“Ethics” as signaling | Hacker News Reader

“Ethics” as signaling

meaningness.wordpress.com

61 pointsnetworked21 comments

This article puts into words a conglomoration of experiences and thoughts I've had over and over, but never really considered together as a concept.

"To be middle-middle class, you need to have all the correct opinions.... This requires memorizing endless lists of taboos and shibboleths, which is a conspicuous waste of time. “The news” and the political internet are tools for this. The high cost of keeping track of all that meaningless noise, and the ease of verifying it by asking your opinion of last night’s synthetic outrage event, makes it an effective signal.

To be upper middle class, you need to be able to figure out, on the fly, what would be the correct opinion about things that are new to you. This requires conceptual sophistication: years of study not only of details, but also of ways to think. That is what a liberal arts education used to be for."

To take this further, I think the New Upper Middle Class signaling strategy is to be conspicuosly ignorant of the latest "synthetic outrage" -- "I don't have a TV" is a refrain that comes to mind. "I don't have Facebook" is another.

Then again, I find myself directly in between these two: a news junkie devoted to understanding "what really matters in the world." That is, my signaling strategy is to have the right opinions about the right topics while publically rejecting the wrong topics (and, in a non-confrontational way, the wrong opinons). It's a way to signal opennesss (an agreeable trait) while maintaining sufficient cost.

Wow, something from the Meaningness blog got onto the front page of Hacker News. I did not expect that.

I want to make a note of something here. The author is a practitioner. I don't know how he thought up of these things, but what he says here and in many of his other articles are worth listening to because many of the things he says here seem to come from practice on the cushion -- at least to me, he does.

It's the meditative experience itself that loosens up beliefs and opinions. When they arise and you pay attention on the cushion, things you take for granted get seen in a new light. Many of the deeper observations result from seeing things that you'd rather not see. What's ironic is that, for some reason, many folks in Consensus Buddhism will have these strange, adverse reactions to this very questioning of the core beliefs of Buddhism, even though the meditative methods taught at the core of Buddhist practices will open up the questioning process. If you're practicing correctly, you'll run through layers of personality and deeper into tightly-held beliefs and world views. Releasing and opening those are often one of the hardest practices. (But hey, you can take what I just said as the ethical posturing; I get that reaction a lot too).

This method does not apply to just Buddhist beliefs. It can apply to any belief system (religious, political, social, etc), including Atheism (Yeah yeah, atheism is an "absence of belief"; but not after you find out what beliefs really are on the cushion).

So, while the insights in this article might be interesting, even practical, I doubt you'll really get it's full potential unless you replicate it by sitting on the cushion yourself.

Just saying.

Maybe 'religious labels as signaling' would be a better title.

Religion is a rather complex institution, involving metaphysics, ie a dichotomy between the sacred/holy/divine and the profane/ungodly; human organizations and activities and social hierarchies; rituals; and yes, codes of behavior.

Ethics is the study of moral principles that govern choices and behavior. I like to think that there are some universal moral principles that are instinctive or even game-theoretically necessary to cooperative human activities, and there are other ethical principles that particular societies or religions choose to agree on.

To the extent someone views ethics as a signaling mechanism, it no longer fits the definition of ethics.

>I like to think that there are some universal moral principles that are instinctive or even game-theoretically necessary to cooperative human activities, and there are other ethical principles that particular societies or religions choose to agree on.

A lot of people think this... but the claim only seems to hold up if you speak in broad truisms rather than details.

I mean, it's generally agreed that murder is unethical; but when you look deeply, this is largely a meaningless tautology, because it's only murder if it's wrong; two people can look at the same act of killing and one can call it murder, while the other can call it something just.

Even within my own country; hell, within my own family, there's a lot of disagreement as to what murder actually is. Is abortion murder? Is killing in defense of property murder? Is killing as a judicial punishment murder?

People I know and consider to be reasonable people disagree rather strongly on those details.

Now, everyone I would consider to be reasonable, and nearly all current Americans would agree that killing someone for the crime of speaking out against a religion is murder, but there certainly isn't a global consensus on that; and really, not so long ago, there was something approaching global consensus that killing someone for the crime of blasphemy was a reasonable and just thing to do.

