Honey is Good

G Wood

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.
“Wearing straw boaters after Labor Day is Bad”. Purely membership, this is a Junk meme. 100 Years Ago Men and Boys Fought on the Streets of New York Over Wearing Straw Hats Past Summer | The New York Public Library
“Eating only fish on Fridays is Good”. Purely group membership, this is a Junk meme. Fasting and abstinence in the Catholic Church - Wikipedia
“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.

Generally agree. I often try to redirect conversations about morality and ethics to conversations about norms. For a bunch of reasons people get confused using the morals abstraction, but the norms abstraction cuts through much of that confusion to ask "how do we expect people to behave" rather than "what's good and bad".

Doesn't "our culture is good" imply that you should keep all your current cultural memes, including the junk ones and the harmful ones?

Yes absolutely, im not trying to propose an idealized way to run a culture. Simply trying to describe what is.

I would absolutely prefer a culture with some flexibility and ability to pick up and drop memes that prove themselves stupid. It's just that to be a viable culture in the first place your host society must belive you to be somthing to encourage.

Probably a mere verbal disagreement, but this strikes me as an attempt at a sociology of morality, rather than a metaethics. Suppose it were a historical fact that all new moral rules were introduced by prophets who got them from angels, and adopted because the prophets worked extraordinary miracles. That would settle the (proximate) question of why our society has the moral conventions it does, but wouldn't settle the question of realism etc. (If it seems like the angels-and-prophets situation would settle things in favor of a theistic version of realism, consider that the prevailing moral rules in such a world could be just as contradictory as in ours.)
I'm pretty skeptical of cultural evolution models in general because they depend on an analogy that's more vibes-based IME than formal, or that, if formalized, doesn't incorporate certain highly relevant differences: the discreteness of organisms, genetype-phenotype distinction, non-intentionality of mutation, etc don't really carry over such that I don't really know how to cash out a claim like "the goal of a culture is self-propagation."

To address some of your specific examples:

"Stealing" like "murder" is a trivial rather than substantively convergent example because the term already includes social disapproval. It's substantive that there are rules in any society about when you can take stuff from someone. But having rules around matters of likely dispute is something you can account for bilaterally and intentionally.
Reciprocity can also be accounted for bilaterally and intentionally; there are convergent instrumental reasons to adopt a reputation for reciprocity. If an alien scientist in 100,000 BCE started progressively culling the hunter-gatherer bands with the highest rates of reciprocity (and secretly enough so as not to activate intentional mechanisms like "oh the gods are annihilating any group with overly strong reciprocity norms, we should adopt weaker ones").
Xhosa prophecies: as you noted, people noticed that the prophecy was harmful and inaccurate, and adjusted their practices. The evolutionary model would involve differential success for societies adopting and not adopting prophecy. (Note that a less extreme example, potlach, has been able to persist for many generations across many societies.)
"Being celibate is good" has been embraced by multiple independent large-scale civilizations over large time scales; historical Christianity and Buddhism strongly claimed the moral superiority of renunciate over family life. Early Christianity grew quickly despite being even more anti-family. The basic survival of monastic institutions for thousands of years belies any very broad generalization from the failure of the Shakers. Differential reproduction rates might explain some of the tendencies towards pronatalist ideology over time, but I'd expect the effects to be slow and we see conscious state projects to instill pronatalist norms driven by concerns about military superiority, which itself is a dynamic that lends itself to selectionist explanations if you don't think too hard but again I think you can get there with direct agentic/strategic intentions.

Thank you Oligo, good comment :). I've got a bit of editing to do as a result. My apologies for the slow reply, I needed to think about things.

Good point, yes, my article does fit better as a sociology of morality rather than a metaethical idea, I'm actually still not quite sure what field the idea sits under, anthropology is good but still doesn't quite fit, it's not about humans precisely.
I would say that the idea still has bearing on metaethics, specifically that if our moral intuitions are fully explainable by a simple selection algorithm then a moral realist has some explaining to do. In your example I would also argue that contradictory rules argue against moral realism, just purely that realism implies design, and you'd think something that's designing a universe would do a good job.

“Discreteness of organisms, genetype-phenotype distinction, non-intentionality of mutation”

You are treating the features of the genetic substrate as requirements for the selection algorithm. The algorithm for selection only needs variation, heritable transmission and differential success. Your examples are just how genes do it rather than requirements for all selection processes.

How to cash the “goal” out? Its just “Variants of a culture that cause their own transmission get commoner” same as genes, a frequency argument. Goal is just a way of indicating the gradient in a way that would explain it if it were an agent, making it easier for my human mind (evolved to understand agents) to reason with the idea.

“bilaterally and intentionally”

You are sneaking in that parties are equal enough that fighting is mutually expensive and so bargaining for a “no taking” or “no killing” rule works. The real issue is when one person or group is strong and the other weak. The BATNA for the strong group is simply to costlessly get what they want.

The claim isn't really "wrongful taking is wrong" which you would be right to call a tautology, it's something like "Unilateral taking by the strong is Bad” and “Third party punishment of acts deemed “Bad” is Good”.

It's pretty hard to get to “no taking” rules without cultural selection, you have free rider problems, who pays the cost of pushing the strong who took?

The norm feels obvious and trivial because we're inside a culture that already mostly solved third party enforcement, indeed most of the cultures in the world have this feature. Step outside our time and what do you find? The strong taking as they please, conquest, slavery, feudal extraction, eminent domain.

“would involve differential success for societies”

On the Xhosa, people noticing and deciding to change is literally the death of a particular cultural variant, though you did minimise the harm there, many many people died. I’m talking about the culture, not the people. Nobody systematically kills their cows and burns their grain now, that cultural variant has evolved away. Also Potlatch doesn't destroy food, just distributes in exchange for social status?

On the shakers, nobody in their society reproduced. In Buddhism and Christianity it was a small fraction of the overall population that didn't. The Shaker culture was an obligate recruiter which died when its supply of hosts failed. "Being celibate is good" Is still a loading meme even if it can be compensated for with other memes.