My own story about my own trajectory in knowing more as I got older is that I have more and more abandoned beliefs in morality. At the age of 10 or 12 or so, I abandoned Roman Catholic morality because the source of that morality, a God who spoke through an infallible Pope who spoke through nuns and priests to me, collapsed in my mind. In my 20s I picked up a bit of a belief in conventional morality as a set of guidelines for simplifying life when an adulterous affair I was having turned out to be fraught with pain and frustration. Since then, I have moved away from a lot of morality as I have learned its psycho-evolutionary basis, and especially as I have aged past the points where status seeking and getting high status coochie were powerful drivers of my behavior.
I find it hard to see morality as something more than the artifacts of a set of algorithms-of-interaction between people. Adultery, theft, assault, insult, fraud, honesty, charity, what else are these other than guidelines for creating a world which facilitates the working together of many humans? As a general matter, it seems clear that MY interests are best served by having OTHER people behave morally, and that the constraints on my own behavior for MY optimum result are much weaker than what I would wish them to be on others. That is, I’d like to get the better of others by lying, cheating, and stealing, but I’d prefer that they didn’t do that to me, or even to each other because if they behave more morally to each other they will be more efficient and produce more, as a group, for me to cheat and steal from them.
Even if my reaction to more knowledge is atypical, it is real, and should put some sort of upper limit on the utility of a generalization like “having more knowledge about reality makes us more moral.”
My own story about my own trajectory in knowing more as I got older is that I have more and more abandoned beliefs in morality. At the age of 10 or 12 or so, I abandoned Roman Catholic morality because the source of that morality, a God who spoke through an infallible Pope who spoke through nuns and priests to me, collapsed in my mind. In my 20s I picked up a bit of a belief in conventional morality as a set of guidelines for simplifying life when an adulterous affair I was having turned out to be fraught with pain and frustration. Since then, I have moved away from a lot of morality as I have learned its psycho-evolutionary basis, and especially as I have aged past the points where status seeking and getting high status coochie were powerful drivers of my behavior.
I find it hard to see morality as something more than the artifacts of a set of algorithms-of-interaction between people. Adultery, theft, assault, insult, fraud, honesty, charity, what else are these other than guidelines for creating a world which facilitates the working together of many humans? As a general matter, it seems clear that MY interests are best served by having OTHER people behave morally, and that the constraints on my own behavior for MY optimum result are much weaker than what I would wish them to be on others. That is, I’d like to get the better of others by lying, cheating, and stealing, but I’d prefer that they didn’t do that to me, or even to each other because if they behave more morally to each other they will be more efficient and produce more, as a group, for me to cheat and steal from them.
Even if my reaction to more knowledge is atypical, it is real, and should put some sort of upper limit on the utility of a generalization like “having more knowledge about reality makes us more moral.”