Morality is Accidental & Self-Congratulatory

>If morality was really the self-serving hypocritical thing as this article suggests, stealing would be considered moral.

No because a community that condones stealing as moral would see itself bled dry. It's not the pathway to good evolutionary fitness. The tension between what a gene "wants" and what the organism "wants" is well-documented within the field of evolution, and you can extrapolate the dynamic to a similar tension between what an individual "wants" and what the community "wants". The best example of this is "kin selection" where an organism engages in altruistic behavior or even complete sacrifice to benefit their close relatives.

Evolved mortality doesn't have to be what is good for the individual at all , and it doesn't have to be instinctive once culture is available. For instance, societies will evolve at least defensive warfare, and quite possible offensive warfare. That's pretty bad for the individuals sent off to do the fighting, and they aren't going to win "on average" if they get killed. Because it is so inherently unatractive, it has to be buttressed by a great deal of cultural mythos about how noble and glorious it is.

You mix up your tenses in sneaky way, projecting bad aspects of the past onto the future:

I think this would normally be an astute observation but in my case mixing up tenses has been a persistent source of frustration for my editors. Despite the scolding I get and my efforts to watch out for it, I screw this up constantly (I don't know if this explains it but English is my third language and I mostly learned it in an ad-hoc manner). All I can say now is that the tense mix-up was an inadvertent error on my part. When I talk about which cultural values "will become" the dominant paradigm, I wasn't referring to the future or present, but rather a jump forward in time from one past date to another (e.g. from 600 AD to 605 AD or whatever). Same when I talk about which code "will replicate", it's about a date in the past that is future from another date in the past. When I talk about "this community" I was referring to communities in the past that materially profited off of warfare.

I'm normally really bad at conjugating verbs consistently, so the mixed up tenses should not be seen as evidence of any hidden messages. I don't know if that clears up any ambiguity.

You speak positively of violence through the lens of past societies that needed it, without disclaiming that it's bad in a present-day lens

You're not the only one to make this criticism but I admit I'm confused by it. I'm generally an optimist about the human condition largely because of how personally thrilling and eternally grateful I am towards the steady obsolescence of violence as a solution in modern life. I think it's a Good Thing™ that humans nowadays are significantly more inclined to favor peaceful cooperation over violent conquest. But if I had to include throat-clearing passages in between all my sentences (violence is bad! trade is good! slavery is bad! peace is good! etc.) I wouldn't fault the reader who would find this patronizing and infantilizing.

So in the passage you quoted above, I relay an observation that Men of Violence were "appropriately" praised by their community. All this means is that, purely from a base material gain, the community had a reason to praise conquerors who bring back stolen and looted riches. "Appropriately" here serves only to distinguish whether the community was acting arbitrarily or rationally; it was not at all intended to be praise for that conduct. The description here was fully intended to describe what is, not what ought. I'm reminded of a similar confusion regarding the "evolutionary benefits" of rape. Describing how sexual coercion can be a "successful" evolutionary strategy is not at all the same thing as arguing that rape is "good" or whatever. I would hope that this distinction is well established within these circles.

I already worry too much about being overly wordy, so in the interest of brevity and also to reduce the risk of coming off as patronizing, I avoid repeating points I think are too obvious. So in this case, I didn't find it necessary to repeatedly disclaim how much I dislike rape, slavery, and violence. The exclusion of my denunciations in my post should not be taken as evidence of endorsement.

Then you quote Samuel Cartwright "conjuring up creatively compelling excuses" for slavery, and never argue against the quotation.

Do you mean this quote?

Gurwinder cites exactly such an example with the 19th century physician Samuel A. Cartwright:

A strong believer in slavery, he used his learning to avoid the clear and simple realization that slaves who tried to escape didn’t want to be slaves, and instead diagnosed them as suffering from a mental disorder he called drapetomania, which could be remedied by “whipping the devil” out of them. It’s an explanation so idiotic only an intellectual could think of it.

That's someone criticizing Cartwright's practice of coming up with such excuses, so having the quote is already an argument against Cartwright (and thus slavery). Arguing against the quotation would be arguing for slavery and oppression.

The first is that you ought to read the Metaethics sequence (long version) or Value Theory (abridged version).

Why? Does it solve everything? Does it make any good points?

Knowing how our current values arose is reason for pessimism about whether AIs we create will share our values, about humanity’s values in unsteered futures, and about what the values of aliens might look like.

I am very unconvinced that we humans have a single coherent set of values, and reading the metaethics sequence did not change my mind -- the claim is assumed , not proven.

