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Morality can be defined as the nature of the guidelines to which the individual and the groups fell, and perhaps agree, that they should refer when taking decisions. All social groups embody their morality in a mixture of formal and tacit rules, the latter often articulated only with difficulty. Most societies have a 'narrative', a body of examples, stories and understood general principles which tell who they are and what they are about. The more complex societies supplement this with a formal body of rules - law - and usually have several narratives in play at any one time.
Western societies have been torn between two views of what should constitute the body of such narratives. One of these is essentially pragmatic: it strives to see what works (a concept which we explore in the next paragraph) but it also harks back to moral absolutes, truths given by religious authority or by appeals to the intrinsic certainties which humans are alleged to share. Experimental exploration of the grounds for and universality of these certainties is making this perspective less and less tenable, however. We review this in depth in the latter part of this paper. At the same time, the issue of what should replace the traditional poles of good and evil when sorting options also presents us with problems.
If we replace an ex cathedra "good" with something desirable which is also open to objective definition, then we find that we run into problems. The greatest good for the greatest number - the catch phrase of Utilitarianism - proves to be a weak guide when it is examined closely. Commercial management is a laboratory in which controlled experiments can be undertaken, and on which much old and ink has been spent. Ultimately, the criterion for a 'good' system of management is the one which is successful in meeting the various external criteria which are imposed on the firm: profit and investment, the law, environmental and social accountability and so on. Systems which are good, in this sense, propagate and hybridise, undergoing Darwinian selection. Systems which are bad fail, and are expunged. Much the same is true of social systems, whether embodied in nation states or ethnicities. We return to this point in the last paragraph of this introduction.
This paper begins, however, with a review of the traditional approach to moral philosophy. It focuses on a critique of Utilitarianism, particularly in the context of what we now know about the diversity of human value systems within and between populations. We discover that there is no likely abstract set of values around which any population may cohere, only dominant 'narratives', as defined earlier.
We set this finding against the extraordinary new developments in what might be called the 'biology of values'. Individuals are, apparently, hard-wired to defend social norms, irrespective of what those norms may be.
Additionally, there is an innate division, traditionally captured in game theory, between private moralities and motivation, on the one hand, and public uniformity and order on the other. This tension has probably underlain public morality since humans created their first settlements. In view of what is discussed above, however, this presents challenges to modern populations, where the sense of identity with the group is fading, or diffused between many such groups.
The conclusion is, to say the least, controversial. It is possible to derive at least six abstract measures of adequacy that allow alternative social systems to be ranked. At least one of these is connected with diversity and the capacity of the system to act as a host to distinct value systems and sub-narratives. Renewal comes when a system is challenged in ways which it comprehends and to which it is fitted to respond. The seeds of this lie in flexibility, cooperation, coherence, trust and predictability.
The morality of the C21st is more likely to focus on considerations of what works in this sense, rather than on ex ante views of what ought to be. This generates what are, in effect, a set of simultaneous equations and non-linear equations. That is, the act of taking a choice may well alters the context and rules of the system which the decision-taker is trying to improve. Equally, the task of explaining ramifying choice that is grounded in a systems approach is innately difficult, notably for populations whose world view may be closer to that of binary good and evil. The implications are considerable for future systems of governance.
This paper was written as a response to and development of the paper on the possible future evolution of the democratic form of government. The prime author is a professional philosopher, who wishes to remain anonymous.
The 'democracy' paper concluded that what was called "Style B" was likely to grow in importance. The assumption that underpinned this was the validity of Utilitarianism, which has at its heart the belief that any system has its optimum - its agreed optimum - and therefore policy should be trimmed towards this scientific goal. The scenario "Carrying the Torch" describes the outcome of this, a trend which is everywhere apparent in the industrial nations of the world.
Let us begin, therefore, with a discussion of what would have to be true if Utilitarianism were to be a useful guide to policy. It is possible to disagree over the right course of action on two very different grounds:
Plainly, these are very different positions. We shall discuss only the second of these, where values are opposed and synthesis between these is difficult. We shall highlight a central distinction between difficult reconciliation which stems from the actual incompatibility of goals - where cakes cannot be both had and eaten - and those where the incompatibility stems more from interpretation and attitude than it does from real pay-offs: for surely one can indeed have environmentally-sustainable activity which is compatible with economic competitiveness?
Additionally, we draw your attention to the fact that whilst game theory has given a great deal of attention to competition, moral philosophy has not done so. Traditional discussion around morality seems always to assume that moral conduct is connected with mutuality and co-operation. The reality of life - and arguably one of the greatest motors of greater capability and choice - is the fact of competition. What is a viable theory of moral order under the fact of competition for scarce resources and in a world of positive feedback, where success favours the successful? Should our reflexes be to support success in our community? Should we support the less successful? At what cost, to what proportion? Indeed, in what terms would a convincing answer to these questions be set?
In order to reach address these issues, it is first necessary to skim across the field of moral philosophy. The deep questions about values are:
Moral philosophy has attracted a copious literature, spread across the centuries. There are probably four fundamental threads to what has been said. First, there is a class of reasoning which starts with a given body of knowledge - of dogma, of revelation - and works out from this. There is not much that can be added to or subtracted from such a position, save in the adequacy or otherwise of the working-through of the givens provided by revelation. "He who wills the end, wills the means."
