Excerpt from: Curry, O. S. (2022). Seven Moral Rules Found All Around the World. Living together with Ambiguities: Different cultures and common values? (pp48-60) (Conference organised by Fondazione Intercultura, Florence, Italy, 2-4 September 2021). [PDF]
What does this new science of morality say about how we ought to behave?
Well, given that morality is a collection of cooperative rules, then of course, it is morally good to follow these rules. It is good to cooperate. You ought to love your family, be loyal to your group, return favours, be brave, respect your superiors, be fair, and respect other’s property. And if these rules come into conflict – if you have to choose between different cooperative opportunities, such as helping your family or helping your group – then you ought to choose the more cooperative option, the greater good.
Hence moral problems are empirical problems; moral questions are empirical questions. The question is always “what is the most cooperative move to make in this situation?” And these questions have objectively correct answers – some behaviours really do promote cooperation more than others. Hence we can solve our moral problems using standard scientific method. Faced with a moral problem, we identify candidate cooperative solutions, and criticise and test them. (And we can apply this method universally, to any culture, as long as we remember that different people in different places might face a different set of problems, and have different solutions available to them.)
As with science in general, we may never be 100% sure what the answer is. Our current set of solutions are tentative, they are hypotheses about how to solve our problems. Nevertheless through successive rounds of trial and error we might move closer to the moral truth. For we do not have to stick with the cooperative solutions given to us by nature or culture. We can try (and have tried) to invent new and better solutions – for example the Enlightenment idea of treating people as equals, or the cultural invention of queuing. And when our new solutions are successful, when they provide better solutions to our problems – when, in game theoretic terms, they lead to superior equilibria – then we make progress, moral progress.
This cooperative theory explains why previous moral theories have identified cooperation (social contract theory), stable strategies (deontology), specific character traits (virtue theory), and beneficial outcomes (consequentialism) as important parts of morality. And it explains why each of these theories – because they each focus on some parts of morality and omit others – has run into predictable difficulties. For example, Social Contract Theory focusses on only one type of cooperation – reciprocity – and is criticised for ignoring the rest. Deontology advocates stable strategies that can be adopted by everyone, but is criticised for neglecting their consequences. Virtue Theory celebrates various ad hoc lists of character traits – love, loyalty, heroism – but it doesn’t explain why these particular traits are moral, nor does it explain how to choose between them when they conflict. Consequentialism, meanwhile, focusses on the beneficial outcomes, but is criticised for advancing unstable solutions that, because they are not cooperative, are not considered moral. The cooperative approach avoids all of these problems.
So conventional wisdom is wrong to claim that you can’t go ‘from is to ought’ or ‘from facts to values’ (Curry, 2006). You can go ‘from facts to values’ if you start with the right ‘facts’ – facts about the nature and content of our moral values, facts about what morality is (Sterelny & Fraser, 2016). With this discovery we can solve our most important problems using the most successful problem-solving machinery ever invented – science.