Morality And Selfishness FAQs

Morality originates from one’s personal values, in a 5-step process that typically consists of:

• Collective values.
• The individual internalization of collective values.
• The assumption that collective values are objective, and thus “moral”.
• A folk theory of morality.
• Individual and collective moral myths.

Read More: What is Morality?

• Evolution selected for egoism and selfishness over altruism. Hence, altruism is a losing reproductive strategy whenever there is a competing pro-selfishness strategy.
• Since mutual cooperation among selfishness individuals enables each individual to gain more than if they each worked alone, humans have evolved a moral accounting system to keep track of what they owe and what they are owed from their respective communities.
• Humans have a natural intuition that life is good and life should be preserved in many cases, even when it’s not very practical (e.g. pro-lifers being against abortion, people against death penalties, people against suicide, assisted suicide, or even suicide with dignity, etc).
• Humans are more likely to favor their children, spouses, family, friends, and other people in their social networks and communities over outsiders, in terms of perks, special advice/tips/tricks, and goods (cronyism/tribalism/favoritism).
• Humans are tribalistic, and develop their own internal labels for who to designate within their in-groups and out-groups.
• Humanists view love as sacred, even though it doesn’t exist merely to make humans feel good. Likewise, people may feel spiteful and vengeful when their partners cheat or break up with them. Regarding cheating, this implicitly causes humans to value consent.
• Many humans favor utilitarian and hedonistic ideologies, although they may be less inclined to favor those if they become post-overtonists and/or recognize evolution’s applications to human nature.
• Going beyond this point, this also affect the human intuitions of how rewards and punishments should work.
• The necessity of human societies in the modern world (and lack of understanding of evolutionary reasoning) has caused people to adopt altruistic moralist ideologies, whose adoptions are further amplified.
• Humans have grown to dislike loneliness and favor being in communities and groups.
• Humans will tend to justify themselves, even if doing so is hypocritical or wrong from the collective moral perspective.
• Human have developed a complex range of emotions. Two such emotions are hate and anger. Even self-identified humanists and other utopian ideologists who live in peaceful societies have an intentionally ignored and unrecognized evolutionary desire to hate and be mad at some people. But their ideology leaves few people left to hate, so they hate Nazis and other people they perceive to be “backwards” or “ignorant” and will even expand the definitions of people who can fall into those groups so that they have more people to release their natural hatred and anger against.
• The negative consequences of technology are not viewed as humiliating because technological progress is viewed as necessary (albeit technology is more of a memetic thing). The humiliation faced by people who get laid off, put out of business, or whose professions become obsolete is ignored in favor of the technological progress of society. Similarly, society views it as moral to forcibly educate children in public schools about curriculum that they hate, because it’s viewed as necessary for the modern world.

Read More: Evolution and Morality - Blithering Genius

Yes. Humans cannot transcend evolution, and just because humans have lots of technology and are the most intelligent form of life ever known to have existed, that doesn’t mean that humans aren’t susceptible to the same population dynamics and other biological realities that all other animals must face. It is still the case that genes are largely responsible for predetermining every person’s destiny, that whoever has the most children is destined to have their genes become more common in the future, and that human populations have the potential to exceed their carrying capacities to the point of causing war, disease, and famine in order to decrease their populations.

Some people view morality as a list of rules that shall never be violated. The justification at a macro-level is that these rules have consequences that cannot be considered at a micro-level. To put this in perspective, let’s take the example of lying. If a drug addict lies to a police officer about the presence of cocaine in his house, he can avoid getting arrested. But if too many people lie, then people won’t trust each other. Here the micro level concern is getting arrested, and the macro level concern is social trust.

Deontology needlessly elevates the value of rules over the consequences of them. Rules cannot be reasonably formed without some sort of appeal to consequence, because it’s not possible to judge a value without another value to judge it by. When rules and values are made without appreciating the consequences of them, they become arbitrary and shitty. For example, you can’t explain why a rule saying that a man can have sex with whichever women he wants is a bad rule without an appeal to the consequences of that rule. You could argue that the first rule violates the autonomy of the women. However, you would need to justify why women are entitled to a certain amount of autonomy, which requires appealing to the consequences of implementing that autonomy. In these scenarios, the appeal of the Non-Aggression comes from reducing the amount of coercion that occurs. If the justification for the NAP ultimately appeals to consequences, then why not evaluate the actions and specific rules you make based on the consequences themselves rather than some general rule that doesn’t always work out?