The second strand is that which has been alluded to above, namely Utilitarianism. In this view, relative merit is to be assigned to alternative courses of action as a result of the balance of benefits and penalties which they generate. As already noted, this shifts the issue from assigning relative benefits to actions to assigning this to outcomes, or perhaps to probability-weighted outcomes. The issue of value-based assignment remains in play.
There is, therefore, the problem of regress that arises when applying the principles of Utilitarianism. Some may reject this, saying that there are at least some uncontroversial statements that can be made that appeal to 'universal' values. It is, for example, plainly preferable that people should be well fed, as opposed to starved, in a situation in which all other variables are kept constant. Opponents reply that this is a tautology masked as a universal law: dietary sufficiency is one of the tropisms that are innate in our biology, and a dimension which measures this simply measures the fulfilment of one our biological needs. Utilitarianism then reduces to a statement that situations which predispose to our biological health are desirable, which is hardly news; or which sets public health, hygiene and nutrition as the greatest social priorities. G.E. Moore, commenting on utilitarianism, suggested that it views reduce to tautology which amounts to no more than saying that " nice things are nice".
Utilitarianism fails to answer other practical questions: for example, is it better to have ten people who are each ten percent happier before, or one person who is twice as happy? The sum of increased contentment is the same in both cases. Criminal punishment can be seen as an inverse example of this issue. The usual choice that societies make is to have a few criminals who are extremely unhappy in gaol, and a large number of people gaining a small moiety of content as a result of their absence from the scene. However, the overall level of content might be the same if the criminals were not gaoled - and therefore much happier - and the population at large mildly less content. It depends on the values of whoever is making the social choice.
There are further problems around the question of risk and of discounting the future which Utilitarianism cannot answer. Should one seek two units of happiness to be achieved in the next year over one unit received right now, or should it be three units? How should one treat an uncertain path to happiness over a safe route to a lesser outcome? If this seems trivial, recall that public policy towards environmental issues, for example, can render future damage trivial or overwhelming in the resulting assessment, depending entirely on the assignment of probabilities and discount rates.
Evidence is firm that humans are very poor gauges of objective risk, and also of other peoples' values. Science has shown us that we have powerful internal engines which generate a 'model of the other' - in the jargon, we are intensional about other people. Indeed, we extend these models to animals, to machines and to intangible entities, assigning motives and feelings to these without a fleck of evidence. These models are extremely useful to us, as they permit us to navigate in our society. However, they are tightly calibrated on our own social experience. We most generally model others as though they were ourselves, or idealised versions of ourselves. We become upset or angry when others transgress our model of what conduct is 'right'. Humans are, therefore, innately poor measures to use when making value judgements about societies or individuals for whom our intensionality is poorly calibrated.
Additionally, humans are inclined to be influenced by egregious joy or misery than by pastel-shaded distinctions in middle range content. Unless some objective measure of content were to be created - a brain scanner, let us say - then it is impossible to define the level of happiness exists in an individual or community using human observers as probes.
Hume, writing two centuries before the invention of Utilitarianism, noted that our moral goals lie less upon analysis than on a foundation of empathy with our fellows. We are "intentional" about others in the sense that we assign concrete meaning and value to our perceptions of how they thing and feel. Our social world is founded on concepts of obligations and justice, shame and honour as much as it is on property, status and power. It is a separate universe, as real to us as the physical universe of atoms and forces.
We have already touched on Kant's categorical imperative: that we simply know good when we see it. Two centuries of anthropology and historical research has surely exploded this point of view, save within individual and stable societies, or classes of people within them. Nevertheless, philosophers such as Stevenson have attempted to formalise this by suggesting that there are distinct 'evaluative' ideas and 'descriptive' ones - that is, what ought to be the case and what is so - and that these should be treated as two distinct magisteria, each with its own sphere of influence. That is, there is a world of moral calculus in some Platonic space, and a mundane sphere in which values bid against each other. The individual in isolated contemplation may reach for the absolutes - truth, beauty - and these are the fundamental particles of this universe. Social interactions can seldom wholly enter into this space, and should be calibrated against it indirectly.
The Romantic meditator is, however, supposed to know innately what separates a strongly held desire to hurt other people from an equally strong desire to cherish them. Indeed, the Romantic views are, in essence, intentional at an individual rather than a societal level, and probably all the worse for this.
Kant's view can also be taken in a distinct manner, as by more recent philosophers such as Hare. As noted, Kant believed that there were certain things which all rational beings would want in the light of rationality, the so-called categorical imperatives. Kant arrives at his views by 'thinking about thinking', in this case thinking why would you still act if all personal or practical concerns were removed. Your action would then be based on reason alone and, if reason is a universal quality, would then be universal. "Act so that the criteria ('maxim') of your action might become a law of nature in the Kingdom of Goals." In essence, it is this position which modern game theory tries to capture when it seeks universal optima, and against which it works - indeed, denies - when it considers the interests of individual players.
The view advanced by Hume - that reason was subject to the emotions, and that disinterested reason was at best a transient state - is denied. Morality implies freedom of action, whilst emotionality is the opposite of freedom, it is enslavement. A person is a member of a moral community to the extent that he or she acts within this freedom and universal rationality, and is not a member - should not be held as equal, or in esteem - to the extent that they do not do so. The categorical imperative is, however, stronger in telling us what we cannot do than what we should.
