I see Gwern’s/Aaron’s post about The Narrowing Circle as part of an important thread in EA devoted to understanding the causes of moral change. By probing the limits of the “expanding circle” idea for counterexamples, perhaps we can understand it better.
Effective altruism is popular among moral philosophers, and EAs are often seeking to expand people’s “moral circle of concern” towards currently neglected classes of beings, like nonhuman animals or potential future generations of mankind. This is a laudable goal (and one which I share), but it’s important that the movement does not get carried away with the assumption that such a cultural shift is inevitable. The phenomenon of the expanding circle must be caused by something, and those causes are probably driven by material conditions that could change or reverse in the future.
As I see it, the strongest part of the argument for a “narrowing circle” is the “Ancestors” and “Descendants” sections. It seems plausible to me that preindustrial “farmer” culture placed nigh-obsessive emphasis on pleasing the wishes of your ancestors and securing a promising future for your descendants. (I suspect this is probably because, in a world where income came from farming the land rather than hunting/gathering or performing skilled industrial-age work for wages, inheritance of farmland from one generation to the next becomes crucially important.) Much of the modern world seems to have essentially abandoned the idea that we should place much weight on the values of our ancestors, which should be concerning to longtermists since valuing the lives of ancestors seems very close to valuing the lives of unborn generations (see for instance Chesterton’s quote about how “tradition is the democracy of the dead”).
The idea that concern for descendants has also decreased is certainly a worry worth investigating—perhaps a logical place to start would be by investigating how much the recent worldwide decline in fertility rates really reflects a decreased desire for children. A drop in respect for ancestors might also directly cause a drop in concern for descendants—it might be logical to disregard the lives of future generations if we assume that they (just like us) will ignore the wishes of their ancestors!
Anyways, here are some other pieces that seem relevant to the thread of “investigating what drives moral change”: - AppliedDivinityStudies arguing that moral philosophy is not what actually drives moral progress. - A lot of Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten is about understanding cultural changes. Here for instance is a dialogue about shifting moral foundations, expanding circles, and what that might tell us about how things will continue to shift in the future.
Finally, I think that investigating the “expanding circle” is doubly important because it’s not just an assumption of a couple people within the nascent EA movement… it’s very similar to one of the core legitimizing stories that are held up to justify mainstream liberal democracy! I am talking about the whole civil-rights story that “the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice”, that democracy is good because it has lead an expanding-circle-style transition towards increasingly recognizing the civil rights of women, minorities, etc. I think this story is true, but I don’t know exactly why and I don’t think the trend is guaranteed to continue. (Was democracy itself the cause, or merely another symptom of a larger force like the Industrial Revolution?)
For all these reasons, I think this is a good post worthy of inclusion in the decadal review.
I see Gwern’s/Aaron’s post about The Narrowing Circle as part of an important thread in EA devoted to understanding the causes of moral change. By probing the limits of the “expanding circle” idea for counterexamples, perhaps we can understand it better.
Effective altruism is popular among moral philosophers, and EAs are often seeking to expand people’s “moral circle of concern” towards currently neglected classes of beings, like nonhuman animals or potential future generations of mankind. This is a laudable goal (and one which I share), but it’s important that the movement does not get carried away with the assumption that such a cultural shift is inevitable. The phenomenon of the expanding circle must be caused by something, and those causes are probably driven by material conditions that could change or reverse in the future.
As I see it, the strongest part of the argument for a “narrowing circle” is the “Ancestors” and “Descendants” sections. It seems plausible to me that preindustrial “farmer” culture placed nigh-obsessive emphasis on pleasing the wishes of your ancestors and securing a promising future for your descendants. (I suspect this is probably because, in a world where income came from farming the land rather than hunting/gathering or performing skilled industrial-age work for wages, inheritance of farmland from one generation to the next becomes crucially important.) Much of the modern world seems to have essentially abandoned the idea that we should place much weight on the values of our ancestors, which should be concerning to longtermists since valuing the lives of ancestors seems very close to valuing the lives of unborn generations (see for instance Chesterton’s quote about how “tradition is the democracy of the dead”).
The idea that concern for descendants has also decreased is certainly a worry worth investigating—perhaps a logical place to start would be by investigating how much the recent worldwide decline in fertility rates really reflects a decreased desire for children. A drop in respect for ancestors might also directly cause a drop in concern for descendants—it might be logical to disregard the lives of future generations if we assume that they (just like us) will ignore the wishes of their ancestors!
Anyways, here are some other pieces that seem relevant to the thread of “investigating what drives moral change”:
- AppliedDivinityStudies arguing that moral philosophy is not what actually drives moral progress.
- A lot of Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten is about understanding cultural changes. Here for instance is a dialogue about shifting moral foundations, expanding circles, and what that might tell us about how things will continue to shift in the future.
Finally, I think that investigating the “expanding circle” is doubly important because it’s not just an assumption of a couple people within the nascent EA movement… it’s very similar to one of the core legitimizing stories that are held up to justify mainstream liberal democracy! I am talking about the whole civil-rights story that “the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice”, that democracy is good because it has lead an expanding-circle-style transition towards increasingly recognizing the civil rights of women, minorities, etc. I think this story is true, but I don’t know exactly why and I don’t think the trend is guaranteed to continue. (Was democracy itself the cause, or merely another symptom of a larger force like the Industrial Revolution?)
For all these reasons, I think this is a good post worthy of inclusion in the decadal review.