Wow. Just wow. And I had such high hopes, before the tipping example.
After two paragraphs about there being no objective basis for morality, you conclude, implicitly, that correct morality is unboundedly selfish, antisocial, non-cooperative utility maximization. You quietly omit this rather gigantic assumption, but it's clearly how you view it, since your evaluation of the value of altruism is based off of its strictly selfish payoff.
Under your reasoning, it would be immoral to pay your taxes if the expected cost of not paying them is lower than the expected cost if you do pay them; it's the exact same calculation as tipping, but with bigger numbers. I don't think I need to further demonstrate that a moral system that says, "Paying your taxes is immoral," is not compatible with modern society.
In general, if you conclude, "X is immoral," you've done it under an implicit framework. You really need to reference that framework, especially if your audience is unlikely to be on the same page you're on. The observation, "If your utility function is strictly self-centered, you should not generally tip at restaurants" is not exactly insightful.
I agree. A better example might be bending metal wires.
We like to bend metal wires because that's what we were, in a sense, made to do. We get personal pleasure out of bending metal wires, once, twice, thrice, and on to the next!
But see, there are modern manufacturing methods that can churn out paperclips much faster than we can personally build them. So, if we really want more paperclips, we should work on researching these methods and building these factories.
Yet we still feel that urge to just bend, bend, bend. I don't know anyone who could get through the day without bending an actual metal wire. I certainly wouldn't trust them.
Altruism is no longer valuable in evolutionary terms, but who cares?.
What's important to us as people isn't evolutionary value, it's satisfying personal preferences derived causally but not normatively from evolutionary value. Having money is one of those preferences. Being a nice person is another one of those preferences. If you deliberately make a choice that satisfies weaker preferences than the alternative, you're just throwing away utility for no reason.
If you haven't already, I suggest reading the Evolution Sequence, especially Alien God, Adaption-Executors, and Evolutionary Psychology, and the Metaethics Sequence
Now, if you want to make this into a reaaaallly repulsive ethical dilemma, add that true utilitarians should refuse to tip so they can donate that money to a charity that produces greater utility than the tip does.
That helps me understand where the evolution reference comes from and how the tip fits in, but I still don't understand where you get your preference.
Most people would like to be richer, more powerful, and more admired, and it may be that their morality is keeping them from that. But most people would probably also like to be more moral, more compassionate, and contribute more to society, and their desire for material success is keeping them from that. Moral choices are a trade-off between these two desires.
Like all trade-offs, which option to choose depends on the value of each good involved. In a choice between getting an extra dollar and saving a million lives, I'd choose the lives. In a choice between getting a million dollars and preventing one other person getting a dust-speck-in-the-eye, I'd take the million. The question isn't whether to take moral or material goods, it's at what rate to exchange them.
This post seems to be arguing that people consistently overvalue moral goods and undervalue material goods. But when psychologists actually study the issue, they find the opposite: that moral goods are much more effective at purchasing life satisfaction and personal happiness than material goods (This study is the first I found, and not necessarily the best, of a large number).
If increasing our consumption of material as opposed to moral goods isn't justified by evolutionary history and doesn't make us happier, what exactly is the advantage?
You don't tip in order to be altruistic, you tip because you informally agreed to tip by eating in a restaurant in the first place. If you don't tip (assuming the service was acceptable), you aren't being virtuous, you're being a thief.
Perhaps you should say the correct moral move is to tip exactly 15%.
[S]ome form of secular humanism [...] argues that humans are genetically programed not to lie, murder or steal, therefore this is both the right morality & the one they practice. This, to my mind, is committing the naturalistic fallacy.
It is naturalistic fallacy. You should avoid murdering people not because evolution programmed you to do so, but because it's the behavior you prefer to implement. That you were also (causally) created as you are by evolution is another issue entirely: the difference becomes important where you see some of the feature...
If there are no moral facts, why are you telling us what we should and should not do?
Overindulging in fatty, sweet, salty foods appears to be harmful; this is why one may do well to limit it. What corresponding harm do you see done by tipping waitresses that one will never see again, that would be prevented by the moral code that you advocate?
You're not explicit about it, but you appear to be advocating "selfish utilitarianism": the principle that one's personal utility is the only proper moral value, and should consider other people only as a me...
I agree with large chunks of what you say; but caution:
There exists no supernatural forces in the world and there is no objective morality imposed from above.
Those who believe in supernatural forces "above" us, often think they believe in objective morality. This does not imply either that belief in a God implies belief in objective morality, or that belief in objective morality implies belief in a God.
(It's ironic, and a major source of confusion, that Christian "morality", which is often used as the prototype for "morality&q...
