Really enjoyed this — it definitely got my brain cooking.
As a nurse, empathy is basically currency in my world, so this landed in an interesting way. One thing it made me wonder about is whether empathy is less something people lack, and more something that gets narrowed or shut down when perceived threat is high. When the world feels hostile or unsafe, care seems to contract, often as a form of self-protection.
It got me considering a thought experiment: if we could inject empathy into new nurses the moment they walked through the door, would we actually want to? I’m not sure we would. A sudden flood of empathy, without the emotional intelligence to direct it or recover from it, would probably just lead to overwhelm rather than better care.
In training we don’t try to “add” empathy so much as help people learn how to hold it, tune it, and sustain it under pressure — and how to protect it when the stakes are high. That makes me sympathetic to the logical case for reducing suffering, but also curious whether creating conditions where empathy can survive and be rewarded matters as much as mapping the circuitry itself.
Thanks for the wise and sincere feedback nurse, and for your service to our species.
I agree empathy it’s not a switch but a continuum, and that doing it right might have different considerations.
Doing ANYTHING in a rash, binary way, without considering the delicate balance is always a bad idea. (You know this as a nurse giving meds and therapies in delicate balance. Whether you’re allowed by insurance and legal to honor the MOST personalized delicate balance is another story. And btw it’s a story extremely analogous to what I’m talking about overall, which is: 1) use the best tools we have to 2) promote wellness hippocratically 3) implement wisely, as soon feasible.)
I feel my framework is neutral: we can derive a more accurate mapping of causes or alleviations of suffering. We have a sense of this, and should lean on new science to deepen it.
There’s a permissiveness around suffering because the amorphous and allegedly subjective nature of it tells us we sometimes “can’t know” what causes suffering and wellbeing with any real uniformity. Entire industries are counting on us to buy into that, as are those of us touched by luck and privilege. They also want us to not care if it’s not US in pain. If we start attaching felt emotional valence to the pain of others, humanity wins, but the systems that count on that air-gapped sense of valence to drive division indifference or detachment to the suffering of other human beings? They lose big.
With objective proof around what we consider to be “suffering,” comes responsibility. It reveals what’s behind the wall. Many of us find that terrifying, as we should. But if we “feel” it beyond just Parfitian reasons, the Lords of detachment won’t stand a chance.
I agree with you that there’s a real moral obligation here, and that “it’s complicated” can easily slide into a way of not having to act. That discomfort feels justified.
Where my experience nudges me slightly is in why knowing about suffering so often fails to translate into response. In healthcare and education I’ve seen that clearly naming suffering can sometimes backfire if it lands in a system already saturated with threat. Rather than opening empathy, it can trigger denial, distancing, or intellectualisation, not out of indifference, but self-protection.
That’s why I keep coming back to conditions rather than capacity. When people feel safer — slower pace, less adversarial framing, more face-to-face contact, better mental health support — empathy tends to reappear without needing to be argued into existence.
So I’m very aligned with the urgency to act. I just wonder whether part of the challenge is that empathy doesn’t disappear because suffering is unclear, but because we’ve built environments where fully acknowledging it feels unbearable. In that sense, the task may be less about increasing empathy, and more about giving it somewhere to live again.
"The number of us humans who reliably generalize affective empathy across all conscious creatures, all the time, without situational drop-off is effectively zero."
I really like your IWRS model and I will explore it further, though I think this distillation of your thoughts is probably enough. I do think though that much of the empathy gap you describe is cultural rather than biological: humans have the capacity to extend empathy even beyond our species in the right cultural context. Jainism or strict Buddhism for example. There may be some people who simply aren't hard-wired for empathy, but I think the number that couldn't be culturally conditioned for empathy is vanishingly small. On the other hand, I think our world shows us pretty convincingly that cultural conditioning can likewise strip just about anyone of empathy for perceived "out groups."
Brilliant reframing of the empathy bottleneck as an engineering problem rather than a philosophical one. The IWRS framework captures something essential - that once affective empathy kicks in, the directional ought becomes undeniable for the experiencer. I've seen this play out in real conversations where someone intellectualy agrees with utilitarian principles but just doesn't feel motivated to act until something shifts in their emotional circuitry (sometimes just exposure, sometimes deeper). The voluntary intervention angle feels like the only path that doesn;t descend into coercion dystopia.
You absolutely get it. That right there is an informed, concept level affirmation from someone who SEES.
