This morning I got to participate in a fascinating debate about reputation and identity on the blockchain which turned into a deeper philosophical discussion about morality. It was a fascinating 2 hour conversation including Vinay Gupta, Xavier Hawk, and other members of the growing Crypto Wednesdays community.
Things got especially heated in the last fifteen minutes when Vinay told me to shut up after I mentioned the role consensus plays in our frameworks for morality.
Starting at 1:45:15, but you can watch the whole thing if you're into philosophical debates and the potential ethical consequences of identity and reputation on immutable blockchains:
I understand and respect why Vinay shut me down so hard and why he spoke of democide, something I've mentioned often in my writing, Just "going along with everyone else" when it comes to what is right and wrong does have serious historical problems to the tune of 260 million human deaths.
I'll still argue that doesn't mean we can ignore aspects of consensus as we construct our moral frameworks and consider how to build systems that will be used in ethical ways while making it difficult to use them in unethical ways. I wanted to write a bit more about this, because that's often what I do with my writing as a form of thinking out loud to better formulate and clarify my own understanding.
I'll also, occasionally, do the classic "google for my opinion and return the first thing I agree with" :)
In this case, I searched for "what role does consensus have in morality" and came up with the first result which was a paper titled The Concept of Moral Consensus, Philosophical Reflections. Here's part of the abstract:
...the basic principles of justice achieve moral viability due to the fact that they are established consensually in the original position and under certain conditions by the persons concerned. Following Rawls’ thesis “that the argument for the principles of justice should proceed from some consensus” ([14], p. 581), other authors have expanded upon the foundational function of consensus, beyond the principles of justice. According to T.M. Scan-Ion, for example, the validity of each moral principle must be attributed to a “hypothetical agreement” ([15], p. 44) which is entered into voluntarily by free and rational persons.
The first phase of this program aims at the transcendental-pragmatic foundation of a criterion for moral Tightness: According to the Diskursethik a norm only has a claim to validity if all those potentially affected by that norm reach (or would reach) agreement as participants in a practical discourse that the norm is valid ([9], p. 76). On the basis of this principle concrete moral discourses are then required in order to discuss and consensually confirm (or not) the validity of individual material norms.
I think this touches on some of what I was trying to get at with my heated debate with Vinay. I've written about aspects of identity, morality, and consensus before:
- Privacy, Identity, and Human Flourishing
- Where Does Your Morality Come From?
- Beyond Cartoon Morality: The World Isn't Bad Guys vs. Good Guys
- What If There Is No Big "T" Truth?
- We Disagree. Are You Ignorant, Immoral, or Stupid?
During the discussion, I don't think I represented myself very well given that both the people I invited to the show (Vinay and Xavier) dramatically and emphatically disagreed when I mentioned consensus in relation to morality. I'm going to try and unpack that a little better here.
Morality doesn't exist without more than one conscious being.
Morality (principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior) and ethics (moral principles that govern a person's behavior or the conducting of an activity) don't make much sense if you're all alone by yourself on an island. They are principles which are worked out over time between sufficiently conscious creatures. To put it simply, as was mentioned in the chat during the show, they are that which supports life.
Even our explorations of evolutionary game theory seem to indicate that cooperative strategies such as tit-for-tat with forgiveness are the most effective strategies for reproducing successfully in any environment, whether it be hostile or friendly. Finding ways to cooperate, while still being able to defend what you value, is how we can reach evolutionary stable strategies.
We don't come up with concepts like "right" and "wrong" in a vacuum.
It's only through repeated interactions with other conscious creatures that we, over time, determine what works and what doesn't. Together, we come to certain universally preferred behaviors which, for the most part, seem to work rather well such as the non-aggression principle which asserts that
aggression, which they define as initiating or threatening any forceful interference with an individual or their property, is inherently wrong. It however faces definitional issues regarding what is understood as forceful interference, property, under which conditions does it apply, and so on. In contrast to pacifism, it does not forbid forceful defense. - Wikipedia
The grey areas among these principles are only determined through trial and error within community consensus.
