masonmcgill

Interesting post! You've inspired me to reflect a bit on my own internal competitive ethicist (I think to some degree we all have one; mine is named Jeff and he's very not fun at parties):

Despite all the big important topical connections, I found myself thinking back to being in high school, a freshly minted vegan, trying to back-of-the-envelope the amount of animal suffering indirectly inflicted by (hypothetically!) choosing to be a Preachy Vegan vs. approaching things with a more laid-back, live-and-let-live attitude.

One way to frame that exercise is to say that I was considering adopting two competing ethics: (1) logging onto peta2.com to sign up for the Meat is Murder mailing list, complete with swag, a list of cool edgy bands to get into, and the warm fuzzy feeling of fighting for a cause, vs. (2) sitting quietly in the corner and finishing my salad. Alternatively, you could say that I had one ethic, reducing animal suffering to the extent that I could, taking into account the dynamics of my social network and my (comically miniscule but theoretically existent) capacity to influence it, and that I was just working out the details. The reality, I think, was somewhere in between.

[Note to readers: For the next 3 paragraphs I'll be spending 3 of my 10 insufferable dork points allotted monthly by the cap-and-trade system.]

For the sake of this reply, I'll define an “ethic” to be a single memetic unit of incentivisation or disincentivisation, e.g., “be disgusted at those who do not love their country”, or “be pleased with yourself when you feel you've shown intellectual humility”. Using this definition, you can think of an ethic as a distributed controller, in the control theoretic sense, exerting influence on human behavior.

As I see it, functioning communities depend on a fault-tolerant array of often-redundant ethics. The Torah contains 613 commandments. Ethical common sense in the United States is a region-dependent cocktail with ingredients ranging from Judeo-Christianity to American patriotism to liberal universalism to local customs. Shared moral goals (“reduce suffering”) act as robust high-level controllers, but may be inefficient tools for navigating day-to-day interactions. Practical ethics (“don't eat shellfish”) may be easier to follow and/or spread, but they don't tend to transfer as well to new environments. Mid-level ethics (“conceptualize the existence of something called 'rights', and then respect them”) serve as a bridge between ideals and habits.

From this perspective, individual ethics compete, but less for dominance than to occupy one of many complementary niches. Ethics packages, however, especially those from the big global brands, often include some mechanism for vendor lock-in, generally marketed as “antivirus software” on the tin (blasphemy laws, etc.).

A few observations based on this framing:

1. The fitness of an ethic depends on the culture in which it is deployed. (Normatively) good ethics or ethics packages should engage with human impulses to be compassionate, judicious, well respected, and purposeful, but I can have an amoral preference for these impulses to be engaged with without being exploited, and that preference can be culturally reinforced. An “addictive” ethical system can be off-putting in the same way the idea of using “the world's most addictive meditation app” is off-putting... so long as you can spot it.

2. One way for an ethic to “win” is to be high-compatibility, traveling alongside the dominant ethical systems like a remora. For example, the ethic of psychological health: In my city, with a bit of googling, you can find Christian psychologists, non-denominational spiritual psychologists, and secular psychologists all counseling clients towards similar goals. And while the definition of psychological health can vary from clinician to clinician, the concepts of introspection, bad-habit-breaking, setting developmentally appropriate expectations for children, boundary-formation, the cultivation of healthy relationships, and self-actualization are widely shared.

3. The ethic of conscientious objection plays a special role in the marketplace of ethics. The extent to which you can repeal a low-level ethic by appealing to a higher-level ethic should affect the extent to which the stock prices of practical ethics (ew; I'm showering after this) are tied to those of the high-level principles that support them. This can be both good—e.g., leveraging Christian principles for the civil rights movement—or bad—e.g., rejecting the value of liberalism because you're in favor of a law that only seems to get passed in authoritarian countries. Weirdly, you might expect that the more open a group is to polishing up its moral code, the more credible it will seem that a moral idea could be “dangerous”, since the project of avoiding hypocrisy makes the fates of all of the ethics in the ecosystem more interdependent.