The main criticism of ethical altruism is its inability to accommodate human behaviour and human nature. It has a reputation for approaching morality from a cold, calculating perspective without accounting for human emotion and social belonging. Briefly, it is the Gradgrind of our times.
This piece argues that ethical altruists should:
I assign a high level of confidence in the arguments which I make here. The principles are drawn from core writings from the ethical altruism community and the criticisms I make are based on well-established, and insufficiently refuted, critiques.
Effective Altruism is demonstrably an effective method by which good can be achieved in the World. The Effective Altruism website defines ethical altruism as “the project of trying to find the best ways of helping others, and putting them into practice.” Since the project began there have been numerous cases serving as evidence of the success of this method. A commonly cited example is the 159 000 lives saved as a result of the donations from the GiveWell [1]. That the project takes an empirically grounded approach to addressing moral and social issues is undoubtedly a good thing. The strength of the ethical altruism method lies in its ability to discern the best course of action to achieve a specific aim, that ethical altruism achieves this is supported by examples such as that cited previously and that this is a just aim is self-evident. This aspect of ethical altruism has been pithily summarised by William MacAskill[2] as an engineering approach to morality, as contrasted with a scientific approach which would be analogous to identifying fundamental moral truths. Using this definition of ethical altruism is something I have no issue with, the problem arises when statements such as “with everyone’s wellbeing counting equally”[2] , “we should do the most good we can…”[3] and “give everyone's interests equal weight, no matter where or when they live.”[4]. When these statements are added to the definition of ethical altruism we move to a “scientific” view, where we are making normative claims about morality. These claims expect us to sacrifice too much to moral causes, they are the source of the criticism that effective altruism asks us to ignore the plight of those close to us in order to prevent the suffering of some distant unknown people.
It is in these normative claims that ethical altruism draws the most negative criticism from people outside of the community. MacAskill[2] has claimed that ethical altruism makes no normative claims; in the first instance the majority of criticism contends that it in fact does make normative claims, in the second, the intellectual heritage of ethical altruism implies the existence of normative claims, and in the third, without at least some normative claims ethical altruism would lose all function as it would cease to have a guide for what it should “effective altruism” actually leads to.
Effective altruism draws criticisms from its reduction of moral decision making to simplistic, cold, rational calculations. This criticism has been explicated by Amia Srinavisan[5] and by Martha Nussbaum[6] amongst others. I propose that it is those normative claims highlighted earlier which allow these criticism of ethical altruism to manifest. I also go further and propose that these normative claims are the wrong ones to be making and will be harmful to society in the future. Claims that we must always and everywhere treat all human life as being of the same value is ridiculed because it demands that we sacrifice money spent on improving the lives of close family members to donating to distant people whom we shall never meet and have no relationship with at all. These criticisms, the ones by Srinivasan, Gray[7] and Williams[8] are based on the suppositions that ethical altruism is a moral system derived from utilitarianism. There are good arguments supporting this notion and although the schools of thought have differences they share an intellectual heritage and share core tenets to such an extent that it is fair to state that current ethical altruism is a least a close relation to utilitarianism [9]. What these critiques of ethical altruism fail to provide is an empirically grounded criticism of why the utilitarian aspect of ethical altruism moral decision making is wrong.
We should have learned from ethical altruism that moral philosophy requires insight from the scientific community, It needs to be empirically supported. Any criticism of ethical altruism must advance along similar lines. In what follows I will briefly outline the nature of human moral decision making and why it is at odds with that proposed by ethical altruism, much of this is an elaboration of work done by thinkers from many disparate schools of thought. I then propose a framework in which we can participate in moral reasoning and elucidate the ways in which this approach to morality can be used to formulate a new foundation for ethical altruism free of the criticism previously mentioned which will benefit the longterm future of humanity by understanding more deeply the human origins of morality. My fear is that if ethical altruism is not able to adapt its philosophical foundations then it will not be able to achieve widespread acceptance and the extremely useful aspects of ethical altruism will be lost.
