Evolutionary Biology Substrate for Digital Policy: What Regulates the Regulators?

As a lawyer by training, I tend to be interested in what drives and limits human behaviour.

Lawyers are in the business of regulating that behaviour, primarily viewing that question through the lens of legal norms. However what humans can do and what they actually do is also influenced by other factors.

Things That Regulate: After the Fact and Upfront

In his ?Code 2.0?, Lawrence Lessig famously postulated a behaviour-governing quadrumvirate: (1) laws, (2) markets, (3) social norms and (4) architecture (physical and virtual, including computer code).

All four of these forces influence us.

Some — by allowing us behavioural liberty but punishing non-conformity after the fact. These are laws and social norms.

Some — by limiting our liberty and making some behaviour impossible upfront. These are markets and architecture, including computer code. You can’t buy a house you don’t have money for. You can’t fill in a numeric-only field in a form with words or pursue another behaviour that is disabled or not supported by the software developer.

What Do We Regulate?

We understand this and, through our — hopefully democratically formed —? governments, in turn, regulate markets, physical architecture and computer code to the extent it matters to our societies.

But in the end, we regulate human behaviour. Even when governing technology, we regulate not the artefacts per se, but the behaviour of people (and collectives) who build and operate them.

And here is when the importance and genesis of social norms comes to the fore — one of those four behavioural drivers Lessig was highlighting.

Sustainable Regulation Is Morally Aligned

To regulate human behaviour in societies sustainably, we must explore, through empirical research, which regulatory techniques,? incentives and penalties work and which do not.

To do so, we need, among other things, to better understand what people perceive as moral and immoral: it makes no sense to establish man-made rules that go against commonly shared perceptions of what is morally right.

For some time, I was largely basing my assumptions in this field on the work of moral philosophers, where experiments to support or disprove ideas were mostly mental, not anthropological.

But something changed for me at the end of the 2010s.

Morality Is an Evolutionary Adaptation for Cooperation

In 2019, I got acquainted with the work of Jonathan Haidt (and colleagues) and Oliver Scott Curry (and colleagues).

Thanks to them, I discovered how our behaviour and societally predominant moral judgments are significantly explained by evolutionary biology and evolutionary game theory.

Haidt and colleagues postulated the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), while Curry and colleagues postulated Morality-as-Cooperation (MAC).

Both assume that morality is an evolutionary adaptation that aids cooperation within the species. An action is perceived as moral in human societies if it, in the grand scheme of things, facilitates cooperation, a type of non-zero-sum game.

Haidt’s work on Moral Foundations was already a massive breakthrough in explaining all of this to a lot of people, including myself. With Morality-as-Cooperation, Curry and colleagues took the matter further, providing an increasingly refined account of morality, even more coherent internally and with what we observe in societies.

Seven Universal Moral Pillars

Already by 2019, the basic concepts behind Morality-As-Cooperation have been validated on anthropological research data from 60 societies worldwide.

It was found that seven basic forms of cooperative behaviour are considered morally good whenever they arise, in all cultures:

(1) helping kin,

(2) helping your group,

(3) reciprocating,

(4) being brave,

(5) deferring to superiors,

(6) dividing disputed resources, and

(7) respecting prior possession (property).

Prior theories of morality have suggested that some of the above might indeed be moral universals. But nothing before has granted us such a broad overview of these universals in their entirety and not in isolation.

Goodbye to Radical Moral Relativism and Lessons to Learn

You can translate and test this broad theory and each of its seven pillars for your field of expertise.

As an example, lawyers know of ?Pacta sunt servanda?, the by-now universal legal principle which translates as ?Agreements must be kept?. Being guided by the theory of Morality-as-Cooperation, we can explain that the principle has become widely known and universally applied not thanks to a whim of Roman jurists, but rather because it embodies one of the seven universal moral pillars, namely reciprocity.

And, of course, the concluded validation of the above research on empirical data across so many cultures globally leaves little breathing room for the proponents of moral relativism, at least in its most extreme forms.

Humanity does have universal moral principles. Then, if we want to cooperate, we ought to heed these principles, not dismiss them by flimsy relativistic arguments: what is broadly considered cooperative and thus morally good in one place of the world is predominantly likely to be assessed as cooperative and thus morally good elsewhere, across cultures.

Also, we probably want to promote not short-term gains by random actors who capture regulatory attention, but long-term cooperation in our society. If that is the case, we’d better make sure that any newly proposed regulations and policies remain based on the seven above-mentioned moral pillars, appropriately balanced against each other when needed.

I realise that ?appropriately balanced? is the tricky bit. But at least we have a set of principles to filter the most egregiously unfit policies.

Resources to Dive Deeper:

Podcast with Oliver Curry on Morality-As-Cooperation?(MAC)

Oliver Curry and colleagues, MAC research on 60 societies

Richard McElreath, Very Little Evolutionary Game Theory (5 x 2h lectures)

Jonathan Haidt. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion

Jonathan Haidt's Website