Value evolution

Upvoted for making an interesting general point. Downvoted for cartoonish history that reads like it's about some weird parallel universe. (A point by point criticism would require a comment of almost the same length, but if someone seriously disputes my claim, I can list half a dozen or so particularly bizarre claims.)

I think there is some evidence morality improved, one as a thought experiment, another as a real, factual evidence.

The thought experiment is considering that you would take someone from now, and teleport him back to another period of history (say the Dark Ages, or the Roman Empire), and in the other way, take someone from those time and teleport him to now. In both cases the person will be shocked, and need time to adapt. But I do think there will be a significant difference : the guy from now teleported to the Dark Ages will be horrified that they use torture and horrible punishments, the one teleported to the Roman Empire will be horrified about gladiator games and slavery. The guy from the past teleported to now will not be horrified by the lack of them, but surprised that we manage to do without them : how can you maintain civil peace and order without cruel punishments ? How can you feed people without slaves ? How can you entertain people without gladiators ? That's a fundamental point to me : many things which are unethical now were accepted in the past not because they were valued for themselves, but because they were perceived as the only solution to a worse problem. The same apply with corporal punishment in education, or countless other examples. And the same will apply to things like prison in the future : right now, most people don't support prisons because we love putting people in cage, but because we fear (rightfully or wrongfully) that without prisons, there would be much more criminals.

The real experiment is showing how (more or less) isolated cultures adapt to the modern world. They very rarely are horrified by most of what we consider "moral progress". They adapt quite fast to the modern world. That's something Darwin described quite well in his travel logs, and is not limited to him.

Sure, there are things which can horrify people from the past - the way we treat the elderly in modern western societies by "locking" them in pension house instead of keeping them with the family as done traditionally, for example. Or things like porn which can horrify some, mostly for religious reasons. But those are a minority.

But apart from this disagreement, upvoted for asking interesting questions in a novel way.

If you believe this, then in the comments below, please describe a scenario that could have happened, in which we would today believe that the values people had hundreds of years ago were superior to the values they have today. Not a scenario in which some conservative sub-group could believe this; but a scenario in which society as a whole could believe it, and keep on believing it for a hundred years, without changing their values.

And yet for the majority of history most people believed that values were decaying. See, for example, the ancient Greek notion of the Ages of Man, the related Hindu concept of the Four Yugas, or the quote at the top of this article.

Our values do not change as a result of reflection

Values, like biology and culture, evolve. That doesn't mean getting "better" over time. It means becoming more adaptive.

Take any moral advance you like. Study its history, and you'll find people adopted it when it became economically advantageous to those in power do so.

The arguments here seem completely orthogonal to the heading they are supposed to support. In fact that seems to be representative of the whole post.

Yes, values are unstable over time. Go far enough back and there will not even be creatures with something that can be described as 'values'. The same could be expected if humanity somehow managed to evolve towards the Malthusian equilibrium that current evolutionary payoffs would reward. Our current values are completely unstable.

CEV isn't anything to do with predicting what humans would value in the future. It is about capturing the values we have right now and adjusting them only according to how we would want them to be adjusted if we had the time, power and resources to think it through. That doesn't mean simulating the future it means taking a closer look at inconsistencies and competing desires and resolving them in whichever fashion seems best. It means ironing out problems with respect to want/approve/like/would want. It means extrapolating current preferences to a best effort evaluation of how to value scenarios which are too complex or unfamiliar for us to give a useful evaluation of if faced with it now.

I like the point that human values seem to be changing faster lately, so it doesn't look like they're approaching equilibrium. But the post seems to be making huge leaps of logic.

The Roman Empire was not an empire; it was a forest fire. It burned its way out from Italy and across the continent, using up each new land that it came to, stripping it of resources and funneling them to Rome. When it burned its way out until pillaging the new area on its perimeter (increasing as R) could no longer support the area in its interior (increasing as R squared), it burned out and died.

That sounds different from the standard story about Rome. Why do you believe that?

"Slaves, obey your masters" was an economic necessity. (China had discovered Taoism and Buddhism centuries earlier.)

Confucianism would have been more appropriate.

The Civil War began just after mechanical reapers and other inventions began to make slavery uneconomical for more and more people, until they reached the tipping point at which the people with these devices could use anti-slavery as a weapon against their competitors.

