The Moral Arc

58. See, for example, McCullough, Michael. 2008. Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. The neuroscientist Daniel Reisel draws three lessons from his fifteen years of work with serial killers and psychopaths: (1) We need to change our mind-set about incarceration. “The moment we speak about prisons, it’s like we’re back in Dickensian—if not medieval—times. For too long we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded of the false notion that human beings can’t change, and, as a society, it’s costing us dearly.” (2) We need transdisciplinary research from multiple fields to work on the problem: “We need people from different disciplines, lab-based scientists, clinicians, social workers and policy makers, to work together.” (3) We need to change our mind-set on prisoners. If we see psychopaths as irredeemable, how are they ever going to see themselves as any different? Wouldn’t it be better for psychopaths to spend their time in jail training their amygdalas and generating new brain cells? goo.gl/VYaGA

12: PROTOPIA: THE FUTURE OF MORAL PROGRESS

8. In researching his 2010 book What Technology Wants, for example, Kelly recalls that he went through back issues of Time and Newsweek, plus early issues of Wired (which he cofounded and edited), to see what everyone was predicting for the Web. “Generally, what people thought, including to some extent myself, was it was going to be better TV, like TV 2.0. But, of course, that missed the entire real revolution of the Web, which was that most of the content would be generated by the people using it. The Web was not better TV, it was the Web. Now we think about the future of the Web, we think it’s going to be the better Web; it’s going to be Web 2.0, but it’s not. It’s going to be as different from the Web as Web was from TV.” How does this type of technological improvement translate into moral progress? Kelly explains (goo.gl/LhfbMS):

One way to think about this is if you imagine the very first tool made, say, a stone hammer. That stone hammer could be used to kill somebody, or it could be used to make a structure, but before that stone hammer became a tool, that possibility of making that choice did not exist. Technology is continually giving us ways to do harm and to do well; it’s amplifying both … but the fact that we also have a new choice each time is a new good. That, in itself, is an unalloyed good—the fact that we have another choice and that additional choice tips that balance in one direction towards a net good. So you have the power to do evil expanded. You have the power to do good expanded. You think that’s a wash. In fact, we now have a choice that we did not have before, and that tips it very, very slightly in the category of the sum of good.