From: szabo@techbook.com (Nick Szabo)
Subject: Re: Moral propagationism
Organization: TECHbooks --- Public Access UNIX --- (503) 220-0636
Distribution: usa
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 09:04:00 GMT

><1992Sep29.095827.11433@techbook.com>, szabo@techbook.com writes:

>|> We analyze evolution of a morality over time, determine the
>|> consequences of that morality for its own propagation, and estimates 
>|> the future propagation.

><183668@pyramid.pyramid.com> (Paul Collacchi) writes:
>
>What is "a morality"?  Some possibilities: set of thoughts, set of beliefs,
>set of behaviors etc.  You get to answer, I'm just prompting ....

A morality is a moral system, a set of prescriptions for behavior.  
It often goes along with emotional motivations for such behavior (eg 
salvation vs. damnation in religions), but I'm abstracting out the straight
prescriptions.  For example, the Ten Commandments constitute a
morality.  The actual behaviors, while an important part of the chain
between morality and its propagation, do not constitute the morality,
and indeed it would in many cases be naive to assume that behaviors 
trivially follow from the prescribed behaviors.

>Can we differentiate
>between differing moralities? 

Yes.  For example, there are slightly different versions of the Ten
Commandments in various Christian sects.  Those differences may be
important, and can be analyzed for their consequences.

>How do we "estimate"the amount of a
>morality contained?

We can't estimate current morality directly.  We can measure past
morality by doing population studies.  How many copies of the Ten 
commandments are there in the world?  How many of each kind?  It's 
pretty easy to tell what has propagated the most; the tougher part 
is figuring out how differences in moralities bring about differences 
in propagation.

>How do we isolate the "morality" or its subsequent behavior as being that
>which "caused" extinction?  Will we have proper "control" groups etc.

This could be tough.  We might be using mostly methods from historical
sciences like archeology and paleontology, and some methods from
the humanities like deconstruction, rather than a strict scientific 
method as used in physics.  Ideally we'd like to use a strict 
s.m., since m.p. provides a way to directly go from description to 
prescription, and s.m. is our best descriptive capability.  However, 
the description of moralities falls mostly under the humanities, 
and somewhat under the social sciences, and we are constrained by the 
methods available, most of which are not strictly scientific but can 
nevertheless be useful.  Sociobiology definitely qualifies as a
method for doing such analysis, keeping in mind that it is
descriptive, with consequences for prescription only via m.p.

Even aside from m.p., it would be an interesting challenge to,
for example, predict the membership of the Episcopalian Church
in the year 2000.  Have any studies undertaken such a task?

Some issues are immenable to straightforward reasoning, such as
the example of the morality of human extinction.  The issue of birth 
control may also be quite amenable to studies of prescription,
practice, natality, and educational retention in various religious
and secular situations; I've taken an initial stab at that.

>"Morality" must be a quality that *any* observer can look at and measure
>according to our yardstick.

Any sufficiently knowledgeable and skilled observer, in an ideal
classical world, yes.  In our quantum world our measurement of 
morality will be incomplete, just as our ability to measure any
other phenomenon is incomplete.  The ability to predict propagation 
depends on a large amount of descriptive capability, as discussed 
above. M.P. provides a way to go from description to prescription; the 
description is provided through other techniques (reasoning, scholarship, 
scientific method, etc.)

>To look first at the proliferating species and then ascertain the morality
>leads to "data mining."  In data mining, one either selectively perceives
>in order to validate conclusions (i.e. isolate the identified morality as
>the reason for survival despite the fact that there may still be a
>million other common factors) or one continues to redefine the quality,
>in this case morality, so that its definition becomes meaningless.

I agree the temptation is there, but the main fruit of m.p. may
be to do reconstruction, that is to gather a morally optimal set
of prescriptions.  I would be suspicious of it being used to
justify the whole of any single religion or secular practice.
We should strive to avoid prejudiced data-gathering by first defining 
the quality as strictly as possible, for example the adultery commandment 
in Christianity, and then doing comparative measures, eg against the 
adultery commandment in Islam.  If the consequence on propagation relies 
on the actual practice of adultery we must study accurately the behavior 
itself, not just assume the prescription is being obeyed, or even that it 
is being obeyed more than the looser prescription down the street.

But there may be at least a few cases amenable to simple reasoning;
human extinction is one.  In general if we have morality (A,B) with 
population greater than morality (A,C), with B vs. C being the only 
difference, we can conclude that C is more prolific in this context, 
and (A,B) could be benificially substituted for (A,C).  If we have
another factor so that (A,B) could be (A,B,D), that reasoning
is invalid.  Most cases will be much more complicated, but not
necessarily intractable.


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