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This is a great post. However, it seems also that it is impossible to build the world based solely on official policy and law. We need people to continually mak

This is a great post. However, it seems also that it is impossible to build the world based solely on official policy and law. We need people to continually make moral decisions in their own lives, to the best of their ability. This involves making sacrifices and ignoring incentives at times. How do we find this balance? I'm not sure. I think we may always be searching for it.

dcow 9y ago
This is were abstractions like religion come into play. Unfortunately it's taking awhile for them to modernize and adjust to the point where they're culturally relevant again so we can stop socially shaming people who participate in religious groups/orginaizations. But I do believe we as a society have, of late, over-zealously crusaded against the religious archetype in a rather naive stance that science will lead the way...
TeMPOraL 9y ago
I agree. What I mean is recognition of human nature. We do respond to incentives, there's no working around that (at least for now; maybe we'll have some mind-engineering tech in the future). We want people to do good, and to achieve this we need to both strengthen individual sense of morality and shape the incentives and engineer systems that protect from pressure - because we recognize no human is immune to incentives. Will we find the right balance? I don't know, but I certainly hope so. The balance we have now is dynamic - people do bad things, but not enough of them to cause a societal collapse. Incentives are recursive, too - institutions are formed not out of abstract thinking, but because there were enough bad things happening on that some people had a powerful incentive to stop them.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  Fully agree, I just wanted to stress both aspects. I do think the systemic and incentive based side of things is more difficult to understand, so it's good to articulate those concepts. Either way, I think it's important to keep having these conversations.

dcow 9y ago

This is were abstractions like religion come into play. Unfortunately it's taking awhile for them to modernize and adjust to the point where they're culturally relevant again so we can stop socially shaming people who participate in religious groups/orginaizations. But I do believe we as a society have, of late, over-zealously crusaded against the religious archetype in a rather naive stance that science will lead the way...

TeMPOraL 9y ago

I agree. What I mean is recognition of human nature. We do respond to incentives, there's no working around that (at least for now; maybe we'll have some mind-engineering tech in the future). We want people to do good, and to achieve this we need to both strengthen individual sense of morality and shape the incentives and engineer systems that protect from pressure - because we recognize no human is immune to incentives. Will we find the right balance? I don't know, but I certainly hope so. The balance we have now is dynamic - people do bad things, but not enough of them to cause a societal collapse. Incentives are recursive, too - institutions are formed not out of abstract thinking, but because there were enough bad things happening on that some people had a powerful incentive to stop them.

dwaltrip 9y ago
Fully agree, I just wanted to stress both aspects. I do think the systemic and incentive based side of things is more difficult to understand, so it's good to articulate those concepts. Either way, I think it's important to keep having these conversations.