It is true that rules are important for setting precedents. If people stole and pirated whenever they want in a society, people would be less incentivized to create wealth, which is a net negative. On the other hand, respecting private property creates a macro-level effect of encouraging wealth because people will think it won’t be stolen. However, would 10 acts of fraud intended to fund research into embryo selection be ethical? I would say yes – you increase the amount of utility in the society without severely damaging the precedent of private property. 10 acts of fraud are the kind of crime that makes the papers for a few days until people forget about it, rather than something that seriously undermines people’s trust.

Sure, people frequently engaging in actions that break rules would undermine the precedents that these rules uphold. However, there are clearly violations of rules that don’t break the precedent they set. Let’s take private property as an example. When people having a right to property, that incentivizes them to protect it and create more value. Taxing people at the threat of incarceration would be a violation of private property. However, if these taxes are used for institutions that help uphold private property, then there is no moral objection to it as they are massively preventing the very thing they are violating.

Read More: When Appeal to Consequences is a Valid Fallacy.

No, this is backwards. “Moral progress” is an illusion, and the illusion is created by technological advancements.

Humanism is a secular, liberal, hedonistic, pro-altruism ideology religion that has supplanted Christianity as the main moral value system of the Western World. Humanists take for granted that personal happiness is the purpose of life, technology is always good, humans are naturally morally good, sympathy is always “better” than hate, and that tolerance of other cultures and beliefs is good, as long as they agree with humanism. Humanism is popular because it appeals to moral intuitions in the absence of traditional supernatural religious beliefs.

Humanism is not a legitimate philosophy because it doesn’t have a theory of truth, nor a theory of value, nor a theory of society. When we investigate and critique the Humanist Manifesto, we find that it’s all just rhetoric designed to affirm prior intuitions, rather than question them.

Watch: Dissecting Humanism.

Rational Humanism is a proposed ideology for replacing (Naive) Humanism as the primary ideology of the Western World. The individual core value of Rational Humanism is Reproduction, while the collective core value is Civilization. In comparison to Naive Humanism, Rational Humanism embraces selfishness, it defines more sustainable values, and it isn’t fundamentally deceptive.

Read More: Toward Rational Humanism

Accepting the abyss (1), (2), (3) enables us to reject assumptions about how we should live our lives.

In my own experience, when I was Efilist-leaning, it was a problem for me because my desires contradicted what seemed to have been the “right thing to do”. Once I recognized that there’s no objective basis for morality, this enabled me to reject the values and beliefs that conflicted with my desires. So, recognizing that there’s an abyss for value and morality has helped me.

Recognizing that biological value arises from causality by the loop of reproduction also gives me a way to “immanentize the abyss” by fulfilling my objective purpose and what I evolved to do (reproduction).

We favor a society based on rational humanism and a rationally designed culture. The society would value cooperation and shun defecting. Legally speaking, this ideal society would have a lot of individual freedom, but memetic traditions that promote higher fertility would naturally be the most prevalent in the society. Over time, those traditions would likely be deemed “moral” and actions that don’t conform with those traditions would be deemed “immoral”. However, the society would theoretically become very intelligent and culturally aware after a few hundred years since it would practical eugenic population control, so it’s reasonably possible that the society would eventually adopt a rational, laissez-faire approach to morality as well.

This FAQs page disproves many arguments in favor of objective morality, but for an essay-style format, we recommend reading: What is morality?

This assumption relies on a misunderstanding of how reason and knowledge work. Reason is a psychological mechanism where thought conforms to rules for thinking (a logic). The nature of logical reasoning prevents it from being a suitable foundation for anything, let alone morality.

It can be tempting to conclude that morality is based on rationality since it’s possible for values to contradict each other, to be based on false or unquestioned assumptions, and/or to be justified by fallacious reasoning. If some value systems are contradictory and others are not, that should imply that some moral systems are better than others, right? It does, but reason alone is still not sufficient for building an incontrovertible moral foundation. There is no uniquely rational way to define value philosophically since values depend on other values. Reason makes your thinking consistent, but reason does not provide a foundation.

