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billswift comments on Savulescu: "Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction" - Less Wrong
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Comments (193)
The problem is that culture is embedded in the genetic/evolutionary matrix; there are severe limits on what is possible to change culturally.
Culture is what separates us from cavemen. They often killed their enemies and ate their brains. Clearly culture can be responsible for a great deal of change in the domain of moral behaviour.
If Robin Hanson is right, moral progress is simply a luxury we indulge in in this time of plenty.
Did crime increase significantly during the Great Depression? Wouldn't this potentially be falsifying evidence for Hanson's hypothesis?
Perhaps the Great Depression just wasn't bad enough, but it seems to cast doubt on the hypothesis, at the very least.
Crime is down during the current recession. It's possible that the shock simply hasn't been strong enough, but it may be evidence nonetheless.
I think Hanson's hypothesis was more about true catastrophes, though--if some catastrophe devastated civilization and we were thrown back into widespread starvation, people wouldn't worry about morality.
Probably testable - if we can find some poor civilised folk to study.
Indeed, rarely do we eat brains.
Culture has also produced radical Islam. Just look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuAAK032kCA to get a bit more pessimistic about the natural moral zeitgeist evolution in culture.
What fraction of the population, though? Some people are still cannibals. It doesn't mean there hasn't been moral progress. Update 2011-08-04 - the video link is now busted.
The persistence of the taboo against cannibalism is an example where we haven't made moral progress. There's no good moral reason to treat eating human meat as any different than meat of other animals, once the animals in question are dead, though there may be health reasons. It's just an example of prejudice and unreasonable moral disgust.