Rebasing Ethics

Wow. Just wow. And I had such high hopes, before the tipping example.

After two paragraphs about there being no objective basis for morality, you conclude, implicitly, that correct morality is unboundedly selfish, antisocial, non-cooperative utility maximization. You quietly omit this rather gigantic assumption, but it's clearly how you view it, since your evaluation of the value of altruism is based off of its strictly selfish payoff.

Under your reasoning, it would be immoral to pay your taxes if the expected cost of not paying them is lower than the expected cost if you do pay them; it's the exact same calculation as tipping, but with bigger numbers. I don't think I need to further demonstrate that a moral system that says, "Paying your taxes is immoral," is not compatible with modern society.

In general, if you conclude, "X is immoral," you've done it under an implicit framework. You really need to reference that framework, especially if your audience is unlikely to be on the same page you're on. The observation, "If your utility function is strictly self-centered, you should not generally tip at restaurants" is not exactly insightful.

Altruism is no longer valuable in evolutionary terms, but who cares?.

What's important to us as people isn't evolutionary value, it's satisfying personal preferences derived causally but not normatively from evolutionary value. Having money is one of those preferences. Being a nice person is another one of those preferences. If you deliberately make a choice that satisfies weaker preferences than the alternative, you're just throwing away utility for no reason.

If you haven't already, I suggest reading the Evolution Sequence, especially Alien God, Adaption-Executors, and Evolutionary Psychology, and the Metaethics Sequence

Now, if you want to make this into a reaaaallly repulsive ethical dilemma, add that true utilitarians should refuse to tip so they can donate that money to a charity that produces greater utility than the tip does.

You don't tip in order to be altruistic, you tip because you informally agreed to tip by eating in a restaurant in the first place. If you don't tip (assuming the service was acceptable), you aren't being virtuous, you're being a thief.

Perhaps you should say the correct moral move is to tip exactly 15%.

[S]ome form of secular humanism [...] argues that humans are genetically programed not to lie, murder or steal, therefore this is both the right morality & the one they practice. This, to my mind, is committing the naturalistic fallacy.

It is naturalistic fallacy. You should avoid murdering people not because evolution programmed you to do so, but because it's the behavior you prefer to implement. That you were also (causally) created as you are by evolution is another issue entirely: the difference becomes important where you see some of the features implemented by evolution as (normatively) undesirable. It doesn't even have to be something to do with change in the environment, it may well be something that works as "intended". See Which Parts Are "Me"?, and more generally the Metaethics sequence.

If there are no moral facts, why are you telling us what we should and should not do?

Overindulging in fatty, sweet, salty foods appears to be harmful; this is why one may do well to limit it. What corresponding harm do you see done by tipping waitresses that one will never see again, that would be prevented by the moral code that you advocate?

You're not explicit about it, but you appear to be advocating "selfish utilitarianism": the principle that one's personal utility is the only proper moral value, and should consider other people only as a means to one's own benefit. But as I said, having thrown out shoulds at the start, I don't see how you get them back in.

The first rule of rebasing your entire ethics system is that you never tell anyone you've rebased your entire ethics system.

For much the same reasons that you should never tell anyone you're a serial killer.

I second Yvain's recommendation for further reading.

I agree with large chunks of what you say; but caution:

There exists no supernatural forces in the world and there is no objective morality imposed from above.

Those who believe in supernatural forces "above" us, often think they believe in objective morality. This does not imply either that belief in a God implies belief in objective morality, or that belief in objective morality implies belief in a God.

(It's ironic, and a major source of confusion, that Christian "morality", which is often used as the prototype for "morality", does not address the problem of "where does oughtness come from?", any more than positing a God addresses the problem of where life comes from. It's the same cheap trick in both cases.)

