UNR Students for Liberty » Science

Moral Objectivism, Stated Eloquently

Barry Belmont — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 18:31:36 +0000

There are such things as objective moral truths. For anyone who disagrees:

Physicists Study How Moral Behaviour Evolved

Barry Belmont — Sun, 09 May 2010 16:54:07 +0000

This article originally appeared on the physicsworld.com news section [hence, the British-ism in the title]. It is written by Edwin Cartlidge, a science writer based in Rome. For those of you with a particular interest in the ‘game theory’ approach to the development of social cohesion.

Physicists Study How Moral Behaviour Evolved

A statistical-physics-based model may shed light on the age-old question “how can morality take root in a world where everyone is out for themselves?” Computer simulations by an international team of scientists suggest that the answer lies in how people interact with their closest neighbours rather than with the population as a whole.

Led by Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich in Switzerland, the study also suggests that under certain conditions, dishonest behaviour of some individuals can actually improve the social fabric.

Public goods such as environmental resources or social benefits are often depleted because self-interested individuals ignore the common good. Co-operative behaviour can be enforced via punishment but ultimately co-operators who punish will lose out to co-operators who don’t punish because punishing requires time and effort. These non-punishing co-operators then lose out to the non co-operators, or free riders. With free riders dominant the resource is depleted, to the detriment of everyone – a scenario known as “tragedy of the commons”.

How, then, does co-operation arise? Some researchers have proposed that co-operators who punish could survive through “indirect reciprocity”, the idea that working for the common good will enhance a person’s reputation and ensure that they benefit in the future. Helbing’s group, however, has shown that this is not needed for co-operation to flourish.

Emergent phenomena

They came to this conclusion by focusing on how individuals behave with their nearest neighbours, rather than a wider group that is representative of the entire population. Like nearest-neighbour models of magnetism – which are often more realistic than mean-field approximations – they say that this approach captures “emergent” phenomena that would otherwise be lost.

Their game-theory-based model comprises a square lattice of tens of thousands of points, each representing an individual. Each individual could adopt one of four strategies – co-operate without punishing free riders; co-operate and punish (“moralist”); free ride; or free ride but also punish other free riders (“immoralist”). Initially, the four strategies are distributed randomly among individuals and the system evolves to find out which behaviour wins in the long run.

This evolution is influenced by three variables – the fines that penalize free riders; the cost of administering punishment; and the “synergy factor”, which stipulates how much the sum of individual contributions is enhanced by collective action.

The computer program picks an individual at random and calculates how much it stands to gain relative to its four nearest neighbours, given the strategies employed by each neighbour. The exercise is then repeated for the neighbours themselves. The strategy employed by each individual was then modified in light of the success of their neighbours, so that individuals could imitate those who performed better than themselves.

Intriguing results

Running the simulation for up to 10 million iterations yielded some intriguing results. As expected, if the punishment fine to cost ratio and synergy factor were low then everyone would eventually become a free rider, just as moralists would prevail if the fine was set high enough. However, they also found that moralists could win out over non-punishing co-operators even if the cost of administering punishment was relatively high. This was because imitation of better-performing neighbours soon led to small clusters of both co-operators and moralists in a sea of free-riders. With moralists better than co-operators at dealing with free riders they came to dominate, even though they would lose out if placed in direct competition with the non-punishers.

An “unholy collaboration” between moralists and immoralists was also seen whereby individuals adopting these strategies could coexist at the expense of both co-operators and free riders. This, the researchers found, would occur if the cost of punishment was low, the synergy not particularly high, and the fines moderately high. As they point out, this scenario is supported by the real-life existence of immoralists.

New type of collective behaviour

Helbing’s colleague, Attila Szolnoki of the Institute for Technical Physics and Materials Science in Budapest sums up the work, “The contribution of statistical physics to this research field could be to realize that large numbers of players can result in a new type of collective behaviour that cannot be derived from two-player analyses. Computer models can therefore be considered as pre-experiments that help to design more sophisticated lab experiments.”

The team is currently building a laboratory capable of carrying out game-theory experiments with up to 36 people, which should allow them to test the predictions of their model.

Herbert Gintis, an economist and game-theory expert at the Santa Fe Institute and Central European University in Budapest, believes that Helbing and colleagues are right to incorporate small-scale interactions into their model. But he says that they should also factor in genetic relations between people because individuals’ behaviours depend on whether or not they are dealing with a close relative.

While Studying for Biology 481…

Barry Belmont — Wed, 05 May 2010 23:22:06 +0000

My Principles of Animal Behavior class is a wonderfully insightful class. While I was studying for the Final Exam that I have in there tomorrow, I came across the table about the costs and benefits of social living. Maybe someone will find it interesting. If nothing else it’s smirk inducing when we consider topics about how we should wish to model societies (democracy vs tyranny, markets vs something else, etc). We should always remember that deep down we’re animals who are trying not to be.

Taken without permission from Animal Behavior, eighth edition, John Alcock.

Ought From Is

Barry Belmont — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 23:39:45 +0000

I recently wrote the following article about morality for the Sagebrush where I am putting forth the idea that not only can we extrapolate from the the way the world is to the way the world should be, but that we must do this. I am putting forth the radical notion that there is such a thing as “right” and “wrong” answers to questions of morality. As this seems like the kind of group that might have something to add to this, I post the unedited version below:

“If you walked through campus these past two weeks, no doubt you came across that Crazy Screaming Christian Guy (CSCG) telling us that we all “deserve hell.” Alongside CSCG’s claim that homosexuality is like putting gasoline in your exhaust pipe and describing cunnilingus as sticking pineapple pizza up your nose, he pronounced that science cannot address morality, that science deems us all amoral apes with no responsibilities to no one, and that only (his) religion can save us.