What about countries like Mexico, that both got rid of slavery before the technology you mention, and without using it much as a piece in power struggles? Some account of the widespread abolition of slavery might be written without reference to human values, but this isn't it and I don't know what would be.

Take any moral advance you like. Study its history, and you'll find people adopted it when it became economically advantageous to those in power do so.

In other words, to falsify your entire theory, all I have to do is find an example where a moral choice came at considerable economic cost?

That doesn't sound too hard.

Values converge and reach equilbrium in the same way that evolution converges and reaches equilbrium: Not at all.

Evolution constantly converges toward equilibrium. This is why when constructing evolutionary algorithms preventing premature convergence is such a big deal. In nature the main thing preventing convergence to a rather boring equilibrium is changing environmental conditions - followed by Fisherian runaway, of course.

I am confused.

You seem to be simultaneously arguing that 1) there's no objective way to define "better values", so we can't assert that our present values are any better than our past values, and 2) moral advances bring us farther from "equilibrium", so equilibrium isn't the right way to define better values.

But implicit in the second statement is the assumption that there are "better values", and "moral advances"!

Is the present more morally advanced than the past, or not? Were slavery and the end of masculinity (?) and the advent of Christianity moral advances or not? If so, and equilibrium doesn't explain why they were moral advances, why were they moral advances? If not, how are they evidence against "moral advances are movements closer to equilibrium"?

Phil, in your opinion does the argument you offered for the thesis "There can be no evidence that morality has improved" likewise prove (mutatis mutandis) that there can be no evidence that knowledge can be improved? [EDIT, a few days later: of course I meant "has improved" at the end there. Sorry.]

It looks to me as if it should work as well for that as for your actual thesis: I cannot envisage a scenario in which we would believe that the opinions held by people in the past were better than our present opinions, and stably maintain that belief without changing our opinions. But I'd hazard a guess that you either wouldn't want to say that we can't have evidence for improvements in knowledge, or wouldn't want to draw from that the sorts of conclusions you've drawn about morality.

(Actually, I can envisage such a scenario, but (1) it's kind of a cheat, (2) something very like it would apply to morality too, and (3) it doesn't apply in the real world to either morality or opinions. The scenario is that our archaeologists somehow find compelling evidence that 8000 years ago there was a technologically advanced society far ahead of ours, but are unable to find out what their scientific theories or engineering techniques were. We would then be pretty sure that they knew a lot of things we don't; it would be fair to assume that they knew some things that we actually believe to be false. We just wouldn't know what. Similarly, suppose we somehow found good evidence that our distant ancestors were much nicer than we are to one another, and much happier, and much more prosperous, despite external circumstances very similar to ours and basically identical brain hardware; then I think today's moral realists would be justified in thinking it likely that those ancestors had better moral values than ours.)

As you might surmise, I think your argument is incorrect. Specifically: (1) I think you confuse negation and reversal. That is, the relevant opposite of "Our values are better than our ancestors'" is not "Our values are worse than our ancestors'" but "Our values are not better than our ancestors'". (2) I think there are possible circumstances in which we would conclude that our values are worse than our ancestors' (and, a fortiori, that they aren't better); see the previous paragraph. (3) If you have evidence for something, then indeed it must be that different evidence would have justified a different conclusion. That doesn't mean that different evidence would in fact have led you to that different conclusion. So "with such-and-such evidence we ought to have concluded that our values are worse than our ancestors'" is not the same as "with such-and-such evidence we would have concluded that our values are worse than our ancestors'". It's the second of those that you're asking for, and I think it should be the first.

(Note: I am on the whole not a moral realist. I think there is something very dicey about claiming that our values are Objectively Better than our ancestors'. I have no grave objection to the conclusion you're aiming for. But your argument looks very wrong.)

If you have such a strong belief, that must mean you have evidence for it. That must mean you had some hypothesis, and the evidence could have gone either way; and the evidence went in such a way that it supported your hypothesis.

Not for particularly strong beliefs, but consider the case of judging certain pieces of art better (for your personal appreciation). What kind of evidence counts? Personal hunch seems to be the best we have.

When people talk about values getting better I think they mean that they have some core values and "improving" means they have a more accurate picture of what derivative values should be in order to maximize those core values.

Morality has been getting better over time, right?

I don't understand the claim.