When you make a valid deduction, you are reasoning from established propositions. The established propositions are assumptions made for that particular step of reasoning. The act of making a valid inference does not depend on the actual truth-value of any given assumption. They are merely assumed to be true in the abstract. The point here is that the starting point, particularly the truth-value of the starting point, is not relevant to validity. Logic is only concerned with the transmission of assumed truth down into a conclusion. Logic has to do with the flow of thought, not the starting point of thought.

Any attempt to provide a rational foundation for morality will invariably require contradicting itself. To start, there needs to be a framework where specific ethical actions can be deduced from more general first principles. But these first principles will never have a justification, themselves. Reason makes it possible to construct a valid flow of thought from first principles, but it does not have the artillery to provide justification for those first principles. If you appeal to some principle from which you can deduce that first principle, then the first principle loses its status and the principle you’ve deduced it from is now the new first principle. We’re now back where we started, needing justification for our starting point.

But first principles are self-evidently true. They do not depend on other principles for justification, as they justify their own truth-value.

“Self-evidence” is a gloriously vague assertion, ripe for equivocation. It’s also not a valid epistemological concept since anything can be questioned and rejected.

Intuition can form a basis for morality.

First, intuition is not universal, just as self-evidence is not universal. What strikes you as intuitive will depend, in part, on culture. Most people accepted slavery as a norm in society for thousands of years, until within the last couple centuries. Whatever intuition you go with is arbitrary.

Second, intuition is not necessarily coherent, as is assumed by these lapsed rationalists. The idea is that we are able to come up with a complete and coherent framework that will jive with all of our intuitions. But there is no reason to assume this. Intuition is influenced by indoctrination, education, and social factors, which destabilizes the first principle as well. Appeals to self-evidence or to intuition are arbitrary and there is no way to settle disputes between different parties.

It’s also a mistake to assume that values can be based on sensory knowledge instead of emotional knowledge. Values can be coordinated with reason, but reason and sensory knowledge alone cannot form an objective basis for morality.

It is also a huge mistake to view morality as black and white. Even if morality were objective, there’s always more ways to be wrong than there are ways to be right, so anybody who thinks that they are abiding by supposedly objective moral standards is probably wrong. Many people would also use their belief that they are imposing the one and only true “objective” morality as a justification to rule with an iron fist.

If cooperating together was the objectively best choice, i.e. it offers the greatest individual reward for each player and defection is guaranteed to not happen, then prisoner’s dilemmas wouldn’t exist at all in the first place. Conversely, if prisoner’s dilemmas didn’t exist, then there would be no inquiry as to why someone would choose anything less than the option with the greatest potential reward and what can be done to achieve that.

No. The creation of “Moral progress” is an illusion. Most “improvements” in moral progress are only really just advancements in technology.

Contrary to popular belief, not everybody wants to live in a technologically-advanced society where everybody lives harmoniously with each other. Many people assume that everybody wants exactly this, and that this implies the existence of an objectively-correct morality, but there are some notably interesting ideologies that oppose it: Efilism and Anarcho-Primitivism.

Efilists disagree because they believe in absolute negative-utilitarianism, that not even the existence of the smallest quantity of pain can ever be morally justified. Efilists recognize that wherever life exists, problems will never go away. Efilists thus believe that the most morally correct thing to do would be to eliminate all life so that problems will stop existing forever.

It’s also naive to believe that technology is the solution to all problems. It is impossible for life to exist without problems, because once again, problems will never go away for as long as life continues to exist. Anarcho-Primitivists (Anprims) even argue that technology causes more problems than it solves.

Both of these ideologies have their shortfallings, but in some ways, these two ideologies are more enlightened than the conventional Humanist worldview of the West. There might even be more ideologies that oppose this premise than just the two counter-examples that I have mentioned here, but the bottom line is that since not everybody agrees that a harmonious, technologically-advanced society would be a utopia where maximal morality is achieved, the premise that everybody wants to achieve that cannot be assumed as a basis for objective morality.