Hegel amplified this, noting that when the categorical imperative was applied in a society of unequal power, then either those without power were necessarily objectified, made into 'things' that existed to fulfil tasks. Such beings had no liberty or moral nature: 'Slaves can have no morality for slaves can have no choice.' A moral society - in which all participated in the moral community - must, therefore, assign rights to individuals which give them the liberty to choose. This creates a framework within which all can exercise their moral nature. A theory of rights can be built from this insight.
The fourth strand is relatively new, and evidence in its favour is arriving as I write. This approach is essentially socio-biological. It develops from four assumptions.
First, it notes that communities have probably had higher survival capabilities than have isolated individuals throughout primate evolutionary history. (Only a very few contemporary primates live solitary lives - the Ourang Outang, for example.)
Second, it notes that emotionality - values and tropisms, responses and strategies for self-advancement and coping - are mental processes, influenced by our neurological and thus genetic make-up.
Third, it notes that we observe highly developed and stereotyped social order within animal communities. Animal societies, in which abstract reasoning is not highly advanced, will only develop such communal structures - that is, group behaviour, individual behaviour within the group -as an emergent property of the predispositions of their individual members.
Fourth, it notes that communities are under selective pressure in much the same way as are individuals. That is, those which prosper will propagate the information on which they are based. Some of this is learned and transmitted socially, but the predispositions to cohere socially are primarily genetic - that is, "instinctual". There is ample evidence that animals can be bred by human intervention for behavioural characteristics a wide range of behavioural characteristics, from reduced aggression and nervousness towards passivity, openness and a desire to cooperate; and to much more finely-tuned predispositions.
Many of Hume's bedrock of social emotions can be shown to be universal to all human communities. However, the balances which individual societies strike amongst these often competing of incompatible emotions are extremely varied. Social narratives - interpretations that are made explicit or which are implied by the institutions and customs of the society - are passed down generations, changing to meet new insight and different options and challenges. Social groups are under selective pressure, and their narratives are as much subject to winnowing, hybridisation and mutation as are the genes in the individuals who make them up. Successful narratives tend to propagate, and what constitutes success has created a fairly small space within the enormous universe of possible human societies. Groups which eat their children, for example, fail not because they are 'bad' but because they are unable to compete with groups who do not do this.
We have noted Stevenson's attempt to create two magisteria for moral issues. We could, perhaps, advance a rather different version of this as a result of these thoughts. In one sphere, the overall fitness of a social group is measured against the benchmark of the world, and a major component of this fitness is set by the value balances which it has struck and the customs and institutions which it has created as a result of this. In the other sphere, interacting with this, we have individual desires, capabilities, predispositions struggling to find their own position of comfort and advantage in this society.
To progress, we need to take a step back and to think about the individuality of the individual. There are two elements to this: first, how the individual differs from the group norm and, second, how their pursuit of individual advantage takes their actions away from what the group deems desirable or moral. Plainly, very different individuals can want the same things as each other; and identical individuals can agree on what constitutes group advantage, and still strive for their individual goals, perhaps at the expense of the group.
Sociometrics is the discipline which sets out to measure individual predispositions, including values. Population values are expressed as dimensions, which together span a space within which each individual is a points. (Or more properly, a volume, as the balances which they express amongst their values in fact changes considerably as they react to circumstances. If an experimental subject is pre-exposed to material which heightens or reduces their sense of insecurity, for example, then the choices that they take in subsequent trials varies very considerably and predictably. Equally, laudatory or condemnatory language will have a profound affect on what they do when asked to arbitrate in an unrelated dispute.)
A society can, therefore, be represented as a cloud of points - or as an extended volume - in such a space. When this is done, it is found that the extent of the could that represents any one society is much greater than the difference between the cloud representing two separate societies. Germans differ more amongst themselves than does the centre of weight of Germany and the USA, for example.
The roots of this scatter lie in the interaction between biology and social narrative that we have already mentioned. Behaviour is both learned and hard-wired by our genes. (It is to the group's evolutionary advantage to have a scatter of predispositions: for the division of labour, to react to change in ways which do not become stereotyped, to maintain parallel but different streams of learning and insight.) Individuals may have more or less of certain predispositions and capabilities 'wired' into them. We see the focused, local nature of this wiring when individuals suffer strokes and other trauma to the brain; and it is increasingly clear that many of the chronic forms of mental illness are due to poor wiring together of physically remote volumes in the brain, something that continues until a person is around 20 years old. Cleverly-designed experiments that use functional magnetic resonance (FMR) scanners are able to localise specific centres for certain tasks. An atlas of the location of the neural components which underpin many generic mental tasks is rapidly becoming clear. Some value-related tasks - such as assessing fairness or reasonable behaviour in others - are exceedingly abstract, yet seem to have dedicated sites in the brain which are constant between cultures and individuals. Others, such as feeling confidence or anxiety, are apparently more concrete, yet have much less focused support systems.
These insights and tools The interaction between circumstance and predisposition plot a path for the individual, and whether the outcome is primarily defined by nature or nurture depends, in all probability, on the weight that each of these take in the life path the individual treads.
There area pair of reasons why this variability matters to the current discussion.
First, it is self-evident that if it is the case that people are physically as well as behaviourally variable in respect to their individual ability and values, then the idea of a universal set of values is going to have difficulties to surmount.
