Ordinary Banana

The brain seems to be a sort of hard limit on the space of "reasonable" ethical stances a person can hold. The vast majority of ethical stances originate with an honest impulse that "this thing is/feels good and true, to me." What happens if you can modify what "feels ethical"?

The sorts of biological modifications we can make on ethical positions seems limited inherently by how our brains operate. The easiest manipulation would seem to be manipulating the relative weight of a "core" ethical impulse, including turning it off entirely.

We must ask: what are the atomic ethical impulses built into the human brain? Haidt's Moral Foundations seem like a first step. The following are taken as atomic impulses: caring for others, fairness, loyalty to tribe, respect for legitimate authority, and insistence on purity.

I doubt that Moral Foundations is a totally correct analysis of human ethical impulses (caveat: I have no evidence and am not an expert), but it's sufficient for play. What sorts of ethical frameworks might develop if you take one foundation as primary? What if one disappears?

A playful example: what happens if fairness is elevated over the other values? Perhaps a naive version of communism, in which everyone moralizes each other into accepting their fair share and filling out their (collectively managed) bureaucratic forms completely accurately. Idk!

But brains seems more complex than Moral Foundations. Do people have a whole separate set of impulses governing their feelings about sexuality than their feelings about, say, income? Evidence from this weekend suggests Yes. More evidence: sexual ethics texts like The Bro Code.

What behavioral domains are we "hardwired" to treat differently? As per "Elephant in the Brain", @robinhanson might say that sex, social status, and politics are the "three games". Maybe they each have different rules.

Religions seem to make a distinction between the "three games" of sex, social status, and politics, so perhaps ethical thought should as well. I imagine some western philosophy considers this, but I'm not aware offhand of any that does so clearly (if you have it, send pdfs).