“HOMO MORALICUS” – ETHICAL AND MORAL STATUS MACHINES Did you ever notice that we

“HOMO MORALICUS” – ETHICAL AND MORAL STATUS MACHINES

Did you ever notice that we human beings don’t need formal logic, mathematics, special tools and equipment, to determine if we think that something is unethical or immoral?

Did you every notice that we don’t need logic, science, tools, equipment or sophisticated devices to perceive changes in our status relative to one another? We are masters of the must subtle change.

Unlike the social world, we need a lot of tools to be able to grasp the real world, and to reduce it’s complexity to some analogy to experience. But we don’t need any such tools to perceive vastly complex status cues and cheating or contribution to the social commons.

Man is a moral animal. We evolved to sense moral and immoral behavior as contributing to or extractive from, our ability to reproduce. And it was an evolutionary necessity that we develop these moral and social intuitions – otherwise we could not distinguish parasitic from cooperative actions. And we would not survive.

Can we sense the economy? No. We have invented the most amazing tool EVER- prices. Prices allow us to sense what we need to do to sustain ourselves by serving others.

We will willingly pay very high costs to stop others from cheating. We will willingly pay very high costs to preserve our status – even resorting to committing suicide rather than experience that loss.

We place higher priority on these things than we do on economics.

Why?

Because it’s reproductively more important that we do.

Man is a moral creature BEFORE he is an economic creature.

And anyone who states otherwise is very likely trying to cover for or justify, some criminal, immoral or unethical action.