Overarching Moral Concepts

Existence: Moral Realism~Social Construct

Morality exists as a suite of several subconcepts that grade between prescriptions to evolved to fundamental.

Moral Prescriptions - Prescriptions, like money, are social consctructions that tend to matter because everyone treats them like they matter, and everyone treats them as such because they are useful. The prescription "people ought not steal" itself is not structured to have truth value, it is structured like a warning or advise, but instead has implications about human social life regarding consequences of behavior (var b), an aversion to harm/loss (var c), and an intuition to detect entropy (var a). These prescriptions are tools that result from mental processes supported by moral instincts which are sourced from evolution.

Evolved Morality -  Humans evolved as social creatures interested in survival and reproduction, which can be idealized as well-being and prosperity. This interest leads people to behave in ways that benefit themselves, their kin, and other members of the society they're a part of, all managed by moralistic emotions. These evolved behaviors are not likely to be arbitrary since they are so common across all cultures and many social species; it's likely that evolution honed in on foundational principles of physics.

Moral Fundamentals -  The principles of aerodynamics describes the efficiency of air flow around an object and how well it can produce lift. Evolution took advantage of these principles not because it had some agency or could decide otherwise, instead animals that adhered to these principles were more efficient fliers which allowed them to reproduce more often and survive longer. Likewise, the principles of entropy allow for formation of modular hierarchies, that evolution can take advantage to form human communities. The primary aspect that turns entropy towards moral relevance lies in the difference between living and dead organisms, living organisms will have less chaos and more energy stored in cells, organs and bodies than the dead one; communities, cities and nations can function like organisms too and will also benefit from the same patterns of low entropy as other modules in the hierarchy.

Interpretation: Moral Objectivity~Subjectivity

Interpretations of morality reside at the level of human agency and have a tri-modal spectrum between subjectivity, objectivity and abstractivity. This gradient is defined by what we do with the information we find in the world and each interpretation has tradeoffs for expediency, accuracy and simplicity.

Subjective Morality - Our senses take information which is passed on to the brain which has specialized programs that process the information into emotions, opinions, ideas and behavior. The results from some of these programs feed into our moral instincts, and thanks to the nature of instincts we are able to act quickly to time sensitive situations like a drowning child, cheaters, contamination and loyalty checks.

Objective Morality - Our senses were not adapted for dealing with the very large and small scales, abstract forms of probability, non cheater related logical contingencies and many other things that were not pivotal to our survival. So a niche was born that science could fill in their creation of instruments that provide accurate measurements that our senses couldn't match, and also provided the results of these measurements for everyone to verify before being presented to the brain's programs. These measurements are mind independent and feed into facts and evidence that form the conventional definition of objectivity. A measurement of morality that can accurately represent the three forms of moral existence would vastly benefit inference about wellbeing and prosperity in long chains of causality.

Abstractive Morality -  Our senses and brains were adapted to understand mainly survival relevant things, as such we fall for gambling machines, apply agency to natural phenomena and see faces that aren't there. This niche is filled by philosophy and takes information from subjectivity and objectivity to form simplified concepts that can be more easily understood. Concepts like categories, flowcharts, syllogisms, analogies, maps, diagrams, perfect circles and infinite straight lines all take away the fuzzyness of the world to better fit our intuitions about places, motion, causation, agency and paths. Some examples of abstractive morality are concepts like the golden rule, Singer's expanding circle, Rawl's veil of ignorance, Foot's trolleyology, Harris' moral landscape, Haidt's moral spheres along with my progressive addendum, all serve to dissect and isolate the complexities of morality.

Dynamics: Moral Relativity~Absolutism

Moral dynamics reside at the level of the application of the previous two concepts - existence and interpretation - and how the presence of changing variables and their source can shift morality towards relativity or absolutism. The changing variables can either be classified as direct or indirect, depending on how integral to well being and prosperity they are.

Relative 

Subjective Morality and Moral Prescriptions have the most changing variables. 

- Pain and suffering are direct variables that change from person to person in intensity which are used to determine the moral wrongness of harm; parts of the environment that are likely to cause pain are the indirect variables, which change the variables in terms of quantity present or likelyhood of causing harm. 

- The formation of moral prescriptions requires the processing of information about descriptions of the world relating to the moral spheres and game theories of human behavior. Different cultures will have different political pressures to come up with these prescriptions, pressures of which moral alignment largely depends on its government's shape of their selectorate, according to selectorate theory. For example, India's caste system favors myths and legends over accurate historical records; accurate records could undermine its ruling class' legitimacy. This changing variable of political incentives can shift the target of moral prescriptions to benefit those within the government's winning coalition; in autocracies moral prescriptions benefit the few in power, in democracies moral prescriptions take the shape of public policy that benefit the many.

Intermediate

- Objectivity allows for fewer changing variables. Accurate measurements can allow us to set facts about reality in stone, however the target of a measurement can still be a changing variable, like the different amounts of harm a fall can do depending on a person's age. 

- Evolution affects organisms on very large timescales, so its changing variables are usually stable enough for people to come up with effective moral prescriptions. If we had evolved a mechanism for pruning harmful recessive genes, we probably wouldn't have an instinct for avoiding incest and wouldn't make prescriptions and laws to prevent it.

Absolute 

- The more simplistic, perfected and unfuzzy a moral concept becomes the less likely it is to have changing variables. Foot's trolley problems, by virtue of being hypotheticals don't need to deal with the vagaries perception, emotion or cultural differences, which are the primary sources of changing variables. The simplicity of the hypotheticals allows us to cleanly dissect where people draw their moral lines.

- The patterns of low entropy as they relate to morality has two primary variables: Stability and Improvement. I talk further about how these two concepts change in relation to each other in a previous blog called The Marriage of Progressive and Conservative Values.

 

Emergence:  Moral Universality~Locality

The emergence of morality deals with where we would expect to find it if we had a reliable way to detect it. Would it show up in plants? bacteria? other animals? aliens? Would the same morality be found in an alien species due to different life-forms converging on the same solutions or are our morals unique to our brand of life because of how evolution shaped us.

Locality - Some parts of morality that depend on lots of changing variables, on emotions, historical happenstance or political pressures, are likely to be unique to us. The respect for a flag, the disgust for some dietary restrictions, people's aversion for the toothbrush mustache look. 

Intermediate - Natural selection is the only process we know that produces complex organisms, and we see other animals develop signs of empathy, compassion, reciprocity and fairness. So it's likely that a different selection process could too converge on a morality similar to ours just as it could discover the same rules for aerodynamics we've discovered.

Universality  - Aliens are likely to also have to deal with entropy, since we can expect the laws of thermodynamics to apply anywhere. However, would a different star that dumps higher or lower amounts of energy onto its planet cause different equilibrium pressures for stability and improvement?