leviathan-supersystem:

robotlyra:

leviathan-supersystem:

many an edgelord has observed that morality is purely a human creation, and has thus concluded that it must be fake, and lame, etc.

this, of course, misses the whole point- morality is social technology.

imagine a prehistoric community of hunter-gatherers. they’re doing decently for themselves but they have a problem- conflicts in the community keep escalating to violence, even killing. so a moral edict is created- “do not spill blood”- and people following this edict helps to keep conflicts from spiraling out of control, increasing the overall welfare of the community. decades go by, and with the help of the social technology of morality, the hunter-gather community has settled down, developed agriculture, and formed a small early city.

then someone in the community figures out how to drain poison from snakebites, or some other early form of surgery- and a problem emerges, because according to the moral edict, this practice is banned, since it spills blood.

so an underground develops, of people using these banned practices. and the society struggles to stamp this out, and the underground surgeons struggle against this repression- until as a result of the struggle, it is realized that the moral edict is flawed, and is preventing well-being, rather than encouraging it. so the moral edict is revised to “do not spill blood involuntarily,” legalizing surgery, and further improving the well-being of the community.

through this process- a dialectic between hegemony and counter-hegemony, an alchemical process of the conjunction of opposites- the social technology of morality is refined and improved.

both moral realism and moral nihilism stymie this process. we must not fall into the trap of thinking morality is One Definite Unchanging Thing. and we also must not fall into the trap of thinking morality is Fake And Lame And Nothing Matters.

we must remember that morality is social technology, which must be continually revised and rectified, through a repeating process of revolutionary struggle.

Human Morality as the Operating System for the Computer that is Mankind: makes it easier to function understandably, but does best when we upgrade it every so often.

^good metaphor