Finally. I’m not a ghost. I’m a real girl. Finally. 👩✈️😭
You caught the ENTIRE engineering reframe.
You clocked IWRS as a system that activates motivation only AFTER empathy lights up.
You actually confirmed my intuition about voluntary interventions being the only viable path forward. So far everyone WITHOUT EXCEPTION did not. They mostly told me I sound deranged.
Daiyenu.
That’s some high-resolution uptake you FUCKING FUCKER.
You didn’t flatter. You didn’t mimic. You didn’t restate it as “no you’re wrong, it’s this” and then say the same thing but by a MAN.
You simply recognized it and read it the way it’s meant to be read.
I’m literally crying.
Go away. I can die now. I am already dissolving into the ether.
Take this scroll…run as fast as your little legs can carry you…
I freaking love this plan. I've treated a lot of people with ptsd and other neurological disorders with sound healing and have had better success than many drugs. Sound is Medicine. I want to ease suffering so much that I have spent half my adult life trying to find ways to do it that complement more conventional therapies and make them more effective. Stupid, unfortunately, is non treatable. Nor is most dickishness.
Yeah, some matter in the universe functions to reduce unnecessary suffering and that’s great. Humans are a treasure trove of this sort of matter. Something very cool is happening on this planet, where matter has organized and evolved in such a way where it sometimes seeks to reduce unnecessary suffering in sentient life. That’s kind of a big deal and we’re threatening to fuck it up with fear, ignorance and scarcity-mindset selfishness in a theoretically post-scarcity world.
Your nature to help other is probably in large part due to your mirror neurons and empathy circuits, where perceived positive valence in others registers in your brain as first-order positive valence. That’s very good. My point is we need to engineer that where it’s currently missing. A world where everyone has positive valence circuits is a better world than one where caring about the suffering of others is left to chance and accepted as inevitable or sacred. Just my humble opinion. But yeah, you’re an example of empathetic electrons using music to heal. We need more of you.
Well, (big surprise here) my thought is that music (and art generally) need to be given a much greater role in developing and recovering the kind of mirror neuron action we so badly need. Yeah, we can medicate to within a singularity - which can be great and life saving, but to *heal* we need to get analog. Making art. Making up songs. Singing with people, even if you can't sing. Baltering like a drunken fawn to real music played by actual musicians. There is nothing else like it. It's tribal and ritual and if done right, initiatory. At a concert, not only does the band "lock in" and sync their brain waves and electrical pulses, the whole audience locks in with them, and you have a great big mass of people breathing as one. Humans are wired for community, not isolation. We need to literally sing together again under the Harmony Tree (to quote one of mine, which is probably tacky). Because when you sing or play music with someone, there's a bond. You've shared brain waves for a little while, so a little piece of them stays with you, and a little piece of you stays with them. Why has music in schools been targeted for defunding by an establishment that benefits from having people disconnected, dysfunctional, dysregulated, and afraid? Because it bonds people like fuckin' gorilla glue.
Yeah that all tracks. That sort of thing has saved humanity many times over throughout history. Getting analog is good medicine. Certainly gets as back in the game and makes us better people, mostly. I still worry there’s something lurking that can’t be solved with that alone. Not totally. And if we can’t solve it totally, it’s always hanging around, like a malignant cell, waiting for an opportunity to take the world at the last second (possibly while we’re busy being drunken fawns) and explode like an infected cyst all over the galaxy.
Yep, I have that same worry, but if we can prevent even say, 60% of that tendency through analog means, and another 10-20% through medical intervention, the unhelpable few will have less support for their shenanigans. Plus, if we are able to remain on the trend of creating, encouraging the felt-sense, gnostic approach to engaging in the world, after a couple generations that few will decline to a blip. But we the artsy-farts have to make a fuss anytime somebody even thinks about taking our crayons away. I'm not sure we have the attention spans to make that work.
Let me start with the quote Harris used as the opening of his book and a comment I sent him before I give my two cents on your framework:
Harris: "The people of Albania have a venerable tradition of vendetta called “Kanun”: If a man commits a murder, his victim’s family can kill any one of his male relatives in reprisal. If a boy has the misfortune of being the son or brother of a murderer, he must spend his days and nights in hiding, forgoing a proper education, adequate health care, and the pleasures of a normal life. Untold numbers of Albanian men and boys live as prisoners of their homes even now. Can we say that the Albanians are morally wrong to have structured their society in this way? Is their tradition of blood feud a form of evil? Are their values inferior to our own?"