The evidence I present in support of these arguments is robust, but there is scope for debate regarding the methodologies used. I am confident that the conclusions of this section are supported by the evidence.
The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment: Adam Smith, Frances Hutcheson and David Hume, developed a system of morality which was separate from that developed by thinkers on the continent. It was a system where human intuition took precedence over rationalism. Adam Smith in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments''[10] charted the emergence of morality from an innate (biologically determined) capacity for natural sympathy toward others. Hume notes that reason alone cannot be the sole driver of our decisions regarding moral questions. Both of these thinkers were influenced by the thought of Hutcheson who defined sense as the “determination of the mind, to receive any idea from the presence of an object which occurs to us, independent of our will”[11]. These ideas give us a picture of morality emerging from the innate reaction that we have to the World as it is presented to us. Modern science allows for the discovery of evidence giving credence to these ideas regarding the origin of morality, lending them the empirical support needed to be used as foundations for moral thought.
The neurobiology of disgust has long been studied, and fMRI data suggests that the regions of the brain which are active when one experiences moral disgust[12]. Evolutionary mechanisms giving rise to disgust[13] imply that the core feelings associated with moral disgust are preserved across culture. This is a fact which can be recognised even while accommodating for the importance of cultural evolution in morality. Similarly there exists evidence from fMRI studies suggesting that there are universally preserves neural correlates of “compassion for physical pain” and “compassion for social/psychological pain”[14]. Taken together the findings suggest a neurobiological basis for Smith’s notion of biologically informed sympathy for the state of others formed from innate moral sentiments. From this it is reasonable to make the steps Smith made in inferring that these reactions inform moral action. Jonathan Haidt took these ideas and developed them into a theory of moral reasoning he called the “Social Intuitionist Approach” [15], identifying moral reasoning as partially ascribable to the discovery of moral facts by a “gut-reaction” to moral quandaries. The conclusion of his paper proposing this model reminds us that a not negligible proportion of human cognition occurs in a manner which is “unconscious”, that there are cognitive traps into which human reasoning is liable to fall as elaborated by Tversky and Kahnemann, and that morality is not a practice restricted to humans but form of proto-morality exist in other animals [16]. We have reason to believe that there are mental processes which affect the outcome of our moral decision making to which we aren't privy, anecdotally we have all experienced this when we instinctively know that the person we see being attacked is being treated in an immoral manner. That our rational thinking is so susceptible to failure gives us reason for caution when trying to determine the solution to moral questions by purely rationalistic models. Non-human animal moral practices primarily suggest the existence of morality in non rational beings hinting at the possibility that a purely rationalistic model is not entirely responsible for the moral systems that we create. One of the other great minds of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume, gave perhaps the most succinct depiction of the primacy of the of the non-rationalist aspect of our nature stating “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them".
The purpose of morality in nature has been a key issue in evolutionary biology. Theorising on this topic began with Darwin when he wrote in The Descent of Man [17]
It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe … an increase in the number of well‐endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another
Since Darwin’s insight into the evolved nature of human morality the scientific community has produced copious amounts of evidence supporting this thesis. EO Wilson’s work on ants [18] provides evidence of evolved altruism in non-human animals. Ernest Fehr [19] has discussed the evolutionary mechanism by which altruism arises in the human species. In his magisterial work A Natural History of Human Morality [20]Michael Tomasello has argued that rational cooperation and a process of self-subordination into a you-me-we schema are the evolutionary components which gave rise to morality.
This section contains the most strongly supported arguments. The scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports my thesis and that evidence is multi-disciplinary, replicable, and temporally distributed. These factors give reason for high levels of confidence in the conclusions drawn.
The Ancients understood that humans are social animals. In the Politics [21]Aristotle tells us of the political nature of man, and that the existence of the “ city-state is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually”. This understanding of life as being inherently social is supported by evidence from biology, ecology, anthropology, and literature.