For example, if someone walking down the sidewalk steps one foot on my lawn, and I shoot them in the head and kill them, it's very probable the members of my neighborhood and local community would hold me accountable for what would be considered murder. If, instead, someone with a dangerous weapon was screaming threats against myself or my family and charging my property with the clear immediate intent to do harm and I fire the same killing shot as they step on to my property, it's equally probable members of my neighborhood and local community would treat me very differently and possibly consider my actions justified as self-defense.
The main facts are the same: foot on lawn, bullet to the head. The intentions of the dead person leading up to that moment do matter and, as with many things concerning morality, are subjectively interpreted by the people involved or who might be impacted by the definitions and outcome of those definitions in the future. Few if any would want to live in a neighborhood where one misstep could mean your death or in a neighborhood where psychopaths could rampage into peoples' homes and kill anyone there without any threat of defensive force.
Voluntary agreements and "concrete moral discourse" (as described in the paper from my google search results) are required to form moral principles that actually stand up to scrutiny. One crazy person can call themselves moral and might even be persuasive enough to convince those in their immediate vicinity to go along with their perspective, but in the globally connected world of today, that's not enough. If a Hitler rises up today with a story behind a moral justification for sending people to gas chambers, the world, I believe, through the process of consensus about what is right and what is wrong will not stand for it! Without an understanding of the role of consensus within morality, any individual person can come up with the worst immoral framework and use it to harm others as long as they can convince themselves they are the righteous actors and everyone else is misguided. A system of checks and balances is required and that comes from consensus. Our laws and constitutions are just written down forms of consensus.
It's our ability to come together to find consensus which will shape our shared, cooperative future. Blockchain technology is an example of the incredible power and economic value behind systems of global, non-violent consensus. When I talk about consensus in terms of morality, I don't mean the all-or-nothing, our-way-or-fork rigidness of the blockchain. I'm going by the "general agreement" definition. Ideas like "murder is wrong" come from our concepts of morality shaped by consensus. Whether or not we like this, it is the reality we live in.
For example, if propagandists can train people to "honor the troops" and salute them as they walk through airports while giving them special attention before sporting events for "fighting for our freedom" then all of a sudden those who murder for the state while wearing a costume are no longer considered immoral. How did that happen? By consensus and the myth of authority. It's only by changing our collective perspectives on war and the military that we might, over time, change the moral consensus about those who participate in these activities.
If you're a strong supporter of the military, maybe this is a bad example for you, but personally I've spoken with enough ex-military personnel and read Smedley Butler's War is a Racket to think the military industrial complex is something, over time, that we as a species will change our consensus on.
Throughout history we see these shifts in the general agreement of right and wrong, as Steven Pinker highlights in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Land owners were considered morally justified in owning human slaves, husbands used to essentially own their wives, and people used to put cats in bags and burn them for entertainment. Public executions were considered entertainment for the whole family with ornate torture devices designed to prolong the suffering.
As a species, we have changed our perspectives on these things, and I think it's due, in part, to our technology allowing us to rise higher up Maslow's Hierarchy with more of us able to consider questions like how to improve the world. We have tools today which never existed before which make networks as efficient as hierarchies meaning consensus can be found as the world transitions towards a global tribe. The tools we have today are dangerous, no doubt, but just like a brick, they can be used to build a house or break a window. How we work together to create consensus and form the right ethical foundations will determine our ability to cooperate effectively in the future.
I know we don't have solutions yet to prevent blockchain-based identity and reputation from being used by bad actors to harm people. I also know we can't stop this information from being collected and stored by bad actors and the surveillance state today either. So what if, instead of acting just out of fear, we took the stance that radical transparency goes both ways and through our formation of consensus, if a bad actor tries to silence or attack someone because they are a threat to the system, the very nature of transparent identity and reputation (which can not be censored) could be used by others as justification to stand up against the oppressor and defend the innocent because the propaganda and lies about them would be that much harder to support.
What if the truth really can set us free?