This post suffers from lack of a clear example. You give no reason why not tipping should be preferable in spite of the moral revulsion. If you wanted to make utilitarian claims like Yvain pointed out, it would be one thing, but it's not clear at all that you are filling the moral void created by not tipping with anything better. A better argument would be: think about what you really value, and if the sum total of 20% of your food budget isn't worth avoiding the feeling of moral revulsion you get from not-tipping, then don't do it. This statement doe...
Move to France for a while. You will learn not to tip, and you won't feel bad about it.
If this fills you with immediate moral revulsion
This assumes a culturally narrow "you".
Let me start off with a mild example: Tipping.
Altruism evolved in an era of small tribes where individual altruistic acts could be remembered & paid back.
Tipping isn't altruism. It is even less about altruism in those countries (not here) where it a social obligation.
Now that we live in a large, anonymous society, there are many times when altruism doesn't pay. Unless you are with friends or a frequent diner at a restaurant or bar, the correct moral move is to stiff the waiter on the tip.
When the potential complications are assumed away it is a...
Unless you are with friends or a frequent diner at a restaurant or bar, the correct moral move is to stiff the waiter on the tip. If you're traveling somewhere alone, you should universally fail to tip as you're not likely to ever return there. If this fills you with immediate moral revulsion, you're not alone.
I never tipped any waiter in my life. Tipping waiters seems to be an American idea. They are employees and they should be getting normal salaries.
I think I understand where you're going with this, but I'm mostly going off the sentence:
In the same way that there is junk food that tastes good but is ultimately unhealthy for you, I believe there is ethical junk food which fills us with a feeling of virtue that is underserved [sic].
I think you're saying that we have actions that don't fulfill our moral systems as much as we feel like they fulfill our moral systems. I.e., tipping makes us feel like much better people than its fulfillment of our modern moral system justifies, whereas donating a big ch...
Perhaps a better test than tipping might be alms, giving money to people on the street.
Does either giving or not giving to beggars fill you with moral revulsion ? This is a case where I personally make the same decision (almost) every time, and each time feel serious qualms about it, so at least insofar as I'm concerned it's more representative of "rebasing" than tipping, which I've never had a moral feeling about.
Of the current figures who accept these premises, most espouse some form of secular humanism which argues that humans are genetically programed not to lie, murder or steal, therefore this is both the right morality & the one they practice.
This sounds wrong to me. It seems rather that humans are genetically programmed to lie, murder, and steal, and that, insofar as ethics help society function smoothly, they do so by constructing a system in which people feel inhibited about doing the "bad" things they are genetically programmed to do.
This seems to imply that because our instincts came from payback to our genes, that ethics-in-general is supposed to be based on payback to the moral agent.
Also, the traveling tipper seems to be in a prisoners dilemma against other traveling tippers.
Lets start with the following accepted as a given:
Of the current figures who accept these premises, most espouse some form of secular humanism which argues that humans are genetically programed not to lie, murder or steal, therefore this is both the right morality & the one they practice. This, to my mind, is committing the naturalistic fallacy.
Instead, I want to offer an analogy: Humans have an innate preference for certain foods which evolved in an environment radically different from modern society. In a modern society, it is widely regarded as virtuous to be actively working against our innate, genetic impulses through the practice of dieting. Similarly, our ethical landscape is radically different from the one we evolved in. Thus what we should be doing is actively working against our innate moral sense to be more in line with the modern world. In the same way that there is junk food that tastes good but is ultimately unhealthy for you, I believe there is ethical junk food which fills us with a feeling of virtue that is underserved.
Let me start off with a mild example: Tipping.
Altruism evolved in an era of small tribes where individual altruistic acts could be remembered & paid back. Now that we live in a large, anonymous society, there are many times when altruism doesn't pay. Unless you are with friends or a frequent diner at a restaurant or bar, the correct moral move is to stiff the waiter on the tip. If you're traveling somewhere alone, you should universally fail to tip as you're not likely to ever return there.
If this fills you with immediate moral revulsion, you're not alone. I'm so skeeved out by this that I've never yet worked up the nerve to do it. My empathetic system simulates how the waiter must feel to not get a tip and I get queasy in the pit of my stomach. But this empathetic system isn't based on any moral fact, it's simply an evolutionary shortcut that helps us survive in small groups. To rebase your ethics is to start actively fighting against that feeling of moral revulsion, just as the first step of a diet is to fight against the desire for fatty, sweet, salty foods.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that if your own personal moral system doesn't have parts that are morally repulsive to you, then you're not doing it right and anybody who tries to tell you different is selling you snake oil.
As to why I don't hear anyone talking about this stuff, it's like fight club. The first rule of rebasing your entire ethics system is that you never tell anyone you've rebased your entire ethics system.