Some of the most simple organisms exist not as solitary units but in a social network. Proteus mirabilis is capable of swarming, such a phenomenon requires that individual bacteria are able to recognise self and non-self, thus implying the existence of rudimentary social behaviour [22]. Further support for the proto-sociality of humans in their bacterial cousins is outlined by Antonio Damasio in The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures.[23] Frans de Waal, in Chimpanzee Politics,[24] summarises the social nature of life in colonies of chimpanzees, findings which have been replicated in dolphins [25] and whales [26] amongst other animals.
The evidence for the inherent social nature of humans is also overwhelmingly strong. What makes humans unique is that they exhibit an additional level of sociability not seen in other mammals[27]. This high level of sociability has resulted in the emergence of complex human societies, that complexity results from the interaction between multiple levels of social interaction. There is a fractal pattern to the organisation of human sociality. The levels of human sociality have been described by Dunbar and his collaborators over the past two decades. The support-clique is made up of three-five individuals, the sympathy group 12-20, the band of circa fifty individuals and then larger conglomerations of up to whatever the limit of stable human sociality is. Estimates of that limit vary but range from 150 as proposed by Robin Dunbar, to 290 according to Bernard and Killworth. The phenomena of group-size constraints in humans is supported by findings from other primate species [28]. The anthropological evidence supports a universal restraint on the formation of stable group sizes suggesting that there is an innate capacity for the formation of social bonds in humans. Whatever the exact number at which stable societies can exist there is evidence to support the view that this number is at least predicted by brain size[29]. Suggesting that our social interactions are partially constrained by our biology.
Further support is lent to the notion of humans as being inherently social animals by recent advances in neuroscience. It has been shown that oxytocin plays a role in modulating trust and betrayal in humans, two factors which are vital for the formation of social groups[30]. The mirror neuron system in the human brain [31] is composed of groups of neurons which fire when humans and other primates (the mirror neuron system of macaques has been extensively studied) witness other individuals engaged in some actions similar to that in which the individual is participating. This system has been proposed as a mechanism through which mediates feelings of disgust; an group of neurons in the insula (a brain region) is activated when we feel disgust at something, the exact same region is activated when we see other people who are experiencing disgust even if we are not subject to the initial source of disgust ourselves[32]. The mirror neuron system is thus thought to be part of the neural mechanisms which give humans the ability to empathise with others[33]. The capacity for empathy is vital to the formation of social structures and there is significant empirical support for the view that it is an emotional capability built upon neuro-biological phenomena which are hard wired into our brains.
The proceeding argument is more speculative. It rests on the correctness of the preceding arguments and as such is strengthened by the power of the evidence in “Humans as Social Animals” but there should be some caution due to the questions of methodological validity of the evidence in “A Theory of Moral Sentiments”.
From this vantage point we can see humans as being animals rooted in their social connections to other humans. This view is overwhelmingly supported in the scientific literature and any claims that humans naturally exist in a Hobbesian state of individualistic competition are entirely unfounded. We also have an understanding of the drivers of moral action as being rooted in our innate capability for sympathy for others. This innate capability being analogous to the moral sentiments of the Scottish Enlightenment. Again, this is a concept to which the scientific literature lends its support, the evidence from this claim is not as strong as for the inherent sociability of humans but on balance there is stronger support for the claim of an innate, rather than a purely learned, moral sensibility. And we additionally have an outline of the evolutionary origins of human morality. These are the facts of human nature from which we are charged with building a moral system.
The realm of moral action is firmly rooted in the realm of human nature, this is a fact from which we cannot escape. Formulating a moral framework founded in our biological nature has a long pedigree. E O Wilson applied his concept of consilience to the problem, proposing that the facts of the natural sciences restrict the domain of human morality. He described his school of ethical materialism as based on the principle that [34]
Strong innate feeling and historical experience cause certain actions to be preferred; we have experienced them, and have weighed their consequences, and agree to conform with codes that express them. Let us take an oath upon the codes, invest our personal honour in them, and suffer punishment for their violation.
