as people get richer and happier and wiser and so forth, they just have more time and interest and mental/emotional capacity to think carefully about ethics and act accordingly
I think that’s right as far as it goes, but it’s worth considering the limiting behaviour with wealth, which is (as the ultra-wealthy show) presumably that the activity of thinking about ethics still competes with other “leisure time” activities, and behaviour is still sensitive to non-moral incentives like through social competition. But also note that the ways in which it becomes cheaper to help others as society gets richer are going to tend to be the ways in which it becomes cheaper for others to help themselves (or ways in which people’s lives just get better without much altruism). That’s not always true, like in the case of animals.
Good point about persuasion. I guess one way of saying that back, is that (i) if the “right” or just “less bad” moral views are on average the most persuasive views, and (ii) at least some people are generating them, then they will win out. One worry is that (i) isn’t true, because other bad views are more memetically fit, even in a society of people with access to very good abstract reasoning abilities.
Yeah good point that memetic fitness != moral truth. I suppose one could hope that as long as some people are pursuing moral truth, then even if truth and fitness are uncorrelated, that will be some push towards truth, even though there is a lot of drift/noise from random ideas being fit.
The bad case is if truth and fitness are anticorrelated for some reason. My guess is that is unlikely though? Except insofar as the moral truth ends up being really convoluted and abstruse, and then simpler ideas might be more fit. But even then, maybe the memetically fitter simple ideas (e.g. total utilitarianism?) might be close approximations of some really messy truth.
I think that’s right as far as it goes, but it’s worth considering the limiting behaviour with wealth, which is (as the ultra-wealthy show) presumably that the activity of thinking about ethics still competes with other “leisure time” activities, and behaviour is still sensitive to non-moral incentives like through social competition. But also note that the ways in which it becomes cheaper to help others as society gets richer are going to tend to be the ways in which it becomes cheaper for others to help themselves (or ways in which people’s lives just get better without much altruism). That’s not always true, like in the case of animals.
Good point about persuasion. I guess one way of saying that back, is that (i) if the “right” or just “less bad” moral views are on average the most persuasive views, and (ii) at least some people are generating them, then they will win out. One worry is that (i) isn’t true, because other bad views are more memetically fit, even in a society of people with access to very good abstract reasoning abilities.
Yeah good point that memetic fitness != moral truth. I suppose one could hope that as long as some people are pursuing moral truth, then even if truth and fitness are uncorrelated, that will be some push towards truth, even though there is a lot of drift/noise from random ideas being fit.
The bad case is if truth and fitness are anticorrelated for some reason. My guess is that is unlikely though? Except insofar as the moral truth ends up being really convoluted and abstruse, and then simpler ideas might be more fit. But even then, maybe the memetically fitter simple ideas (e.g. total utilitarianism?) might be close approximations of some really messy truth.