Why Do We Engage in Moral Simplification?

Why do we find it natural or attractive to simplify our moral intuitions?

I'll go with the Hansonian answer: we keep our old and complex systems of reasons-for-actions, but verbally endorse simple moral frameworks because they make it easier to argue against enemies or make allies. I don't believe people who profess to have adopted some moral system in earnest, because all simple moral systems recommend very extreme behavior when followed to their logical conclusions.

I like Nesov's idea of ditching the abstract phlogiston of "rightness" that doesn't have much causal or explanatory power anyway, and thinking only about concrete and varied reasons-for-actions instead. Accepting this view (ignoring abstract moral intuitions that have no motive power) might even make things easier for CEV.

I nominate wishful thinking. Life would be so much simpler and easier if we knew what we were doing.

why do we have a tendency to accept moral philosophies that do not fit all of our existing values?

Do most humans actually accept them, or do most humans find themselves conflicted between their complex pre-accumulated values and their attraction [see question 2] towards the elegance of a simple moral system, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to bend the two so that they coincide?

Why do we find it natural or attractive to simplify our moral intuitions?

I'm going to offer an hypothesis that I don't quite have the competence to properly defend, but which I find plausible off of weak evidence:

It is a defining feature of Western culture - stretching all the way back to classical Greece, and I'm thinking in particular of pre-Socratic philosophers as well as Euclides - to see the strength of intellectual edifices as inversely proportional to their Kolmogorov complexity, whatever the subject they treat. This heuristic permeates the overwhelming majority of our theoretical education, and it is practically instinctual for people like us to see systems consisting of fewer and simpler axioms as more likely to be "correct", even in a field such as ethics where it is unclear if there are strong reasons to apply said heuristic. People who were not educated in Western culture, or Westerners who have undergone only minimal schooling, are nowhere near as uncomfortable with the idea that their moral system cannot be reduced to a brief set of fundamental principles.

I think the line of research being conducted by Haidt and others on the psychology of morality is relevant here. His TED talk provides a simple summary: http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html

The basic idea is that there are "primary colours" of our moral intuitions that include fairness, harm reduction, loyalty, purity, respect for authority. These considerations give you a web of intuitions about goodness and propriety that are often brought into conflict. You might have a respect for authority, but also recognise that this can cause grave harm. You might have a respect for purity that gives you a knee jerk aversion to promiscuity or homosexuality, but also see that this is unfair to people who have immutable preferences and who aren't harming anyone.

There's no way to reconcile these conflicting intuitions, so we tend to focus on a "prime directive" like "make the world a better place", or "be a fine upstanding individual in your own life and try not to judge other people too harshly".

I think the former, "make the world a better place", is particularly good for producing moral systems that are internally consistent. It does ask you to question and reject a lot of knee jerk reactions. Counter-factuals are useful in doing this. Someone who has trouble letting go of a moral distaste for promiscuity or gluttony should keep in mind that the same instinct could under different circumstances make you repulsed by the idea of a woman on her period preparing food. Someone who thinks there's a moral failure in refusing to stick together with your in-group under adversity should remember that this instinct could have put you on the wrong side of the Holocaust.

It's worth noting that most moral systems are not as simplistic as utilitarianisms and Kantianisms. Many religious moral systems, for example, project the complexity of human values onto the magical psychology of deities. Virtue theories and contract theories can't easily be reduced to a single moral principle, either. Recent studies in experimental philosophy suggest that moral relativism is more prevalent than once thought, too.

Why do we find it natural or attractive to simplify our moral intuitions?

Because of Occam's razor, reductionism and signalling.

When I believed in simple morality, I did so because I thought that morality had to be "fundamental" in some way. Complex value seemed it was chosen arbitrarily, while simple value could be built into the structure of the universe. If morality were regarded the same way by all sufficiently intelligent beings, it would have to be something simple, based on some small set of self-evident principles.

I agree with much of your analysis - particularly the analogy to geometry, where, as you point out, the heuristic works. That heuristic is also useful in science. And in other branches of philosophy besides ethics.

The puzzle this post presents is: why do we have a tendency to accept moral philosophies that do not fit all of our existing values? Why do we find it natural or attractive to simplify our moral intuitions?

Here’s my idea: we have a heuristic that in effect says, if many related beliefs or intuitions all fit a certain pattern or logical structure, but a few don’t, the ones that don’t fit are probably caused by cognitive errors and should be dropped and regenerated from the underlying pattern or structure.

Given that the heuristic is so useful in other areas, I have to ask, "How you can be sure it is wrong to use it in ethics?"

Also, I think that the intuitions that don't fit into the logical structure or system are not usually discarded or replaced. Instead, I think they are often simply reclassified - if they can no longer be justified as intrinsic values, a just-so story is constructed to explain them as instrumental values, or perhaps as evo-psych artifacts of an ancestral environment which no longer applies.

I think it’s likely that both of these are factors that contribute to the apparent divergence in human moral reasoning. This seems to be another piece of bad news for the prospect of CEV, unless there are stronger converging influences in human moral reasoning that (in the limit of reflective equilibrium) can counteract these diverging tendencies.

If my morality had changed simply from me hearing about a moral simplification and throwing out what didn't fit, and I only picked that moral simplification because I had heard of it first and because of it diverged, I would want to discard the simplification and go back to an earlier, more convergent morality.

Is that a sufficient converging influence?

I get the feeling simplified moral systems are largely a recent western phenomenon. This doesn't seem to be limited to moral systems, e.g., simple theories of history. I suspect this is caused by people seeing the success that fundamentally simple theories have had in the hard sciences, and trying to apply the same methods to other fields of endeavor.

Why do we find it natural or attractive to simplify our moral intuitions?

Pragmatically, there is some necessary lossy compression of moral intuitions for these reasons

1) Meta-value of being consistent in different emotional states. E.g. I do not like to kill, but that guy in a BMW who cut me off when it was my right of way... Or not doing things while being drunk that you will regret.

2) Providing instructions to agents acting on your behalf.

3) Comprimise of one's preferences in some collective action context (corporate cultures)

Incidentally Iain Banks cleverly deals with the communication channel problem by having persons send each other mindstate extracts.

In addition to being simple, the moral systems you describe also appear to be "obviously" consistent (although upon reflection they aren't). The more complicated systems you might adopt are not only more complicated, but also generally either don't look very consistent or (more frequently) are manifestly inconsistent. Complicated systems seem unlikely to be consistent unless they are extremely carefully designed.

If the point of your moral philosophy is to evaluate moral arguments, and if your moral philosophy is the only thing you use to evaluate moral arguments, having an inconsistent philosophy is dangerous for obvious reasons. So either you need to adopt a consistent moral philosophy, you need to be ready to change your philosophy when you are presented with an unpalatable argument (appealing to your real decision making process, which is your inconsistent intuition), or you should never engage in a moral argument. Changing your framework whenever you encounter an uncomfortable argument (or never engaging in an argument) is an easy way to avoid ever coming to an uncomfortable conclusion, which worries me.

I have never encountered a good simple moral framework, but the benefits of consistency do seem considerable. Of course a complicated consistent framework would be just as good, but I've never seen one of those either.

There're probably no simple reasons for people engaging in moral simplification.

I go for simpler moral systems largely for Occam's razor. If I assume anything that's not very basic, I'm almost certainly completely wrong.