Second, although people vary, they nevertheless tend to clump around a centre of weight, forming the cloud of points to which we referred above. Parts of that cloud can, however, acquire a voice, and the narrative which that voice tells about values, conduct and identity may overwhelm the innate tendencies of people who happen to be located in other parts of the cloud. That is, an 'official' narrative suppresses innate diversity to impose an identity upon it.
Consider, for example, two ends of one common dimension along which people vary as a consequence of their innate make-up. This dimension includes introversion-extroversion as an important component. People who lie at one extreme of it, therefore, need constant stimulation, bright colours and loud noises, social interaction and quick, easily-surmounted challenges that are set for them by others. People at the other end of it, by contrast, prefer to be solitary, quiet, contemplative; and prefer to undertake the long haul towards a success which they define for themselves.
A social group that is so small that its members cannot isolate themselves from each other - for example, a group of school children on an outing - will find it hard to accommodate both extremes of this dimension. The extroverts will be accused of being rowdy is the introverts dominate the narrative, the introvert of being kill-joys if the extroverts do so. There is no abstract right and wrong to this - save that of individual perspective - but it takes careful negotiation and moderation to achieve a state in which one group or the other are not feeling put upon.
A set of public values which perfectly suit one social group may well upset another, not through their voluntary intransigence but as a result of innate predispositions. Part of this difficulty is solved by voluntary partitioning of the society. There are few discotheques which seek a Quietist clientele. Another part is settled by the social narrative, which defines what is appropriate for the society at any one time.
This narrative may be a compromise, but it is frequently tyrannical to at least some groups - children, for example, whom parents force into continence and obedience from a state to which neither of these are natural. That is, one group in the sociometric cloud grasps the narrative and makes it their own, actively suppressing alternative interpretations. It is this which makes Germany unlike the USA - or the Middle East unlike China - rather than innate factors that emerge in sociometric or deeper biological examinations. It is not that a religious-fundamentalist (or a libertarian-capitalist) outcome is mandated by economic of other forces - or that either is morally correct, in some absolute manner - but that lobby forces have captured the narrative and made it their own. The outcome may succeed or fail in the Darwinian struggle amongst narratives, but that is a secondary issue.
Individuals who do not fit into the social narrative are nevertheless carried along by it. Many blame themselves, some attempt to escape by migration, others set up various forms of partitioning. Complex societies absorb all of these attempts, and have very general narratives. Simple societies - or those which set out to simplify or refine themselves to the dictates of a given narrative - will not permit this. There is an official line, and each is expected to follow it exactly. Totalitarian societies are one example of this in action.
In summary: We have noted that individuals are innately varied, and that they have to accommodate their particular predispositions to the narrative of the group. There is no right answer to this, only a set of more or less stable outcomes that are negotiated over time. We have politics precisely because there are no objective measures of the degree of 'rightness' to such balances, only examples of where things have gone very wrong.
We have also seen that groups are more or less fitted to survive by the form of political organisation which they develop. Narratives and the societies which support them undergo a selection process which is certainly Darwinian, even if the details are very different from that of biological evolution. The next section reviews striking evidence that we have evolved innate tendencies to support 'narrative strategies' that are likely to cause the group to thrive, and to reject behaviours which do not. One can choose to see this as a hard-wired, deep moral imperative.
There is now a large body of work that studies how social norms are policed. Research has shown that the behaviour which characterises the management of dissonance is highly repeatable across the world. Indeed, some part of it is shared between humans and many of the other primates.
Amongst human subjects, however, it has been shown that there is a strong tendency to object to unfair situations, to punish people who cheat or who do not follow established rules, and to do so even at considerable personal cost. This predisposition varies between individuals in much the way expected of any biological trait, and is repeatable across all cultures that have been tested. People who express it strongly have been studied in FMR scanners, and the trait has been localised in the brain, specifically to the posterior superior temporal sulcus. There are similar tendencies to defer to tradition, to custom and tacit institutions, to existing hierarchies, to respect intangible boundaries in physical and social spaces. Humans appear, therefore, to be deeply predisposed to treat the emotional universe as being as real and immutable as the physical one.
Under a socio-biological perspective, rights and duties are outward signs of structural features which societies need if they are to function. The sociobiology of a decade ago would have seen this as a process of a purely genetic nature: that is, that genes that predisposed people to express the characteristics that were described above would spread through populations because those populations were rendered fitted as a result of this. The more recent synthesis sees an important additional element for the evolving narrative, carried by social forces. (This is not confined to humans and their ability to communicate by speech and record experience in stories and texts. Wild dogs, for example, cannot survive in the wild unless they learn hunting skills from their peers when they are young. This is social transmission of information, and was - presumably - important in the evolution of human groups before speech became widespread.)
Human societies use social transmission much more strongly than do animals, of course, but the pattern of ordering has much the same origins: emotionality as discussed by Hume. We are intentional about others because we are wired up in ways which help us model the inner state of others, and so predict (and care about) this. This wiring is defined by our genetic code, and modulated by the social environment in which we are raised. Kantian imperatives become necessary when we deal with new situations, or societies which rise above a certain level of complexity: we ask ourselves in abstract how we should deal with this or that problem, and solutions find their way into other communities and become a part of the narrative which we learn as children. Hegelian solutions become necessary when we seek societies in which reciprocity is more important than raw power, when we want to exploit the economies of specialisation and where the complexity is such that we must rely on self-assembly around self-interest rather than the dictates of a centralised power.
