The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates

Individuals may have the ability to commandeer jet planes and fly into buildings, but only a nation can build a nuclear missile system capable of annihilating the planet.

The problem isn't with individuals. The problem is with society. And on that front — societal ethics seem to be keeping pace with technological growth. It might be technology that is propelling our societal ethics forward.

We'll always have broken men and women who do terrible things, but we might not always have broken societies that lynch, torture, pollute, and war.

Conservative moralists argue that we must prohibit something because it's potentially dangerous, while liberal moralists argue that we must encourage it because it's potentially beneficial. Absolutists argue that morality cannot, or must not change, much to the chagrin of the relativists. And all this before we even get into the culturally directed moralities!

Compounding the problem is everyone's surety that THEIR morality is superior, with some even suggesting that their axiomatically superior morality be imposed upon others, by law, or even by force, if necessary.

Morality was always inside the human. No evolution needed here. But from an evolutionary perspective, the evolution of morality was the defining factor that made us drastically different other species.

Then what causes some people to be Buddha, Jesus, Moses, or Muhammadﷺ while others to be ignorant and vicious? Morality needs to be brought to health and vigor after being subdued because of social or political conflict. This is often termed enlightenment.

And religion has always been a powerful vehicle and force to establish morality in individuals, a vehicle that carries arguably the divine rule, or an evolutionary mechanism that is carried through trial and failure.

I don't think we can expect to get the same sort of moral improvement we do in the fastest-moving areas of technology by throwing technology at the problem of morality. We're still not all that far along in learning how to treat mental illnesses, and using medicine to make people more moral would probably be similarly difficult. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not a solution, just that we shouldn't be surprised if building a solution of that sort turns out to have a difficulty more like curing PTSD than preventing childbed fever.

I also think that making humans act more morally probably has more to do with helping us recognize and think clearly about moral decisions, than making us care more. One of the reasons the Gates foundation is special is that they're trying to help people efficiently. The way human minds are built makes it hard to realize that it's important to be efficient at doing good, rather than just to make an effort.

I guess this is coming from someone whose empathy dial is turned up to eleven anyway, though, so it could also be that different people have different problems to overcome to be more moral. The problems I had were not forgetting about causes of suffering just because they don't happen to be staring me in the face at the moment, and then focusing on the right things.

The website LessWrong has some interesting writing about why humans suck at charity http://lesswrong.com/lw/aid/heuristics_and_biases_in_charity... , and learning how to reason better in general is the main thing they write about. The main effects the stuff I read there has had on my morality-related actions are that I take my career more seriously (I don't actually care that much about more money for me, but I do care about more resources for improving the world), and I worry less about small stuff (I accept inefficiencies in my own life if fixing them doesn't look worth the effort, and don't get distracted by projects that would help people but only a small amount).

Some of what you're talking about here - the idea of giving flamethrowers to children - sounds similar to the idea of existential risk, though on a smaller scale. If you don't already know if it, you may find it relevant.

I'm sure you could begin to answer this if you tried harder. Global decrease in violence would be a good start at a proxy to measure, see e.g. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405311190410670...

A more subtle example involves measuring the "expanding circle" -- the degree with which we're willing to empathize with people who are not like us. We've made clear recent advances towards showing empathy and consideration for e.g. black people, women, gay people, in relative recency in human history.