Human Morality: From Evolutionary to Future Perspectives

Yaoqi Wei

doi:10.54254/2753-7064/9/20231113

1.Introduction

Historically, the prediction of morality seems to be an entirely unnecessary topic to study. On the one hand, it was always meaningless. Because of the slow pace of progress and development of the era, usually, the moral system was slow to change. This slow moral evolution created stability, and many problems caused by the change in the moral system were alleviated in this slow evolution process. Hence, people in the past only regarded this process as a necessary part of era development rather than as a process of solving problems. On the other hand, it was extremely difficult to predict the future morality, which requires a great deal of information, including some mainstream ideas, the interaction between different cultural regions, government policies, the general development situation and so on. It made moral prediction virtually impossible on a practical level. However, in the current era, it has become much more convenient to collect all kinds of real-time information, and the amount and level of information that can be collected have been greatly increased, which provides a certain premise for the practicability of moral prediction. And moral prediction is not as unimportant as it used to be. Due to the rapid development of the current era, the evolution of morality has lost its stability. A certain degree of moral prediction for the future can prepare for, or even prevent, problems that may hinder human development. Nowadays, it has become a controversial topic that human labor is replaced by high technology. In the beginning, efficient robots replaced ordinary workers, and in recent years, artificial intelligence replaced human intellectual labor. For instance, the copyright problems and artist unemployment caused by artificial intelligence (AI) painting programs like NovelAi are even minor. The more serious problem is that the development of AI painting will squeeze out new artists to the point where there will be no new experienced artists in the future, which seems to be a kind of destruction of the meaning of art. And ChatGPT, the much-discussed AI language model in 2023. Israel’s president has even used it to generate his own speeches for important meetings. Programmers use it to quickly generate programming copy, students use it to take notes and even do most of their homework directly, academics use it to analyze and generate papers, and the president of Israel even uses it to generate his own speech for an important conference. The trend of substitution of human labor is becoming more and more obvious. Therefore, this paper considers it necessary to discuss the ethical implications of the extreme results of this trend.

It is one of the important purposes of the development of science and technology to replace the human labor process with high technology so that human beings can enjoy the fruits of labor more easily (or even directly). Therefore, after dealing with some necessary contradictions and making enough preparations, human beings will eventually choose to let high technology replace basic human labor, rather than resist its occurrence. This paper tries to explore the ethics of the future when human labor is replaced by high technology based on the theory of morality as cooperation [1-3].

2.Methods

In the past, predicting future morality did not seem to matter to researchers. However, the exponential trend of the era development makes this paper think that it is necessary to make an advanced prediction of morality at a certain stage in the future, which has practical significance. Recent research on moral prediction seems to be more about predicting the formation of individual morality than analyzing future social morality. Moreover, recent ethics studies have focused more on the rationality of certain moral principles than on the impact of these principles on the future of human beings. Morality-as-cooperation, as a new theory of ethics, has not been widely applied, so there are not many applications and analyses of this moral theory, and there is almost no relevant research on moral prediction. Literature referred to in this paper comes from databases ProQuest Central, Elsevier ScienceDirect Journals, APA PsycArticles, EBSCOhost Academic Search Ultimate, and Sage Journals, which selects part of the research on the nature of moral principles mentioned in the theory of morality as cooperation, and excludes the part that explores the rationality of these principles. The following search terms, as well as their derivatives, were entered: Group loyalty, reciprocity, fairness, property right, morality as cooperation, and human values. Literature was included if they: (1) were related to morality principle or human values, (2) were peer-reviewed, (3) analyzed the nature of the term, (4) had enough supported pieces of evidence.

3.Literature Review

3.1.Reciprocity

Reciprocity (Exchange) is likely to be changed, considering the complexity of the “desert” itself. Then, in addition to people’s expectations for “help” and “return” will be reduced or becoming clear, people’s “help” and “return” will also have a tendency.

The change in perceived value will affect people’s definition of value in “help” and “return”. Due to the multi-dimensional nature of the exchange, people tend to be more forgiving when helping others or giving something in return. “Multi-dimensional” makes value complex and ambiguous, so people think less about their losses when they think about the benefits [4-6]. The changes in perceived value, including the loss of some of its dimensions, can make “value” more transparent. This means that it is easier for people to anticipate their own utilitarian benefits before they can help.

Then in that era, most people will have almost reached saturation in the two levels of physiological and safety, so they basically focus on high-level abstract requirements [7-10]. It is likely to present a tendency for people are more likely not to ask for material return (desert). In combination with the above discussion, the unconscious and accidental goals of today’s human beings will probably become more of the conscious goals of the age discussed in this paper, which is a major shift in the mechanism of motivation [11,12]. Overall, this paper predicts that the act of help will receive higher praise because its selflessness will be more easily verified due to the empathic awareness of the act of help, even though the helper is not altruistic [13]. A society that is highly altruistic in its pattern of manifestation will emerge.

3.2.Fairness, Doves and Hawks

Fairness (division) seems to be fundamentally touched. Desert and needs, which are two of the determinants of fairness, will be affected [14,15]. In the current era, the proportion of the perceived value of labor is extremely high, and its decline is likely to directly change the expression model of the principle of fairness(division).