Unfortunately, he is not alone in this belief. It’s generally accepted that questions of morality are questions to which science provides no answer. Science may tell us how to get what we want, but it can lay no claim on what we ought to want. More broadly it is thought that the way the world “is” cannot tell us how it “ought to be.”

However, this is completely wrong as all systems of morality are reducible, ultimately, to a concern for the well-being of conscious entities. This concern places “value” on behaviors which increase well-being while decrying those that do not. Since values correlate to the real world effects science can indeed answer these fundamental questions. This is not to say that all possible questions of morality will one day be answered by a supercomputer or derived using axioms or equations, but rather to say that questions of human morality have right and wrong answers.

Some might object that the notion of “well-being” is open to interpretation and it is therefore impossible to develop an objective science of morality. Consider though that “food” is also open to interpretation but there is clear distinction between food and poison. The same logic applies to the concept of “health”: obviously there is a difference between healthy and dead. These differences matter.

And just as there are many ways to become healthy and many kinds of foods, there are many ways to answer moral questions objectively. Just because there are many right answers, does not mean there are no truths to be known, whether it be in studies of health, food, or morality.

Some others might object, wouldn’t an objective study of morality necessitate the exclusion of exceptions? In other words, a universal moral truth can’t admit of any exceptions – if it’s wrong to lie, it’s always wrong to lie. But why should this be true? For example, in the game of chess (a realm of perfect objectivity), a principle like “don’t lose your queen” is a good rule to follow. Sure, there are exceptions, there are times when losing your queen is a smart move, but the fact that there are exceptions does not change the sound principle of retaining your queen.

Not only can science answer questions of morality, it must answer these questions. For too long, the fundamental questions of human well-being have been suffocated by religious dogma (like CSCG says it should remain) and political expediency. This is why we spend more time talking about gay marriage and illegal immigration than we do about alleviating poverty and ending genocides.

It is through science and reason alone that we can come to know and shape all aspects of our world. Simply by admitting this we will have advanced the conversation about morality by millennia.”

A Criticism of Free Markets

Barry Belmont — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:14:32 +0000

This is an adapted excerpt from a larger work of mine entitled “The Evolution of Free Markets.” Please do enjoy.

Critics of free markets generally (and the super free markets of Austrian economics specifically) tend to be of this type:

1) I cannot think of how A would occur on the free and open market.

2) Therefore A cannot occur on the free and open market.

3) Therefore A must be provided by something extraneous to the free and open market.

Practically every objection you will ever hear against free markets will be of this sort. For instance, my first lecture on “anarcho-capitalism” was mostly criticized as “Well, I can’t see how police protection could be provided on the free market. Since it can’t be provided on the free market, the State is thus necessary in order to provide this.” It is a categorical error lacking all meaning since A can be anything: roads, medicine, defense, you name it. There are hundreds of different versions of this basic formula, but I’m telling you right now, not a single one of them is valid at all as a critique.

It’s exactly akin to me saying “I can’t think of how televisions would occur on the free market, hence televisions can’t occur on the free market, thus televisions must be provided by the government. QED.” And this isn’t a facetious example, I honestly have no idea how televisions could come to be so prevalent within modern society. Think of all the things that need to rise with them in order to make them successful: You need various televisions stations with different programs that people want to watch, these programs require actors and directors and writers, but the shows themselves need advertisers and wardrobe and catered food. The executives need fancy offices and need to draft deals to pump information out through the airwaves and the airwaves need to be interpreted by various intermediate satellites and big receivers and there’s tons of computers and infrastructure and…and that’s just to make the complex product of a TV (with resistors and capacitors and liquid crystal displays and built in DVD players and now they’re all flat and pristine), just the product of the TV work. In fact, I doubt there is a single person in the world who know all the ins and outs of making televisions available on the free market, it’s just too complicated. And yet there are televisions.

The beauty of free markets is that it’s one big collective brain (in a metaphorical sense of course). As I have said previously, the free market is nothing short of the sum total of the voluntary interactions of all consenting individuals. What that means is that no single person or group of people needs to hit upon “the” solution for a problem in the market, simply by taking part within the marketplace, every single person is contributing toward progress. The reason this works is because there is no “correct” solution to the problems of the free market. The free market is an optimizing process, not a perfecting process. The difference being that to optimize something means to do the best you can with what you’ve got. Perfection is a completely foreign concept in the market. There is no ultimate goal that the free market strives for. Rewind the tape of civilization and I can guarantee you that the iPod would never again have been invented. This is much like the evolution of species, go back a hundred million years ago and let evolution run its course again – you would never end up with Homo sapiens ever ever.”

Perhaps I’ll share some of it later, such as the comparison of the Invisible Hand with Natural Selection (they’re actually just different embodiments of the same underlying principle of self-organizing systems), but for now, this’ll have to do.

Evolution of Cooperation and Fairness

Barry Belmont — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:49:46 +0000

I know I often use evidence from evolutionary biology to make many of my points. Since we’re not all biology majors, sometimes it may seem a little remote or implausible or downright wrong. Perhaps this little video will highlight a few of the things I talk about. (Bear in mind that studies on monkeys and primates are often excellent examples of what occurred during our early evolutionary history.)

Fox and Friends and Genetics and Ignorance and Some Closet Racism

Barry Belmont — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 03:17:09 +0000

The perversification of the sciences of biology, genetics, medicine, sociology, and psychology, the utter disregard for the institution of acceptance and tolerance, and the disgusting, romping foray into the most shameful shadows of xenophobia that still plague the otherwise noble humanist values to which much of this country suscribes can all be seen in the following fifty-two seconds of unadulterated conservativism-at-its-worse from the show Fox and Friends.

Laugh, cry, and turn away in shame for that biological wonder which lies between his two ears also lies betwixt yours dear reader.