it not just as well cure adaptive, but unwanted ones?