Me: "Dear Dr. Harris,
If you are truly baffled by your failure to export ideas, grab your Moral Landscape and read the first few starting lines from the eyes of an Albanian.
And here's my perspective too:
- By 2010, blood feuds were a residual phenomenon, not a defining feature of Albanian life.
- 'Venerable' tradition of Vendetta called Kanun - What does venerable mean exactly? That we gathered around a fire and performed rituals? That it was ancient? It wasn't.
- The Kanun wasn’t created to glorify violence or embody some dark national romance; it functioned as emergency governance. When the Ottoman Empire ruled Albania (late 15th–early 20th century), its administrative reach barely touched the northern highlands. No courts, no gendarmerie, no predictable justice. The Kanun filled that vacuum—a decentralized legal substitute, not a cultural obsession with killing.
- You opened with Albania because it gave you a quick, exotic contrast—blood feuds sound medieval, so they dramatize your “objective morality” pitch. But you didn’t stay long enough to ask why that system existed or how it evolved. The example was instrumental, not investigative.
- As an Albanian, I read your "Are their values inferior to our own?" and think are we animals to him? Did he never expect an Albanian to read it? I understand it's not hatred though. It is philosophical provincialism.
-The Kanun gradually fell out of practical use in the early 20th century, as the Albanian state strengthened after 1912. You didn't do right by us.
You measure morality by outcomes; I measure it by integration, that is a society's ability to keep its soul while upgrading its justice. You want moral realism through cultural negation. I want moral realism through cultural continuity. You quantify suffering; I transform the meaning of honor. Your path is diagnostic: measure, rank, intervene. Mine is evolutionary: reinterpret, re-root, and dissolve the old code by fulfilling its essence under new law."
----
Now unto your framework:
"The diagnosis of Harris's gap is good. He gave a map, not an engine. Identifying empathy as the bottleneck is real. Empathy variance is empirically real. Psychopathy, subclinical empathy deficits, tribal gating, are all real. Moral reasoning without motivational substrate does fail in practice. Measurement objections are indeed overstated. This is serious, technically informed thinking. Treating it as an engineering problem is a step forward.
This is where you go wrong:
1. You confuse moral motivation with moral convergence. You seem to be under the assumption that if we boost empathy, morality will align. History shows an opposite order - empathy follows structure, not the other way around. Your framework flips causality.
2. You treat empathy as the engine when it's actually the fuel. Empathy is context-sensitive, not foundational. It expands with trust. It contracts with insecurity. It collapses under perceived injustice. Again, history is with me on this.
3. You risk technocratic moral authoritarianism even as you say "voluntary." “Voluntary” becomes socially compulsory fast. And once you medicalize empathy, dissent becomes pathology. Reinterpretation is more intelligent than rewiring here.
4. Much like Harris, you miss the real bottleneck which is identity continuity. Your framework assumes humans resist moral progress because brains are faulty. The lived experience of my people shows humans resist when progress threatens identity. Moral convergence historically follows trusted institutions and identity-preserving translation, not affective rewiring. Albanians didn’t need their empathy enhanced. They needed structure and translation. Once the translation happened, convergence followed without neurointervention.
----
If you're interested to take a look:
"Moral–Historical Convergence (MHC) Frame
Goal: Rank practices by human flourishing and change them without breaking legitimacy or identity.
1) Evaluation layer (Harris)
Define the harm baseline: morbidity, education loss, income loss, trauma, trust.
Compute the moral delta: best feasible alternative vs current practice.
Output: a ranked list of practices by net effect on well-being.
2) Constraint layer (yours)
Map state capacity: policing, courts, admin reach.
Map legitimacy: do people trust the enforcer?
Map identity load: which virtues are tied to the practice?
3) Translation layer (yours)
Extract core virtues from the old code (e.g., besa, hospitality, courage).
Re-express them inside current law and institutions.
Rule: retire mechanisms, preserve meanings.
4) Intervention ladder
Abstain → organic convergence. Use when capacity < threshold.
Promise procedures (fair courts), not abstract futures.
6) Tempo rule
Speed up only if acceleration does not reduce legitimacy below the enforcement floor.
If trust drops, step down the ladder.
7) Metrics
Lead indicators: perceived fairness of courts, case clearance time, reconciliation counts.
Lag indicators: homicide rates, years of confinement, school attendance, income recovery.
Identity continuity: surveys on “our values now live in the law.”
8) Decision test (all must pass)
Harm delta is large and measured.