You can claim that all people share a instinctual belief in a set of core ethics, and I'm not going to say you are wrong, but you have a lot of convincing to do.

people feel empathy without being taught, for people and even animals they've never seen before.

they will agree harming or killing someone for no reason is wrong, even if they might have a different threshold for what would be a valid reason. they share the notion that there is some kind of reciprocity, or social contract, even if they differ on the details of what the contract allows.

animal experiments in fairness, etc.

https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_mora...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZurINLlVds

If you are saying that believing in something like morals or ethics seems to be a universal, then I agree with you; it does seem to be a universal.

However, if we talk about any moral or ethical value or set of values, I still don't see any that are universal in any meaningful way. Across time and culture they are so different that what is the greatest good can be the greatest evil and vis-a-vis.

>they will agree harming or killing someone for no reason is wrong, even if they might have a different threshold for what would be a valid reason.

I'm taking this as "everyone thinks killing a human is a big deal" (implicit in your statement, I think, is that reasons like "because it gave me slight pleasure" or "because they slightly inconvenienced me" count as "no reason" - because otherwise the statement has no meaning. There's always a reason, even if it's a bad one.)

My counterargument is slavery. Even Aristotle, the father of western philosophy, thought that slavery was a perfectly natural thing; that humans could, in fact, be property.

Yes, I know, not all systems of slavery were absolute to the point where a master could kill a slave with the same ethical and legal consequences as I would face for destroying my old laptop rather than passing it on to someone would could make use of it, but in all systems of slavery, killing a slave was much less of a big deal than killing a noble, and in many systems, it would qualify as "not a big deal"

I also point you at "ethnic cleansing" and religious violence, though part of that is that is my own values; I think that killing someone for their race or religious affiliation is killing for a trivial reason. I'm sure the people doing or organizing that killing disagree with me.

once you 'other' someone, you can justify anything including torture, death camps.

Kant did a pretty good job with this stuff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

Kant was quite a writer, and yea, an innovator for his time, but the idea that you should act in a way that, if everyone did it, would turn out okay was radical in his time, and still not generally accepted.

If anything, your categorical imperative is another argument that people don't agree on what is right across time and culture.

In fact, considering his socioeconomic position at the time, I highly doubt he lived anything like a life that could be lived by everyone. We talk about economic inequality now... but in his day the difference between the rich and the poor wasn't the number of dollars, it was who had access to food and who did not, which I personally think is a much greater inequality than any amount of dollars.

> once you 'other' someone, you can justify anything including torture, death camps.

The point here is that you can go back and rationalize people's actions like that, but to say those people are acting on the same ethical principles that we are makes a mockery of our modern ethics. If you have rules about what you can and can't do to a person, as we do, and you re-define person to not include a bunch of humanity, you are no longer following the same ethics we are following now.

>I mean, it's generally agreed that murder is unethical; but when you look deeply, this is largely a meaningless tautology, because it's only murder if it's wrong; two people can look at the same act of killing and one can call it murder, while the other can call it something just.

That's a really poor example that only applies because you chose to use the term "murder" rather than "killing." Killing is not wrong because it's killing, it's wrong for more subtle and practical reasons -- something that is easier to show if you don't go around wantonly calling killing 'murder.'

>You can claim that all people share a instinctual belief in a set of core ethics [..]

I wouldn't claim that people share an instinctual belief, but I would claim that there is a minimally-consistent rational belief-structure that applies to all decision-making entities, whether people actually believe it or not. There are things that are true for all decision-makers, given that "decision-making" is a coherent concept. For instance, you can't make decisions without valuing the mechanisms that make those decisions. This is essentially a tautology that mean "If you're going to use your brain to do anything, you're going to use it to value your own brain first."

Add a couple layers of complexity and you're going to end up valuing life simply because you need it to do just about anything. And killing becomes wrong when it is destroying valuable resources.

This doesn't require you to have beliefs tied to some specific culture, it only requires you to be a rational generalist -- someone who's morality actually encompasses real goals.

>That's a really poor example that only applies because you chose to use the term "murder" rather than "killing." Killing is not wrong because it's killing, it's wrong for more subtle and practical reasons -- something that is easier to show if you don't go around wantonly calling killing 'murder.'

