Morality

Less Wrong: Ethics as a black box function

Most humans optimize their morality for their own well-being. A big reason why personal morality is subject to change is because an individual's morality will be workable for one social environment, and then when the environment changes, an individual's morality will suddenly be "out of sync" with the moralities of relevant people in the environment. Since incompatible moralities leads to difficulties in cooperation, this is a huge problem. At the same time, there are good reasons to have a reputation for stability. Thus the conflict of having an "incorrect" morality and not being able to change it drastically. I'd engage in more rambling about how the Stanford Prison Experiment supports this notion, but the point of this post is not to speculate on the interaction between identity and morality.

It would be desirable, then, to simply find what the "best" morality would be in terms of being compatible with various likely future environments, and stick with it. It seems like many of the candidates for these "optimal" all-purpose moralities are the broad moral theories under discussion.

Notice that most theoretical moral frameworks contain an element of fairness.

When morality is left to personal whim, the individual tends to modify their morality to favor themselves and their in-groups. Thus when they encounter others, especially ones outside their original groups, the individual's original morality comes into conflict with the new tribe, whose members have optimized their moralities for themselves and their own in-groups. Golden-rule-type ideas correct this, by having individuals consider the viewpoint of others (and thus, adjusting their morality to be more compatible with these viewpoints.)

If what I said is true, then moral "progress" tends to occur when social groups who have previously maintained prejudicial moralities find it necessary to work with groups they have previously discriminated against.

And if this is the case, the implications for moral philosophy are this: it would be profitable to put more focus on finding the reasons why morality differs between individuals, rather than get caught up in quandaries about our suboptimally egoistic moral intuitions.