Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

RE: “Q: IS THE PERCEPTION THAT MORALITY IS DECLINING TRUE OR FALSE?”

FYI: Not directly addressed in the article, but understood by some of us in the field:

1) Wealth from the Industrial-Technological age creates opportunity for personal divergence in favor of biological bias – we do NOT ‘come together’ but separate. We don’t need to compromise because we are less directly dependent upon any agreement other than commercial.

2) The Information age is exposing us all to (saturating us in) differences of sex, class, ability, intelligence, culture, race, and of course the differences in moral bias caused by each of those differences.

3) Moral differences are insurmountable, genetic, and biological but reinforced by culture and ideosycratic experience.
i)All moral differences originate in sex differences in cognition, valence, and bias: predicting empathizing(personal) in time, status seeking by evading responsibiilty for the commons on one hand and vs predicting systematizing(impersonal) over time, and status seeking by accumulating responsibilty for commons.
ii) There are only three possible coercive institutions, with religion appealing to the empathic/inclusion/ostracization, and state/force appealing to the systematic/defense/offense.
iii) All civilizations were forced into one of those institutions by local circumstance (Geography, means of production, competitors, heterogeneity, relation between warriors and workers).
iv) All civilizations anchored on their first institution, whether State(China), Religion (MENA, India), Contract(law, Europe), Natural(Kin, Africa).
v) all humans are indoctrinated into the metaphysics (presumptions) that emerged from that initial set of conditions and institutions. Metaphysical presumptions are almost impossible to modify. There is also minor evidence that we adapt (a bit) to suit our group’s historical strategy.

4) Increase in numbers and diversity of exploration of moral confirmation bias, combined with excessive education (desocialization), insufficiently cooperative employment(desocialization), immigration(reduction in capacity for error detection and increase in tolerance for behavioral variation). The result is an increase in alienation that is sedated by entertainment and consumption. The result is a decline in social stuctures far worse than ‘bowling alone’, decline in mating competitino, decline in marriage, decline in reproduction. WHy? For most of history society = offspring, and the norms traditions and values necessary for raising children with the minimum moral (developmental, behavioral) hazard, and therefore the least cost to parents.

5) What we are detecting is a competition for political attention to satisfy increasingly divergent moral biases, given the lack of need for consensus on moral biases outside of the commercial arena in which we produce income we use to specialize in fulfillment of our individual moral biases.

6) The solution of course is rather obvious: retention of those few limited natural(human) rights at the level of central governments (Federations, Empires), then the devolution to regional, state, and local self determination of social and economic policy.

7) in other words, Europeans had it right with many different states. The holy roman empire had it right with 350 principalities, and the USA had it right with the original constitution and the colonies that were an imitation of the 1000 years of experience in the holy roman empire, and the final invention of the modern rule of law state by england, finally encoded by the americans …. and increasingly destroyed in the postwar era by the various utopians (lefitsts).

So yes, we are diverging in morality causing universal perception of relative decrease in morality. While at the same time our wealth has eliminated many previously useful forms of immorality when we were poorer.

The result is that we are seeing an increase in demand for a larger number of smaller polities.

And yet, the W.I.E.R.D. eurpeans assume that our high trust moral intuitions are normal ,when they are the opposite of normal – only a small part of our civilization practices truth before face, and the rest of the world practices either face before truth (asia), facelessness (MENA, where lying and cheating is heroic), and africa where the concept still doesn’t exist, except among the upper middle classes in a few countries (nigeria, ghana at the least).

Cheers
Curt Doolittle.
The Natural Law Institute

Reply addressees: @NAChristakis @DanTGilbert @Nature @a_m_mastroianni