Konrad Lorenz claimed that dogs and wolves have morality. When a puppy does something wrong then a parent pushes on the back of its neck with their mouth and pins it to the ground, and lets it up when it whines appropriately.

Lorenz gave an example of an animal that mated at the wrong time. The pack leader found the male still helplessly coupled with the female, and pinned his head to the ground just like a puppy.

It doesn't have to take language. It starts out with moral beliefs that some individuals break. I can't think of any moral taboos that haven't been broken, except for the extermination of the human species which hasn't happened yet. So, moral taboos that get broken and the perps get punished for it. That's morality.

It happens among dogs and cats and horses and probably lots of animals. It isn't that all these behaviors are in the genes, selected genetically by natural selection over the last million generations or so. They get taught, which is much faster to develop but which also has a higher cost.

Chaung-Tzu had a story: Two philosophers were walking home from the bar after a long evening drinking. They stopped to piss off a bridge. One of them said, "Look at the fish playing in the moonlight! How happy they are!"

The other said, "You're not a fish so you can't know whether the fish are happy."

The first said, "You're not me so you can't know whether I know whether the fish are happy."

It seems implausible to me that rabbits or foxes think about morality at all. But I don't know that with any certainty, I'm not sure how they think.

Eliezer says with certainty that they do not think about morality at all. It seems implausible to me that Eliezer would know that any more than I do, but I don't know with any certainty that he doesn't know.

Caledonian, thank you. I didn't notice that there might be people who disagree with that, since it seemed to me so clearly true and unarguable.

I guess in the extreme case somebody could believe that fairness has nothing to do with agreement. He might find a bunch of people who have a deal that each of them believes is fair, and he might argue that each of them is wrong, that their deal is actually unfair to every one of them. That each of them is deforming his own soul by agreeing to this horrible deal.

My thought about that is that there might be some deal that none of them has thought of, that would indeed be better for each of them. Maybe if they heard about the other deal they'd all prefer it. I'd want to listen to his proposals and see if I could understand them, or get new ideas from them.

But when somebody argues that a deal is unfair to somebody else, unfair to somebody who himself thinks it is not unfair to himself, it disrespects that person. It is a way to say that he doesn't know what he's doing, that he isn't competent to make his own deals, that he's a stupid or ignorant person who does not know what's good for him, that he needs you to take care of him and make his decisions for him. In general it is rude. And yet sometimes it could be true that people are stupid and agree to deals that are unfair to them because they don't know any better. There are probably 40 million american Republicans I'd suspect of that....

Lakshmi, Eliezer does have a point, though.

While there are many competing moral justifications for different ways to divide the pie, and while a moral relativist can say that no one of them is objectively correct, still many human beings will choose one. Not even a moral relativist is obligated to refrain from choosing moral standards. Indeed, someone who is intensely aware that he has chosen his standards may feel much more intensely that they are his than someone who believes they are a moral absolute that all honest and intelligent people are obligated to accept.

So, once you have made your moral choice, it is not fair to simply put it aside because somebody else disagrees. If he convinces you that he's right, then it's OK. But if you believe you know what's right and you agree to do wrong, you are doing wrong.

If all but two members of the group -- you and Aaron -- think it's right to do something that Aaron thinks is unfair to him, then it's wrong for you to violate your ethics and go along with the group. If everybody but you thinks it's right then it's still wrong for you to agree, when you believe it's wrong.

Unless, of course, you belong to a moral philosophy which says it's right to do that.

When Dennis says he deserves the whole pie and you disagree, and it violates your ethical code to say it's right when you think it's wrong, then you should not agree for Dennis to get the whole pie. It would be wrong.

I believe that what you ought to do in the case when there's no agreement, should still be somewhat undecided. If you have the power to impose your own choice on someone else or everybody else then that might be the most convenient thing to do. But it takes a special way of thinking to say it's fair to do that. Is it in general a fair thing to impose your standards on other people when you think you are right? I guess a whole lot of people think so. But I'm convinced they're wrong. It isn't fair. And yet it can be damn convenient....

"Why would anybody think that there *is* a single perfect morality, and if everybody could only see it then we'd all live in peace and harmony?"

Because they have a specific argument which leads them to believe that?

Sure, but have you ever seen such an argument that wasn't obviously fallacious? I have not seen one yet. It's been utterly obvious every time.

Thomas, you are running in to the same problem Eliezer is: you can't have a convincing argument about what is fair, versus what is not fair, if you don't explicitly define "fair" in the first place. It's more than a little surprising that this isn't very obvious.