No, Appeal to the People might be a valid fallacy for epistemological or scientific reasoning, it’s not a legitimate Fallacy when reasoning about ethical or political philosophy. Epistemology and Science are based on sensory knowledge, whereas Ethics and Politics are based on emotional/value knowledge. If anything, it is a Fallacy here by trying to apply sensory knowledge outside of its scope of appropriate use.

No, this lacks an understanding about the epistemological limits of human reasoning. Epistemology and Science are based on sensory knowledge, whereas Ethics and Politics are based on emotional/value knowledge. If anything, it is a Fallacy here by trying to apply sensory knowledge outside of its scope of appropriate use.

No, not at all. Consider the following dictionary entries:

• Wiktionary defines selfishness as: The quality of being selfish; the condition of putting one’s own interests before those of others.
• Merriam Webster defines selfishness as: The quality or state of being selfish : a concern for one’s own welfare or advantage at the expense of or in disregard of others.
• Dictionary.com defines selfishness as: The quality or state of caring only for oneself or one’s own interests.

The phrases “regardless of others”, “without regard for others”, or “in disregard of others” all simply mean that you are concerned with yourself, and not concerned with other people. In other words, you are acting for your benefit, not theirs. On the other hand, a prepositional phrase like “at the expense of others” has very different semantics since it would imply that you can only benefit yourself if others are negatively affected by your actions.

No, it isn’t. All of the so-called examples of altruism in human evolution are misunderstandings of how evolution actually works:

• Debunking the Selfish Gene by T. K. Van Allen
• Altruism and Selfishness
• Bees are not Altruistic
• Pathological Altruism
• Family, Transfers of Energy, and Exchanges of Labor

If anything, altruism is self-defeating, and any attempt to establish altruism in nature would be quickly erased as soon as evolution takes back the helm and reinstates selfishness. Altruism cannot evolve, due to the free-rider problem.

Usually no, and this is also a misunderstanding of what true altruism actually is. When people are helping out their family and friends, they are typically doing transactions between their moral accounting systems.

No, it’s a Fallacy of Composition to assume that being able to help others implies that we can collectively help the entire world. Altruism is not sustainable in nature. At most, we can help people who are likely to help ourselves, and that is the natural limit to which people can sustainably help others.

We don’t equate selfishness to “cynicalism”, hence why we define the two differently. If someone is selfish, then they are prioritizing the pursuit of their self interests first and foremost, but they will often have to obey their moral accounting systems as a means to an end.

We define cynicalism as being selfish, except that you don’t adhere to your moral accounting system. If someone helps out a cynical person, the cynical person would accept the help, but then they wouldn’t help the helper back, which would incentivize the helper to not help the cynical person in the future.

Because we have no other choice. We can only do what we want to do, so in that sense, we’re always being selfish. Some people might want to be nicer than others, and some might want to be cruel. Regardless, all voluntary acts are based on desires.

Desires are not chosen. A serial killer chooses to kill, but does not choose to want to kill. Likewise, a philanthropist chooses to help the poor, but does not choose to want to help the poor. Both are acting on their desires. Both are psychologically selfish.

Life also evolved to be selfish. Altruism cannot evolve due to the free-rider problem.

No, not at all. Society is not based on altruism at any level: global, racial, national, or even tribal. Society is based on cooperation between selfish individuals, not Altruism and Collectivism.

Even if people were altruistic, the economic calculation problem makes altruism untenable. You have the knowledge to act selfishly, but not the knowledge to act altruistically.

Furthermore, every altruistic civilization is doomed to fail.

No, and for several reasons.

1. Consequentialist Ethics are superior to deontological ethics.
2. It is misleading to think of the Libertarian NAP as a single principle.
3. The Libertarian NAP ignores that life becomes zero-sum when a population reaches the carrying capacity of the environment..

This question assumes that “evil” is well-defined and objective, but it isn’t. It also assumes that humans should act according to deontological ethics.

Because moral preferences depend on perspective.

For example, most people in Japan, the United States, and Europe view the Assassination of Shinzo Abe to be a “morally bad” thing since they like Japan, but most people in China and Korea view his assassination to be a “morally good” thing because they hate Japan. If it was truly the case that it is “universally preferable” to condemn murder, then why are there hundreds of millions people who applaud the assassination and celebrate the assassin as a hero?