How is one to know a positive set of public ethics from a bad one? Plainly, values enter into the question, and any answer to it contains the danger of endless regress. Nevertheless, if we slightly re-phrase the question, we can come to some conclusions that are not self-referential.
The question that we should ask is, perhaps, the following: Given the innate diversity of populations, and the somewhat arbitrary nature of the narrative on which they may settle at any one time, what does a public morality need to deliver in order for that society to be well-fitted to survive when compared to its peers? Are the best quality parameters defined by what a society itself sets out to achieve, or what a dispassionate and omniscient observer would believe that it ought to need?
Game theory, for example, defines three fundamental types of interaction: those where the net outcome is a loss, those where there is neither a net gain nor a net loss; and of course those where there is an overall gain. These are called negative, zero and positive sum games. Positive sum games will, in the short run at any rate, increase the store of what a society wants to achieve. Negative sum games will diminish this store.
Of course all of the objections that were raised against Utilitarianism also apply to this form of analysis. Who is to say what constitutes a game or a loss? This is not a value-neutral matter: does ripping up a unique water meadow to build a shopping centre represent a gain or a loss? One may observe the balances which a society strikes, as an anthropologist an economist might do, and so deduce the way in which one set of values are traded against another other. That tells one what their values are, but not whether they are 'good' values in any terms but their own.
We can, however, develop criteria which get around these difficulties. First, we can think about coherence and cohesion; then about friction and trust; and, finally, we can deploy the eye of hindsight.
Coherence: Societies create an organisational framework which generates mutual support amongst their members. The collective is able to achieve outcomes that are not open to the same number of people acting as individuals: the division of labour and the exchange of value; security and risk containment; education, the storage of information and its exchange.
This framework has to function smoothly over time. Its internal processes need to be able to operate without outside management, much as markets arrive at a price signal without a coordinating body. The processes need to heal themselves when they have been damaged, and to protect themselves from harm. One quality parameter for a society is, therefore, whether this design coherence is strongly expressed or not.
Cohesion: Societies may consist of armed camps (ethnicities, classes, clans) or be a smoothly integrated whole. Those which enjoy cohesion will plainly have an easier job at arriving at a consensus - or imposing a view - that do those which are fractured internally. This is not just a matter of balancing alternative needs. Rather, there may be several different narratives in play - regarding the establishment of a supermarket as an economic-social issue or a matter of religious interpretation, for example. Dissonant narratives make political settlements extremely hard to achieve, as the key issues have to be taken out of the dispute entirely and the matter managed in terms of peripheral trivia.
Low friction: A coherent, cohesive society may still be one in which it is extremely hard to get anything done. This is often the case in developing nations. The following quote is not untypical: "I tried to do it the way I had learnt it in the US: hire the right people, give the right assignments, watch for results, that sort of thing. None of that worked. I learnt the hard way that most people just wanted to take me for a ride. [. almost everyone, from government bureaucrats to business partners and associates, to workers, just wanted a piece of the pie I was struggling to create." High-friction societies also tend to lack coherence and to be less than cohesive, but this is nevertheless an independent criterion around which to assess a society.
Trust: A lack of trust requires us to guard ourselves. We may not trust the coherence of the society - its economic volatility, for example - or we may not trust our neighbours, our police forces, our business colleagues. Societies which lack trust have high innate overheads, whilst those in which it is generally safe to extend trust can focus on other matters. Trust can be reduced to three factors. First, to the issues which were discussed under coherence, and which are embodied in the narrative of the society. What is to be expected of a policeman, or a doctor and what is illegitimate for them to do? Second, to high quality information channels which connect agents - such as excellent policemen or naughty children - to their actions. Third, to systems of reward and retribution, which bring benefits and penalties to these agents in ways which connect to their actions.
Low trust societies - or poorly cohesive societies, in which particular groups are perhaps victimised - may have a low expectation of agents such as policemen. They may be unable to discriminate between business partners who are worthy of trust and those who are not: they may not have access to the social networks in which reputations are discussed. Equally, however, there may be a sense that corrupt state inspectors or predatory neighbours are never punished, or that hard workers are never rewarded. Societies which are defective in these ways display an yet another objective and largely value free quality parameter.
Success reviewed in hindsight: It is something of a cliché that great art cannot be detected within its own time, but only with the benefit of hindsight. Masterworks stand out as initiating a trend, perfectly exemplifying or transcending their times, failing to be dulled by familiarity or buffed up by fashion. Much the same can be said for societies, for industries, for social groups, for grand ideas. They are introduced, flare into prominence and then wink out, leaving ash or a slid contribution to whatever follows. It is not necessary to take a moral stand in order to assess the impact which they made. Indeed, no historian would attempt to define a major event as a Good Thing, but would have no equivocation in calling it a Big Thing.
In much the same terms, a measure of the quality of the coherence and value narratives that were adopted by past societies is embodied in the contribution which they make to subsequent events, or which lead to their vanishing without a heritage. (Technically, this is known as Kolmogorov complexity: a measure of the degree to which a minimal description of the internal state of an inheritor system - organism, civilisation - must require specific reference to its predecessor systems.)
Impacts can, of course, be negative. The Black Death (or the reign of Ghengis Khan) added little by way of legacy to the populations which they vanquished. Both tested the societies which they encountered. Some of these were resilient - such as Fourteenth Century England, which continued to hammer the Scots despite losing half its population - whilst others proved themselves unable to meet the challenge.
