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Comment by davedx | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that makes sense to me; how do society's moral rules change (slowly) but peoples' moral rules don't/change little? I mean I can think of some isolated examples like pirating video content, but generally a society's moral rules reflect its constituents; where else do those rules come from, if not its people?

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Culture. Humans have pretty stable moral intuitions about the basics - fairness, reciprocity, value of life; AFAIK they're consistent throughout time and space as far as history goes[0], and form a common base from which more complex morality stems.

In short: "theft is bad" is something people are born with[1]; "pirating media is bad" isn't; the former will be universal wherever you go, the latter depends strongly on who you ask[2]; the former is constant throughout history, the latter can change within months or years.

On a more general point, human society is the poster child of "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" - there's a lot of ideas and institutions in our lives that are purely abstract, and exist only in the shared, social sphere. Things like money, rule of law, countries or corporations - they exist as long as people expect them to exist, but ultimately they can disappear overnight - unlike the more fundamental concepts like self-preservation or reciprocity, which are anchored in our selves.

[0] - If it weren't, we would have much more trouble understanding or relating to the past; the saying is that the past is a foreign country, not that it's an alien species!

[1] - Or at least it's as close to innate as we can get.

[2] - And, of course, the progress of science and technologies that made this question meaningful in the first place.

My experience is there's also a fundamentally inborn notion of "fair price" and "fair pay" that people are born with, that they have to be educated out of to operate successfully in the modern economy. It's one way in which our system is kinda anti-human—it assumes a kind of game-playing that's seen as wrong by people, naturally, and you have to play that game or you can't succeed. "What the market will bear" doesn't feel fair to people until they're made to see it as fair.

Price is just a symptom or manifestation. People naturally see it as unfair to take advantage of someone based on a power imbalance or information asymmetry. So charging an excessive price or paying a starvation wage is just one way to take advantage, but there are other non-monetary ways as well. Attempts to impose "fair" price or wage controls by legislative fiat or cultural norms are doomed to fail because they don't resolve the underlying cause.

"AFAIK they're consistent throughout time and space as far as history goes[0], and form a common base from which more complex morality stems."

Not even close! Universalized morality (e.g., "stealing is wrong") is a product of the last couple thousand years, and it's only present in some modern humans. It is the foundation of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) psychology.

If you're curious about what other kinds of human experience can be like, I recommend checking out some ethnographies. Here's a summary of one: https://peacefulsocieties.uncg.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/1...

I think you missed “in group” vs “out group” in this comment?

I would think that the distinction lies in the time it takes to reach consensus. An individual person's moral values may change rapidly without the need for external validation. A book club may take a few weeks of debate over a heavily philosophical book to modify the perceived moral values of the group as a whole. But stretching large moral shifts across an entire populace would probably take more time and a more concerted effort to accomplish. New ideas or values need time to be sorted, whether they be picked up into the mainstream view or dropped into unfavourability.

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