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Salemicus comments on Open thread, Mar. 2 - Mar. 8, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have not yet read the sequences in full, let met ask, is there maybe an answer to what is bothering me about ethics: why is basically all ethics in the last 300 years or so universalistic? I.e. prescribing to treat everybody without exception according to the same principles? I don't understand it because I think altruism is based on reciprocity. If my cousin is starving and a complete stranger is halfway accross the world is starving even more, and I have money for food, most ethics would figure out I should help the stranger. But from my angle, I am obviously getting less reciprocity, less personal utility out of that than out of helping my cousin. I am not even considering the chance of a direct payback, simply the utility of having people I like and associate with not suffer is a utility to me, obviously. Basically you see altruism as an investment, you get a lot back from investing into people close to you, and then with the distance the return on investment is less and less to you, although never completely zero because making humankind as such better off is always better for you. This explains things like that kind of economic nationalism that if free trade makes Chinese workers better off with 100 units and American or European workers worse off with 50, a lot of people still don't want it, this is actually rational, 100 units to people far away make you better off with 1 unit, 50 units lost to basically your neighbors makes you worse off with 5.
And this is why I don't understand why most ethics are universalistic?
Of course one could argue this is not ethics when you talk about what is the best investment for yourself. After all with that sort of logic you would get the most return if you never give anything to anyone else, so why even help your cousin?
Anyway, was this sort of reciprocal and thus non-universalistic ethics ever discussed here?
Because so much of it comes out of a Christian tradition with a deep presumption of Universalism built into it. But you are not the first person to ask this tradition "What is the value of your values?".
Your "reciprocal ethics" might be framed as long-term self-interest, or as a form of virtue ethics. It immediately makes me think of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
There's a nice discussion on related themes here, or try googling the site for "virtue ethics".
Hm, I would call it "graded ingroup loyalty", to quote an Arab saying "me and by brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the world". Instead of a binary ingroup and outgroup, other people are gradually more or less your ingroup, spouse more than cousin, cousin more than buddy, buddy more than compatriot, compatriot more than someone really far away.
But note that reciprocity is almost the opposite of loyalty. That kind of tribalism is dysfunctional in the modern world, because:
Rather than a static loyalty, it is more interesting to ask how people move into and out of your ingroup? What elicits our feelings of sympathy for some more than others? What kind of institutions encourage us to sympathise with other people and stand in their shoes? What triggers our moral imagination?
I'd tell a story of co-operative trade forcing us to stand in the shoes of other people, to figure out what they want as customers, thus not only allowing co-operation between people with divergent moral viewpoints, but itself giving rise to an ethic of conscientiousness, trustworthiness, and self-discipline. The "bourgeois virtues" out-competing the "warrior ethic."