A Measurement of Morality

1. What is being measured?

What elements of beliefs, emotions, reasoning and decisions are essential for something to be moral? Without which, these relevant aspects would merely be pragmatic, convenient or efficient. What specific aspects turn something morally relevant? That is what will be measured. 

 Things become morally relevant when two concepts are introduced; the Well-being and Prosperity of conscious creatures. 

Entertain the following examples below by Jonathan Haidt, which focuses on the 5 conservative spheres of morality:

A: Stick a pin into your palm.
B: Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don't know. (Harm.)
A: Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error.
B: Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthyfamily. (Fairness.)
A: Say something bad about your nation (which you don't believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation.
B: Say something bad about your nation (which you don't believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation.
(Community.)
A: Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.
B: Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. (Authority.)
A: Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on stage.
B: Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling
around naked and urinating on stage. (Purity.) 

The difference between examples A and B is that morality becomes relevant when pertaining to the well being spheres on B.

In contrast to Well-being, Prosperity doesn't have an intuitive moral switch, however the relationship with entropy is clear in that prosperity tries to lower entropy further.

A: Person sees a celebrity on a magazine and buys it to find out why two celebrities broke up.
B: Person sees and buys a magazine that explains the psychology behind interpersonal relationships.(Curiosity)
A: A hiker explores a forest as part of a hobby.
B: A hiker explores a forest, maps it and shares the maps in a blog as part of a hobby. (Exploration)
A: A workplace obscures knowledge from other departments because their information isn't helpful to your scope of work and it would add noise to your workflow.
B: A workplace obscures knowledge about benefits you could get from joining a union because it would be detrimental to the board's revenue.(Knowledge)
A: A bookclub restricts membership based on interest.
B: A project restricts participation based on expertise. (Collaboration)
A: Individual does not put tools in places and order where they would be easy or convenient to access.
B: Team member uses labels, boxes and flowcharts to separate tools to facilitate finding the right one. (Organization) 

 In two previous blogs [1],[2], I made the connection between entropy, the essential moral concepts above and the conservative/progressive trends of entropy. However a mere measurement of entropy is not enough, entropy is the measurement of chaos in a system, and we need to measure order instead, not just any order either, functional order. 

Iron ore isn't very ordered, but it can be refined into iron or steel which can be used to build stable machines; iron can further be refined into magnets to generate electricity inside a copper coil. The highly functional order of the body and of society correlates with wellbeing where entropy is extremely low and with prosperity where entropy is sought to be lowered even further. 

2. What is it being measured with?

There is no instrument yet. What would a measuring instrument for morality look like?

I suspect it would look like a formula or flowchart that takes in [a]variables of the states of highly ordered systems related to the well being and prosperity of conscious creatures; [b]variables from the result of game theories at play; and [c]variables from the cost of loss.

[a] the order of a system could be measured by quantifying the amount of modular and heirarchical complexity present. Very low entropy, complex things have distinctive patterns in their constintution because only when an isolated module is stable enough for long enough (very low entropy), can it be successfully implemented in even higher complex systems. Atoms to molecules to cells to organs to bodies to families to tribes to cities to nations to civilizations. At each step there's a kind of equilibrium that needs to be reached before the next stage can be achived. Perhaps morality is part of the mechanism supporting the equilibrium of the later stages.

[b] games like tit-for-tat or its more effective version grudging tit-for-tat play important roles in reciprocal altruism. Other games like the tragedy of the commons determines whether a societal environment will be suitable to vulnerable but beneficial commons without being exploited, like free drinking fountains, restrooms and parks. Games like the doomsday machine, where people will have both shared and competing goals; where it's a game of strategy as opposed to skill, strength, or intellect; where the strategies are defined by predicting what the other person will do and making decisions based on those predictions and what the other person is predicting about you; in this game the strategy tends to be to handicap one's own access to free choice, information, rationality. Depending on the type of game being played and the expected results will define this variable.

[c] the value of what is lost (destroyed, inaccessible, misplaced) can be calculated by the uniqueness of the thing, the energy necessary to (re)create it and the importance of the function it had. If humanity solved death by replicating the mind and archiving it in a computer, then restoring it to another artificial body, if this process could be relatively inexpensive, if the replacement body could keep the same functions as the old body, then the results of the moral formula for the wrongness of murder would change almost entirely by this variable alone.

3. How precise is it? 

 The accuracy of the formula's results would depend on how much data we can extract from the world and how accurately we can apply it in context. The precision need only be more accurate and consistent than human instincts, which is what we've been using to determine morality, for the formula to be useful.