The following addresses a list of objections by someone who defines morality as “universally preferable behavior”.

Nobody can logically defend the position that NAP-violations can be morally good.

Of course they can. For the same reason why Libertarians can’t agree on whether abortion violates the NAP or not. Or how Libertarians can’t agree on whether blackmailing is NAP-compliant. Or how Ancaps may drop-kick people out who disagree with their interpretation of the NAP. The bottom line is that “Aggression” is subjective, so the NAP is also subjective.

Only creatures that have the mental capacity to conceive of abstract rules can be bound and protected by said rules - and only if they reciprocate.

That is very arbitrary. By the same logic, a newborn infant or a person with severe dementia may not be protected by the Libertarian NAP if they lack the mentally ability to understand it. Most people would disagree and insist that those humans deserve the same legal protections as more mentally capable humans.

In moral terms, the only important criteria is if they’re able to understand and reciprocate rules. Moral rules, if they exist, are a subset of these that ought to be universally upheld.

According to who, and why? For starters, this claim doesn’t make any sense since your definition of morality has been easily debunked.

“Modern moral theory says you aren’t obligated to help someone hanging off the edge of a cliff.

Modern Liberals disagree. Who’s to say that your beliefs are more correct than theirs, besides yourself?

Other species are not subject to the same moral protections as us, since they can neither conceive nor reciprocate moral norms.

If that’s true, then human babies, severely retarded people, and the mentally disabled elderly do not have the same legal protections as everyone else, which contradicts most people’s moral intuitions, at least in today’s world anyway. Though I am indifferent since I understand that literally nothing is objectively immoral.

Animals shouldn’t breed if there isn’t enough energy around to sustain themselves. Just like a mother is being cruel/evil if she has babies that she cannot feed.

And yet animals will still breed anyway irregardless. If there’s a famine and civilization collapses, the most reasonable thing to do from a biological/evolutionary/game-theoretic point-of-view is to take what you can and give nothing back. Because that is what will maximize your reproductive success. And all the organisms that follow that strategy will spread their genes to a greater extent, whereas the most altruistic ones who choose to have fewer offspring will have their kind die out. You don’t seem to understand biology or evolutionary theory very well…

“Humans aren’t fighting over the last bits of air, land, water, etc.

That’s literally what they’ve done all throughout modern history, with the main exception being the modern era.

Our competitions are chosen / voluntary.

No, they aren’t. If competition was truly voluntary, then there would be no competition at all because everyone would avoid it. One of the most fundamental principles of geopolitics is that selfish players (countries in this case) will compete against each other for scarce resources. And there are no permanent friends, only temporary allies for as long as the right conditions for cooperation hold true.

Having one more human born on this planet won’t hurt any existing human.

If it’s exactly one human, then probably not. But it isn’t. The world population is increasing by several tens of millions of humans every year. Only a fool would say that there’s no way this continuing trend could ever go wrong on a planet with finite resources. Unlimited population growth is unsustainable, and that’s what we’re heading towards.

The energies in our ecosystems aren’t that scarce.

Yes they are, and they always have been. And it will only become more apparent as the world population continues to grow. If that continues, all it will take is another major crisis or two to make the world’s food/resource supplies trip up and unable to keep up. Then you’ll catch a glimpse of how biological systems have always worked.

See: Philosophy of Truth: The Meaninglessness of the Standpoint Theory of Truth.

No. Utilitarianism is defined as maximizing “well-being”, and “well-being” is subjective. That’s why there’s many different types of Utiliarianism.

In what ways does utilitarianism fail to put enough emphasis on the subject-object dichotomy?

First, there is the calculation problem. Every single person and faction of society has different utilitarian calculations that would be “best” for their own lives. A lot of Utilitarians get caught up in failing to recognize that corruption within a society is “morally good” from the perspective of the corrupt people. Corruption is cooperation in such contexts. Utilitarianism also implies that I should sacrifice my own well-being if there are situations where it would benefit everybody else. It depends on the situation of course, but I wouldn’t do that in most cases. Fortunately, I rarely face dilemmas where I have sacrifice my own self-interests. I do cooperate with others, but those relationships are reciprocal chains of giving and taking.

