On the third part of this series we deal with the objective versus subjective nature of moral. If you have not already please take a look at the previous two parts for context:

The next part will deal with communication so stay tuned if you like this topic.

Origin of Morals - Scope

I have stated before that morals require a group of entities that are capable of reflection. You need to trust that the other entities will, in some way, be able to reciprocate your moral choice. They may not actually do that but all that is needed is for the choice to be available.

However I have also stated that you can have moral behaviours towards subspecies, mostly based on the special case of reflection where time is considered at the scale of biological evolution. What I have not proposed yet is that the set of morals that you consider towards your peers are different than the set of morals you consider towards subspecies. More concerning is that often the morals you apply towards people that are close to you, like your family, are different than those you apply to the common people.

This leaves us with a perilous possibility. That morals allowed to function in this manner can make acceptable, for example, for a human to classify another race of humans as a subspecies and treat them with a different moral set. This is contradictory to observed reality as we reject that such a conclusion would be a moral one. So what is the mechanism that prevents calculations to reach this absurd?

I had to meditate quite a bit on this conundrum. The conclusion came as a shock: It’s not an absurd. Morals are in fact applied in different manner to different entities. But there is an important nuance:

Each of your morals has a well defined scope. Outside its respective scope it's not applicable. So what is preventing this system from devolving into subjective individualistic morals and collapsing on itself?

The simple answer is that we need to rely on reflection again. Specifically the expectation of reflection.

The expectation around the concept of family, for example, allows the addition of morals like adultery and incest that are only constructed because only that group of entities will share them.

Yes, I am aware that there are real physical consequences to those two examples I used, but you will find real world reasons in every moral if you dig deep enough, that is the whole point of an objective moral. Some may seem purely spiritual, but eventually one can always find a well hidden physical benefit.

This calculation does not fall into individualistic morals because every member of the family group will be able to reach the same conclusion. In addition, even members outside of the family group will be able to calculate those morals through reflecting their existence as if they were in the family and so will accept and even be able to inform members inside the family on moral valuation.

Additionally, racial segregation in this system of reflection only happens if the values of Survival, Happiness and Liberty are affected by the colour of your skin, assuming that is the difference in question. If you perform your moral calculation for two members of different species, or races, or genders, or whatever different attribute, and the calculation result comes back the same, then those entities belong to the same moral scope. There is no valid benefit to have a different set of morals just because of unrelated differences.

It is also the reason that we calculate slightly different morals towards handicapped or mentally retarded people. You might not be comfortable in admitting this, but I am pretty sure that if you had to pick only 3 people to survive and extinction event, they would not be old, sick or handicapped people. That is because the value of Survival is affected by that choice, even if only slightly.

Animals and subspecies will also only enjoy the subset of morals that are reflective between you and them. Killing an animal is not immoral under several conditions, immoral under others. You recoil from eradicating a species because, as a species, you can fully reflect your condition. But you allow the killing of an animal to eat it because you do not reflect that condition, the animal has no problem killing you if he needs to eat as well. You find human cannibalism immoral because you can trust other humans to recoil from it as well even if they are fatally hungry.

You have almost zero morals regarding inanimate entities like rocks, planets, moons and stars because there is almost zero reflection of what those entities are capable of doing to you.

Moral scope allows for different sets of morals to be applied where entities differ in their reflection, creating in turn differences in the calculated moral values.

Origin of Morals, the Scope

Origin of Morals - Scope