No... I chose to say murder because it is not generally agreed that killing is wrong, even today.

Most people think that killing in self-defense, for example, is permissible, and sometimes admirable thing (though again, there is much disagreement on exactly what self-defense is) Hell, a lot of people think that killing in pursuit of a sufficiently emotionally charged goal is okay, see collateral damage in wars of choice. Many people think that killing in defense of property is okay, and many people disagree with that first set. I could go on and on.

In the country where I live, most killings are auto crashes. Clearly, most people don't think that this is wrong, considering how loosely we regulate who can drive (compared to, say, who can carry a gun) Hell, I am about to go to work; getting there half an hour earlier (vs. what it would take on my dramatically less dangerous to other people bicycle) is apparently worth risking other people's lives to me. Now, I don't feel particularly okay about this, and I mitigate it somewhat by carrying more than the usual liability insurance, but I'm about to step into my car and drive.

My point is that "murder is wrong" is so much of a tautology to be a completely uninteresting topic. Nobody needs to talk about the fact that murder is wrong, the discussion is about which killings are murder and which aren't.

I was suggesting that the difference between the word "murder" and the word "killing" is demonstrative of the sort of broad thinking that allows people to say that there is a set of ethics that is universally believed.

Many of the things that make killing murder are sufficient for universal ethical principles. That is, there are things that are universally true within every rational, coherent ethical framework. This doesn't mean everybody knows about them, agrees to them, or even believes in them.

So this:

>people to say that there is a set of ethics that is universally believed.

...is absurd. There is nothing that is universally believed. That's because people can be wrong about facts. That doesn't mean there are no facts.

And? We were talking about commonly held ethical or moral beliefs. Not what "true morals" or "true ethics" are. I quote those, but I don't reject the idea that there are true morals or true ethics that exist outside of your opinion and my opinion. It certainly feels right that there is a truth somewhere that is bigger than my ego. I'm just pointing out that you can't use general agreement across time and culture as evidence for said external, objective true ethics, because such an agreement doesn't exist in a meaningful way.

It exists in a meaningful way, just as an approximation. Like how the concept of "tree" is meaningful in spite of the fact that every single plant on this planet is unique.

When a significant number of people think that killing someone for blasphemy is a just thing to do? when a significant number of people a few centuries back thought that humans could be property? I'd compare this to finding a civilization that used the word "tree" to refer to Volkswagens. Yeah, I'm going to say that there isn't a meaningful agreement on ethics or morals across culture and time.

This idea of an external set of ethics; an external morality that is "right" regardless of human opinion is a universal-ish concept, as far as I can tell, it's agreement on what those universal ethics are where there is disagreement.

I've always thought this is partially why people of mainstream religions are often so scared of atheism: they subconsciously interpret the statement "I am an atheist" as "I do not subscribe to your ethics" and assume the speaker is liable to kill anyone at anytime.

I think that's totally at odds with the OP's argument.

Under the OP's view, atheists aren't scary because they might be violent -- most people aren't psychopaths, that's not what social signaling is for -- but because they've chosen to chuck out a large chunk of the signaling machinery that the "middle middle class and below" have habitually relied upon.

In other words, if you've sworn off the dominant canon of ethical and social judgements, your position now suddenly requires just-in-time evaluation by the other, and that is threatening to people who don't trust themselves to reliably pull it off.

I'm not sure how you interpreted what I said, but I meant it to mean exactly what you said! Isolated atheists have no signaling mechanism, and thus are often assumed to have no, or a very different, moral code. ("Else why would they not subscribe to my religion?")

I tried reading this article. But even as someone raised as a (Theravada) Buddhist, I found it confusing. Perhaps because it addresses something(?) that troubles mostly westerners? Even though I no longer subscribe to the rebirth/karmic aspects of the religion, the core of Buddhism is fairly self-evident to me. This article made me question my own understanding, and did so with a handling of the English language that, well, did not exactly help. Perhaps this kind of analysis comes across sounding different to those from a Buddhist background?

"What is “I am a Buddhist” supposed to say about you? ... it signifies particular personality traits such as openness and agreeableness."

Interestingly, the present Dalai Lama is ranked as low on both openness and agreeableness.

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