If you believe this, then in the comments below, please describe a scenario that could have happened, in which we would today believe that the values people had hundreds of years ago were superior to the values they have today.

It's not uncommon for societies to believe others more moral, particularly their ancestors, but not always. There is a whole noble savage genre. My first piece of evidence is that my society thinks it has improved on the past; I expect to find such a view less often among societies that are worse than their predecessors.

Ultimately, I don't care if my society would be approved of by (random tribe from a long time ago). It's still interesting that I can actually approve of their society more than mine, by my values!

If society agreed that another set of values were superior, they would adopt those values. In fact, they would already have those values, prior to agreeing.

Transition to a different societal structure is a game theory issue, not just a matter of agreeing about values.

In addition, the claim conflates levels. As an example, Laconophillia, extreme admiration of Sparta, is over two thousand years old. People have long valued valuing courage, discipline, more than they have valued valuing managerial skill, artistic ability, etc. They would take the blue pill, if they could, in order to actually value courage and discipline that much. That's part of valuing valuing those qualities. But they have no blue pill, so they go on valuing courage and discipline less than Spartans did, less than they would if they could.

Assuming the Spartans valued some things that they didn't value valuing (perhaps skill with a bow, or fine hair, or something), the Laconphile might now value valuing those things, while desiring to cease valuing those values - the person will not value valuing valuing the primary trait.

By losing track of the levels, you rendered the position you had begun arguing against artificially incoherent.

I think there's good evidence against moral progress. Take any example somebody would give of moral progress and you can generally find another society or another era where the same, or at least similar, values were held. The appropriate question for somebody who believes in moral progress is, I think, What is the moral equivalent of a Saturn V rocket or a 747? Technological progress is obvious. I can point to any number of devices we have now that have absolutely no equivalent in history. Arguing that, say, animal welfare in the West is a genuine moral advance in the face of Buddhism and Jainism is, on the other hand, a much more difficult prospect. Perhaps there are arguments for why it's a genuine advance in the context of Western society but I find it difficult to believe that there's anything like the moral equivalent of even basic technological advances.

Is there any reason to think this process will converge, rather than diverge more and more, as it has for all of history? If there is, it has not been articulated.

Future creatures will probably have bigger genomes, bigger sef-descriptions, and so bigger moralities - assuming, of course, that their morality refers to themselves. There might be practical limits on creature size - but these are probably large, leaving a lot of space for evolution in the mean time.

The idea that values will freeze arises out of an analysis of self-improving systems, that claims that agents will want to preserve their values (e.g. see Omohundro's "Basic AI Drives"). In a competitive scenario, agents won't get their way. So: folks imagine one big organism and self-directed evolution - and that it will get its way.

One reason for scepicism about this is the alien race. If our values freeze - and then we meet aliens - we would probably be assimilated. So - lacking confidence that aliens do not exist - we may decide to allow our values to grow - in order to better preserve at least some of them.

(I don't even know how to express coherently the idea that "values are getting better".)

Do you grant that I can have reflective preferences about the way my values should change in the future? That is, that I would not want my values to change in certain ways (e.g. by the intervention of an antagonist) but would want my values to change in other ways (e.g. if I think for a long time and decide that I value something different).

If so it seems clear that I can have preferences over ways my values could have changed in past, and can therefore say that some processes of change are good and some are bad. (To get the actual statement you made you would need something like CEV, but you don't need the statement you made to define or justify CEV).

I think there are two steps to morality engineering, either of which can fail:

1. Develop an ethical code through deliberate reflection, that is better than existing values.
2. Bind that code into the active moral code.

You say neither has happened; I disagree on both, but I'll limit this post to the second question on "binding." I use the following definitions - they may not be correct or universal, but they should be internally consistent:

• Value System: A collection of memes to do with decision-making, which provide better overall utility than innate responses.
• Moral Code: An individual's value system that drives day-to-day decision making through emotional response.
• Ethical Code: A value system derived from deliberate study ("Ethics").

Evolution of Morality

Let's take as a given that emotions drive behavior, and an emotion-driven response will always trump an analytic response - we act on emotions, then use our intellect and self-image to rationalize our behavior. Let's take evolutionary psychology and memetics as a given, and posit that human evolution is largely memetic at this point, with genetic evolution driven largely by ability to host memes.

