I was in the market for a new Nespresso machine a couple of months ago. While shopping I found myself standing in the appliance aisle of Target in East Palo Alto staring at the coffee machine I wanted. The device in question cost ~$120 and was surrounded by boxes and boxes of similar bougie devices. Now my partner and I earn fine money; but, I’m a PhD student and $120 is a non-trivial amount of money, so part of me was debating if I needed a Nespresso machine or if we could make do with something much simpler and save the cash when I realized I could just pick the box up and walk out of the store. I live in California where all theft below $950 is a misdemeanor but more importantly, I just knew no one would even look if I simply walked away with the device. If I was worried about offending my fellow shopper, since this is a regular stop of mine, I could easily drive to a different Target and simply steal that machine there. If I believed as it is rumored that Target allows shoppers to steal right up until they cross the threshold into felony I could simply rob a local store which I know I would never go to again or even just never steal again. In summary, whatever “fears” I might have about being punished for this theft, I could have come up with a “solution” to circumvent them with just a few hours of planning. But I didn’t do any of that, instead, I did what I have done my entire life and simply paid full price.
I've been grappling with why I didn’t steal the machine recently. I spend most of my day thinking about how people rationally respond to incentives and my not stealing the coffee machine feels borderline irrational. I know of course that the society I live in is one where high levels of social trust and low levels of crime are essential, but the impact on social welfare from my stealing is close to zero. The only explanation that I can think of is that on some level I view theft, in any form, as morally wrong and therefore something that I simply don’t do. My choice not to steal from a huge faceless corporation was not driven by a cost-benefit analysis. Instead, when I think about stealing, I get the same clammy feeling in my hands that I get whenever I’m about to do or have just done something embarrassing. The act of stealing isn’t just wrong, it's also deeply shameful in a way that I think is hard to articulate in writing. If I did end up stealing it, there is no way I would be sitting here telling you all this story. Not because I thought I would get in trouble but because I would be ashamed that this is something I would do.
In the case of the Nespresso machine it is easy to point to a sort of innate Human morality that views theft as bad, but for much of what I find “moral” or “immoral”, this becomes much more complicated. The lack of any classical-era emancipationists is something that I just cannot comprehend given that slavery - in particular, race-based slavery - is about as close to the pinnacle of evil as I can picture. But, most people in human history simply didn’t care. Even individuals like Marcus Aurelius who I admire immensely held views on slavery and gender that I cannot square with a consistent Human morality. To me the white-collar middle-middle-class bourgeois morality I was raised with feels ~objective~ but the more history I read the more confident I am that it isn't.
The only satisfying explanation for this tension is that morality is narrowly relativist and heavily informed by the socialization we go through as a child. Because what socialization does is inject into our value function a touch of the collective; it forces us to internalize our externalities by creating guilt when we do something selfish or destructive to our group. But what is useful to the group changes with time, often radically so. In short, a lot of what feels central to our understanding of morality can only be understood in the context of the socio-economic fabric of our society.
Ethics of a Modern Life
Most of what I’ve written about so far for Voyagers-Log has been an effort to understand my place in modern society that no one seems to understand. The world is littered with slain gods and smashed idols, but what exactly we should believe in is extremely unclear. I do not have answers any more than anyone else, but I hope the perspective I bring is at least unique. I share it not because I think that it is without error, but because I know it has errors. I believe in strong ideas held loosely and look forward to hearing what others think.
When I look around I see what appears to be an emerging moral system for a world of increasing diversity, economic growth, and personal atomization. It is still extremely nebulous right now - there is no Bible we can reference or Confucius we can turn to for answers - but with every passing year of my life, it appears to become more and more rigid. I want to focus in this essay on three of the more unique beliefs of the ethic of modern life, but it should not be taken for granted that these are the only beliefs. Specifically, these are:
1) Group-level differences can only be the cause of discrimination.
2) Proscribed gender roles are bad.
3) Violence is never acceptable.
If you want, you can think of this essay as an attempt to understand the “why” behind the West’s Sacred Cows.
I’m going to try and justify these, but I wouldn’t be surprised if what I write is offensive to some people for two competing reasons. First, I think attaching morality to material incentives feels “wrong”. Theft isn’t bad because it undermines the ability of Target to generate profits and thus serve my community. It's wrong simply because it is. Trying to explain morality through material forces is almost tantamount to being a Marxist. Perhaps. Second, I think that many people would be fine with viewing other’s morality as the imposition of a self-serving system interested only in its preservation, but the idea that our morality, in particular the relatively new additions to our morality, might also be a response to the incentives we live under rather than some long arc towards justice is deeply offensive. That I can argue something like hierarchical gender isn’t morally wrong in an objective sense, but instead merely harmful to the social organism isn’t something I see much sympathy for in my life. I simply think it is true - offensive or otherwise. There are limits to moral relativism, but they are broad and I’m as hesitant to assume that societies in the past were irredeemably evil as I am to assume countries with whom I differ culturally are now. In brief, I’ve written at length about how incentives influence society and I don't think morality is all that different.
Group-level differences can only be the cause of discrimination.