In a commentary on Aristotle’s biological text De Motu Animalium [35]Martha Nussbaum argues for the importance of an understanding of Aristotle’s conception of biology for understanding the larger body of his philosophical work. For example, she argues that Aristotle’s notion of “man’s function”, which he relies on in his Nicomachean Ethics, is grounded in his teleological biological theory. In this view, the ethical theory of Aristotle is rooted in human biology. His ethics is based upon the World as it is, not some transcendent notion of what the morally correct course of action is. This is the position to which ethical altruism should strive. As a movement which claims its effectiveness is founded in a scientific approach to moral action, what greater claim could it make than to say that its core philosophical principles are similarly grounded in a scientific understanding of human nature?
The teleological properties to human life are readily supported. The moral drivers, such as those discussed by Jonathan Haidt, can be viewed as conferring a set of moral goals to which humans are motivated to strive for. Those goals were originally determined for the maintenance of a homeostatic equilibrium (Damasio) but have over evolutionary time developed into guides to moral action. The social function of humans, and the morality that is needed for that sociality to exist, can be seen as conferring a telos upon each of us. Our telos give us ethical direction and serve to provide a standard by which we can evaluate our moral actions. In this sense, what emerges from biology is a moral framework somewhat akin to the “natural law” of the Ancients. By conceiving of natural law as being implied by biology we have developed an ethical position which is fully justified on empirical grounds. We do not have reason to resort to transcendental claims as Kant and his successor school did, and we do not need to resort to any reliance on a God-given set of laws. This conception of ethics is the one which should be accepted by Occam’s razor, we have begun with the facts of human existence and nothing more has been added. All we are positing is that humans are social animals who have a set of “moral sentiments” and from this emerges a coherent ethical framework.
Aristotle developed his notions of the good life as being that life which is concordant with the natural role of humans. In the 20th century biology contributed to what the natural role of humans is; Donald Brown enumerated the universal traits which are characteristic of all human populations, a list of his universals is provided in the Appendix to Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate[36]. The existence of these universals supports the view of humanity as a related unity, with shared goals, desires, and motivators for moral actions. It is from this conception of humans that the primacy of moral rule that all shall be treated equally emerges. These universal traits, along with the
Biologically emergent morality identifies morality with a striving to achieve those ends which are set for humans by their nature. G.E.Moore challenged this view as falling victim to a naturalistic fallacy. Claiming that there is no reason to assume that the function implies a set of standards for evaluation. Alasdair MacIntyre [37]proposes a convincing case against this view. Consider the function of a wristwatch, its function, its telos, is to tell the time. The standard by which we will evaluate it is by its ability to tell the time, by a function which corresponds to its own nature. The standards we use for evaluation are bound up in the functions of what we are evaluating. The same principle should apply to human morality.
To take an example from the literary canon we think of Antigone, her moral reasoning was guided by her adherence to the principle of citizenship by nature. Why did she follow this path of reasoning? Because it is in accordance with the path to the natural ends of all humans, a moral sentiment of sympathy manifesting itself as grief and a notion of familial responsibility. These are notions which are explicitly associated with biological origins; grief [38] possibly being explained as a cognitive adaptation affecting a sense of reunification with the deceased party, and familial responsibility as a key component of kin-selection[39]. Even here, in one of the world-historical accounts of natural law we can see the biological mechanisms at play.
The innate moral instincts that exist within each of us, the nature of humans as being political, or social, animals, and the social nature of morality create a picture of humans as socially embedded animals, with innate moral priors upon which we can build more elaborate moral systems. But it is from those priors, and from within that social community, that we build morality, not from some abstract concept of the individual existing as a purely rational entity. To formulate a system of ethics we must begin with man as a political animal imbued with a set of innate instincts for moral action and a set of attitudes towards a good life.
