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how much good has moral conviction done throughout history?
one extreme view you can have is everything good comes from moral conviction, and that without it everything would be moloch slop. the opposite view is a Randian view that everything good comes from practical incentives, and that moral convictions are at best futile and at worst actively harmful.
To me it seems that moral action usually means something other than the profit-maximizing action. Not because there is something inherently bad about maximizing profit, it's just that it would be too much of a coincidence if the same action that maximizes the profit also happens to generate lots of good. (But if it does, definitely take it!)
That usually requires having some slack. I won't donate to charity if my kids are starving. And I won't judge other people for not donating to charity when their kids are starving. It's when you have some extra money, a... (read more)
IMO indirect effects and leverage are the most important factors here.
Almost all actions are taken habitually, rather as the result of bespoke strategic consideration, but what gets to be habitual is downstream of morality and material incentives. And morality exercises leverage via:
1) Reputational effects/RLHF (it's "cheap" to judge your neighbor and expensive to walk the walk yourself, but many many neighbors judging each other differently produces different habit regimes)
2) Acausal trade once there's common knowledge that the trade exists
3) Consciously reworking incentives systems (if you keep other people as slaves we'll chop your head off, etc)
Back when I was a more orthodox marxist, I thought that material incentives were downstream of technological regimes, and that morality tended to be downstream of the incentives, such that morality tended to be lower-leverage even if people took plenty of actions for moral reasons. I still think all those effects are real; I'm just more of a moral realist now so I don't think morality is as pliable as all that - it's downstream of True Morality and higher-leverage.
There's an "equilibrium disequilibrium" situation where everyone can see that everyone benefits from everyone doing X, and you can defect and reach high rewards from Y, where individuals doing X vs Y is hard to observe directly, and so there are periodic cycles of moralized attempts to get to a higher X-based equilibrium and people tearing through the commons by Y-ing (and becoming objects of emulation since many other, perfectly good, things could have led to their success.)
This is all in principle orthogonal to whether morality is harming or helping - I'd expect the same incentives when morality is being harmful. But (1) on moral realism here I think there's an inherent bias towards being helpful rather than harmful that is just a function of "intentional actions have some kind of relation to what they're intending at all," if you want to throw t
2cubefox
The existence of psychopaths (people without altruistic motivation) suggests that "moral conviction" is very important -- if it were identified with altruistic motivation. But of course there is a difference between beliefs and desires, and a psychopath can be perfectly able to believe that altruism is good and egoism is bad, without having any altruistic desires.