My causal account of moral directionality is that cognitive resources are scarce and that people try to conserve them. One class of cognitive resource people try to conserve is complexity of model, driving a tendency towards parsimonious explanations. In other words, ethical consistency is a sub-set of consistency in general, which is a luxury good. As non-cognitive wealth increases relative to cognitive wealth people purchase more parsimony and noise in early highly random but constrained ethical systems gets locked onto strong attractor dynamics. Islamists, whose meme complexes come from desert nomads with no parsimonious “do onto others” statement explicitly claiming to be the core of ethics, become more misogynistic and violent. Almost everyone else, all of whom hold meme-complexes originating in urban life in the axial age and possessing such a statement, expands their circle of empathy. We don’t know what happens to rich hunter-gatherer cultures, as we haven’t seen any.
My causal account of moral directionality is that cognitive resources are scarce and that people try to conserve them. One class of cognitive resource people try to conserve is complexity of model, driving a tendency towards parsimonious explanations. In other words, ethical consistency is a sub-set of consistency in general, which is a luxury good. As non-cognitive wealth increases relative to cognitive wealth people purchase more parsimony and noise in early highly random but constrained ethical systems gets locked onto strong attractor dynamics. Islamists, whose meme complexes come from desert nomads with no parsimonious “do onto others” statement explicitly claiming to be the core of ethics, become more misogynistic and violent. Almost everyone else, all of whom hold meme-complexes originating in urban life in the axial age and possessing such a statement, expands their circle of empathy. We don’t know what happens to rich hunter-gatherer cultures, as we haven’t seen any.