Cooperation-based morality helps with some things that I find important:
1. Most moral frameworks focus exclusively on conscious experience, which gets confusing when we start interacting with agents about whose conscious experience we are uncertain (and it’s hard to make progress on this, because we don’t have a good working definition of consciousness).
2. Furthermore, existing moral frameworks make it difficult to cooperate with agents that don’t have conscious experience. Of course we can still cooperate for selfish reasons, but this seems like a somewhat toxic framing, similarly to how valuing other people only instrumentally would be.
3. It seems that morality evolved mostly for cooperation — perhaps those who study it should be paying attention.
I like this.
Cooperation-based morality helps with some things that I find important:
1. Most moral frameworks focus exclusively on conscious experience, which gets confusing when we start interacting with agents about whose conscious experience we are uncertain (and it’s hard to make progress on this, because we don’t have a good working definition of consciousness).
2. Furthermore, existing moral frameworks make it difficult to cooperate with agents that don’t have conscious experience. Of course we can still cooperate for selfish reasons, but this seems like a somewhat toxic framing, similarly to how valuing other people only instrumentally would be.
3. It seems that morality evolved mostly for cooperation — perhaps those who study it should be paying attention.