I hadn’t read that link on the side-taking hypothesis of morality before, but I note that if you find that argument interesting, you would like Gillian Hadfield’s book “Rules for a Flat World”. She talks about law (not “what courts and congress do” but broadly “the enterprise of subjecting human conduct to rules”) and emphasizes that law is similar to norms/morality, except in addition there is a canonical place that “the rules” get posted and also a canonical way to obtain a final arbitration about questions of “did person X break the rule?”. She emphasizes that these properties enable third-party enforcement of rules with much less assumption of personal risk (because otherwise, if there’s no final arbitration about whether a rule got broken, someone might punish *me* for punishing the rule-breaker). While other primates have altruism and even norms, they do not appear to have third-party enforcement. Anyway, consider this a book recommendation.
I’m a little perplexed about what you find horrifying about the side-taking hypothesis. In my view, the whole point of everything is basically to assemble the largest possible coalition of as many beings as we can possibly coordinate, using the best possible coordination mechanisms we collectively have access to, so that as many as possible of us can play this game and have a good time playing it for as long as we can. Of course we need to protect that coalition and defend it from its enemies, because there will always be enemies. But hopefully we can make there be fewer of them so that more of us can play.
If that’s the whole point of everything, then a system in which we can constantly make coordinated decisions about which side is “the big coalition of all of us” and keep the number of enemies to a minimum seems like *fantastic* technology and I want us all to be using it.
As a side note, I saw recently somewhere in the blogsphere a discussion about whether the development of human intelligence was fueled by advantages in creating laws (versus “breaking laws” or “some other reason”), but I don’t recall where that was and I would appreciate a reference if someone has one. The basic idea was that laws and morality both require a kind of abstract thinking—logical quantifiers like “for all people with property X” and “Y is allowed only if Z”—which, lo and behold, homo sapiens seems to have evolved for some reason, and that reason might’ve been to reason abstractly about social rules. (Indeed, people are much better at the Wason card-flipping task when policing a social rule rather than deducing abstract properties).
Wow. Huge respect for noticing that and then just saying it outright. That’s… hard to do. Or at least, rare.
Also the side-taking morality link is extremely thought-provoking; it led to one of those “wow how come I never thought of this before...” moments—thanks.
I hadn’t read that link on the side-taking hypothesis of morality before, but I note that if you find that argument interesting, you would like Gillian Hadfield’s book “Rules for a Flat World”. She talks about law (not “what courts and congress do” but broadly “the enterprise of subjecting human conduct to rules”) and emphasizes that law is similar to norms/morality, except in addition there is a canonical place that “the rules” get posted and also a canonical way to obtain a final arbitration about questions of “did person X break the rule?”. She emphasizes that these properties enable third-party enforcement of rules with much less assumption of personal risk (because otherwise, if there’s no final arbitration about whether a rule got broken, someone might punish *me* for punishing the rule-breaker). While other primates have altruism and even norms, they do not appear to have third-party enforcement. Anyway, consider this a book recommendation.
I’m a little perplexed about what you find horrifying about the side-taking hypothesis. In my view, the whole point of everything is basically to assemble the largest possible coalition of as many beings as we can possibly coordinate, using the best possible coordination mechanisms we collectively have access to, so that as many as possible of us can play this game and have a good time playing it for as long as we can. Of course we need to protect that coalition and defend it from its enemies, because there will always be enemies. But hopefully we can make there be fewer of them so that more of us can play.
If that’s the whole point of everything, then a system in which we can constantly make coordinated decisions about which side is “the big coalition of all of us” and keep the number of enemies to a minimum seems like *fantastic* technology and I want us all to be using it.
As a side note, I saw recently somewhere in the blogsphere a discussion about whether the development of human intelligence was fueled by advantages in creating laws (versus “breaking laws” or “some other reason”), but I don’t recall where that was and I would appreciate a reference if someone has one. The basic idea was that laws and morality both require a kind of abstract thinking—logical quantifiers like “for all people with property X” and “Y is allowed only if Z”—which, lo and behold, homo sapiens seems to have evolved for some reason, and that reason might’ve been to reason abstractly about social rules. (Indeed, people are much better at the Wason card-flipping task when policing a social rule rather than deducing abstract properties).
I think there was a part of me that was still in some sense a moral realist and the side-taking hypothesis broke it.
Wow. Huge respect for noticing that and then just saying it outright. That’s… hard to do. Or at least, rare.
Also the side-taking morality link is extremely thought-provoking; it led to one of those “wow how come I never thought of this before...” moments—thanks.