I think that first point is either very wrong or very weak. You can argue that humans don’t have preferences for more than 100 billions of entities in their vicinity, but it is not what is usually meant by “parochialism” and we don’t have much evidence about whether this statement is true or false. If we take more conventional meaning of parochialism, like “people care about ~Dunbar number of people”, I think this is clearly false. Giuseppe Garibaldi didn’t fight for the unification of Italy to help his loved ones, who would be served much better by his sailor career.
The issue with morality-as-rational-behavior is that humans are not capable to behave this way rationally. We fake rational behavior by valuing abstract moral concepts like “honor”, “fairness”, “charity”, etc. The same with precommitment: we can’t actually precommit in decision-theoretical sense, which is roughly “rewrite your source code so you take correct action”, because we don’t have access to said source code.
What I meant is not “people only care about ~Dunbar number of people”, but something more like “the closest ~Dunbar number of people have [some fraction around the range 1/1000-1/2] of the total value”. Giuseppe Garibaldi was also influenced by considerations such as increasing his own status (or maybe even posthumous reputation).
As to “humans are not capable to behave this way rationally”, I disagree. (The whole point of decision theories like UDT/FDT is that you don’t need to rewrite your source code to behave in an a priori-optimal way, and I believe that I’m fully capable of following the recommendations of such decision theories—and do follow their recommendations. )There is probably also a sense in which we value something vaguely akin to “abstract moral concepts”, but this caches out to something very different from utilitarianism (closer to virtue ethics).
I think that first point is either very wrong or very weak. You can argue that humans don’t have preferences for more than 100 billions of entities in their vicinity, but it is not what is usually meant by “parochialism” and we don’t have much evidence about whether this statement is true or false. If we take more conventional meaning of parochialism, like “people care about ~Dunbar number of people”, I think this is clearly false. Giuseppe Garibaldi didn’t fight for the unification of Italy to help his loved ones, who would be served much better by his sailor career.
The issue with morality-as-rational-behavior is that humans are not capable to behave this way rationally. We fake rational behavior by valuing abstract moral concepts like “honor”, “fairness”, “charity”, etc. The same with precommitment: we can’t actually precommit in decision-theoretical sense, which is roughly “rewrite your source code so you take correct action”, because we don’t have access to said source code.
What I meant is not “people only care about ~Dunbar number of people”, but something more like “the closest ~Dunbar number of people have [some fraction around the range 1/1000-1/2] of the total value”. Giuseppe Garibaldi was also influenced by considerations such as increasing his own status (or maybe even posthumous reputation).
As to “humans are not capable to behave this way rationally”, I disagree. (The whole point of decision theories like UDT/FDT is that you don’t need to rewrite your source code to behave in an a priori-optimal way, and I believe that I’m fully capable of following the recommendations of such decision theories—and do follow their recommendations. )There is probably also a sense in which we value something vaguely akin to “abstract moral concepts”, but this caches out to something very different from utilitarianism (closer to virtue ethics).