Knowledge is social and requires a moral system

 

How much do we know?  And how do we know it is true? The things that we know about turn out to be the things we are most familiar with: the state of our bodies, our families, our living arrangements,  our friends,  our pastimes, our communities, and so on.

It’s obvious that no one person knows everything. Since no one individual knows everything, every person depends on many others to get to know more than what they themselves are familiar with. In getting to know, we observe, practice, ask around, take classes, read books, consult Wikipedia, etc.  Every way we come to know outside our own observations and practice involves other people doing the learning or passing on the knowledge to others, who pass it on to others.  Knowledge, therefore, is like a continually developing awareness of reality that expands outward through human social networks.

Perhaps the most important characteristic of human knowledge is that it is highly sharable. Nowadays the scale of society is such that we can conceive of this sharing to involve eight billion people, although we break this “compact”  in times of war and when we are around potential enemies.  The fact that we can share scientific, technical, economic, and general interest kinds of  knowledge universally is an incredible feat. We take this for granted, but we shouldn’t.  Sharing knowledge is the basis for all human societies’ ability to capture resources and energy and thereby continue to grow. The practice of sharing knowledge is what makes the global scale of human society possible.

But why should anyone care about global society?  And anyway, can’t we just keep our knowledge to ourselves? Why indeed, do we share knowledge?  To answer these questions it helps to imagine what it would have been like to live for most of human existence before agriculture was invented, when living in a nomadic foraging group was the only option.

Human evolution largely occurred during the ice ages, a period in which massive amounts of water were locked up in ice sheets, and tropical forests shrank back into “islands” surrounded by dryer savannahs. Nomadic foragers did not have all season access to tropical forests like apes did. In these dryer conditions survival outside the forests was not possible without extensive cooperation. Human hunters needed to share their kill with their neighbours as a kind of insurance, to cover the time when their own hunting was unsuccessful. Likewise, sharing knowledge about food sources, and about dangers, simply made survival for everyone more likely. The fact is, humans have never survived and prospered all on their own.

Humans cooperate on a vastly greater scale than do other types of animals.   But our particularly human type of cooperation is more vulnerable than simpler animal cooperation. Unlike animal cooperation, human cooperation requires active maintenance from everyone in society.

  The basic problem here is that, if people continually take advantage of others' cooperation without themselves contributing, then others will see this and they will tend to withhold their cooperation, in a downward spiraling process that ultimately deprives everyone.  Thus, human cooperation is like a reservoir of water that is there for everyone to partake in, but, if it isn’t protected from exploitation, it can be depleted to the point that it becomes available to no one.

Sharing knowledge is a form of cooperation, perhaps the most important form of cooperation, in the sense that  the human species would not have appreciably grown in size without it.

 Imagine a world where everyone lied whenever they wanted, with no consequences for themselves.  We wouldn’t be able to trust anything anyone said, there would hardly be any point in speaking to each other or correcting someone else’s mistakes. Of course we do not live in such a world, because we largely disapprove of lying, we shun liars, and we embrace truth as an ideal. That’s why we can share knowledge, because we honour the truth and try to avoid falsehoods.  And, as much as we can, we try to prohibit lying in public. This implies a moral system where lying is disapproved of and sometimes punishable.  In society we value the truth and see no value in falsehoods except for aiding in criminality. 

A moral  system is a collective enforcement system that makes human knowledge and human cooperation possible.  In great ape social groups the incentive to share knowledge is low, because it usually means that the dominant animal will take advantage of the knowledge sharer and shut them out of the benefits of their knowledge.

 It’s important to realize that the concept: “human cooperation” is an abstraction of a process which is quite often not directly visible without our making an inference. That likely means that it didn’t evolve by people asking others to “please cooperate with me!” It could have started when a group all realized  that they could attain a valuable goal by working together to achieve what individuals couldn’t attain  by trying on their own.  Male chimpanzees' cooperate in hunting monkeys, as well as in defending against predators, such as boa constrictors and leopards. But human cooperation is on an entirely different level.  Unlike apes, human cooperation is sustained beyond responding to random opportunities or dangers, and it functions on a vastly larger scale.

 To initiate a process is one thing, to keep it going is entirely another. Human cooperation is a common resource that is protected by everyone. It’s everyone’s job to protect human cooperation, which we all do by virtue of being a part of a moral system.  By living in a moral system and committing to it, it’s everyone’s job to condemn and refrain from immoral acts. Living in a moral system is the active way that we facilitate our cooperative nature. So how does this work in practice? 

First, there is no boss. No one person or association can be in charge of morality because that is not how morality works.  If there were one person or one association in charge of the moral system, that would tip the scales in favour of one group and destroy the impartial nature of morality. The moral system requires impartiality, the quality of not favoring or disfavoring people arbitrarily within a society.  Otherwise the moral rules do not get general assent.  To commit to being a member of a moral system is, in effect, the same as committing to be a member of society. By implicitly agreeing to being a part of a moral system we agree to each becoming equally subject to the moral rules.  Once we commit to the moral rules we know to follow them in order to avoid harming others, and we are motivated to enforce the rules and recruit others to help in  enforcing the rules.

This "absence of a boss”,  is always true of self-organizing systems, systems that maintain themselves spontaneously from the bottom up, without a hierarchy.  A murmuration of starlings is also self-organizing.   One could say that they fly in formation when enough of them are committed to flying together.  The system works  right up to the point where the majority of the  birds abandon flying together.This is kind of conventional behaviour on the part of starlings.  It doesn’t require a  previously existing intentional structure, it simply arises spontaneously.

In the absence of morality, it always boils down to coercion - the stronger rule the weaker and coerce them, as it goes in the rest of the animal kingdom.  When this happens, the kind of cooperation unique to humans becomes untenable.

A moral system is the default mode in order for human cooperation to be possible. But unlike animal forms of cooperation, to be in a moral system is a lifetime commitment.  Morality isn’t just a  convention because it isn’t optional.  To opt out of the moral system is to opt out of society, to become an outlaw.