The Evolution of Virtue 6

Former student and friend Miranda has been putting me to the task in a long running exchange appended to this post.  I will address two general questions she poses at various points in this and a subsequent post. 

First, if virtuous behavior is selected for, then why does vicious behavior persist?  Why are some of us still tempted to do immoral things and why are some persons so inclined toward immorality that they become tyrants? 

I reply that selection works by favoring traits that are reproductively fit within a distinct environmental context.  The usual term for this is a niche.  Several distinct sets of organisms may be found at different altitudes on a mountain because temperature, moisture, etc., form distinct niches.  Niches may be geographically separated or they may overlap and more than one may be found inside another.  An environmental niche will usually include other organisms in such roles as predators and prey, mates and partners.  Thus, in adapting to a niche one species will often create a niche for another, as a large animal, in making a home in the forest, makes a home for his load of parasites.  Finally, different individuals within the same species will sometimes occupy slightly different niches.  The reproductive interests of male and female are rarely identical. 

The simplest model for understanding how distinct niches can favor both morality and immorality is the infamous prisoner’s dilemma.  This is a simple game in which two players have each the choice to cooperate or defect.  Here is the payoff matrix:

The game produces a paradox.  In a single round, each player does better by defecting regardless of what the other player does.  In an extended series of rounds, both players do better by cooperating.  That is the logic of justice. 

In a famous tournament involving computer programs that consisted of strategies for playing the game, the most successful strategy was called Tit For Tat.  This program always begins by cooperating and then on each subsequent move it mimics what the other player did on the last move.  TFT wins by forming cooperative partnerships with any player inclined to cooperate and by punishing defectors (as well as limiting they damage they can inflict).  TFT is the simple logic of righteousness in exchanges.  The unrighteous, always-defect hawks fare poorly against a population of honest cooperators. 

TFT also creates a niche for the saintly, always-cooperate program, which prospers when it is playing with TFT.  However, this in turn creates a niche for the occasional hawk who makes out like a bandit when he encounters a saint. 

Replace points with offspring and this provides a model for the evolution of virtue.  Honest cooperators are stronger, collectively, that dishonest defectors.  However, the more successful that an honest community becomes, the more it leaves a niche for the conman who can effectively exploit the trust that the cooperators have achieved.  That is why most people are not very good at cheating and why no human community is free from cheats. 

Christopher Boehm argues in the second chapter of Moral Origins that, while our moral emotions keep us in check most of the time, the temptation to cheat when we think we can get away with it is also selected for.  This seems to me to be right. 

Not So Electric Cars

As Orco roars through the Dakotas, dumping white powder on my sidewalk faster than I can shovel it off, it occurs to me that this might be the first time that I have ever been on a first name basis with a snow storm.  It took the weather channel rather a long time to figure out that it could goose a little more drama out wind and ice by giving storms names that sound like Japanese monsters.  

I don’t really mind the blizzard, much.  In fact, it looks to me like the Good Lord’s way of declaring an impromptu holiday.  Of course, I don’t have to go out to plow roads or look for stranded cars driven by folks who ignored the no travel warnings.  Perhaps the unlucky drivers didn’t have cell phones or just had stupid cell phones.  My smart phone has been texting me daily with warnings about blizzard conditions.  It’s sort of like having a portable mom.  

I also don’t have an electric car.  In particular, I don’t have a Tesla Model S Sedan of the sort recently tested by New York Times reporter John Broder.  There are several reasons I don’t have one.  The first is that the luxury vehicle would be affordable for me only if I didn’t eat or make house payments for about two years.  Another reason is that I find it hard to see the sense of a car that takes an hour to refuel, or recharge as it were, even if charging stations were available in this area.  They aren’t, and I very much doubt that they will be anytime soon.  

Broder took the car on a drive from Washington DC to Delaware and discovered that electricity evaporates much faster than gasoline.  The onboard computer, apparently not as helpful as my smart phone, promised him a lot more miles than it could deliver.  As the juice ran out, he was instructed to drive rather more slowly than the flow of traffic and, sorry, turn off the heater.  Over a cold night, the car lost two thirds of its charge.  The next day, after a full charge, it shut down leaving Broder stranded and cold on the side of the road.  When the tow truck arrived, it turned out that the brakes wouldn’t release without power.  He had to wait for forty-five minutes while the car was dragged onto the flatbed.  

There is a lot of mystery in a hundred thousand dollar car that performs like it was cursed by some ancient god.  One mystery is why anyone is building electric cars.  Yes, they are quiet and produce no carbon emissions while you are driving them.  But the electricity that turns the engine while you have some of it left wasn’t produced by unicorns pushing a pinwheel.  Nor are the batteries and expensive components made out of tofu.  Every stage of production and operation requires inputs of energy and will produce carbon emissions and waste.  Those will determine what the environmental footprint of the car really is.  