Impacts are often carried between societies through the medium of economic, cultural or intellectual competition. The growth of the international European trading empires broke with a tradition in which states made such advances, for the benefit of ruling elites. Joint stock companies became the individual exploiters of technology for the profit of the middle classes; and middle class savings were circulated by retail banking in a way never previously seen. The model became the de facto narrative, the 'right way to do things', and it changed (and still dominates) the world order.
The capacity to meet and survive challenge, to create the grounds on which competition will be waged, to generate new ideas and technologies which diffuse into other societies are, therefore, all a part of a further objective quality parameter, one that stands aside from values.
Social narratives give rise to behaviours which have at least five independent quality parameters. These do not map onto "good" or "bad", but rather onto "adaptive and effective" as opposed to its opposite. The measure of effectiveness is less about values than about the consequence of having certain values.
We have already seen that group behaviour is grounded both in nature (in our genetic predispositions) and in nurture (through social transmission of narratives, social enforcement by institutions). This section discusses what we know about the evolution of genetically-defined altruistic traits. It will follow Nowak's 2007 review paper in Nature.
Societies abound with altruistic acts. Mothers are slaves to their children. As we have seen, people will accept considerable costs in order to punish individuals who cheat in situations which require collaboration for a good outcome.
Evolutionary biologists revere Hamilton's rule, which states that an altruistic trait will spread in a population if the relatedness of the agent to the beneficiary exceeds the ratio of cost to benefit: r > c/b. Following this calculus, J.B.S. Haldane said that he would expect to be prompted by his instincts to jump in the river to save two brothers or one cousin (that is, someone who shared half of his genes, or two people who shared a quarter of them).
It seems likely that there are six main modes in which altruism can spread through a population in which genetic predispositions lead individuals to show enlightened self interest: to cooperate with their peers. One of these is of academic interest only. It is the so-called 'green beard' model, in which virtue is somehow flagged by a physical trait, with the green beard being given as a whimsical example. We know of no such mating plumage, so the issue can be set aside.
The first of the five remaining modes is kin selection, the most direct application of Hamilton's law. It will help our genes to spread if we assist the survival and reproduction of those who carry them. We have already discussed this mechanism and Haldane's joke about it. It is clear that the rationale behind genetic kin selection is also true of those who share our customs and our values, driving the spread of our particular narrative.
The second mechanism is that of social reciprocity. Kin selection leads us to favour only our relations, but it is plainly the case that we collaborate with people who are not closely related to us. However the tendency to work with unrelated people came about, it conveys huge advantages on those who show the trait. However, uncritical collaboration, of the sheep with the wolf, is swiftly fatal. Less obvious is, however, the growth of 'cheats', individuals who reap the benefits granted by the collaborating individuals, but without paying any of the costs.
The issue of how collaboration can survive in a population which may well act as a parasite upon it is a major intellectual (and practical) issue. Game theorists - and experimental economics - showed the importance of reputation, a generalisation of the issues discussed above under the topic of trust. Using computer based simulations, Axelrod demonstrated that the best strategy for a collaborator was to try to cooperate, but then to act in narrow self-interest if the partner cheated.
Subsequent work showed that this 'tit-for-tat' strategy could lock individuals out of collaboration indefinitely on the basis of a single error or trial defection. The universal winning strategy is called "win stay, lose shift", in which you carry on as before if you are doing well, but try something else if you are losing.
It can be shown that the proportion of the population which is engaged in cooperative responses is then set by the ratio of benefits to costs from doing so, meaning that a highly collaborate society will tend to lock into ever-deeper cooperation, and a 'cheating' population will spiral downwards into yet more of the same. As collaborative societies do better in terms of the quality parameters which we have already discussed, their dependents have more offspring than do those societies which are locked into negative sum games. The genes which accentuate such behaviours are, perhaps, preferentially passed on, whilst those which lead to the thoughtless grasping of easy prizes do not.
The remaining three of the five ways in which the genetic basis for collaboration is likely to inherited are indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity and group selection. Indirect reciprocity refers to the halo of reputation which we acquire in a social group: helping one individual may predispose others to collaborate with us. Network reciprocity is what occurs in communities in which the virtuous know each other, but are immersed in a sea of cheats. They deal preferentially with other collaborators, excluding the cheats or those who are an unknown quantity. Finally, group selection has already been discussed: reciprocating societies tend to succeed, and to out-breed groups which cheat.
These models have been observed at play in animal societies, in complex computer models and in experimental structures that have been proven on many different cultures. The insights which they generate resonate strongly with everyday experience. We may also add in the evidence for hard-wired neural structures which cause us to behave in much the ways which these models would predict. These insights may well address some of the real dynamics which form human societies.
The model that emerges is that of individuals who, as we described earlier, can be represented as points in "value space". The social narrative is usually a much smaller volume than the cloud which all of the society represents. Some outliers will defect - become criminals, eccentrics, outsiders - whilst others will force themselves to conform to what are values alien to their innate tendencies. Large groups which are able to find each other often set up separate, parallel societies which try to minimise contact with their host, with their members donning appropriate personae when they go into it, for example to do business. Many religious groups behave in just this way in Western societies. Vocational groups such as the armed forces, scientists and artists are often highly isolated from the rest of their society, in activity and in values. Healthy societies probably need these internal hot houses, as new ideas and useful critique emerge from them.