We'll go one step further and say that a key trait of modern humanity is the ability to give a meme access to our emotional centers. This is the basis of morality - a learned rule triggers an emotional response to counter or modify our innate "animal" emotional response, modifying behavior. Most likely brains that allow acquired memes to trigger strong emotions co-evolved with memes that help us survive in tribes. This is an "evolution-of-evolution" event. instead of a lever on phenotypes like modularity or a lever on recombination like sex, we evolved a lever on learned thought patterns by allowing them to tap directly into our emotional core.

We survive now based on the quality of our meme sets, and the best surviving memes tend to include a trigger and strong emotional response. This unlocks an evolutionary path tens of thousands of times faster than genetics, and allows horizontal transfer within a generation. Within this framework, morality memes evolve individually (Fire is comforting, not scary), then in colonies (also, this is how to make new fire and keep old fire burning), and finally into "memetic organisms" - proto-religions and proto-cultures. These are messy and include memes that only make sense in the context of others, but their defining feature is that they tie in to the emotional core.

Leaning on some en vogue evolutionary theories, a meme that is fashionable can become hard-wired. If you need to do it anyway, and it's related to sexual selection, hard-wiring it may free up mental resources for more complicated memes. At the extreme, entirely new emotions may be developed (e.g. shame or embarassment).

Ethical Transplants

Engineering an ethical code - whether its for Attorneys or Humanists - doesn't guarantee that anyone will follow it. Following the code in the face of innate or moral emotion requires an emotional hook. There are two major emotional pathways an ethical code can follow, and they're both indirect. There can be an external enforcer - God, the Police, the Bar Association, or Santa Clause - which followers fear. There can be an internal hook within the moral code which says "it is moral to follow applicable ethical codes." Both approaches are weak and indirect compared to an innate emotional reaction.

Religion

Binding an ethical rule to an emotional response results in a moral tenet that will actually be followed. We can call the beliefs, rites, and rituals that bind and activate the tenet religion, we can call the strength of that binding morality (these aren't the precise meanings of those words, but they are familiar and relevant). Religions are selected for their morality and the extent to which they promote survivability (in some ethical systems that's the same as being ethical, YMMV). They include not only the values-memes themselves, but the layers of memes that bind them.

Conclusion

Ethically-derived values don't work without emotions, because we act on emotions and rationalize after. Repeated and emotional rituals (religions) instantiate morality by binding ethical tenets to emotional responses. Once you know this, you can engineer a religion just like any other virus:

1. Lay out your ethically-derived values.
2. Add values for maintaining your religion/beliefs and passing to others.
3. Collect existing rites, rituals, stories, and beliefs that bind value to emotions, and develop new ones if needed.
4. Compress and self-reference as much as possible to reduce package size.

Like any other bio-engineering, you lose some control once you release it, and your engineered religion is going into combat with all others.

I think there are two steps to morality engineering, either of which can fail:

1. Develop an ethical code through deliberate reflection, that is better than existing values.
2. Bind that code into the active moral code.

You say neither has happened; I disagree on both, but I'll limit this post to the second question on "binding." I use the following definitions - they may not be correct or universal, but they should be internally consistent:

• Value System: A collection of memes to do with decision-making, which provide better overall utility than innate responses.
• Moral Code: An individual's value system that drives day-to-day decision making through emotional response.
• Ethical Code: A value system derived from deliberate study ("Ethics").

Evolution of Morality

Let's take as a given that emotions drive behavior, and an emotion-driven response will always trump an analytic response. Let's take evolutionary psychology and memetics as a given, and posit that human evolution is largely memetic at this point, with genetic evolution driven largely by ability to host memes.

We'll go one step further and say that a key trait of modern humanity is the ability to give a meme access to our emotional centers. This is the basis of morality - a learned rule triggers an emotional response to counter or modify our innate "animal" emotional response, modifying behavior. Most likely brains that allow acquired memes to trigger strong emotions co-evolved with memes that help us survive in tribes. This is an "evolution-of-evolution" event. instead of a lever on

phenotypes like modularity or a lever on recombination like sex, we evolved a lever on learned thought patterns by allowing them to tap directly into our emotional core.