I gave a simple obvious definition. You might disagree with it, but how is it unclear?

Hendrick, it could be argued that each person deserves to own 1/N of the pie because they are there. So if Doreen isn't hungry, she still owns 1/N of the pie which she can sell to anyone who is hungry.

Similarly it could be argued that the whole forest should be divided up and each person should own 1/N of it, and if the pie is found in the part of the forest that I own then I own that whole pie. But I have no rights to pies found in the rest of the forest.

Now suppose that all but one of the group is busy looking up into the trees at beautiful birds, which gives them great enjoyment. But Dennis instead has been working hard looking at the ground, searching for pies, and he finds one. Should he own the pie? Should he have the right to give or sell pieces to whoever he wants? Or should he have no special rights?

What if Dennis, knowing that the group will confiscate his pie if he shows it to them, eats it before they notice he has it. Is it then fair to pump his stomach so it can be divided equally?

Say it's 5 people walking through the woods, but they left 5 others back at base camp. Do the other 5 have any right to any of the pie?

If so, what if there are 5 starving children in india. Do they have any rights?

I say, Eliezer is wrong to say there is anything objectively fair about this.

If you and the others present get together and give Dennis 1/Nth of the pie - or even if you happen to have the upper hand, and you unilaterally give Dennis and yourself and all others each 1/Nth - then you are not being unfair on any level; there is no meta-level of fairness where Dennis gets the whole pie.

I agree that giving Dennis the whole pie when others disagree would not be fair. But when you disregard Dennis's opinion and dictate a solution, that isn't fair either. Just because Dennis is unable to explain his position so that you see it's right, and he does not suggest a compromise you can accept, does not make your alternative solution imposed on him fair.

There is no absolute standard of fairness here. It all depends. The concept that we should start with equal shares sounds right if you live in an egalitarian nation, otherwise not. Like, if it's a medieval english nobleman and four retainers walking through the woods, it would be idiotic to assert the pie must be split into 5 equal shares. The retainers would whip you for saying it, and they'd insist it was no more than you deserved, it was a fair response.

I say, fairness involves people who are making a deal, who are trying to be fair to each other. It is not about people who are not present, who cannot speak their minds. You aren't making a deal with starving children in india. You can be kind to them or unkind but until you can make a deal with them you can't be fair or unfair. It is not about the people back in base camp unless you made a deal with them that you will uphold or break.

If the people who are making the deal all agree it is fair, then it is fair. That's what it means for it to be fair. If some of them do not agree that it's fair then it isn't fair. It wouldn't be fair to give Dennis the whole pie, when somebody doesn't want to. It wouldn't be fair to give Dennis nothing, or 1/N of what he believes he deserves, when he doesn't agree. If you can't reach an agreement then you don't have a fair solution. Because that's what a fair solution isn't.

You can't say that just anything is fair. "Fair" isn't an empty concept that can apply to anything whatsoever. "Fair" is a concept that can apply to anything whatsoever that all participants of the deal freely agree to. If they don't agree, then it isn't fair.

But most of all - why on Earth would any human being think that one ought to optimize inclusive genetic fitness, rather than what is good? What is even the appeal of this, morally or otherwise? At all?

I don't think you ought to try to optimise fitness. Your opinion about fitness might be quite wrong, even if you accept the goal of optimising fitness. Say you sacrifice trying to optimise fitness and then it turns out you failed. Like, you try to optimise for intelligence just before a plague hits that kills 3/4 of the public. You should have optimised for plague resistance. What a loser.

And what would you do to optimise genetic fitness anyway? Carefully choose who to have children with?

Perhaps you would want to change the environment so that it will be good for humans, or for your kind of human being. That makes a kind of sense to me, but again it's hard to do. Not only do you have the problem of actually changing the world. You also have the problem of ecological succession. Very often, species that take over an ecosystem change it in ways that leave something else better able to grow than that species' own children. Some places, grasses provide a good environment for pine seedlings that then shade out the grass. But the pines in turn create an environment where hardwood saplings can grow better than pine saplings. Etc. If you like human beings or your own kind of human beings then it makes some sense to create an environment where they will thrive. But do you know how to do that?

If you knew all about how to design ecosystems to get the results you want, that might provide some of the tools you'd need to design human societies. I don't think those tools exist yet.