Feasible alternative exists here and now.
Path preserves identity while switching mechanisms.
If any fail, postpone or move down a rung."
Ultimately, the question is not purely philosophical. But I'll save you some time too because it doesn't need adding just an additional layer that is your wellbeing. It needs grounding in history as it always has and it always will.
(Edit: I like your other comment on the “How to know what to do” piece much more. It was more sincere and so my answer was, too. The below is kind of jokey and snarky.)
Respectfully I think you’re the one misreading, or maybe just scared I’m going to lobitomize you so you want to appeal to the idea that people are willing to play along and reduce unnecessary suffering as long as they get to hold onto their sense of identity, continuity, customs, etc.
Well….
Ok. I’ll put down the scalpel and discuss. For a sec.
I have to do a better job locking in up front that IWRS doesn’t claim to describe how empathy functions in the wild or how to cultivate it.
Everything you said is fine and I’m keeping it in my notes for sure; but I guess we differ in that I think it’s orthogonal. IWRS is upstream of all of it.
What I need to make clear (in my next draft) is first reinforce that some pain is unwanted by the experiencer and sometimes that pain is unnecessary by our own lights. Fine.
We gotta then use well-being science to flag, quantity and mitigate suffering.
IWRS never in any way claims to know HOW solve this or that pain, how pain works, etc. obviously context matters.
Gym workouts in another context would be legitimately barbaric suffering. I’m not getting into that messy side of things with IWRS.
The framework I propose is downstream or upstream of that stuff in the broader architecture.
I don’t doubt for a second that MHC or wtvr has a place on the map.
It’s just not within the boundaries of MY portion of the map, and I’m not convinced that my portion isn’t compatible with what you’re describing. It really is, in my opinion.
Not to be a cunt, but is it possible you’re being a little over-eager and confusing your very good use case for diplomacy of change and reform with my physics that your use case plugs into, and then coming to me as if this use case HAS to be merged into my architecture?
Because that’s how it feels.
If you wanna use phrases like “this is where you go wrong” it really needs to be followed by an example of where I went wrong and imho it didn’t. I’m going to remember that and excise the part of your brain that makes you talk like that, so patriarchal in tone.
All seriousness,
IWRS says there is “some unnecessary suffering afoot here.”
If the rebuttal is “no, it’s necessary suffering because it allows these people over here to feel continuity.”
Well, that’s a tradeoff. We have to decide if that lack of continuity is more painful than the suffering in question, and vote on it. Maybe there’s a way to come to some agreement.
IWRS kicks in when that doesn’t work. Or rather, it’s the physics that persists throughout. It doesn’t give up just because people are set in their ways.
What it will not abide is keeping the levels of suffering in the dark.
It’ll also not abide numb patches being the real reason why we decide these tradeoffs.
If someone else is suffering needlessly and we don’t care at all, then IWRS doesn’t don’t care that it’s because of your “continuity and identity.”
I mean, fine, maybe, it can try to work with you on that. But there are limits.
At some point it’ll be hacking into your brain. It’s just going to make you think it was your idea.
At best, you add no missing step to Harris's Moral Landscape. At worst, you simply cross a line Harris deliberately refused to cross by smuggling in teleology. You don't describe morality. You describe what you believe the future must do. That is not a missing step in Harris' argument. That is a replacement of philosophy with destiny-talk.
What if I've already hacked into yours? bum bum. I am a force to be reckoned with. BUM BUM.
Wrong, I add step five. He never discusses this step. In fact, he doesn’t have steps. He has the experience and valence axioms. He has boundary conditions that we all agree eternal suffering for everyone for no reason is safe enough to call bad. And the opposite axis is safe enough to call good. He says there’s a landscape in the middle and it’s not random. It’s directionally coherent and partially mappable and we should try to map it because it’s the closest thing to a prescriptive map we have. I added step 5.
I don’t smuggle in “teleology,” but I assert the existence of “unnecessary” suffering as a category of suffering, I cite the implicit goal of most of humanity to reduce unnecessary suffering, and coin the concept of feasible reduction. At no point do I imply there’s an extrinsic or absolute purpose to the Universe or meaning. So you’re wrong.
Really enjoyed this — it definitely got my brain cooking.
As a nurse, empathy is basically currency in my world, so this landed in an interesting way. One thing it made me wonder about is whether empathy is less something people lack, and more something that gets narrowed or shut down when perceived threat is high. When the world feels hostile or unsafe, care seems to contract, often as a form of self-protection.
