What people think of morality is actually a combination of two traits:
- an understanding of needs. needs (and by extension, desires) are present in every interpersonal dynamic. Knowledge of what actions can either alleviate or further harm those needs lays the groundwork for a person’s ability to act morally or morally. Without this, a person doesn’t have a choice. They are amoral, purely animalistic in their intent
- altruism. This is someone’s willingness to give up their own power. Someone can have a high understanding of needs but without any altruism, their actions will default to being asocial immoral. Though their cunning allows them to act against morality, they can’t help that they are unwilling to give up their power. In the extreme case, we call these people psychopaths
morality matters
society is becoming a technological dystopia driven by good intentions. Observe that many people in tech and science are on the autism spectrum. Though some of them are very altruistic, autistic people struggle understanding people’s needs. The sciences, for all the good they produce, are largely amoral
but, it is a flaw in human leadership at scale that drives the divide between an oblivious technological elite (who often thinking they are helping) and the remainder of the world. At a small scale, altruism is an asset. As scale grows, altruism becomes a liability. Asocial immorality helps leaders deceive and outcompete their opponents at scale. And CEOs are notorious for being psychopathic
despite the obvious insight that centralized systems are cancerous to human society in every form (government, corporations, organized religions) and are leading us astray from a society driven by morality, you could argue that asocial immorality is just a more sophisticated version of amorality. There is nothing inherently immoral about the centralized forces that drive the decay of our human society, it is just an extension to the already amoral natural laws that govern biology, physics, and mathematics. But in removing asocial immorality from the bucket of immorality, we are left with a definition that is much more pure and distinct from amorality
conscious immorality
a person can be capable of understanding the needs of someone else and also have it in them to be altruistic. If that person then acts immorally, they have violated morality consciously. This is an issue so serious that it’s the only thing that pissed off Jesus in the Bible. We commonly refer to conscious immorality as hypocrisy
amoral people are benign friends and acquaintances. Asocially immoral people are dangerous people to become emotionally or financially beholden too. But the consciously immoral —hypocrites, are the worst of them all because hypocrisy is an infectious with a long road to recovery