(A commentator notices the problem: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fG3g3764tSubr6xvs/the-meaning-of-right?commentId=pgSokbnCJDWPbCRDC [LW(p) · GW(p)] No one solves it)(But you responded by editing out the link to Meaning of Right).

Knowing how our current values arose is not something that should move us away from them, or confuse us about which things are good and bad.

Would that have been true if stated by a roman slave owner? If his values were wrong then, yours could be now.

(A commentator notes the problem-- well, he uses Washington, not a Roman: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fG3g3764tSubr6xvs/the-meaning-of-right?commentId=eR5f6SZS3iJydHQsH [LW(p) · GW(p)])

Many commenters seem to be reading this post as implying something like slavery and violence being good or at least morally okay... I read it as a caution similar to the common points of "how sure are you that you would have made the morally correct choice if you had been born as someone benefiting from slavery back when it was a thing" combined with "the values that we endorse are strongly shaped by self-interest and motivated cognition"

I don't agree with your characterization of the post's claims. The title is synonymous with "morality is arbitrary virtue-signaling," and it promotes a cynical attitude toward moral argument in general. There is nothing wrong with having a cynical attitude, provided it's useful and/or correct. Is there reason to believe such cynicism is in fact useful or correct? The post doesn't promote moral cynicism by considering more sincere moral perspectives, falsifying them, and then promoting a cynical approach as a better alternative. It promotes cynicism by painting an evocative series of images that encourage us to cast ourselves as George Washington (rather than as one of his 150 slaves) or as a powerful Bronze-age warrior (rather than as one of the women he just raped and murdered in his latest town-sacking), and thereby take a cynical stance toward our own modern-day morality because it's just an arbitrary material fact that we were born as ourselves rather than as slaveholders and city-sackers.

I do think that characterizing morality as a way of promoting attitudes that lead to net better outcomes for their subscribers (despite short-term temptations) is a pretty good one. And it would therefore be true that morality is governed by materiality. But materiality is anything but arbitrary and self-congratulatory. It's as objective as the ratio of slaves-to-Washingtons and peasants-to-knights. If morality is about living well within our material conditions, then morality is mainly objective, asking questions like "given my resources and abilities, what is the best-in-expectation way for me to live in modern society?" There are other questions one could ask that might lead to different answers and actions, such as "what's the best way to improve the state of the world for my grandchildren?" How we prioritize these questions is probably more subjective. But the answers to the questions is in theory mostly objective.

From this point of view, the idea that we'd have been pro-slavery had we been born into a slaveowning family should no more disturb us than the idea that we'd have been flat-Earthers if born in a place and time when the Earth was widely considered to be flat.

I thought it was a sort of mundane statement that morality is a set of evolved heuristics that make cooperation rather than defection possible, even when it is ostensibly against the person’s interests in the moment.

Evolutionary, and other naturalistic accounts, aren't quite a slam dunk, because they leave the open question -- the question of what is actually moral, beyond what you have been told is moral -- open. A society might tell its members to pillage and enslave other socieities, and that would be good for the society, but it can still be criticised from a universalistic perspective.

The question of what is the prevailing, de facto morality is different to the question of what is the best-adapated form of the prevailing morality, given the constraints a society is under. But that question itself is itself different to the question of the ideal morality without any material constraints -- but note that such morality could be a "luxury belief", an unimplementable ideal.

Can you be more specific about what exactly you find objectionable about my argumentation style?

Regarding 'patriarchy', I don't disagree that the word has muddled meaning nowadays but what other term would you recommend for me to use to describe the concept I wrote about?

I think anyone making claims that they're on the side of "objective" morality is hopelessly confused and making a category error.

Where exactly does the objectivity arise from? At most, a moral memeplex can simply become so omnipresent and universal that people take it for granted, but that's not the same as being actually objective.

I can look around and see no evidence of morality being handed down from the heavens (and even if it was, that would be highly suspect. I deny even a hypothetical ASI or God himself the right to make that determination, any more than they can make 2+2=3 by fiat).

At the end of the day, there's nothing to hide behind when subject to the Socratic Method, at one point or another, you simply need to plant your feet in the ground and declare that it is so because you say so.

At most there are axioms that are convenient to hold, or socially useful, or appealing to the same mammalian brain, in the manner that monkeys and dogs hate unfairness or show kin preference.

To look for something fundamental below that is foolishness, because there's no reason to think that such a grounding even exists.

Mind you, being a moral relativist doesn't stop me from holding onto the supremacy of my own morals, I just don't need the mental comfort of having an ineffable objectivity to prop that up.

Perhaps at the end of the day there'll be a memeplex that's hyperoptimized for human brains, such that we can't help but be attracted to it, but that's more from it being convincing than it being true.