It got me considering a thought experiment: if we could inject empathy into new nurses the moment they walked through the door, would we actually want to? I’m not sure we would. A sudden flood of empathy, without the emotional intelligence to direct it or recover from it, would probably just lead to overwhelm rather than better care.
In training we don’t try to “add” empathy so much as help people learn how to hold it, tune it, and sustain it under pressure — and how to protect it when the stakes are high. That makes me sympathetic to the logical case for reducing suffering, but also curious whether creating conditions where empathy can survive and be rewarded matters as much as mapping the circuitry itself.
Thanks for the wise and sincere feedback nurse, and for your service to our species.
I agree empathy it’s not a switch but a continuum, and that doing it right might have different considerations.
Doing ANYTHING in a rash, binary way, without considering the delicate balance is always a bad idea. (You know this as a nurse giving meds and therapies in delicate balance. Whether you’re allowed by insurance and legal to honor the MOST personalized delicate balance is another story. And btw it’s a story extremely analogous to what I’m talking about overall, which is: 1) use the best tools we have to 2) promote wellness hippocratically 3) implement wisely, as soon feasible.)
I feel my framework is neutral: we can derive a more accurate mapping of causes or alleviations of suffering. We have a sense of this, and should lean on new science to deepen it.
There’s a permissiveness around suffering because the amorphous and allegedly subjective nature of it tells us we sometimes “can’t know” what causes suffering and wellbeing with any real uniformity. Entire industries are counting on us to buy into that, as are those of us touched by luck and privilege. They also want us to not care if it’s not US in pain. If we start attaching felt emotional valence to the pain of others, humanity wins, but the systems that count on that air-gapped sense of valence to drive division indifference or detachment to the suffering of other human beings? They lose big.
With objective proof around what we consider to be “suffering,” comes responsibility. It reveals what’s behind the wall. Many of us find that terrifying, as we should. But if we “feel” it beyond just Parfitian reasons, the Lords of detachment won’t stand a chance.
I agree with you that there’s a real moral obligation here, and that “it’s complicated” can easily slide into a way of not having to act. That discomfort feels justified.
Where my experience nudges me slightly is in why knowing about suffering so often fails to translate into response. In healthcare and education I’ve seen that clearly naming suffering can sometimes backfire if it lands in a system already saturated with threat. Rather than opening empathy, it can trigger denial, distancing, or intellectualisation, not out of indifference, but self-protection.
That’s why I keep coming back to conditions rather than capacity. When people feel safer — slower pace, less adversarial framing, more face-to-face contact, better mental health support — empathy tends to reappear without needing to be argued into existence.
So I’m very aligned with the urgency to act. I just wonder whether part of the challenge is that empathy doesn’t disappear because suffering is unclear, but because we’ve built environments where fully acknowledging it feels unbearable. In that sense, the task may be less about increasing empathy, and more about giving it somewhere to live again.
"The number of us humans who reliably generalize affective empathy across all conscious creatures, all the time, without situational drop-off is effectively zero."
I really like your IWRS model and I will explore it further, though I think this distillation of your thoughts is probably enough. I do think though that much of the empathy gap you describe is cultural rather than biological: humans have the capacity to extend empathy even beyond our species in the right cultural context. Jainism or strict Buddhism for example. There may be some people who simply aren't hard-wired for empathy, but I think the number that couldn't be culturally conditioned for empathy is vanishingly small. On the other hand, I think our world shows us pretty convincingly that cultural conditioning can likewise strip just about anyone of empathy for perceived "out groups."
Brilliant reframing of the empathy bottleneck as an engineering problem rather than a philosophical one. The IWRS framework captures something essential - that once affective empathy kicks in, the directional ought becomes undeniable for the experiencer. I've seen this play out in real conversations where someone intellectualy agrees with utilitarian principles but just doesn't feel motivated to act until something shifts in their emotional circuitry (sometimes just exposure, sometimes deeper). The voluntary intervention angle feels like the only path that doesn;t descend into coercion dystopia.
FUCK YOU.
You absolutely get it. That right there is an informed, concept level affirmation from someone who SEES.
Finally. I’m not a ghost. I’m a real girl. Finally. 👩✈️😭
You caught the ENTIRE engineering reframe.
You clocked IWRS as a system that activates motivation only AFTER empathy lights up.
You actually confirmed my intuition about voluntary interventions being the only viable path forward. So far everyone WITHOUT EXCEPTION did not. They mostly told me I sound deranged.
