The other day I was watching the magic school bus with my young son; they were learning about bees and honey. One of the characters says, “We shouldn't take the honey, the bees didn't make it for us” and another character replies with “But if we don't take the honey, then I won't have any? I want the honey”.
This struck me as close to a “First argument”. Thanks to evolution, an organism wouldn't exist if it didn't want to survive. The first argument is "Survival is Good" and Survival = Calories = Sugar = Sweet taste = Honey.
You could say that for an organism made by genes, “Honey is Good” is a load bearing rule. This rule is encoded in genes. Following the rule increases organism survival and not following it harms survival rates.
I’ve been thinking about a more esoteric organism, a culture / society, not made from genes, but from memes and gene-built organisms, Dawkins virus of the mind but literally and with the negative valence stripped away, say a mind siphonophore. Specifically I've been thinking about what a “first argument” looks like for such a being, lets call it a culture for the purposes of this article.
Of course, “Honey is good” can result in the destruction of bees and a subsequent dip in quarterly honey production. Something that is good for an individual right now conflicts both with an individual's long-term interest and that of the culture that individual belongs to. For a culture to survive, as is its imperative under cultural evolution, it must have memes to co-ordinate its host organisms (its society) and manage these conflicts, say “Hurting the bees is bad” encoded in a meme. Following the rule increases the cultures survival rate.
Do you grok the correlation?
What “Morality” is
I would say that the collection of coordinating rules a society has is named “Morality” and any particular set is a moral system.
In this essay, I am making a case about what “Morality” is and not what it tells you to do. What this view lets you do is a follow up article.
Brief metaethics landscape
Most metaethical positions fall into
Realist (moral facts exist independently of organisms)
Anti-realist (moral facts don't exist)
Constructivist (they're built by rational agents)
I'm taking a fourth-ish path:
Functionalist (Morality evolved to co-ordinate) (something along the lines of Haidt/Henrich/Hobbes/Hanson) (Why so many H's?!)
My base claims
Memes, like Genes, have hosts or carriers.
Morality is a set of memes or a meme complex that has been constructed / evolved over time.
Culture is the full set of memes, morality is a subset of those memes.
Hosts may hold more than one meme complex, frustratingly even contradictory ones.
The host of a particular implementation of morality is not the individual, but the set of people who hold the meme complex, the society.
Moral rules are specifically for coordinating behaviour amongst the members of the society, encouraging “That's Good” and discouraging “That's Bad”.
Meme complexes are subject to evolution, cultural group selection. Their reproductive success is the society's persistence and growth through biological (children copy those around them) or cultural means (conversion).
Status is the reward for visible conformity and recruits ambition into compliance. Defection is punished in varying ways, from lowered status to prison time.
To be explicit, the “goal” of a culture is the same as the "goal" of a gene, self-propagation, this means that it must either convert or generate more biological hosts at least at replacement levels.
The hosts do not need to be maximally happy, just alive, this is a floor argument.
Judging a Meme
I'm going to classify memes as
Memes that clearly net benefit their culture, “Load bearing”.
Memes that clearly harm their culture, “Loading”.
Junk memes, they don't help or harm, but get carried along with the meme complex regardless.
Memes that are confusing and arguable as to helping or harming the culture (a great number of them, unfortunately for our collective sanity)
And further classify them as central vs edge, central memes are supporting pillars for many other memes. Edge memes may depend upon a stack of others, but support few or none by themselves.
All memes signal cultural membership, sensible or not.
Right, let's hit some easy, basic targets, broadly agreed on.
“Stealing from members of your society is Bad”. Without this load bearing meme, there are no predictable claims you can make over resources, this kills trade and specialization, true fonts of real wealth. I suspect that without this meme the only stable society is very small, communist, mostly family groups.
“Reciprocating is Good”. This is load bearing, returning favours, repaying debts and punishing cheaters is the engine of non-kin cooperation.
“Destroying your life support systems is Good”. “Why You Don’t Believe in Xhosa Prophecies”, the meme directly and quickly harmed its host, the society only continued to survive by abandoning that meme. Many individuals did not abandon the meme and died.
“Being celibate is good”. Straight up the simple end of a society, the Shakers never rejected this meme and eventually stopped compensating for it by adopting orphans. There are ~2-3 Shakers left and they are happy about it. Shakers.
The first argument for a Culture
Here is my claim for a moral rule equivalent to the biological organisms "Survival is Good".
“Our culture is Good”.
This meme may have previously struck you as simple chauvinism or irrational tribalism, it certainly is sometimes irrational for an individual and is always simple and baseless.
I claim that it's both simple and baseless because it is the base, It's the central load bearing meme in the network of memes that make up a viable culture.
The other day I was watching the magic school bus with my young son; they were learning about bees and honey. One of the characters says, “We shouldn't take the honey, the bees didn't make it for us” and another character replies with “But if we don't take the honey, then I won't have any? I want the honey”.
This struck me as close to a “First argument”. Thanks to evolution, an organism wouldn't exist if it didn't want to survive. The first argument is "Survival is Good" and Survival = Calories = Sugar = Sweet taste = Honey.
You could say that for an organism made by genes, “Honey is Good” is a load bearing rule. This rule is encoded in genes. Following the rule increases organism survival and not following it harms survival rates.
I’ve been thinking about a more esoteric organism, a culture / society, not made from genes, but from memes and gene-built organisms, Dawkins virus of the mind but literally and with the negative valence stripped away, say a mind siphonophore. Specifically I've been thinking about what a “first argument” looks like for such a being, lets call it a culture for the purposes of this article.
Of course, “Honey is good” can result in the destruction of bees and a subsequent dip in quarterly honey production. Something that is good for an individual right now conflicts both with an individual's long-term interest and that of the culture that individual belongs to. For a culture to survive, as is its imperative under cultural evolution, it must have memes to co-ordinate its host organisms (its society) and manage these conflicts, say “Hurting the bees is bad” encoded in a meme. Following the rule increases the cultures survival rate.
Do you grok the correlation?
What “Morality” is
I would say that the collection of coordinating rules a society has is named “Morality” and any particular set is a moral system.
In this essay, I am making a case about what “Morality” is and not what it tells you to do. What this view lets you do is a follow up article.
Brief metaethics landscape
Most metaethical positions fall into
I'm taking a fourth-ish path:
My base claims
Judging a Meme
I'm going to classify memes as
And further classify them as central vs edge, central memes are supporting pillars for many other memes. Edge memes may depend upon a stack of others, but support few or none by themselves.
All memes signal cultural membership, sensible or not.
Right, let's hit some easy, basic targets, broadly agreed on.
The first argument for a Culture
Here is my claim for a moral rule equivalent to the biological organisms "Survival is Good".
“Our culture is Good”.
This meme may have previously struck you as simple chauvinism or irrational tribalism, it certainly is sometimes irrational for an individual and is always simple and baseless.
I claim that it's both simple and baseless because it is the base, It's the central load bearing meme in the network of memes that make up a viable culture.