We discussed the objective parameters for successful societies. Much the same parameters apply to individuals, leading them to be adaptive, coherent, insightful, self-managing or, by contrast, to be rigid, adherents of fragmented, slogan-dominated or outdated insight, rejecting active measures through which to change and drifting where the consensus suggests.
The latter is probably no bad way to manage one's life for the individual who lives in a successful society with the values of which he or she feels personal harmony. It is not a helpful stance for people who are not happy with the prescriptions of their society, however. People who do not fit in as a matter of course have to work hard to adapt themselves to what they find, or face negative consequences. At best, they will feel frustration and alienation and at worst, they will be isolated, perhaps persecuted, perhaps become criminal. Large, complex societies can offer a niche to a wide range of personal traits, whilst the smaller and the more normative ones act to repress or expel anyone who cannot convince the majority of their enthusiasm.
Western societies tend to permit most behaviours that do not have a victim. Many act in advance of the harm to the victim, as with the interventions practiced on inadequate parents. Society has responded with both experiments and considerable individual bewilderment as to how they are to navigate their lives. Should they marry young or wait until they are financially stable? Should they have a baby or pursue a career? Should they marry for love, or find a solid person whose key quality is their reliability? A vast self-help and counselling industry has developed to fill the gap left by these disappearing norms. At the same time, however, any attempt to introduce normative narratives is immediately attacked, as 'nobody wants to be told what to do'.
Normative value shave, therefore retracted to the boundaries of potential harm. We do not like people who throw stones across natural divides in our society. Many 'of the middling sort' have become extremely anxious about giving offence, with mixed societies having the practical concern about social potential polarisation in the background. It is not seemly to draw distinctions of gender, race, religion or - at least in de haut en bas form - class; and any comment that can be regarded as vaguely negative is classified as 'abuse'. Some societies have taken this to an extreme in which distinctions are essentially unmentionable, with each child being seen as having identical potential, each social group having equally viable 'cultures' and any discussion which hints at 'better' or 'worse' being taboo. This is plainly to opposite of 'adaptive', and falls closer to the 'frozen, anxious' camp of the weak social narratives.
We have arrived at something of a four layer model of public ethics and morality, as they currently function. That is, people are wired up to feel, and what they feel results from two distinct structures. These structures have been tuned by our evolutionary past, and have been in a high non-linear relationship with the social and individual behaviour which they have triggered.
There are two 'hard wired' levels. The first of these structures governs the emotions and motives to which the individual is subject. These emotions are often arrayed along an axis, with - for example - the will to dominance at one end, and the tendency to subjection and passivity at the other. (We know that this is not an artefact of description but a fact about how the brain works: neurologically, one can be activated in on one way or the other at a given time, but seldom in both at once.)
The second set of the hardwired structures are to do with how we perceive and react to our social surroundings. A set of predispositions - such as wanting the good will of others - are also apparently wired into the average human, or is perhaps universal to the average higher vertebrate. These predispositions interact with and modulate our personal tropisms, such that we treat others as emotional extensions of ourselves and not, in general, as things. Indeed, we have to work hard to depersonalise others (for purposes of conflict or punishment, for example) and are prone to anthropomorphise - assign reciprocal feelings to - anything from a pet goldfish to a computer.
The third level strives to integrate these two layers. A variety of social mechanisms exist to ensure the likelihood that individuals and groups will seek customary outcomes to commonplace dilemmas. Members of animal societies learn how to avoid conflicts, and submit quickly to the dominant so as to minimise injury when these do occur. Humans learn much more complex behaviours, also transmitted culturally and also intended to prescribe responses to common situations.
Consistency is important to human societies, so that it is desirable that all sets of responses are mutually compatible and distressing to us when they are not. As noted, we share a sense of fairness across the higher vertebrates, and monkeys, dogs and even rats have been shown to reject a 'contract' that seems to be unfair or inconsistent.
Emotional predispositions of this sort are 'rules', albeit probabilistic and flexible rules. When applied they are applied to the group, they generate emergent structures: that is, widespread regularities that exist only because they are locally reproduced. The gas laws of physics 'emerge' from the mechanical and statistical properties of molecules. Simple market rules allow traders to create a price and, through an emergent invisible hand, so manage supply and demand. Distributed structures of the same sort give rise to the patterns of 'natural morality' that are universal to human societies. Some of these approach Kant's categorical imperative, whilst others - such as the 'tragedy of the commons' - rather plainly do not.
The model has four levels. At the fourth, upper level, emergent rules are seen to suffer the equivalent of what economists call 'market failures'. The animal kingdom is riven with social failures, and any close observer of animals in the wild is struck by the bickering, anxiety and stress than governs much of their social interaction. Male lions might select who is to breed by some mechanism other than through brute force and mutually-crippling battles, infanticide and ambush, but they lack the capacity to do this. If these deficiencies are to be corrected, a new set of machinery is needed that sits above and separate from the emergent structures of order. This we call custom, law and policy.
Human societies are of such complexity that they need formal rules in order to govern the interaction of parts which seldom exchange much information. In addition, human societies use rules as a way of managing power, and its top predators have been adept at creating structures which make the perpetuation of their position effectively effortless. The community of moral beings that Kant had envisaged has never been close to the reality of events, and never far from the aspirations of at least some members of any community, from Roman Stoics to the ethos of British colonial administrators.