Daiyenu.
That’s some high-resolution uptake you FUCKING FUCKER.
You didn’t flatter. You didn’t mimic. You didn’t restate it as “no you’re wrong, it’s this” and then say the same thing but by a MAN.
You simply recognized it and read it the way it’s meant to be read.
I’m literally crying.
Go away. I can die now. I am already dissolving into the ether.
Take this scroll…run as fast as your little legs can carry you…
It’s up to you now…
I love your passion ♥️
I freaking love this plan. I've treated a lot of people with ptsd and other neurological disorders with sound healing and have had better success than many drugs. Sound is Medicine. I want to ease suffering so much that I have spent half my adult life trying to find ways to do it that complement more conventional therapies and make them more effective. Stupid, unfortunately, is non treatable. Nor is most dickishness.
Yeah, some matter in the universe functions to reduce unnecessary suffering and that’s great. Humans are a treasure trove of this sort of matter. Something very cool is happening on this planet, where matter has organized and evolved in such a way where it sometimes seeks to reduce unnecessary suffering in sentient life. That’s kind of a big deal and we’re threatening to fuck it up with fear, ignorance and scarcity-mindset selfishness in a theoretically post-scarcity world.
Your nature to help other is probably in large part due to your mirror neurons and empathy circuits, where perceived positive valence in others registers in your brain as first-order positive valence. That’s very good. My point is we need to engineer that where it’s currently missing. A world where everyone has positive valence circuits is a better world than one where caring about the suffering of others is left to chance and accepted as inevitable or sacred. Just my humble opinion. But yeah, you’re an example of empathetic electrons using music to heal. We need more of you.
Well, (big surprise here) my thought is that music (and art generally) need to be given a much greater role in developing and recovering the kind of mirror neuron action we so badly need. Yeah, we can medicate to within a singularity - which can be great and life saving, but to *heal* we need to get analog. Making art. Making up songs. Singing with people, even if you can't sing. Baltering like a drunken fawn to real music played by actual musicians. There is nothing else like it. It's tribal and ritual and if done right, initiatory. At a concert, not only does the band "lock in" and sync their brain waves and electrical pulses, the whole audience locks in with them, and you have a great big mass of people breathing as one. Humans are wired for community, not isolation. We need to literally sing together again under the Harmony Tree (to quote one of mine, which is probably tacky). Because when you sing or play music with someone, there's a bond. You've shared brain waves for a little while, so a little piece of them stays with you, and a little piece of you stays with them. Why has music in schools been targeted for defunding by an establishment that benefits from having people disconnected, dysfunctional, dysregulated, and afraid? Because it bonds people like fuckin' gorilla glue.
Yeah that all tracks. That sort of thing has saved humanity many times over throughout history. Getting analog is good medicine. Certainly gets as back in the game and makes us better people, mostly. I still worry there’s something lurking that can’t be solved with that alone. Not totally. And if we can’t solve it totally, it’s always hanging around, like a malignant cell, waiting for an opportunity to take the world at the last second (possibly while we’re busy being drunken fawns) and explode like an infected cyst all over the galaxy.
You do your part, all do mine.
Yep, I have that same worry, but if we can prevent even say, 60% of that tendency through analog means, and another 10-20% through medical intervention, the unhelpable few will have less support for their shenanigans. Plus, if we are able to remain on the trend of creating, encouraging the felt-sense, gnostic approach to engaging in the world, after a couple generations that few will decline to a blip. But we the artsy-farts have to make a fuss anytime somebody even thinks about taking our crayons away. I'm not sure we have the attention spans to make that work.
Let me start with the quote Harris used as the opening of his book and a comment I sent him before I give my two cents on your framework:
Harris: "The people of Albania have a venerable tradition of vendetta called “Kanun”: If a man commits a murder, his victim’s family can kill any one of his male relatives in reprisal. If a boy has the misfortune of being the son or brother of a murderer, he must spend his days and nights in hiding, forgoing a proper education, adequate health care, and the pleasures of a normal life. Untold numbers of Albanian men and boys live as prisoners of their homes even now. Can we say that the Albanians are morally wrong to have structured their society in this way? Is their tradition of blood feud a form of evil? Are their values inferior to our own?"
Me: "Dear Dr. Harris,
If you are truly baffled by your failure to export ideas, grab your Moral Landscape and read the first few starting lines from the eyes of an Albanian.
