why do we have a tendency to accept moral philosophies that do not fit all of our existing values?
Do most humans actually accept them, or do most humans find themselves conflicted between their complex pre-accumulated values and their attraction [see question 2] towards the elegance of a simple moral system, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to bend the two so that they coincide?
Why do we find it natural or attractive to simplify our moral intuitions?
I’m going to offer an hypothesis that I don’t quite have the competence to properly defend, but which I find plausible off of weak evidence:
It is a defining feature of Western culture—stretching all the way back to classical Greece, and I’m thinking in particular of pre-Socratic philosophers as well as Euclides—to see the strength of intellectual edifices as inversely proportional to their Kolmogorov complexity, whatever the subject they treat. This heuristic permeates the overwhelming majority of our theoretical education, and it is practically instinctual for people like us to see systems consisting of fewer and simpler axioms as more likely to be “correct”, even in a field such as ethics where it is unclear if there are strong reasons to apply said heuristic. People who were not educated in Western culture, or Westerners who have undergone only minimal schooling, are nowhere near as uncomfortable with the idea that their moral system cannot be reduced to a brief set of fundamental principles.
Do most humans actually accept them, or do most humans find themselves conflicted between their complex pre-accumulated values and their attraction [see question 2] towards the elegance of a simple moral system, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to bend the two so that they coincide?
I’m going to offer an hypothesis that I don’t quite have the competence to properly defend, but which I find plausible off of weak evidence:
It is a defining feature of Western culture—stretching all the way back to classical Greece, and I’m thinking in particular of pre-Socratic philosophers as well as Euclides—to see the strength of intellectual edifices as inversely proportional to their Kolmogorov complexity, whatever the subject they treat. This heuristic permeates the overwhelming majority of our theoretical education, and it is practically instinctual for people like us to see systems consisting of fewer and simpler axioms as more likely to be “correct”, even in a field such as ethics where it is unclear if there are strong reasons to apply said heuristic. People who were not educated in Western culture, or Westerners who have undergone only minimal schooling, are nowhere near as uncomfortable with the idea that their moral system cannot be reduced to a brief set of fundamental principles.