The modern world, however, plainly makes gestures to this ideal. Concentrations of wealth are mitigated, and the community spends resources on collective projects. However, as we noted in the introduction, there is no extant theory of 'moral competition'. Competition is conducted under law, but so were Roman slave markets, embodying a distinctive view of morality.
There are, therefore, three layers and four modules of ordering, each of which has a role to play in our social order. There are deep, shared emotional responses to things. There are regularities which emerge when these social responses are connected together in small communities, Then there are the artificial structures which we have pasted on top of this, for a mixture of reasons that mix the values of the collective and the elite; the need for coherence and specialisation with the desire to impose uniformity of belief and conduct; and a declining amount of baggage that was derived from revealed truth and other dogma.
These three layers generate all manner of associations that go beyond the individual and their local community. Some of these have the status of legal personae, many have much more power than individuals, are much better at communicating their views and imposing themselves on the political process. Virtually none of the agents involved take a global view of optima, but pursue their particular interests; raw or to a degree defined for them by others, by law, by the need to pay of one desideratum against another. Utilitarian solutions fail, for the many reasons discussed in the introduction.
The response to this has been straightforward, if erratic and largely unexamined. In place of Utilitarianism, we have installed something to which we have yet to give a name. Perhaps "Optimisation" would be a good name for this movement, which as yet has no spokespeople, no iconography but which nevertheless informs virtually every policy move, every idea coming from business schools and agendæ of most thinking individuals. This approach is concerned to understand the "engine" that comprises society, the economy and all of the other activities that support it. We set out to make sure that this engine works well. We have already discussed the five or six criteria that can be deduced against which to bench mark any such engine. (This way of thinking characterises a social group who have been called "systems rationalists", here. Editor.)
Instead of maximising something (happiness, potential, closeness to the Deity), therefore, the approach that we will call 'Optimisation' seeks only improvement. It assumes that some measure of merit will exist in any area of concern. Corrective actions will gradually "hill climb" up the figure of merit, usually seen as a surface which exists over the variables which are open to manipulation. Any one such step is open to outcry from affected stakeholders, and the benefits or penalties are usually open to analysis. Local political skirmishes - between shareholders and workers, for example - are resolved piecemeal until a narrative about how to think around such issues establishes itself; this moves into general best practice and eventually and where necessary, into law. (Here we see the rationale for Style B Democracy, as discussed in the paper cited in the introduction.)
Competition is written into every step of this. What constitutes success depends on competition amongst stakeholder groups, and often between companies, nations and other direct rivals for scarce resources or markets. Good solutions are solutions which win, are accepted, which create limited collateral problems. Their narrative becomes a part of what we mean by "good", successful of liberating.
This style makes no attempt to find shining cities upon the hill: in essence, it operates as little as possible in the upper tier of out four layer model. Its principles are those of functionality, and its social filters are less those of moral advance than the ability to attract the custom of many whilst alienating relatively few.
These are weaknesses. The path to their removal leads to the upper tier of the model. In this space, actions are considered in the round, for their short and long term impact on the likely quality parameters of the society as a whole. Anyone who has been engaged in corporate planning knows the pitfalls, some of which have already been rehearsed. How is uncertainty to be handled? How much should the future be discounted over the present? Any politician will cite a whole new range of concerns, not the least of which is how one can persuade a society to think in these terms. Jam today is preferable over jam tomorrow, and emotional "truths" sell more newspapers than analytical insight.
This said, the industrial societies are ever-more educated, and sharply more exposed to information and insight than their predecessors. People are aware of ramifications in a way which previous populations were not. Who could have imagined that a staid documentary about climate change would become a box office hit? That issues such as food chain integrity would become popular concerns? The rise of the blogger, discussion communities and other Internet-born opinion-forming tools will continue to be influential in ways which centralised and proprietor- or propriety-driven media are not.
A fully realised hedonistic and Optimised society would allow little personal choice and nothing of Kant's moral society of the categorical imperative. It would be evidence-based, and that evidence would come from extensive information exchange. For example, a child's genetic code would be sequenced, its physiological predispositions and weaknesses would be assessed and any thing from skill development to optimum diet prescribed from birth. At least some of this would be mandatory on parents, on behalf of the child. Similar things would occur as the developing individuals psychological predispositions, capabilities and constraints were uncovered. We would allow this to develop in part because it was obviously "better" along any dimension of functionality that one cared to consult, and in part because it delivered immediate benefits. Sceptics might care to read Geoffry Ryman's short story 'Everywhere' to get a feel for what such an information rich and targeted society might be like.
The world which operates several steps back from this "optimiser's optimum" is, nevertheless, innately fixated on how the "engine" of whatever it is with which they feel group solidarity is thought to work. Such thought lead naturally to competition with other groups, to boundary building and positioning for success: to the commercial paradigm, applied to social groups. Any sense of morality which is embedded in this is, at most, a reference to "what works for you", referring to the situation and values of the community for which legislation and commercial change is being enacted.
As all of this is going on at massive volume, great speed and many layers of aggregation - from very local to global, for example - the capacity of feedback systems to respond to this is going to be ever-more limited. For this and other reasons, it is reasonable to say that the "Carrying the Torch" world as not so much probable as almost fore-ordained within the capable parts of the world. The alternative scenario, the Age of Anxiety, is equally inevitable for groups and nations which do not adopt this approach. Groups who stick to a revealed morality or other forms of self-limitation will be painted into ever-smaller corners on the global stage.
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