Morality and the law

I recently wrote a blogpost which talked about the future of education. In it, I argued online learning can greatly facilitate personalized learning.

You might think that education is the boundary at which my desire for personilization ends. You'd be wrong. Very wrong. I think personalization can be extended all the way to moral theory. Yep, it's gonna be another philosophy post.

Before I get started, let's do some groundwork.

1) I don't think there is any objective morality at all. I think our concepts of justice and equality are manifestations of instincts we've been programmed with by evolution. I don't think there is anything objectively wrong with murder, slavery or adultery.

2) I think environment and biology slowly and subtlety cause cultural changes. In some cases, these cultural ideas can resonate with our biological instincts and cause a culture spiral in a certain direction. For example, violence in men is much more common than it is in women, and this is originally due to biological reasons. However, if a man is indoctrinated by the army at the age of 5, then the cultural values of the army (kill, punish etc) will resonate with the biological instincts of the man, and the end result will be a killing machine. Likewise, the subjugation of women by men originally has biological roots, and can explain slight behavioral differences between men and women. However, if these men and women are exposed to a misogynistic religion, then these cultural values can resonate with biology and create an end culture where women remain completely house locked or covered up.

3) We don't have free will, and a lot of the moral and philosophical ideas we think we have are actually largely determined by our environment, biology and culture. If you were born in central America in the 1700's you'd probably think sacrifices were moral, if you were born in America in the 1800's you'd probably think slavery is moral, and if you were born in New Zealand in 1998 you'd probably think eating meat is the moral equivalent of murder.

Anyway, what does this have to do with personalization?

Well, if we take the utilitarianism stance and define 'moral' as whatever maximizes well-being, and not arbitrary golden rules like equality and freedom, then, in general, it's moral to treat different people differently. This means if you did the calculus and could prove that giving James 2 puddings for desert and giving Mark 1 pudding for desert maximized well-being, then this unequal treatment is moral.

Ideally, if we had the power to do so, we could custom make laws that relate to the individual. It would be a good thing (by definition) if we could hypothetically analyze the brain states of every human in the world, and create potentially different rules for each person such that wellbeing is maximized.

So far, this is very theoretical. Clearly we're nowhere near doing something like this, and I bet the inner George Orwell in us is screaming. But consider how domesticated dogs are currently treated. Labradors are essentially slaves to their middle class masters; they are told what to eat, when to eat and where to live. The temptation to apply the golden rule of freedom doesn't apply to Labradors because we know their wellbeing is maximized by being domesticated house pillows. I'd argue humans are just a much more complicated, harder to control breed of labrador.

Even though the end goal would be to analyze the brain state of each human flawlessly, we don't need to start there. We can iterate our way there by creating rules for smaller and smaller groups of humans that have similar traits. This is actually a non controversial idea: 1) The drinking rules for teenagers driving is different to the drinking rules for adults driving, 2) People who earn over $80,000/year pay more tax than people who earn less than $20,000. Where it does get understandably controversial is if we apply these rules to races. But if we can hypothetically show that one race of people is biologically determined to become addicted to alcohol and heroin, then making a law forbidding that race to have  access to that substance would be moral.

Admittedly, the diversity among humans is remarkably small - we all have the same basic instincts and physical limitations. What I've mentioned above about treating some races differently for being different relies on the assumption that there will be no other uncalculated consequences of such a law. I think history has taught us that identifying difference between people brings out our inner xenophobia which can have disastrous consequences. Since personalization is practically impossible to enforce at this point in time, then equality is definitely the best option for now.