To the question “Which circuits are moral?”, I kind of saw that one coming. If you allow me to mirror it: How do you know which decisions involve moral judgements?
Well, I would ask whether the decision in question is one that people (including me) normally refer to as a moral decision. “Moral” is a category of meaning whose content we determine through social negotiations, produced by some combination of each person’s inner shame/disgust/disapproval registers, and the views and attitudes expressed more generally throughout their society. (Those two sources of moral judgments have important interrelations, of course!) I tend to think that many decisions have a moral flavor, but certainly not all. Very few people would say that there is an ethical imperative to choose an english muffin instead of a bagel for breakfast, for instance.
“A moral action is one which you choose (== that makes you feel good) without being likely to benefit your genes.”
Oh, I think a large subset of moral choices are moral precisely because they do benefit our genes—we say that someone who is a good parent is moral, not immoral, despite the genetic advantages conferred by being a good parent. I think some common denominators are altruism (favoring tribe over self, with tribe defined at various scales), virtuous motives, prudence, and compassion. Note that these are all features that relate to our role as social animals—you could say that morality is a conceptual outgrowth of survival strategies that rely on group action (and hence, become a way to avoid collective action problems and other examples of individual rationality that are suboptimal when viewed from the group’s perspective).
To the question “Which circuits are moral?”, I kind of saw that one coming. If you allow me to mirror it: How do you know which decisions involve moral judgements?
Well, I would ask whether the decision in question is one that people (including me) normally refer to as a moral decision. “Moral” is a category of meaning whose content we determine through social negotiations, produced by some combination of each person’s inner shame/disgust/disapproval registers, and the views and attitudes expressed more generally throughout their society. (Those two sources of moral judgments have important interrelations, of course!) I tend to think that many decisions have a moral flavor, but certainly not all. Very few people would say that there is an ethical imperative to choose an english muffin instead of a bagel for breakfast, for instance.
“A moral action is one which you choose (== that makes you feel good) without being likely to benefit your genes.”
Oh, I think a large subset of moral choices are moral precisely because they do benefit our genes—we say that someone who is a good parent is moral, not immoral, despite the genetic advantages conferred by being a good parent. I think some common denominators are altruism (favoring tribe over self, with tribe defined at various scales), virtuous motives, prudence, and compassion. Note that these are all features that relate to our role as social animals—you could say that morality is a conceptual outgrowth of survival strategies that rely on group action (and hence, become a way to avoid collective action problems and other examples of individual rationality that are suboptimal when viewed from the group’s perspective).