Brett Andersen on the evolution of morality

he claims that utilitarianism is "slave morality for nerds."

Brett Andersen writes,

Morality is a collective, consensual hallucination. We implicitly agree to believe in (and act in accordance with) concepts like moral obligations, moral equality, and moral truths. But these concepts do not correspond to “moral facts”. Although acting in accordance with moral precepts might be useful (for yourself or for a group), these moral precepts do not refer to anything that exists outside of the minds, behaviors, and history of human beings. There is not, for example, some kind of Platonic realm containing moral facts, nor is there a transcendent God from whom moral facts emanate.

His main claim:

utilitarianism is slave morality for nerds

He denies that morality is objective, but he suggests that we sustain the illusion of objective morality in order to make moral norms work.

The true reason we perceive our morality as objective is that this propensity was selected for through biological and cultural evolutionary processes.

He sees the early agricultural era as one of master morality.

Karmin and colleagues (2015) documented a “bottleneck” in Y-Chromosome diversity corresponding to the advent of agriculture. To put their findings in simple terms, they provide genetic evidence that the operational sex ratio shot up from 3:1 (i.e., 3 successfully reproducing women for every 1 successfully reproducing man) to 17:1 after the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. If their findings are reliable, this means that there was a period of time after the advent of agriculture when a few men were having a lot of children while the large majority of men died before having any children. While we cannot prove that this was due to the more dominance-based social arrangement brought about by agriculture, these authors suggest that this is the most likely explanation (although Zeng et al., 2018 disagrees with this explanation).

These early agricultural empires proved to be fragile. For states to become powerful, the masses had to buy in, not just be coerced. Morality had to be more than the mere preferences of the powerful

but rather the preferences of a transcendent God or of the universe itself. What does God want? God wants everyone to be held to the same moral standard, for everyone to be compassionate towards the weak and helpless, and for everyone to be equal. …the ultimate culmination of slave morality was Christianity.

But by the 18th century,

there seemed to be some doubt that Christianity would remain the unquestionable guarantor of morality. This means that even those intellectuals who partially retained their belief in Christianity often felt some need to provide a firmer, more “rational” basis for morality. This is the origin of the secular moral philosophies of the enlightenment, most famously of Kant’s “categorical imperative” and Bentham’s utilitarianism.

You can take the Western man out of Christianity, but you can’t take the Christianity out of Western man.

Arguments for utilitarianism, humanism, and other secular moral philosophies simply don’t work unless they are directed at people who already have the moral intuitions that underlie them. The reason those intuitions are widespread in our own culture is largely because of the influence of Christianity

His most speculative claim:

The consequentialism and systemization inherent to utilitarianism would be particularly attractive to people high in autistic-like traits

His justification:

For most of us it is obvious that a murder is a greater moral crime than an accidental killing. By contrast, utilitarianism says that the morality of an action is determined by its consequences and not by the intentions behind the act. …children and adults with autism do not weigh intentions as highly as neurotypicals when making moral judgements. They tend to give more weight to outcomes. …People high in autistic-like traits tend to be systemizers (Baron-Cohen et al., 2009).

What follows:

Of course, the fact that a moral philosophy appeals to a particular kind of person doesn’t necessarily make it false. I do think it supports the idea, however, that in questions of morality, intuitions come first and reasoning comes second. The natural propensities of people with autistic-like traits to ignore intentions in moral judgement and to favor precise, lawful systems would make utilitarianism intuitively appealing. If Haidt’s social intuitionism is correct, then the large philosophical literature defending utilitarianism consists of post-hoc justifications for these initial intuitions.

Consider two extremes: “intentionism” and consequentialism. By”intentionism” I mean the intention heuristic: if Communists’ intentions are good, then Communism is good. By consequentialism I mean ignoring intention entirely: Baldwin committed murder even if it was an accident.

I think that in close personal situations we have to incorporate intentions as well as consequences. In norms and policies for a society with more people than the Dunbar number, we should lean much more on consequences and rely less on the intention heuristic.

I cannot tell where Andersen is headed with his essay series.

This essay is part of a series on human interdependence.

Substacks referenced above:

@

Utilitarianism is Slave Morality for Nerds