This post suffers from lack of a clear example. You give no reason why not tipping should be preferable in spite of the moral revulsion. If you wanted to make utilitarian claims like Yvain pointed out, it would be one thing, but it's not clear at all that you are filling the moral void created by not tipping with anything better. A better argument would be: think about what you really value, and if the sum total of 20% of your food budget isn't worth avoiding the feeling of moral revulsion you get from not-tipping, then don't do it. This statement doesn't suggest that one shouldn't feel moral revulsion, just that we should consider the price. If you want to argue that we shouldn't feel moral-revulsion to not tipping, then you need to provide arguments as to why it's better for the world not to tip. I think there is a good point lurking in this post, but it's not explicit and the post gives no real advice about how to identify, evaluate, and deal with 'moral junk food'.

Move to France for a while. You will learn not to tip, and you won't feel bad about it.

If this fills you with immediate moral revulsion

This assumes a culturally narrow "you".

Let me start off with a mild example: Tipping.

Altruism evolved in an era of small tribes where individual altruistic acts could be remembered & paid back.

Tipping isn't altruism. It is even less about altruism in those countries (not here) where it a social obligation.

Now that we live in a large, anonymous society, there are many times when altruism doesn't pay. Unless you are with friends or a frequent diner at a restaurant or bar, the correct moral move is to stiff the waiter on the tip.

When the potential complications are assumed away it is a rational move. That doesn't make it moral. It's a completely different concept.

If you're traveling somewhere alone, you should universally fail to tip as you're not likely to ever return there.

Except, of course, that you may be beaten or arrested if you are not careful.

Unless you are with friends or a frequent diner at a restaurant or bar, the correct moral move is to stiff the waiter on the tip. If you're traveling somewhere alone, you should universally fail to tip as you're not likely to ever return there. If this fills you with immediate moral revulsion, you're not alone.

I never tipped any waiter in my life. Tipping waiters seems to be an American idea. They are employees and they should be getting normal salaries.

Shalmanese, your heart's in the right place, but I strongly recommend that you start reading through the Sequences.

I think I understand where you're going with this, but I'm mostly going off the sentence:

In the same way that there is junk food that tastes good but is ultimately unhealthy for you, I believe there is ethical junk food which fills us with a feeling of virtue that is underserved [sic].

I think you're saying that we have actions that don't fulfill our moral systems as much as we feel like they fulfill our moral systems. I.e., tipping makes us feel like much better people than its fulfillment of our modern moral system justifies, whereas donating a big chunk of money to charity might actually not be making us feel as good as it should.

Or the reverse, depending on your moral system. The specific examples are beside the point - you're saying our natural sense of moral revulsion has not kept pace with the progress made on the moral systems it is trying to fulfill.

Is this about right?

Perhaps a better test than tipping might be alms, giving money to people on the street.

Does either giving or not giving to beggars fill you with moral revulsion ? This is a case where I personally make the same decision (almost) every time, and each time feel serious qualms about it, so at least insofar as I'm concerned it's more representative of "rebasing" than tipping, which I've never had a moral feeling about.

Of the current figures who accept these premises, most espouse some form of secular humanism which argues that humans are genetically programed not to lie, murder or steal, therefore this is both the right morality & the one they practice.

This sounds wrong to me. It seems rather that humans are genetically programmed to lie, murder, and steal, and that, insofar as ethics help society function smoothly, they do so by constructing a system in which people feel inhibited about doing the "bad" things they are genetically programmed to do.

This seems to imply that because our instincts came from payback to our genes, that ethics-in-general is supposed to be based on payback to the moral agent.

Also, the traveling tipper seems to be in a prisoners dilemma against other traveling tippers.

* There exists no supernatural forces in the world and there is no objective morality imposed from above.
* Our current moral codes are currently based on some mix of sociobiological influences & cultural forces

Backwards. There exists supernatural forces in the world and there is objective morality imposed from above and our current moral codes are not currently based on some mix of sociobiological influences & cultural forces.

If you are thinking thoughts, you are transcending matter. To assert that anything is true presupposes the existence of truth.