And here's my perspective too:
- By 2010, blood feuds were a residual phenomenon, not a defining feature of Albanian life.
- 'Venerable' tradition of Vendetta called Kanun - What does venerable mean exactly? That we gathered around a fire and performed rituals? That it was ancient? It wasn't.
- The Kanun wasn’t created to glorify violence or embody some dark national romance; it functioned as emergency governance. When the Ottoman Empire ruled Albania (late 15th–early 20th century), its administrative reach barely touched the northern highlands. No courts, no gendarmerie, no predictable justice. The Kanun filled that vacuum—a decentralized legal substitute, not a cultural obsession with killing.
- You opened with Albania because it gave you a quick, exotic contrast—blood feuds sound medieval, so they dramatize your “objective morality” pitch. But you didn’t stay long enough to ask why that system existed or how it evolved. The example was instrumental, not investigative.
- As an Albanian, I read your "Are their values inferior to our own?" and think are we animals to him? Did he never expect an Albanian to read it? I understand it's not hatred though. It is philosophical provincialism.
-The Kanun gradually fell out of practical use in the early 20th century, as the Albanian state strengthened after 1912. You didn't do right by us.
You measure morality by outcomes; I measure it by integration, that is a society's ability to keep its soul while upgrading its justice. You want moral realism through cultural negation. I want moral realism through cultural continuity. You quantify suffering; I transform the meaning of honor. Your path is diagnostic: measure, rank, intervene. Mine is evolutionary: reinterpret, re-root, and dissolve the old code by fulfilling its essence under new law."
----
Now unto your framework:
"The diagnosis of Harris's gap is good. He gave a map, not an engine. Identifying empathy as the bottleneck is real. Empathy variance is empirically real. Psychopathy, subclinical empathy deficits, tribal gating, are all real. Moral reasoning without motivational substrate does fail in practice. Measurement objections are indeed overstated. This is serious, technically informed thinking. Treating it as an engineering problem is a step forward.
This is where you go wrong:
1. You confuse moral motivation with moral convergence. You seem to be under the assumption that if we boost empathy, morality will align. History shows an opposite order - empathy follows structure, not the other way around. Your framework flips causality.
2. You treat empathy as the engine when it's actually the fuel. Empathy is context-sensitive, not foundational. It expands with trust. It contracts with insecurity. It collapses under perceived injustice. Again, history is with me on this.
3. You risk technocratic moral authoritarianism even as you say "voluntary." “Voluntary” becomes socially compulsory fast. And once you medicalize empathy, dissent becomes pathology. Reinterpretation is more intelligent than rewiring here.
4. Much like Harris, you miss the real bottleneck which is identity continuity. Your framework assumes humans resist moral progress because brains are faulty. The lived experience of my people shows humans resist when progress threatens identity. Moral convergence historically follows trusted institutions and identity-preserving translation, not affective rewiring. Albanians didn’t need their empathy enhanced. They needed structure and translation. Once the translation happened, convergence followed without neurointervention.
----
If you're interested to take a look:
"Moral–Historical Convergence (MHC) Frame
Goal: Rank practices by human flourishing and change them without breaking legitimacy or identity.
1) Evaluation layer (Harris)
Define the harm baseline: morbidity, education loss, income loss, trauma, trust.
Compute the moral delta: best feasible alternative vs current practice.
Output: a ranked list of practices by net effect on well-being.
2) Constraint layer (yours)
Map state capacity: policing, courts, admin reach.
Map legitimacy: do people trust the enforcer?
Map identity load: which virtues are tied to the practice?
3) Translation layer (yours)
Extract core virtues from the old code (e.g., besa, hospitality, courage).
Re-express them inside current law and institutions.
Rule: retire mechanisms, preserve meanings.
4) Intervention ladder
Abstain → organic convergence. Use when capacity < threshold.
Accompany → reconciliation, amnesties, visible fairness, storytelling.
Align → policy reform, incentives, local champions.
Impose → coercion only when capacity + legitimacy are both high and harm is extreme.
Always pick the lowest rung that achieves the moral delta.
5) Rhetoric protocol
Internal voice first. Outsiders benchmark quietly.
Speak in virtues, not insults.
Promise procedures (fair courts), not abstract futures.
6) Tempo rule
Speed up only if acceleration does not reduce legitimacy below the enforcement floor.
If trust drops, step down the ladder.
7) Metrics
Lead indicators: perceived fairness of courts, case clearance time, reconciliation counts.