The Connection Between The Various Types Of Utiliarianism With The Various Types Of Hedonism

Question	Mainstream	Efilism	Zero Contradictions
If Life Violent?	It shouldn’t be	Yes, and life is worse thing ever.	Yes, but this isn’t necessarily a “bad” thing.
Hedonism/Utilitarianism?	Positive & Negative Utilitarianism	Supremacy of Negative Utilitarianism	N/A, they balance out, and it’s subjective.
Altruism?	Yes.	Yes, absolutely.	No, because nature is intrinsically selfish.

Most people and all Efilists are Utilitarians. The difference is that most people will assign some value to positive hedonism, whereas Efilists will assign either no value to positive hedonism or value it as completely subordinate to Utilitarianism (Positive Hedonism is only valuable if Negative Hedonism is satisfied). In addition, Efilists recognize that life is inherently violent.

Positive and Negative Utilitarianism only differ by the type of hedonism that they favor. Hedonism is not self-evident.

The following is a list of changes enabled by technology that various moralists would claim to be “moral progress” according to their perceptions of the world.

• Vegan diets only being made possible since humans don’t rely on hunting and gathering anymore, clothing made from plants or plant materials instead of animal hides and fabrics, et cetera (according to vegans’ perspectives).
• Gender reassignment surgeries / sex change operations / hormone therapies that make it possible for gender dysphoric people to change their bodies to be more like the opposite sex and less like the biological sex that they were born to.
• Dating websites and dating apps have made it easier than ever for homosexuals and bisexuals to find a partner, and they are now the leading method for finding a partner in many parts of the world.
• Anti-natalists view contraception and abortion as some of the most important technological inventions ever.
• Capitalists view technology favorably because technology has caused capitalism to progress and improve people’s standard of living.

• The technological ability to create synthetic pills that could supply humans with necessary vitamins and minerals that can only be found in animals and not plants (some nutrition-conscious vegans have argued that this should replace eating animal products as the way to acquire those nutrients for humans and other necessarily omnivorous species).
• Ancaps often argue that their fantasy worlds will have amazing technologies like seasteading, blockchains, and more that will enable them to live in a super “ethical” utopia that has never been seen before. But if new/innovative technologies are necessary to make such utopias possible, then hypothetical “moral improvements” like the kinds alluded to by ancaps are only made possible by advancing technologies, as it has always been the case.
• Efilists believe that humanity should destroy the Earth and render it uninhabitable for all sentient life, but this never would have been possible in previous eras because the necessary technology for accomplishing this goal never existed prior to modernity.
• All kinds of Utopian Ideologists want to colonize Mars because it gives them something to work towards as a means of fulfilling their needs for the power process. They also because they perceive Mars as a place of opportunity and free of foreign interference to set up whatever so-called utopia and utopian ideology that they believe in. Examples:
  • Ancaps who want Mars to be a so-called Ancapistan paradise.
  • Communists and Anarcho-Communists who want Mars to be a so-called (Anarcho)-Communist paradise.
  • Some Esperanto Speakers who would like Esperanto to become the language of Mars.

Moreover, it’s extremely unlikely that humanity will ever colonize Mars due to the Laws of Physics and Economic Realities.

• The replacement of monarchies by democracies.
• The abolition of many cruel punishments.
• The progression of human rights (e.g. freedom of expression, right to fair trial, etc).
• The decline of religious persecution, racial segregation, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, etc.
• The decline of European colonialism (it became too expensive to rule overseas colonies, and the local populations began protesting and fighting for independence). It should be noted however that European colonialism seems to have been mostly beneficial in most (but not all) cases since technologies caused declines in infant mortality rates, starvation, diseases, and other factors that have limited the local populations.

Interestingly, anarcho-primitivists are some of the few people who would argue that the progression of technology has actually caused a significant regression in moral progress, whereas virtually everyone else enthusiastically views technology as a way to continue “moral progress”. Besides anarcho-primitivists, some of the most extreme communists and socialists might would believe that humanity has not made much if any moral progress since they hate capitalism so much, even though capitalism has been largely beneficial for humanity.