Caring about certain groups of people more than others is clearly immoral. When your resources can be used much more effectively wasting them is immoral. We all make immoral decisions everyday though, so I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with that.
For some versions of morality, this is true to first order, but it ignores the second order effects. Ultimately, all complex organization, from the level of the cell to the level of the world, can be seen as solutions to the prisoner's dilemma. Defection looks like different things at different levels.
At the level of the cell vs. the body, it's cancer.
At the level of the individual vs. the family, it's adultery or abuse.
At the level of groups of people vs. a city or state, it's organized crime.
At the level of nations vs. the world, it's aggressive war.
It is the most natural thing in the world (literally) for members of an organization/group to preferentially help other members of the group, because there is an expectation of reciprocation, or at least that there would be reciprocation if the shoe were on the other foot.
It can be seen as a measure of progress of a society how large these networks of reciprocation get. It is a great thing when one's circle of concern expands. One thousand years ago, no one was sending resources purely altruistically to people thousands of miles away. To expect the circle of concern to be completely flat though is not an evolutionary stable strategy. The stable strategy is to create more engagement, more interdependency, more common beliefs and habits, so that trust is created, and the concentric circles of concern are progressively flattened.
First, "the most natural thing in the world" has nothing to do with morality. Humans have the ability to reason, so we're able to look past our natural instincts and find the truth.
Second, I agree that having the option to be moral is a great sign of societal progress. I think shaming immoral people is now an effective evolutionary strategy. Social outcasts are less likely to reproduce. Survival of the fittest is no longer about who has the most food(at least in the us). It's now about which culture values reproduction the most is we're looking at the macro scale and usually vapid things like attractiveness on the micro scale.
Saying that "reason" necessarily trumps natural instinct is naive. Your assumption is that your limited experience, knowledge, and cognitive ability are superior to the sum total of all human and animal experience and cognition throughout the aeons.
In group preference and mutual concern exists because it is stable and robust. Even if it doesn't give an optimal utilitarian outcome in the short term, it is capable of perpetuating itself. There is not a single society in history based on purely altruistic principles that has ever survived. Reciprocity is necessary.
No, I'm saying evolution has no reason to take morality into account. In fact, humans evolved to be immoral, if we weren't greedy we'd die. We are no longer in that situation. Being moral had a negative correlation with number of offspring. Arguing that the sum of people greedily trying to survive somehow means being greedy is moral now that it's no longer necessary makes no sense. There is not a single society in history that has had computers other than ours, so I'd say we're in unprecedented times.
I think evolution does take morality into account in a certain way. If you're a utilitarian, in one formulation, you'd say that the good is people being able to satisfy their desires. People form groups, build things together, etc., in general, to satisfy their desires collectively. We are able to satisfy more desires by working together.
My point is that barring genetic engineering or drugs or something else causing us to change our motivational system fundamentally, there will always be some people that are a bit greedier than others. Even if we are collectively materially rich, there are always more things to be acquired, and even if we had unlimited material wealth, there would always be scarce goods like the time/attention/respect of others.
Would you, for example, advocate that one should spend their time with others that they don't like, or even people who behave abusively, as long as these people get a lot of pleasure out of the interaction?
On your second point though, people generally do act morally, and that moral behavior is an evolved trait of a group, because moral behavior promotes the interests of the group. Compared to, say, 50,000 years ago on the savannah, the amount of concern that people show for one another's well being is far higher.
I really don't think people generally act morally at all. Instead I'd say they generally act in a socially acceptable way so as not to become ostracized. Then the question is how well do social norms line up with ethics. Overall it's pretty close, but there are clear areas where social norms are not ethical, such as eating factory farmed meat and donating to domestic charities instead of ones that target the global poor.
Is it your belief then that everyone is immoral? Or do you have any examples of someone maximising possible good?
The most obvious problem with such a system is that you're a bad person regardless of what you do, so there is no value in doing good unless you're a superintelligence. You say as much above- people make immoral decisions (by your evaluation) constantly, so it doesn't really matter whether you do.
You seem to be angling above for a world where people who care about others feel constant shame because they're not doing enough, while selfish, shameless people get to lead happy lives. That seems immoral, even by my much lower standards.
There is never value in doing good outside of the lack of shame it gives you. That doesn't change once you realize eating meat and donating to ineffective domestic charities are immoral. I think labeling people as good or bad is a mistake. We make good or bad choices, but it's impossible to fit us into binary good/bad based off those choices since there's no objective level of good you have to do to be a good person. I don't think you being unhappy with the conclusion means it's wrong.
I find that first sentence shocking. Perhaps we're just different types of people, but I derive a great deal of happiness from making others happy, and, moreover, I think there is fundamental value in increasing the average happiness in the universe. Shame, for me, is chiefly a driver of inaction. I will never not feel it, so why concern myself with it at all? There is always a better choice, so I dedicate time that could be used to make the world a better place (albeit innefficiently) to trying to figure out which choice out of an infinity is best.