Similar to fairness, the principles of doves and hawks are impacted. In relation to these two principles, people’s moral behavior of rational distribution by comparing strength and weakness is affected [16-19]. These three principles are intrinsically related to the principle of distribution, so this paper tends to analyze them together. In the context of the era in which this article is set, it was difficult for most people to be distributed through “labor value”. Some cultures with liberalism or individualism as the main body advocate justice in return; Some collectivist cultures (such as China) pay more attention to overall efficiency and will take more consideration of equal justice, looking for the point between equal justice and reward justice that can provide overall efficiency [20-23]. However, in the era analyzed in this paper, it seems that efficiency is no longer important, while equal justice will become the mainstream at the same time, because reward justice, which is an important consideration, has become equal justice to a large extent after the loss of people’s labor value. People lose an important area of contrast, namely the display of value through various kinds of labor. The parts that people usually use to compare strengths and weaknesses can be divided into controllable areas and difficult areas. Apparently, most people will favor society to pay more attention to controllable areas, because it can better alleviate the problem that the desire of people for something is not equal to their right to get it [24,25], which can better maintain fairness. Therefore, this paper claims that people will look for some new value-controllable areas as the performance of these three principles. Furthermore, people will tend to find those areas in belonging, esteem and self-actualization aspects [9,10], which are what they relatively need. Trying to briefly analyze the effect of labor values on human needs, human labor can certainly meet the physiological and safety needs of people. Any aspect of labor can provide people with healthy food and comfortable housing. With these basic conditions, it is easier to be protected by law and society. Then the value of labor has even penetrated into the latter three spiritual levels. When people communicate, their labor status and achievements always unconsciously affect people’ self-esteem and belongingness needs. Try to imagine people’s attitude towards a beggar and the attitude of a lowly worker. Even though the beggar seems to have more free time to satisfy his spiritual needs, it is quite possible that the worker still gains far more spiritual needs than the beggar. Labor is an important behavior mainly to create physiological needs and safety needs, and most people have some of this ability. What would be a substitute for the value of labor, in which the main purpose is belonging and self-esteem, and the differences in all aspects are within the acceptable range of human beings? This article can only give such an abstract answer.

3.3.Kinship

Kinship is conceptualized by blood relationship in morality-as-cooperation [2,3], which precludes the idea that adoptive parents may also be in the analytical range of familial moral principles. And consideration of adoptive parents falls under the principle of reciprocity (exchange) in the theory of morality as cooperation [26,27]. Therefore, this principle is not affected by the situation set forth in this review.

3.4.Possession

Possession is the moral principle relating to the possession of resources and is always associated with “first”, such as the first to acquire, develop, discover, invent, and so on [1-3]. Historically, social institutions have also had a strong influence on possession [28], but the discussion of social mechanisms seems far removed from the situation discussed in this article. Therefore, this paper does not discuss it.

4.Implications

This paper is a practice the theory of morality as cooperation, discussing a very specific and seemingly remote case. Different from the traditional analysis perspectives, this article can provide a new perspective on the practice of ethics. In terms of content, this paper makes a certain prediction of an event which is very likely to happen in the future and has a great influence on human ethics [29]. In addition to the vision of a future “ostensibly altruistic society”, there is a bold qualitativeness and analogy of what will replace the value of labor in the future [30]. It can interact with other research to bring clarity to what is currently an abstract and vague concept. To make this prediction perfect. The rapid development of modern science and technology determines the rapid change in morality. It is an important question whether human beings are still qualified to choose the slow transformation of the moral system as before, which also determines the value of moral prediction research.

5.Conclusion

In conclusion, in the social conditions where human labor is replaced in all aspects, the principles of reciprocity, fairness, doves and hawks in the theory of morality as cooperation have some impacts on the moral form of human beings. The principle of reciprocity predicts the emergence of an apparent altruistic society after the highly developed material conditions of human life. The mainstream view of the existing research on altruism is that whether an act is altruistic should be judged by its motivation. However, the motivation for helping here is obviously not altruistic for some people. It just makes it more likely that the behavior is altruistic by making this selflessness hard to disprove. Maybe in the future, people will define altruism and these kinds of behaviors very differently than they do now. Principles of fairness, doves and hawks predict that people will choose a non-physical layer of a very controllable aspect to replace the original demand status of labor value in order to achieve fairness. It is important to emphasize that the definition of “controllable” here mainly refers to whether people can develop and acquire this value more equally. It is hard to imagine a value based on self-esteem and a sense of belonging rather than physical and safety needs. In addition, it is also possible that people will try to maintain “labor values” because they cannot find alternatives. What is certain, however, is that the “labor value” maintained here is probably already approaching the abstraction discussed above in nature.

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Cite this article

Wei,Y. (2023). Human Morality: From Evolutionary to Future Perspectives. Communications in Humanities Research,9,58-63.

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Volume title: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Educational Innovation and Philosophical Inquiries

ISBN：978-1-83558-041-7(Print) / 978-1-83558-042-4(Online)

Editor：Javier Cifuentes-Faura, Enrique Mallen

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Volume number: Vol.9

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