And that is an advantage of traditional moral systems—because they have been around for so long, they have had opportunities to be tried and tested in various ways. It won’t give adherents a long-term view, but it can be a similar effect. Think of it as, “I don’t have to think out the consequences of this because other people have thought through similar problems over a thousand years, and came up with a rule that says I should do X.” One would be foolish to totally disregard traditional morality simply because of it’s occasional clash with the modern world. It would be like disregarding a “traditional” gene made by “stupid blind arbitrary evolution” because we think we have a better one made by a smarter system—it might be a good idea to compare anyways.
I tend to agree, but it depends on how something was tested. In “Darwinian Agriculture”, I argue that testing by ability to persist is weaker than testing by competition against alternatives. Trees compete against each other, but forests don’t. Societies often compete and their moral systems probably affect competitive success, but things are complicated by migration between societies, population growth (moral systems that work for bands of relatives may not work as well for modern nations), technological change (cooking pork), etc.
And that is an advantage of traditional moral systems—because they have been around for so long, they have had opportunities to be tried and tested in various ways. It won’t give adherents a long-term view, but it can be a similar effect. Think of it as, “I don’t have to think out the consequences of this because other people have thought through similar problems over a thousand years, and came up with a rule that says I should do X.” One would be foolish to totally disregard traditional morality simply because of it’s occasional clash with the modern world. It would be like disregarding a “traditional” gene made by “stupid blind arbitrary evolution” because we think we have a better one made by a smarter system—it might be a good idea to compare anyways.
I tend to agree, but it depends on how something was tested. In “Darwinian Agriculture”, I argue that testing by ability to persist is weaker than testing by competition against alternatives. Trees compete against each other, but forests don’t. Societies often compete and their moral systems probably affect competitive success, but things are complicated by migration between societies, population growth (moral systems that work for bands of relatives may not work as well for modern nations), technological change (cooking pork), etc.