If you want more of my thoughts on this I recommend you check out either of these two essays. But in summary, it is fundamental to the American legal tradition that group-level differences are sufficient proof of discrimination. For example, the Biden administration's new internet privacy law(American Privacy Rights Act of 2024) requires that any algorithm that creates a disparate impact based on a protected status(race, gender, etc.) must include a report that details the steps they have taken to reduce the negative effects. The logic here is that this disparate impact could only be the result of discrimination consciously or otherwise.
Beyond just the legal system, which is ultimately a reflection of our morality, this belief permeates personal life as well. People feel extremely uncomfortable even thinking about anything that would imply group-level differences. It doesn’t even matter what it is, it could be something as benign as sex differences in competitive chess and I will begin to feel the queasy unwell feeling I do when I consider stealing.
Recently I was going to a restaurant with some friends and one of them made the point that there is information we are almost obligated to do nothing with, for example, racial IQ gaps - I don’t think he is wrong, at least not socially. In a modern diverse country conversations about group-level differences are extremely complicated and we all simply do better when they are excluded. Even my most open-minded friend was recently offended by research that they saw arguing that heritable features of the developing world are keeping them poor(my friend is from the “Global South”). I’ve felt this myself, it is extremely uncomfortable when people say things about White people in front of me, it is really hard to approach a conversation about something as immutable as your ethnic group from anything, but a defensive perspective. So society does better by suppressing these conversations from ever happening in the first place. There is simply no better way to suppress them than to convince people that just noticing differences, even without the risk of punishment, is dirty and only something that an immoral person would do.
For most of Human history, the idea that groups of people differed was fundamental to the way the world was perceived. Ibin Khaldun has an entire section devoted to explaining why both the Black Africans and Slavs are, in short, “the worst”. This was rational in a world with little, elite, diversity. If the purpose is to convince people to fight for the removal of another group, then framing them as less than is exceedingly natural. In a world of atomized economic agents, this framing is catastrophic and so our morality has changed to reflect this new reality. Ability is broadly distributed across the world and companies like Apple and Google benefit from the inclusion of this broad ability. But, since we assign first-order importance to issues of respect, and little feels more disrespectful than having your group denigrated, we are learning slowly that this is morally wrong.
Proscribed gender roles are bad.
As far as I can tell there are no mammals without clearly delineated gender roles. Animals do violate these roles, as people are quick to point out, but the simple requirements of mammalian reproduction mean that to some extent gender roles have to exist - women get pregnant and men do not - or at least they had to. Female contraception, technological advancements like the firearm - as an old saying went “God created men, but Colonel Colt made them equal”, and economic advancements like factory work all leveled the proverbial playing field between men and women for the first time in all of mammalian history. The consequence of this has been a tectonic shift in Human life, a shift I truly believe is larger than the agricultural revolution. In modern life, it is completely unacceptable to argue that people should follow a prescribed path due to their gender. Arguing for gender roles publically in the US is a source of almost unlimited controversy. I don’t have much to say on this other than just observing that it is true. It is driven by the fact that most research indicates gender differences in the things we assign economic value to are minimal - probably non-existent - a society that excludes women is shooting itself in the foot. Our morality reflects this social and economic fact.
Violence is never acceptable.
A couple of months ago I saw this video. It shows a group of climate protestors dumping what appears to be a pink powder all over the case containing the Constitution of the US. Just the other day another video emerged of a similar act of vandalism against Stonehenge. Now it appears both objects were undamaged - thank god - but what struck me in both was the total lack of response. In the case of the constitution, after dumping the powder the protestors stood there while cops just milled around aimlessly unsure of what to do with them exactly. It appears the protestors have gotten felony charges and knowing the Kafkaesque nature of our justice system they will probably rot in jail for decades, good. But this scene should be familiar to everyone. People doing something that is maximally disrespectful, but not technically violent are being treated with kid gloves by everyone around them. Walk to the Caltrain stop in Palo Alto or ride the BART and you will see homeless people making public spaces extremely uncomfortable for everyone else, BUT they aren’t being aggressive so we just ignore them. How else can we hope to live in a society with so much atomization? I can’t get into arguments with people every time they frustrate me. That would be chaos. Instead, we are taught from an extremely young age that engaging in conflict, in particular physical conflict, is morally evil.
Even as was the cast in the video of the Berkely Dean trying to remove a Palestine protester from their property there is a sense of total helplessness. What could Fisk do? The woman was, according to an LA Times article, considering filing charges against him for trying to remove her microphone. Imagine if he had “assaulted” her. Without a state monopoly on violence, nothing we have would last and vigilante justice would be required. So much of our prosperity is built on an abhorrence of violence. Quoting JFK’s 1963 American University commencement speech.
“World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor--it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.”
Conclusion
Tying this back to the introduction. My dilemma of whether to steal the Nespresso machine reflects a deeper truth about morality. Morality reflects not what is best for me, or some objective yardstick, but instead a socialized touch of the collective. My moral system fundamentally reflects those beliefs that best allow the Human social organism of which I am a part to survive, which transcends purely rational individual incentives.
Since the modern world is so unique we similarly have unique beliefs that reflect this new reality. These beliefs are useful and should be maintained, but we should not confuse our shifting beliefs with objective morality any more than those changes during the Axial age brought about by urbanization and agriculture represented some ultimate perfection of Human morality.
The choices we make, whether trivial or profound, are deeply embedded in the moral fabric of our time which is directly downstream from the material incentives of our society. Do not miss the forest for the trees.