I agree that labelling people as good or bad is a mistake. In fact, my issue here is that you explicitly labelled everyone as a bad person. Is this not what you meant to say?
I don't believe I said your conclusion makes me unhappy, my intent was to say that your conclusion is immoral and, as a moral position, it is therefore wrong.
People definition's of good will vary. A strict Muslim and a gay man will probably have quite different interpretations of "good". ISIS probably believe they are acting in a "good" way, it's the strictest interpretation of the word of god after all.
Trying not to do harm would be an easier goal to define.
Is it immoral to care more about your close family (spouse, children, parents) than about strangers? Is it immoral if you care more also about your cousins, grandparents or uncles/aunts? Or does it become immoral when you care more about even more distant parts your family? Or when you care more about your neighbours? Or your compatriots? Where do you draw a line?
Caring more about people who are closer is biological instinct. But if you want to call biology immoral...
Biological instinct has no effect on morality. All else equal, yes it's immoral to care more about your family's well being than strangers, but the downhill effects of that are disastrous due to unhappiness it instinctually causes. Because of that it is usually moral to care about those you are very close with because society would collapse if we didn't.
Ok - but that seems like a loophole in your position that renders it moot.
Since all things are not only never equal, but we can never even tell whether they are or not and since all decisions have an impact on personal happiness and ultimately too much unhappiness would cause society to collapse as you point out, then it is always moral to care about one group more than another if that is a condition of happiness.
That's ignoring the people harmed by ISIS. Clearly the moral decision is to stop abusive ISIS fighters. That doesn't mean babies are more important than them.
> Caring about certain groups of people more than others is clearly immoral.
I don't think it's so clear. That's a bold statement.
First of all, it's obvious that most people care about themselves, their family, their friends, their local community, their online community, etc. more than random people. This is evidenced by thinking of "caring for" people in terms of actions, rather than "caring about" abstract virtues. I care "for" someone by helping them, spending time with them, and by giving to them. I care "about" people in an abstract sense, perhaps by posting or speaking about it, "hope and prayers", taking a moral stand to defend their rights, etc. but not by doing concrete actions for individuals.
I, and most other people (and this almost certainly includes you!) care for those close to us more than we do for those further away, in every sense, because it's what we're more capable of doing meaningfully. So, from a practical standpoint, we're always going to care about certain groups more, purely because we don't actually have the power to care for people that are beyond our reach. The memberships of those groups obviously vary considerably from person to person, but to really care for someone takes time and effort, and we can only give so much.
Second, we have to consider what "moral" means. Arguably, the only morality is civilization; from a game-theoretical standpoint, the most moral actions are those which allow your society and people to thrive, those which allow your genes to propagate. This is how one obeys the genetic imperative, and how one continues to win in the fundamental struggle against nature that life is and has always been. This is what is reflected in the commonalities in law and ethics between all civilizations that have persisted for any length of time. These laws reflect moral values; the moral values reflect evolution, in the sense that if you have self-destructive morals you will not survive long enough to propagate them for a long time.
To maximize this morality, balanced with the capability factor above, one's care for others drops off as some function of the social distance from one's self to others, defined by one's relationships and by the customs of one's society. You help the people you know; you help the people who would help you. Whether this is because of a higher moral precept like the Golden Rule or out of shrewd self-interest doesn't matter - the ideal moral Schelling point is the combination of those two things, after all.
The term "pathological altruism" has been used of late to describe those who expend their resources to help others in ways that damage themselves or their society. For example, if you expend all of your charitable donations and volunteer time helping people who are far away and have no bearing on your own existence one way or the other, there's a huge opportunity cost in comparison to helping the people around you. This is especially salient when there is a disparity, in the sense that nobody from far away is donating to help those close to you either. This results in situations like those in America where homeless veterans, opiate addicts, underprivileged children, etc. are a persistent issue but no matter, because you can get just as much social clout or more from donating to help people halfway around the planet (gladdening many middlemen in the process).
From this perspective, I think it's fair to say that it's plenty moral to care more about certain groups than others. It may even be more moral. Take the log out of your own eye, and so forth.
> When your resources can be used much more effectively wasting them is immoral.
It's very hard to know what is the most effective thing, and so hinging morality on the idea that there's some lower-energy-state solution somewhere else that we didn't find is a bit questionable. It's not like we all have access to CPLEX or a BQM solver with details on every potential outcome for every situation we're in.
The definition of "effective" is also relative. What if I believe it is more "effective" in reality for those I care about to use my resources as described above, to help people whom I can make a real lasting difference for, rather than expending money abstractly helping people I will never meet? Which one is more likely to start a feedback cycle that pushes things upward in my community? Which one is more likely to benefit my descendants generationally, assuming we stay in this area?
Ehh. I don't think you even believe your own point, to be honest.
I don't think the definition of effective is relative. I believe people can have different goals though, so actions that would be effective to one person aren't to another. I don't think it's moral for your goal to be help those in your community at the expense of everyone else. Therefore if you are making moral decisions effective means the choice that will cause the most good per resource.
