In this post, I’ll describe features of the moral system that I use. I expect that it’s similar enough to Robin Hanson’s views I’ll use his name dealism to describe it, but I haven’t seen a well-organized description of dealism. (See a partial description here).
It’s also pretty similar to the system that Drescher described in Good and Real, combined with Anna Salamon’s description of causal models for Newcomb’s problem (which describes how to replace Drescher’s confused notion of “subjunctive relations” with a causal model). Good and Real eloquently describes why people should want to follow dealist-like moral system; my post will be easier to understand if you understand Good and Real.
The most similar mainstream system is contractarianism. Dealism applies to a broader set of agents, and depends less on the initial conditions. I haven’t read enough about contractarianism to decide whether dealism is a special type of contractarianism or whether it should be classified as something separate. Gauthier’s writings look possibly relevant, but I haven’t found time to read them.
Scott Aaronson’s eigenmorality also overlaps a good deal with dealism, and is maybe a bit easier to understand.
Under dealism, morality consists of rules / agreements / deals, especially those that can be universalized. We become more civilized as we coordinate better to produce more cooperative deals. I’m being somewhat ambiguous about what “deal” and “universalized” mean, but those ambiguities don’t seem important to the major disagreements over moral systems, and I want to focus in this post on high-level disagreements.
Continue Reading