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Moral intuitions are evolutionary bugs, not features we should trust
Our moral intuitions evolved for small-scale hunter-gatherer societies and systematically mislead us in modern contexts. Research shows people consistently make irrational moral judgments based on irrelevant factors like physical disgust, in-group loyalty, and temporal proximity. The trolley problem experiments demonstrate how arbitrary contextual details override consistent ethical reasoning. We condemn distant factory farming while eating meat, support harsh punishment for statistical crimes while ignoring systemic issues, and prioritize identifiable victims over statistical lives - even when the numbers clearly favor helping more people anonymously. Behavioral studies reveal that moral decision-making follows the same biased patterns as financial choices: we're loss-averse about moral 'purity,' we discount future moral consequences hyperbolically, and we're influenced by framing effects that have nothing to do with actual outcomes. Just as we've learned to use systematic approaches in medicine and engineering rather than trusting gut instincts, we should rely on consequentialist frameworks and empirical evidence for moral decisions. Effective altruism demonstrates how data-driven approaches can allocate resources to save more lives than intuition-based charity.
Moral intuitions are evolutionary artifacts that often mislead modern ethics
Our moral intuitions evolved to help small hunter-gatherer groups survive, not to solve complex ethical dilemmas in modern society. Research in behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology shows that these intuitive moral responses often lead us astray when dealing with contemporary issues like global poverty, climate change, or AI ethics. For example, studies demonstrate that people feel more compelled to help one identifiable victim than thousands of statistical victims - a bias that makes no logical sense but reflects our ancestral environment where we only interacted with people we could see. Similarly, our intuitive sense of fairness often focuses on intentions rather than outcomes, leading to support for policies that feel morally satisfying but produce worse results for everyone involved. When designing ethical frameworks for modern challenges, we should rely more heavily on empirical evidence about what actually reduces suffering and increases wellbeing, rather than trusting gut feelings that were optimized for a world that no longer exists. This doesn't mean abandoning all moral intuitions, but rather recognizing their limitations and supplementing them with data-driven approaches to ethics.