Lag indicators: homicide rates, years of confinement, school attendance, income recovery.
Identity continuity: surveys on “our values now live in the law.”
8) Decision test (all must pass)
Harm delta is large and measured.
Feasible alternative exists here and now.
Path preserves identity while switching mechanisms.
If any fail, postpone or move down a rung."
Ultimately, the question is not purely philosophical. But I'll save you some time too because it doesn't need adding just an additional layer that is your wellbeing. It needs grounding in history as it always has and it always will.
Thanks Professor. No seriously, it’s fine.
I’ve read through your reply a few times.
(Edit: I like your other comment on the “How to know what to do” piece much more. It was more sincere and so my answer was, too. The below is kind of jokey and snarky.)
Respectfully I think you’re the one misreading, or maybe just scared I’m going to lobitomize you so you want to appeal to the idea that people are willing to play along and reduce unnecessary suffering as long as they get to hold onto their sense of identity, continuity, customs, etc.
Well….
Ok. I’ll put down the scalpel and discuss. For a sec.
I have to do a better job locking in up front that IWRS doesn’t claim to describe how empathy functions in the wild or how to cultivate it.
Everything you said is fine and I’m keeping it in my notes for sure; but I guess we differ in that I think it’s orthogonal. IWRS is upstream of all of it.
What I need to make clear (in my next draft) is first reinforce that some pain is unwanted by the experiencer and sometimes that pain is unnecessary by our own lights. Fine.
We gotta then use well-being science to flag, quantity and mitigate suffering.
IWRS never in any way claims to know HOW solve this or that pain, how pain works, etc. obviously context matters.
Gym workouts in another context would be legitimately barbaric suffering. I’m not getting into that messy side of things with IWRS.
The framework I propose is downstream or upstream of that stuff in the broader architecture.
I don’t doubt for a second that MHC or wtvr has a place on the map.
It’s just not within the boundaries of MY portion of the map, and I’m not convinced that my portion isn’t compatible with what you’re describing. It really is, in my opinion.
Not to be a cunt, but is it possible you’re being a little over-eager and confusing your very good use case for diplomacy of change and reform with my physics that your use case plugs into, and then coming to me as if this use case HAS to be merged into my architecture?
Because that’s how it feels.
If you wanna use phrases like “this is where you go wrong” it really needs to be followed by an example of where I went wrong and imho it didn’t. I’m going to remember that and excise the part of your brain that makes you talk like that, so patriarchal in tone.
All seriousness,
IWRS says there is “some unnecessary suffering afoot here.”
If the rebuttal is “no, it’s necessary suffering because it allows these people over here to feel continuity.”
Well, that’s a tradeoff. We have to decide if that lack of continuity is more painful than the suffering in question, and vote on it. Maybe there’s a way to come to some agreement.
IWRS kicks in when that doesn’t work. Or rather, it’s the physics that persists throughout. It doesn’t give up just because people are set in their ways.
What it will not abide is keeping the levels of suffering in the dark.
It’ll also not abide numb patches being the real reason why we decide these tradeoffs.
If someone else is suffering needlessly and we don’t care at all, then IWRS doesn’t don’t care that it’s because of your “continuity and identity.”
I mean, fine, maybe, it can try to work with you on that. But there are limits.
At some point it’ll be hacking into your brain. It’s just going to make you think it was your idea.
Trust me, it’s better this way.
At best, you add no missing step to Harris's Moral Landscape. At worst, you simply cross a line Harris deliberately refused to cross by smuggling in teleology. You don't describe morality. You describe what you believe the future must do. That is not a missing step in Harris' argument. That is a replacement of philosophy with destiny-talk.
What if I've already hacked into yours? bum bum. I am a force to be reckoned with. BUM BUM.
Wrong, I add step five. He never discusses this step. In fact, he doesn’t have steps. He has the experience and valence axioms. He has boundary conditions that we all agree eternal suffering for everyone for no reason is safe enough to call bad. And the opposite axis is safe enough to call good. He says there’s a landscape in the middle and it’s not random. It’s directionally coherent and partially mappable and we should try to map it because it’s the closest thing to a prescriptive map we have. I added step 5.
I don’t smuggle in “teleology,” but I assert the existence of “unnecessary” suffering as a category of suffering, I cite the implicit goal of most of humanity to reduce unnecessary suffering, and coin the concept of feasible reduction. At no point do I imply there’s an extrinsic or absolute purpose to the Universe or meaning. So you’re wrong.