Humanization

2017/09/27

Related: The Invisible Nation - Reconciling Utilitarianism And Contractualism

Insofar as a species is evolved in a similar enough environment as humanity, that species will be humanity.

Evolution doesn’t know the environment; doesn’t know what conditions are fragile and which aren’t; can’t distinguish specializing and overspecializing. If it’s desirable to be desirable as a cooperation partner, then species will develop ways to signal cooperation, and the easiest way to signal cooperativeness is to actually be/desire to be the ideal cooperator.

If the environment (of cooperation circumstances) are different- if some reasons (conscious or subconscious) to defect have less sway or were never present- then some virtues would never develop.

If multiple technologically-advanced cooperative species1 have roughly the same incentives to defect and are therefore broadly morally similar, maybe they’d all self-modify to adopt any of the others’ virtues that they themselves are missing, in a more hands-on approach to how we try to adapt ourselves around virtue-emotions that turn out to be wrong, recognizing that our implementation of morality can be faulty.


  1. aliens.