“The Tails Coming Apart as a Metaphor for Life” should be retitled “The Tails Coming Apart as a Metaphor for Earth since 1800.” Scott does three things, 1) he notices that happiness research is framing dependent, 2) he notices that happiness is a human level term, but not specific at the extremes, 3) he considers how this relates to deep seated divergences in moral intuitions becoming ever more apparent in our world.
He hints at why moral divergence occurs with his examples. His extreme case of hedonic utilitarianism, converting the entire mass of the universe into nervous tissue experiencing raw euphoria, represents a ludicrous extension of the realm of the possible: wireheading, methadone, subverting factory farming. Each of these is dependent upon technology and modern economies, and presents real ethical questions. None of these were live issues for people hundreds of years ago. The tails of their rival moralities didn’t come apart – or at least not very often or in fundamental ways. Back then Jesuits and Confucians could meet in China and agree on something like the “nature of the prudent man.” But in the words of Lonergan that version of the prudent man, Prudent Man 1.0, is obsolete: “We do not trust the prudent man’s memory but keep files and records and develop systems of information retrieval. We do not trust the prudent man’s ingenuity but call in efficiency experts or set problems for operations research. We do not trust the prudent man’s judgment but employ computers to forecast demand,” and he goes on. For from the moment VisiCalc primed the world for a future of data aggregation, Prudent Man 1.0 has been hiding in the bathroom bewildered by modern business efficiency and moon landings.
Let’s take Scott’s analogy of the Bay Area Transit system entirely literally, and ask the mathematical question: when do parallel lines come apart or converge? Recall Euclid’s Fifth Postulate, the one saying that parallel lines will never intersect. For almost a couple thousand years no one could figure out why it was true. But it wasn’t true, and it wasn’t false. Parallel lines come apart or converge in most spaces. Only, alas, only on a flat plane in a regular Euclidean space ℝ3 do they obey Euclid’s Fifth and stay equidistant.
So what is happening when the tails come apart in morality? Even simple technologies extend our capacities, and each technological step extending the reach of rational consciousness into the world transforms the shape of the moral landscape which we get to engage with. Technological progress requires new norms to develop around it. And so the normative rules of a 16th century Scottish barony don’t become false; they become incomparable.
Now the Fifth postulate was true in a local sense, being useful for building roads, cathedrals, and monuments. And reflective, conventional morality continues to be useful and of inestimable importance for dealing with work, friends, and community. However, it becomes the wrong tool to use when considering technology laws, factory farming, or existential risk. We have to develop new tools.
Scott’s concludes that we have mercifully stayed within the bounds where we are able to correlate the contents of rival moral ideas. But I think it likely that this is getting harder and harder to do each decade. Maybe we need another, albeit very different, Bernard Riemann to develop a new math demonstrating how to navigate all the wild moral landscapes we will come into contact with.
We Human-Sized Creatures access a surprisingly detailed reality with our superhuman tools. May the next decade be a good adventure, filled with new insights, syntheses, and surprising convergences in the tails.
“The Tails Coming Apart as a Metaphor for Life” should be retitled “The Tails Coming Apart as a Metaphor for Earth since 1800.” Scott does three things, 1) he notices that happiness research is framing dependent, 2) he notices that happiness is a human level term, but not specific at the extremes, 3) he considers how this relates to deep seated divergences in moral intuitions becoming ever more apparent in our world.
He hints at why moral divergence occurs with his examples. His extreme case of hedonic utilitarianism, converting the entire mass of the universe into nervous tissue experiencing raw euphoria, represents a ludicrous extension of the realm of the possible: wireheading, methadone, subverting factory farming. Each of these is dependent upon technology and modern economies, and presents real ethical questions. None of these were live issues for people hundreds of years ago. The tails of their rival moralities didn’t come apart – or at least not very often or in fundamental ways. Back then Jesuits and Confucians could meet in China and agree on something like the “nature of the prudent man.” But in the words of Lonergan that version of the prudent man, Prudent Man 1.0, is obsolete: “We do not trust the prudent man’s memory but keep files and records and develop systems of information retrieval. We do not trust the prudent man’s ingenuity but call in efficiency experts or set problems for operations research. We do not trust the prudent man’s judgment but employ computers to forecast demand,” and he goes on. For from the moment VisiCalc primed the world for a future of data aggregation, Prudent Man 1.0 has been hiding in the bathroom bewildered by modern business efficiency and moon landings.
Let’s take Scott’s analogy of the Bay Area Transit system entirely literally, and ask the mathematical question: when do parallel lines come apart or converge? Recall Euclid’s Fifth Postulate, the one saying that parallel lines will never intersect. For almost a couple thousand years no one could figure out why it was true. But it wasn’t true, and it wasn’t false. Parallel lines come apart or converge in most spaces. Only, alas, only on a flat plane in a regular Euclidean space ℝ3 do they obey Euclid’s Fifth and stay equidistant.
So what is happening when the tails come apart in morality? Even simple technologies extend our capacities, and each technological step extending the reach of rational consciousness into the world transforms the shape of the moral landscape which we get to engage with. Technological progress requires new norms to develop around it. And so the normative rules of a 16th century Scottish barony don’t become false; they become incomparable.
Now the Fifth postulate was true in a local sense, being useful for building roads, cathedrals, and monuments. And reflective, conventional morality continues to be useful and of inestimable importance for dealing with work, friends, and community. However, it becomes the wrong tool to use when considering technology laws, factory farming, or existential risk. We have to develop new tools.
Scott’s concludes that we have mercifully stayed within the bounds where we are able to correlate the contents of rival moral ideas. But I think it likely that this is getting harder and harder to do each decade. Maybe we need another, albeit very different, Bernard Riemann to develop a new math demonstrating how to navigate all the wild moral landscapes we will come into contact with.
We Human-Sized Creatures access a surprisingly detailed reality with our superhuman tools. May the next decade be a good adventure, filled with new insights, syntheses, and surprising convergences in the tails.