There’s a lot of interesting writing about the evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology of genetic selfishness, nepotism, and tribalism, and why human values descriptively focus on the sentient beings that are more directly relevant to our survival and reproductive fitness—but that doesn’t mean our normative or prescriptive values should follow whatever natural selection and sexual selection programmed us to value.
Scope sensitivity, I guess, is the triumph of ‘rational compassion’ (as Paul Bloom talks about it in his book Against Empathy), quantitative thinking, and moral imagination, over human moral instincts that are much more focused on small-scope, tribal concerns.
But this is an empirical question in human psychology, and I don’t think there’s much research on it yet. (I hope to do some in the next couple of years though).
That explanation is a bit vague, I don’t understand what you mean.
By “quantitative thinking” do you mean something like having a textual length simplicity prior over moralities?
By triumph of moral imagination do you mean somehow changing the mental representation of the world you are evaluating so that it represents better the state of the world?
Why do you call it a triumph (implying it’s good) over small-scope concerns?
Why do you say this is an empirical question? What do you plan on testing?
There’s a lot of interesting writing about the evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology of genetic selfishness, nepotism, and tribalism, and why human values descriptively focus on the sentient beings that are more directly relevant to our survival and reproductive fitness—but that doesn’t mean our normative or prescriptive values should follow whatever natural selection and sexual selection programmed us to value.
Then what does scope sensitivity follow from?
Scope sensitivity, I guess, is the triumph of ‘rational compassion’ (as Paul Bloom talks about it in his book Against Empathy), quantitative thinking, and moral imagination, over human moral instincts that are much more focused on small-scope, tribal concerns.
But this is an empirical question in human psychology, and I don’t think there’s much research on it yet. (I hope to do some in the next couple of years though).
That explanation is a bit vague, I don’t understand what you mean. By “quantitative thinking” do you mean something like having a textual length simplicity prior over moralities? By triumph of moral imagination do you mean somehow changing the mental representation of the world you are evaluating so that it represents better the state of the world? Why do you call it a triumph (implying it’s good) over small-scope concerns? Why do you say this is an empirical question? What do you plan on testing?