The arguments here are also speculative. The association of increasing social complexity and an increasing realm of moral judgement is a very important step in my argument and is reliant on the evidence in previous sections for the social nature of humans. There is strong evidence for this and so I have high confidence that this important step is also correct.
That social complexity increases as humanity progresses is so ubiquitous to be almost a tautology. For most of human existence the highest level that was reached in social complexity was the level of the tribe, and even then most interactions were at the level of the band with society only occasionally precipitating at the level of the ethno-linguistic tribe. The ascent of human society up the levels of social complexity, and the role played by group selection and reciprocal altruism, is fully developed by Francis Fukyama [40]in his work on the development of political organisation.
As social complexity increases the realm over which humans are required to make moral decisions increases. This idea was espoused by E H Lecky [41]in his work on the history of European morality where he conceived of an ever expanding sphere which encompasses the social groups over which we are capable of morally theorising. This idea was discussed by Singer [42] where he used the notion of Lecky’s expanding sphere to suggest that the notion of “charity beings at home” was applicable when the realm with we we could interact was limited to nearby geographical regions but now, in a time of speed-of-light communication and easy travel to almost anywhere in the World we are faced with a much larger realm over which we owe moral obligations. Thus it is concluded that we owe an equal moral duty to all people wherever they are in the World. This I do not doubt, what I do not think is that this is the only level at which we owe a moral duty.
Complex systems emerge from interactions and feedback. Human social networks are structured in a hierarchical manner and feature a feedback mechanism which feeds information up and down the layers of the hierarchy. The domain over which we owe moral obligations is not restricted to the maximum size of the circle proposed by Lecky, rather we owe moral obligations over multiple levels of the hierarchy of social interactions simultaneously. That is, rather than there being one circle encompassing all of those to whom we owe a moral obligation, there are multiple coexisting circles of different sizes.
As social animals, we are dependent on the community in which we exist, and correspondingly, members of that community are dependent on us. The existence of mutual dependencies is what gives rise to the duties and moral obligations we owe to those in our community. For much of human history the community in which humans existed was restricted to perhaps the level of the anthropological band, our era shows much more complex levels of social integration. Each of us is at once a part of a support clique and all interceding layers in the hierarchy of social interaction up to each of us being part of a global community, made possible by modern travel and communication. The moral obligations which we owe are different in each of these social groups; we are more dependent on those in our support group than we are on those in the larger global community, yet we still maintain some level of dependence on those in the global community. It is this embedded network of social dependency upon which the foundations of morality lie. This aspect of morality is derived from those natural biological features discussed previously. Patricia Churchland [43] argues that the biology of homeostasis [44] is extended to include kin and eventually, but more loosely, more distantly related individuals. My proposal of morality acting over different realms of social interaction is analogous to this.
The development of social complexity must factor into the thinking of ethical altruism, it is especially important from a longtermist perspective. If all moral decision making takes place in the social context, and we have to contend with making moral decisions across a range of different scales of social interactions then as technological progress continues humanity will find itself operating at ever greater scales of social interactions. Two likely routes by which greater complexity of social interaction will be reached are via the “Metaverse” and through the expansion of human populations to other planets in our solar system and beyond. As these developments take place it will become vital to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the social nature of morality so that the moral obligations of the individual can be fully understood and so that the moral obligations of communities of various scales both the other communities and crucially to individuals can be fully elucidated. Anticipating these technological developments and similarly anticipating the moral developments which will be necessary to operate at these new scales of human existence is of the utmost importance.