Another mystery is how the car comes to exist in the first place.  When a company invests millions in producing a sophisticated vehicle, it is usually because it expects to make millions selling them.  Maybe Tesla really expects to sell its cars, starting out at $60,000, in numbers sufficient recover its costs.  What the business model looks like, however, is a device for milking enormous amounts of federal cash.  In 2010, Tesla obtained a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy.  Such largess is one reason that the Sedan was built.  Another, probably, is the rule passed in Sacramento requiring auto companies to produce “zero emission” cars.  

There is nothing wrong with government investments in new technologies.  Funding research is one thing, however; funding the creation of an industry that is not now and may never be ready to survive in the marketplace is something else.  We ought to care about the environment.  Caring, however, will not solve any environmental problems nor will such problems be solved by sparkling ideas unmoored in reality.  

My RAV 4 has a tailpipe, God forgive me, even if it is reasonable fuel efficient as such things go.  I can be reasonably certain that it will start up tomorrow and that there will be as much gas in the tank as there was when Orco arrived.  Now, if I could only get it out of my driveway. 

Social Security & Carbon

I have so far avoided explicitly political questions on this blog, but I have always planned to post on issues involving technology and the environment.  Here is a sample. 

It has occurred to me that the Democratic Party is dramatically at odds with itself concerning energy and the environment.  On the one hand, Democrats are almost exclusively concerned about climate change.  The failed cap and trade legislation pursued by the President in his first term is one example.  The federal mandate on light bulbs is another.  All policies proposed to curb carbon emissions work (if they did or could work) to curb energy consumption. 

On the other hand, the Democratic Party is much more firmly committed to maintaining and increasing federal spending.  This is especially true when it comes to the major entitlement programs.  It seems obvious that the Democrats will do whatever is necessary to prevent any significant reductions in entitlement spending.  I could point out the problems in fiscal logic involved here, but I will focus on something else. 

More and more over time, federal spending has become and will increasingly become devoted to maintaining consumption.  The whole point of most social policy and particularly of entitlements is to make sure that as many people as possible have as much to spend as possible.  Social Security directly funds consumption.  Medicare and Medicaid make it possible for people to get medical care without diverting their resources away from consumption. 

The result is that more people have more floor space, comfortably heated and well lit.  They have more cars and fuel to put in the tank.  They have more wealth to spend on trips about the country, in RVs or airliners, to see the grand kids or visit the Grand Canyon.  This is pretty obviously a good thing as far as it goes. 

However, consumption requires production and production requires the extraction and burning of energy.  Not all the energy efficient light bulbs or all the hybrid vehicles encouraged or mandated by federal law will count as anything next to the consumption levels that our social policies are designed to maintain.  If we know anything about energy use, it is that every increase in energy efficiency is more than matched by an increase in energy use in bigger houses and kitchens, larger TVs and more devices. 

The social policies that the Democrats religiously protect fund ever higher levels of energy consumption, thus wiping away whatever good may come from their environmental policies.  If environmentalists were really serious about curbing energy consumption, they would switch to the Republican Party and push hard for entitlement reform. 

Of course, they won’t ever do that.  Environmental politics is, like all politics, polemical.  Polemical thinking makes it hard to reconsider who your friends and enemies are.  That Democrats are the party that cares more about the environment weighs more heavily than the fact that Democrats may not be the party that is actually good for the environment. 

Another reason that the environmental left will not abandon the Democrats is that the Democrats bring clout to the table.  Democrats can actually block the Keystone pipeline.  They can do this in part because they have the unions and the AARP behind them.  It would require amazing courage and imagination to give up that support in order to move toward really effective environmental policy.  Don’t hold your breath. 

I am not saying that we should impose draconian limits on consumption to save the planet.  While it is true that technological innovations favoring energy consumption have so far been outmatched by energy consumption for new and more expensive living conditions, the ratio will eventually shift if technological advance continues at the present rate.  Sooner or later we will be able to live in very comfortable housing at a negligible cost to the environment, if we continue to innovate. 

I just point out a major contradiction in environmentalist support for the Democratic Party at the present time.  Right now, rising consumption in the developing world is the major driver of carbon emissions.  In the US, emissions are rather stable.  This is due to new technologies like fracking.  Still, personal consumption is the major driver of energy use here as well.  Social Security may be good for the elderly, but it is not good for reducing carbon emissions.  Just sayin’.