On a different level, I feel like it's important to avoid minimising mimetic fitness. If you have ideas that you believe are true or good or beautiful, and those ideas seem to kill off the people who hold them faster than they can spread the ideas, that's a sign that something is wrong. It should not be that the good, true, or beautiful ideas die out. Either there's something wrong with the ideas, or else there should be some way to modify the environment so they spread easier, or at least some way to modify the environment so the bearers of the ideas don't die off so fast. I can't say what it is that's wrong, but there's something wrong when the things that look good tend to disappear.

If they're good then there ought to be a way for them to persist until they can mutate or recombine into something better. They don't need to take over the world but they shouldn't just disappear.

I don't like it when the things I like go extinct.

So I don't want to *maximise* the fitness of things I like, but I sure do want that fitness to be adequate. When it isn't adequate then something is wrong and I want to look carefully at what's wrong. Maybe it's the ideas. Maybe something else.

Similarly, if you run a business you don't need to maximise profits. But if you run at a loss on average then you have a problem that needs to be fixed.

Eliezer, you claim that there is no necessity we should accept Dennis's claim he should get the whole pie as fair. I agree.

There is also no necessity he should accept our alternative claim as fair.

There is no abstract notion that is inherently fair. What there is, is that when people do reach agreement that something is fair, then they have a little bit more of a society. And when they can't agree about what's fair they have a little less of a society. There is nothing that says ahead of time that they must have that society. There is nothing that says ahead of time what it is that they must agree is fair. (Except that some kinds of fairness may aid the survival of the participants, or the society.)

Concepts of fairness aren't inherent in the universe, they're an emergent property that comes from people finding ways to coexist and to find mutual aid. If they agree that it's fair for them to hunt down and kill and eat each other because each victim has just as much right and almost as much opportunity to turn the tables, this does not lead to a society that's real useful to its participants and it does not lead them to be particularly useful to each other. It's a morality that in many circumstances will not be fully competitive. But this is a matter of natural selection among ideas, there isn't anything less *fair* about this concept than other concepts of fairness. It's only less competitive, which is an entirely different thing.

It's an achievement to reach agreement about proper behavior. The default is no agreement. We make an effort to reach agreement because that's the kind of people we are. The kind of people who've survived best so far. When Dennis feels he deserves something different from what we think, we often feel we should try to understand his point of view and see if we can come to a common understanding.

And we have to accept that sometimes we cannot come to any common understanding, that's just how it works. We have to accept that sometimes somebody will feel that it isn't fair, that he's been mistreated, and we have to live with whatever consequences come from that. Society isn't an all-or-none thing. We walk together, we stumble, we fall down, we get back up and try some more.

Why would anybody think that there *is* a single perfect morality, and if everybody could only see it then we'd all live in peace and harmony?

You might as well imagine there's a single perfect language and if we all spoke it we'd understand each other completely and everything we said would be true.

One very funny consecuence of defining "fair" as "that which everyone agrees to be "fair"" is that if you indeed could convince everyone of the correctness of that definition, nobody could ever know what IS "fair", since they would look at their definition of "fair", which is "that which everyone agrees to be "fair"", then they would look at what everyone does agree to be fair, and conclude that "that which everyone agrees to be "fair" is "that which everyone agrees to be "fair""", and so on!

An, I have no idea what you are saying here.

If a deal is fair when all participants freely agree to the deal, then there you are.

Are you saying that everybody has to agree to this definition of fairness before anybody can use it? I don't see why. People use the word "fair" when they are talking about deals. We don't all have to agree on the meaning of a word before any of us can use the word in conversation. If that was necessary, what would we say?

If some people freely agree to a deal but they still say it isn't fair -- perhaps it isn't fair to God, or to the pixies, or to somebody in Mali who isn't a party to the deal anyway -- then they can say that. Whether or not we all agree that the deal is fair, still we have a deal we all agree to.

What point is there to build an infinite regress of definitions? What is it good for?

If fairness is about something other than human agreement, what is it?

Suppose you have a rule that you say is always the fair one. And suppose that you apply it to a situation involving N people, and all N of them object, none of them think it's fair. Are you going to claim that the fair thing for them to do is something that none of them agrees to? What's fair about that?

When everybody involved in a deal agrees it's fair, who are you -- an outside kibitzer -- to tell them they're wrong?

Suppose a group all agrees, they think a deal is fair. And then you come in and persuade some of them that it isn't fair after all, that they should get more, and the agreement breaks down. Maybe they fight each other over it. Maybe some of them get hurt. And after some time contending, it's clear that none of them are better off than they were when they had their old agreement. Were you being fair to that group by destroying their agreement?