Adopting the view of morality as a phenomenon arising from the nature of humans as political animals would be a fundamental shift in the core beliefs of EA, from one rooted in utilitarianism to one where human life is viewed as less of a calculable unit to one where each human is valued according to an Aristotelian conception. This is a framework where moral ends (partially informed by innate priors) will be the source of value of the individual, and where the community interactions in which social life takes place will confer moral obligations between each of us. The task of ethical altruism then becomes to optimise the achievement of human flourishing in the context of socially mandated moral systems.
To give a concrete example. In one of the critiques of ethical altruism mentioned previously Amia Srinivasan [5]cited a story of William MacAskill deciding not to donate to Hamlin Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa because he viewed such a donation as being less effective than other potential donations. In the first case he argues it would be an emotional decision rather than a moral decision, but as we have seen our moral decisions are informed by our emotional priors and therefore the two can not be so simply divorced from one another. Secondly, he is not valuing the lives of these women in themselves, they have goals and ambitions, which confer a teleological value to their lives. Goals which are partially determined by innate biological instincts and partially determined by the rational ability of humans thought. Finally, there is no conception of the social character of morality, perhaps for MacAskill there was no social, therefore no moral, obligation to donate to his cause, but that is not a rule which can be applied for all people. The population of Addis Ababa have a moral obligation to those patients at the hospital by virtue of their membership of a shared community, for them to use the same calculus as MacAskill that donating to other causes would be better would be to ignore these duties.
In one of the more well-known articles outlining the ethical altruism philosophy Eliezer Yudkowsky[45] issued the exhortation to “purchase fuzzies and utilons separately”. The outcomes we follow as a result of moral decision making are rooted in our emotional responses to situations, there is no such dichotomy between, “utilon” and “fuzzy”, there just it the moral course of action. His case that holding a door open for an old lady is a selfish act that can be distinguished with the supposedly entirely altruistic act of working for 60 seconds to earn more money to donate to more “effective” causes is to compare across incommensurable social (moral) obligation networks. We must recognise that both acts are equal in their moral rightness; each act involves a level of social interaction which confers moral obligation, each act advances the teleological ambitions of the recipient of the act, and each act aligns with the moral intuitions we each possess.
In the interests of longterm thinking let this discussion digress to some thoughts on the implications of a socially emergent morality on future technological developments. The near-instantaneous communication between vast numbers of humans on this planet has resulted in a situation where the internet is a moral vacuum, the standard principles upon which normal morally informed interaction works do not exist in this realm of social interaction. Evidence of this lies with the horrific abuse endured by those targets of trolls who, if the realm of social interaction was limited to the physical, would never dream of such morally wrong behaviours. Even more concerningly are the moral implications of our interactions in the online world and the manipulation of these interactions to influence political outcomes. That there are pressing moral questions which have arisen as a result of our expansion of realms of social interaction is evident. ethical altruism as it is currently understood, with its preoccupation with a utilitarian notion of ethics, is not able to address these issues. Equipped with an understanding of the innate moral intuitions and social humans of humans ethical altruism will be positioned to deploy its scientific methodology of identifying those interventions which will achieve the most good in a much
In postulating an ethical system firmly rooted in the social nature of humans we also allow for the acceptance of the core values of longtermism. Those individuals in future generations are just as much a part of our social interactions as those who are currently alive and we therefore owe moral obligations to them; to deliver unto them a safe and habitable World, to protect them from nefarious technologies we may have developed, and to prevent their World from becoming inhospitable. Indeed the reverse is also true, those in future generations owe a moral obligation to us; to uphold and advance the progress which we have strived for, to critique our philosophies and offer improvements to them, and to ensure that the goods which we bequeath to them, such as scientific knowledge, is protected such that it may improve the lives of all humans. Without a conception of moral duties and obligations derived from an understanding of humans as social animals there is no fully rational set of arguments for supporting the concept of longterm thinking. The social ties we have to future generations are obvious, our relationship to them is wholly biological, we form with them an intergenerational community of humans, bound up as all communities of humans are in a web of moral obligations.
