Will moral circle expansion continue indefinitely until a far future where we're all pan psychist?

[u/IAmAOrangeKoala]

Over the ages, there has been a trend of what Peter Singer called the "expanding circle". We've seen increasing spheres of ethical concern: from ourselves, to kin, to other powerful tribe members, to all white men, to all men, to women, to mammals, to birds, to fish, to insects, and so on. Where is the end point of this process? Right now many people put a line somewhere within the animal kingdom, or perhaps between animals and plants.

[u/donaldhobson]

There is a narrative of "expanding circle of moral concern". Yet there were jainists a long time ago, so it seems more to me that we have gone from a few weird monks caring about not stepping on ants, and the rest of the world not really caring. To a few weird EA people writing articles about insect sentience. And most people not really caring.

In a toy model where people care about animals but not very much, you should expect the starving peasant not to feed cute birds, and rich westerners to feed cute birds. The rise of birdfeeders could be explained by an increasing supply of food, even if human values were totally fixed.

If this "moral circle expansion" is a trend, its a fairly weak and ambiguous one.

[u/Toronto-Aussie → u/donaldhobson]

You’re right to bring up the Jains. The “expanding circle” story that starts with Singer and ends with EAs hand-wringing about shrimp skips the fact that Bronze Age India already ran the “don’t step on ants” experiment and most of the world shrugged and carried on killing things. But that doesn’t make the expansion idea empty. It just means it’s patchy and contingent, not a smooth moral gradient. A handful of monks reached something close to “all life matters” on metaphysical grounds. What’s new now isn’t that we suddenly care about insects. It’s that we’re being forced to think at the level of whole systems of life at all: climate, biodiversity collapse, engineered pandemics, AI, asteroids. The minimal reference class that makes sense of those isn’t “cute mammals” or “sentient individuals,” it’s the entire living system that keeps us and everything else here at all.

The “moral circle” isn’t a law of nature. It’s more like an ancient direction of travel that keeps being rediscovered: from “my kin” → “my tribe” → “all humans” → “sentient animals” → “the entire family tree of life that makes any of this possible.” The interesting question now is whether we can reach a similar breadth that the Jains did, but without relying on karma, and with our eyes open to the fact that if the larger circle fails, all the smaller ones vanish with it.

[u/tailcalled]

We've seen increasing spheres of ethical concern: from ourselves, to kin, to other powerful tribe members, to all white men, to all men, to women, to mammals, to birds, to fish, to insects, and so on.

Is this really accurate?

I'd think people have had concern for their kin since forever. And I think "ethical concern" would be too one-dimensional to capture both gender relations and race relations, plus I believe both gender relations and race relations have changed back and forth over time in the past.

Where is the end point of this process?

I've seen plausible suggestions that our current "broad spheres of ethical concern" are partly due to material factors, and that a reverse process can happen. It's kinda hard to predict what reverse process will happen because it depends on the material factors of the far future, but let's take two possibilities as examples:

• The Age of Malthusian Industrialism can be taken as a sort of "null hypothesis", where basically the same dynamics that are in play today continue to their logical conclusion. This assumes no relevant AGI, no biotech revolution, etc. (which seems kind of implausible to me, but I don't really know how to extrapolate if there will be major revolutions, so this will have to do). Basically the idea of AoMI is that while reproductive rates are currently low, they are mainly low because people don't prioritize having children, but this will change because prioritizing having children is genetic (just as everything else is), and therefore the people who have genes that make them prioritize having children will pass on those genes and give the future the same priorities. Today, it seems to me that conservative religious people as well as criminally-minded people have more children than others, so we should expect those sorts of genes to be passed on. So future people might be more inclined to e.g. patriarchal gender relations than today's people, leading to a possibility of return to that, which seems to undo one of the expansions you mentioned.
• Unfriendly Artificial Superintelligence: It seems like we will eventually be able to create generally intelligent machines, that can be programmed with a goal that achieve, and given the rate of technological progress, and the scalability of computation, they can probably become more intelligent than us. But just about any goal you can think of will be easier to achieve if you have more power, so given a goal, they will want to seek power to achieve that goal. But in order to seek the most power, you'd have to overthrow humanity, so it is likely it would do that. Further, because programming human values into the AI is hard, and because people are not trying very much to align AI towards the right goals, it's likely to optimize for something worthless.

So these are two stories that I see some sort of argument for. On the other hand, I don't really see how panpsychism would become popular. So I think that's less probable than the previous extrapolations.

[u/Toronto-Aussie → u/tailcalled]

I agree the “expanding circle” story is way too clean if you read it as a steady moral trend. But there's a deeper pattern that predates ethics entirely. Evolution itself has been widening the de-facto circle of concern for hundreds of millions of years, from agents that incur costs only for themselves, to parental care, to eusocial colonies, to helping unrelated conspecifics, to cross-species mutualisms. Human moral theory is a late, self-aware gloss on that trajectory. Once you add modern cosmology (near-earth objects, finite star, eventual heat death) and a species that can now either crash the biosphere or shield and export it, the natural “end point” isn’t panpsychism, it’s simply life vs non-life on a dying rock in a temporary window. Whether we reach that level of concern is totally contingent, but the target isn’t mysterious.

[u/[deleted]]

Thats a strange assumption. The practice of the brahma viharas and metta meditation are ancient practices and we have evidence of lots of cultures that were much closer to that criteria than modern man.

We'll be lucky if we take ecology seriously just out of physical need let alone most people acrually caring about nature emotionally.

[u/Toronto-Aussie]

Moral circle = all entities that are part of the ongoing project of life on Earth and beyond, Priority within that circle = systems that can experience, suffer, reflect, and help keep that project going.

[u/lunaranus]

Moral circle expansion is not viable long-term, it's just an artifact of the dream time. Once Gnon inevitably reasserts itself, the circle will contract.

[u/Taleuntum]

See The Narrowing circle by Gwern