We survive now based on the quality of our meme sets, and the best surviving memes tend to include a trigger and strong emotional response. This unlocks an evolutionary path tens of thousands of times faster than genetics, and allows horizontal transfer within a generation. Within this framework, morality memes evolve individually (Fire is comforting, not scary), then in colonies (also, this is how to make new fire and keep old fire burning), and finally into "memetic organisms" - proto-religions and proto-cultures. These are messy and include memes that only make sense in the context of others, but their defining feature is that they tie in to the emotional core.

Leaning on some en vogue evolutionary theories, a meme that is fashionable can become hard-wired. If you need to do it anyway, and it's related to sexual selection, hard-wiring it may free up mental resources for more complicated memes. At the extreme, entirely new emotions may be developed (e.g. shame or embarassment).

Ethical Transplants

Engineering an ethical code - whether its for Attorneys or Humanists - doesn't guarantee that anyone will follow it. Following the code in the face of innate or moral emotion requires an emotional hook. There are two major emotional pathways an ethical code can follow, and they're both indirect. There can be an external enforcer - God, the Police, the Bar Association, or Santa Clause - which followers fear. There can be an internal hook within the moral code which says "it is moral to follow applicable ethical codes." Both approaches are weak and indirect compared to an innate emotional reaction.

Religion

Binding an ethical rule to an emotional response results in a moral tenet that will actually be followed. We can call the beliefs, rites, and rituals that bind and activate the tenet religion, we can call the strength of that binding morality (these aren't the precise meanings of those words, but they are familiar and relevant). Religions are selected for their morality and the extent to which they promote survivability (in some ethical systems that's the same as being ethical, YMMV). They include not only the values-memes themselves, but the layers of memes that bind them.

Conclusion

Ethically-derived values don't work without emotions, because we act on emotions and rationalize after. Repeated and emotional rituals (religions) instantiate morality by binding ethical tenets to emotional responses. Once you know this, you can engineer a religion just like any other virus:

1. Lay out your ethically-derived values.
2. Add values for maintaining your religion/beliefs and passing to others.
3. Collect existing rites, rituals, stories, and beliefs that bind value to emotions, and develop new ones if needed.
4. Compress and self-reference as much as possible to reduce package size.

Like any other bio-engineering, you lose some control once you release it, and your engineered religion is going into combat with all others.

CEV isn't just about your values changing by self-reflection. It's about your values changing as you become the person you wish you were. Humanity has reached the peak for self-reflection long ago (though I believe it still advances a little due to a growing understanding of the universe), but we have done nothing about human nature.

Your evidence against CEV is flawed, though you still correctly point out the lack of evidence for it. I doubt we would all end up in the same place, and it's likely that one person could end up in two very different places just by chance. What I'd do is define CEV as the average of what happens.

Also, you say that we are going further from an equilibrium, rather than just not moving to it. How does that work? Are you implying we were at an unstable equilibrium to begin with?

The world is not in equilibrium, and hopefully never will be.

What's wrong with equilibrium?

.

As you've described it, Adaptiveness is very economic. But there are lots of social changes that are hard to explain economically. For example, the expansion of political inclusiveness in the West (Monarchy -> Limited Voting Rights -> Universal Manhood Suffrage -> Universal Suffrage).

And there is a plausible economic story for the creation of Jim Crow (rich whites trying to prevent poor whites from forming a political coalition with poor blacks). But I'm unpersuaded that there's a compelling economic explanation for the end of Jim Crow.

I wouldn't point to "moral progress" as such to explain CEV. Rather, I'd argue that maintaining cruel institutions like American slavery required false or anti-rationalist beliefs. This gives us a straightforward, objectively definable way to 'extrapolate' slavery out of existence. (Though we haven't proven we'd recognize the result as a form of morality.)

I think pre-Christian Greek culture supplies evidence for this, eg The Trojan Women and Aristotle's natural slave theory. The Greeks of Aristotle's time did not, AFAICT, support slavery due to reflectively consistent principles we lack. They felt guilty and had to invent lies or appeal to wiggin theory. Again, I wouldn't describe our change as a simple forward progress, because before changing our minds we probably used a more brutal form of slavery. But the result today seems more consistent than your history would lead us to expect.

ETA: There's a gap between those two paragraphs, yes. But since 'extrapolation' represents an explicit attempt by Eliezer to find a rule or "general strategy" that would apply to Ancient Greeks, I think you can now figure out what I meant by "'extrapolate' slavery out of existence...evidence for this". The point is that the rule seems to work for ancient slavery as well.