Finally I present a case that highlights one of the most profound criticisms which flows from the model of moral thought as being socially embedded. That being that there is an incommensurability of moral actions which take place at different levels of social organisation. Scott Alexander [46] makes the claim that the decision to donate to the purchase of the “Blue Rigi'' by eleven thousand British citizens was the morally incorrect choice when compared to the number of lives which could have been saved by donating the £550 000 raised to savings the livers of people living in the third World instead. This argument is aided by appeal to some of the notions explored in a recent critical article by Erik Hoel [47] which pointed out the relevance of Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” [48] argument to the critique of effective altruism. There is no “family resemblance” between the cases of donating to fund the purchase of the “Blue Rigi” and donating to the developing World. Attempting to identify a more morally correct choice is to fall victim to a category error for each option exists in a different realm of social interaction and therefore in a different realm of moral obligation, The moral obligations that we owe to the culture in which we find ourselves are different to the moral obligations we owe to the greater World community. It is not that donating to preserve the “Blue Rigi '' for British heritage is morally inferior to donating the money to an effective charity operating in the developing World but that there is no possible way in which such a comparison can be made. They are both morally correct actions which seek to achieve different things and which seek to fulfil different sets of moral obligations.
EA is most useful as a tool for doing good. What it lacks is a coherent framework for understanding what good it should be doing. By reconciling human nature with moral thought we pave a way for ethical altruism to be a new system of moral action, which is rooted in science.
We exist in the World as it is, that is a fact from which we cannot escape. We are bound up with our biological natures: our passions, drives, fears, and emotions. We exist in a network of social interactions, mutually dependant on each other. These are the conditions of "Our human bondage" and these are the conditions from which we engage in moral action.
One of the prize winning entries to the Effective Altruism Forum “First Decade in Review Prize” [49]argued that ethical altruism is not an ideology but is simply a question asking “How can I do the most good?”. While writing this piece I often thought back to this question, I think that my codifying the values upon which ethical altruism is predicated we can turn ethical altruism into a revolutionary moral system that has tremendous impact on the World, but I am also conscious of the fact that some of the most powerful aspects of ethical altruism come from it simply asking how to go about doing good rather than trying to describe what that good is. My conclusion to this rests on the case that we always need a guiding principle as to what the “good” actually is, we can’t maximise (or minimise in the case of “the bad”) something without having a cogent definition of what it is that we define as good. However, I am not fully satisfied with this as a solution to this problem and think that there rests ample room for criticism of my re-thinking of the foundations of ethical altruism.
I have made the case that humans are limited in the mode of moral thinking by restrictions placed on their inherited psychological predispositions. This is a view analogous in some ways to Chomsky’s [50] notion that humans do not have the mental faculties to fully understand a concept such as free will, thus suggesting innate limits on the capabilities of human thought. This idea is countered against by David Deutsch [51] who has persuasively argued that anything in the universe is capable of being understood by the rational thought of humans. If Chomsky is wrong and Deutsch correct then the realm of moral conduct is not restricted in any way by the intuitionist thought I have proposed. Such a position would allow for the logical possibility of a truly transcendental system of ethics.
Some of the studies cited giving evidence of the social nature of humans and the neural correlates of moral behaviour feature fMRI in their methods. There are a number of concerns regarding how useful fMRI is in the study of cognition. These range from question around the accuracy of the relationship between blood oxygenation and brain activity [52]to questions around the direction of causality between cortical areas. A good article summarising these criticisms is found here [53]. The other scientific sources can be similarly critiqued. The foundational argument that I present rests on the findings in these courses so any significant methodological or systemic flaws will necessarily impinge upon the conclusion I have made.
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Really enjoyed this. Thank you for writing - clearly a labor of love. A personal question that EA is not always equipped to answer is “what do we give our families and communities?” How do we do the most good we can while being deeply rooted, whole people?
One side note: I think the title of this post didn’t cue me in to what it would be about; perhaps a more direct title would draw more interest?