DISQUS

If you write that post, I'm curious about how you justify not continuing to extend the circle of moral concern to animals and possible people (as well as distant people elsewhere in the universe, with their own preferences about this region).

In other words, you can expect 'moral progress' leading *up to your current values* for anthropic/observer selection reasons, but you have less reason to expect that to continue into the future.

What if we extend our circle of moral concern to animals, and then to possible beings, and thus create a Repugnant Conclusion-like world of vast numbers of impoverished entities with lives just barely worth living? What if we get the same effect from natural selection on values (both memetic selection for pro-fertility religions/ideologies and genetic selection for relevant personality traits)? What if market pressures lead people to modify themselves into beings that do not indulge in what you would call eudaimonia? (http://www.nickbostrom.com/fut/evolution.html) What if advances in neuroscience lead us all to become wireheads or plug into Nozickian Experience Machines?

There are many incompatible extrapolations we could make, and you would find many of them appalling. It would be a mistake to be confused by the anthropic reasons for your endorsement of past changes into undue optimism or complacency about future values.

So there's an observation selection effect. You don't have as much reason to expect continued moral progress by your lights as you would have if your values were determined by a process independent of recent trends.

Lee Kuan Yew, where art thou?

Don't you mean 'moral progress towards the super-liberal values that I happen to have'? If you define the current settings of our moral machinery, then of course we will find that there has been 'progress.' To some of those with higher purity and authority settings, much of what you call progress is decline.

If future evolutionary pressures, combined with powerful technologies of self-modification, result in Earth-descended life evolving into collectivistic hive-beings monomaniacally obsessed with reproduction at all costs, then they will also be able to note 'moral progress,' in the face of what you or I might see as moral disaster.

Also, cultural institutions can shape selective pressures, e.g. high-intensity Chinese agriculture has consistently stayed closer to Malthusian limits over the last couple thousand years than other regions, and shows lower prevalence of variants predisposing to impulsivity and nonconformism. A society with people just barely getting by and rigid agricultural labor requirements probably was less congenial for people with those dispositions to survive and reproduce. As genetic dispositions change, there can be positive feedback with culture, as customs adapt to temperament, and the new customs further reward those with selected temperament.

"He seems to think that moral dispositions are exogenous to institutional structures because humans are genetically uniform. This is wrong. Humans are genetically uniform"

Is this written by the same fellow who praises Haidt's work, and the connection between Openness to Experience (with its rather substantial within-culture heritability) and liberal cosmopolitanism?

Genes associated with nonconformism and restlessness are more common among populations founded by recent migrants (those who are more genetically disposed to 'rootless cosmopolitanism' are more likely to leave their native soil):

http://www.pnas.org/content/99/1/10.full
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/ps...

Bones for both the 'nation of immigrants' and 'national biological character' enthusiasts.

There are also effects of cognitive ability on health independent of time preference, education, and SES.
www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004fund...
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/329...
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.111...