Love makes right

08 Apr, 2025

How to generate morals

I don't have a strong sense of what the definition of morals is, so please understand that this is the epistemic status of the following paragraph.

I think I've developed some basic morals, or maybe I've figured out some things that generate morals -- it's hard to tell the difference between the two for me. But, the baseline is that I have something. And I'd like to share this something, as I have found it to be a rather nice and useful and helpful and stress-relieving something. I've been wanting to share this in longform, and Robin Hanson's piece was a nice way to elicit this from me in blog form.

What naturally generates morals

This is a complement to Robin Hanson's recent poast "Might Makes the Best Right". Not necessary imo, but I'd lightly recommend reading that first as good framing/context for my thinking (maybe takes five min, easy to listen to on the Substack app).

(start below after reading Robin's poast)

Robin primarily talks about what the causes are that lead to forming/changing of people's morals. I generally agree with his categorizations, I think.¹ He mentions five such causes:

• Genes: Our DNA encodes some kind of "natural" morality (which he claims is typically not great by default, but can be corrected for by cultural pressures).
• Lore: Cultural transmission of tradition imbues new generations of people with morals from predecessors.
• Crowd: As social creatures, we humans ingest moral systems from those around us, particularly moral systems that are more popular.
• Talk: People share their morals via communication, trying to use evidence/logic/rationality to give a good reason to follow their ideas.
• Might: Groups who defeat others via war and economy get to determine what the moral zeitgeist is by sheer force of winning.

I generally agree with these causes, although they seem to be somewhat overlapping and a few are causal. This is neither here nor there.

Robin is talking about what causes naturally affect human morals, our morals, that we use every day. As a complement/contrast, I'd like to give my opinion on a couple particular causes that I think SHOULD affect our morals: feeling into one's body and love.

Feeling in

I think that there is a pandemic,² and it's name is thinking. I think that there is too much thinking going on in this world. Not that thinking is bad, but that it is bad without moderation and that it is bad if done as the sole tool in the search for happiness. I've searched my whole life (until pretty recently tbh) for more and more and more and more, and I thought that thinking about harder and cooler things would be what brought me joy. Sure, novelty and understanding interesting things brought me joy, but it never really lasts.³ This is where feeling into my body comes in.

It is basically what it sounds like: I am talking about feeling into my body and noticing the sensations that are there. This is luckily very simple and very accessible to each person wrt their body!⁴ I think that this is a great way to be in touch with what is going on experientially in one's own life, directly, through the stimuli that are literally one's experience. By feeling in, I was able to start to understand what might be good or bad, since sensations feels good or bad (or some superposition of good, bad, and some other ~things). Noticing how my body feels has allowed me to learn what I do and don't like.⁵ As a result, I can build some kind of moral system off of this, knowing that others have similar sensation-ful experiences. (A foreshadowing to the next section...)

How did I come across this? This is a large lesson that meditation and its practitioners have taught me! I love mediating for this reason, of many.⁶

One thing to note: feeling in likely won't have immediate insights. It'll just feel like, well, feeling. But it will eventually lead to great things, including good feelings and insight. You have to trust me on this one :)⁷

Love

This one is also simple, but I think that a consistent and earnest practice of love is something that I had to work on developing. I think love is a great generator of moral thought and action. It is a great place to start, and likely does not lead astray, ie I think that it is hard to Goodhart on earnest love.

My Experience

I'll start with the ways that I experience and practice love. The main delineations of love that I practice are:

• Self-love: I've learned to just love myself, and who I am, and the arising of whatever it is that I am. There is probably a better way to describe this.
• Self-compassion: I've also learned to have compassion for myself. This self includes my present self and my past selves. I can see how they struggled and why they thought and acted why they did, and I extend compassion to all these versions of myself, focusing on one or another at certain times.
• Extending this out to others: I am learning to see others as similarly human to me. I recognize (intellectually) that they have some experience of what it's like to be them, and I consciously try to act in a way that is loving and compassionate to others, since I know that they are just a person in the same way that I am just a person. This has helped me develop better relationships with people, learn to not to react so quickly when I am around others, be kind to myself when I do things that I/others don't like, and many other things. This has been very helpful for me :)

Love as a motivating force

Here is a claim of mine about love and human motivation: nearly all motivations are for love of some kind, whether it is recognized as such or not.

I think that people act, deep down, from a place of love for themselves and those dear to them. I am not sure how universal this is, but I want to optimistically (and a la Occam's Razor) make the claim that it is Just Love at the base of it all, all thinking and all doing.

Acknowledging that we are (likely) acting out of love in some form or other is useful, since you know yourself better and can understand why you are so motivated to think or do in the ways you do. Additionally, it is good to intentionally set love as the motivation/impetus behind one's actions, I think. I find that the right thoughts and actions just follow from nourishing love as a source of motivation. As such, I think it is a good axiom for people to follow.

This might sound silly that logical or important decisions should be made with love, but (at this time) I really do think that love is at the core of why we think and do things. If you buy this, then I think it makes sense to acknowledge and stoke this love that has been driving decision-making your whole life.

The impact of living with love

Since starting to act from a place of self-love and self-compassion, I've found it easier to be, like I'm more in flow. Things just seem more apparently right or wrong, and I can just follow through with them. If I make a mistake, I can be compassionate towards myself and those that I may have harmed through this mistake and learn to do better next time, all from a place of love for myself and others. If I happen to make an egregious mistake, I think it's likely that I was not showing myself or others love. (Or maybe I was measuring success in a way that does not promote love and compassion, and this might be something to review, reflect on, and potentially shift as well.)

Self-love and self-compassion have been a wonderful way to live. This attitude has helped me grow by exposing me to situations in which I had never acted on my principles, but rather had just taken the default action, typically driven by one of Robin's causes.⁸

Au revoir. With love,

imit

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the many, many people throughout my life who have shown me love and allowed me to come to a life founded on love. Special thanks to: tasshin, TWIM metta meditation, [redacted person (represented by this song)], and [redacted person (represented by this song)].