Moral aesthetics

Different groups have different cultures or aesthetics about what a good person is like, and what things it’s good to pay attention to.

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The other day I came across the lyrics to “How Can I Keep from Singing,” a song that strongly evokes the days when my moral system was mostly shaped by Quakers. It wasn’t originally a Quaker song, but the theme of calm resistance to adversity resonated.

“What though the tempest loudly roars?
I hear the truth, it liveth
What though the darkness round me close?
Songs in the night it giveth.”

It struck me how much the emphasis of my moral life has changed since the time when Quakerism was the main culture anchoring my morality.

The Quaker ¹meaning UK and coastal US Quakers – there are also evangelical Quakers with a different aesthetic style emphasized:

• Slow, deliberate pace (of daily life, and of social change)
• Material simplicity, wariness of novelties and fancy stuff
• Discernment of what you’re supposed to be doing with your life done by listening for what God / the universe is leading you to do
• Looking to wisdom from the past for guidance
• Connection with those you help – helping someone is an important opportunity to connect personally with them, and being in “right relationship” with others is as important as helping them materially
• Sense that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice” so you can work on problems you’re called to, and other people can work on other problems, and it will all come together eventually
• Peace / opposition to violence  – in personal life, and in participation in larger systems like incarceration and the military
• Optimism and trust

Many Quaker groups spell these out in sets of queries that you’re meant to reflect on regularly. Some of them I find really beautiful: 

• “How do I maintain simplicity, moderation, and honesty in my speech, my manner of living, and my daily work?”
•  “Where there is distrust, injustice, or hatred, how am I an instrument of reconciliation and love?”

Problems that Quakers²Meaning UK and coastal US Quakers – there are also evangelical Quakers with a different aesthetic worry about more than other people (or at least did 15 years ago when I was paying attention):

• Living in a country with the most military spending in the world
• Paying taxes that fund the military
• Divisions between people in their local community (gentrification, divisions between different social groups, etc)
• Personal environmental effects, like reducing waste and reducing personal carbon footprint
• Using language that reinforces harmful patterns (e.g. someone “fighting cancer” reinforces violence; “blacklisting” reinforces racism)

Now the moral culture I’m most familiar with is that of effective altruism. It doesn’t exactly disagree with Quakerism about much, but the emphasis is on very different things:

• Using time efficiently
• Prioritization
• Bifurcated approach to frugality – either particularly frugal or particularly ready to calculate the value of an hour and spend a lot on Ubers and such
• Discernment of what you’re supposed to be doing with your life done by analysis and working out your comparative advantage
• Looking to logic and data for guidance
• Innovation, new considerations
• Ambition – taking on big problems
• Clarity and accuracy of thought and language
• Optimization and striving rather than acceptance
• Skepticism, questioning

Problems EAs worry about more than other people:

• Existential risks from AI or other technologies
• Poverty in far-away countries more than in the local area
• Consuming animal products
• Using their time poorly
• Failing to get enough done on important problems

Some of these problems seem genuinely important to me, and others seem kind of arbitrary. A lot of EAs eat eggs but not meat, though eggs likely cause more animal suffering. A lot of Quakers won’t eat at Chic-fil-A because it’s anti-LGBT, but eat chocolate despite it sometimes being farmed with slave labor.

………

We’re social creatures, and we’re attracted to what people around us regard as good. There are lots of moral issues out there, and we pay more attention to the issues our friends see as important.

Quakers might say that EAs focus too much on concrete results and not enough on intangible effects or their own humanity. EAs might say that Quakers are very nice people who don’t get much done.

It’s worth paying attention to where the moral culture around you places emphasis, and choosing a culture partly based on how well that emphasis matches your own goals.