Epistemic status: I think this is an interesting mental model; it’s not a rigorous theory.
Overall, the world has gotten better over time. We, as a society, have made moral progress. We have abolished slavery, advanced women’s rights, and granted universal suffrage in much of the world.
What has driven this moral progress? Some may argue that we have improved our moral knowledge. We used to think slavery was permissible, but later realized that it was not. In this view, over time, we “learn” more about the nature of morality. We then integrate this knowledge into our societies.
The nature of moral knowledge is a complex and ongoing debate. Yet, even if we assume the existence of moral knowledge, it is unlikely that it is the only driver of moral progress.
Moral Bandwidth
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker analyzes the decline of violence over time. The study of violence provides a thorough case study into moral progress more broadly. Pinker argues that the decline in violence has been caused by a number of factors, including economic growth, modern political institutions, and higher education rates.
Better education is conducive with the view that moral knowledge drives moral progress. But why do wealth and liberal institutions drive moral progress?
In my view, it’s because they expand our moral bandwidth — our capacity to take moral action. Humans have limited time and resources. We can allocate some of those resources to producing moral value. For example, we can donate to a charity, work on alleviating some societal problem, or assist a friend in need.
Thinking in terms of moral bandwidth conveys the conditionality of morality. Humans do not take moral actions in a vacuum. We act better, in part, when we have better incentives to act better. We act better, in part, when acting better does not come at a large personal cost. In other words, our practical morality is influenced by our economics.
Our moral bandwidth is a subset of our economic bandwidth. I use the word “economic” in an extremely broad sense. We have limited time, energy, and resources that we can allocate. Some fraction of those resources can be spent on moral actions.
Economic growth has expanded our economic bandwidth, allowing us to fill more of that bandwidth with moral action. Thousands of years ago, we toiled in the fields for 12 hours per day just to survive. Now we run on weekends for breast cancer awareness.
Similarly, modern institutions have created social stability. They grant us rights, protect us from transgressions, and help us coordinate over long periods of time. Social stability reduces how much of our economic bandwidth we must allocate to basic needs. These savings in economic bandwidth can be redirected toward moral action.
Moral Focus
There is simply not enough time in the day to march for climate action, volunteer in the election, and work on vaccine research. We have limited moral bandwidth. How we spend our moral bandwidth is what I call moral focus. I may focus on vaccine research instead of climate change, even though I believe both are important.
“And I took shit for being quiet during the election.
And maybe that’s fair, but I’m a busy guy”.
Roadkill, The 1975
Most of us choose our moral focuses implicitly, influenced by culture or personal experiences. By contrast, Effective Altruism popularized the idea of explicitly choosing our moral focus through cause prioritization. Cause prioritization is the act of comparing different causes to determine where one can most effectively allocate their moral bandwidth.
Moral focus and cause prioritization are subtly different. Moral focus is how we spend our moral bandwidth. Cause prioritization is our analysis, if any, that resulted in our moral focus. Stated again:
Moral bandwidth: our capacity to act morally
Moral focus: how we use our moral bandwidth
Cause prioritization: how we decide how to use our moral bandwidth
Cause prioritization acknowledges that moral focus inherently has an opportunity cost: we are always in triage. To spend moral bandwidth on one issue necessarily means we do not use that bandwidth on something else. The moral implications of that fact are debatable; its existence is not.
Expanding our Moral Bandwidth
When we think about how to improve the world, most of us think in terms of moral focus. We do good things. Effective Altruists realized that the meta-action of cause prioritization has been overlooked; we can do more good by using our existing moral bandwidth more effectively.
But I believe there is another way of doing good that has been equally overlooked: expanding our moral bandwidth itself. We can do good in the world by expanding our capacity to do good, individually and collectively.
Beyond doing good directly, we should become more concerned with the drivers of moral progress, and work on ensuring their continuation. We should build awareness that growth is good, an appreciation of the moral consequences of economic growth, and a vigor in chasing it.
Economic growth and institution-building are not the only ways to expand moral bandwidth. A more widely appreciated strategy is pursuing social justice. Improving minority rights and reducing discrimination expands our moral bandwidth too.
But moral bandwidth does not grow monotonically. It can also decrease. Examples can be drawn from economic recessions, wars, or other events that harm economic or social conditions.
A more extreme example comes from Lucifer’s Hammer. The fictional story follows 1970s Americans after a civilization-ending asteroid impact with Earth. Survivors, who held contemporary ethics, were forced into post-apocalyptic conditions, which required looting and fighting with other clans to survive. At the end of the novel, one clan of survivors successfully beat another in a battle. Unable to integrate the losing clan into their society and worried that they’d be unable to survive the winter, the winning clan decided to enslave the opposing survivors to make ends meet.
“What can we afford?” Senator Jellison asked. His voice was low; conserving energy. “Civilizations have the morality and ethics they can afford. Right now we don’t have much, so we can’t afford much. We can’t take care of our own wounded, much less theirs, so all we can afford to do for theirs is put them out of their misery. Now what can we afford to do with other prisoners? Maureen’s right, we can’t let ourselves become barbarians, but our abilities may not be up to our intention.”
Did these people lose their moral knowledge? Did they change their mind about the ethics of slavery? No. Their economic conditions changed, which drastically shrunk their moral bandwidth. They did not believe what they were doing was ethical, but did it in order to survive. I do not claim that this was or wasn’t permissible, but that it reveals something important about our practical ethics.
That is a dramatic example from fiction. Nonetheless, it conveys the intuition. The line between economics and practical ethics is blurry. Ethical actions are choices. The more empowered or incentivized people are to make good choices, the more they will make those choices. Given that, one of the most important ways in which we can do good is to direct our moral focus toward expanding our moral bandwidth, or preventing it from shrinking.