Life tends to be an evolutionary tautology: that which survives and sustains itself (through fitness) is life, because life is, by definition, that which survives and sustains itself. Unfit ("maladaptive") life-forms eventually cease to bear offspring and slip through the cracks, leaving mere echoes in nature's graveyard. dead men tell no tales they'd say, though tales may be told of dead men. the same theme applies to ideas and character traits, doubly so if these are of genetic origin. Take morality and kindness, for instance.
Imagine a utopia where everyone in the population is kind to one another: when one falls, another steps in to help him up; trust is not even a word in their vocabulary because distrust doesn't exist so they've never had to define it! now introduce one schemer, someone who acts intelligently towards (solely) his own interest. The schemer will eventually game the entire population and if they don't learn to game the schemer (by becoming schemers themselves), they will be overrun. at the same time, if everyone becomes a schemer the population system starts to fail because a lack of victims means that schemes no longer pay off. neither of these extremes are sustainable. The former requires an absolute blissful ignorance (not likely), the latter becomes chaos (likely to fail)
One would think then that life may go on if civilization were to find a stable equilibrium, somewhere in between these extremes. one strategy might be to take the middle ground between morality and intelligence: you start off giving others the benefit of the doubt and treat them kindly, and reciprocate their reaction from then on. If they don't game you in response to your kindness, you trust them; if they game you, you game them back from then on. According the linked article, this middle ground between morality and intelligence, which lies very close to the heart of"fairness", is a golden rule for behavior, in a game-theoretic way. But in life there are no golden rules. Life's uncaring whims require a jeet kune do approach, a form of no forms and all forms whose roots lie in the golden paradox that "there are no golden rules." or as an older, wiser, less impulsive person might say: "even gold may erode with the ravages of time and circumstance."
It's not unwise to think that what should matter in determining the philosophy you apply to a situation is the totality of the situation at hand: all its specifics and all its context weighed together to devise the most efficient response. but efficiency is a dangerous word: it is always intelligent, but it may or may not be "moral". what happens when morality meets efficiency? can they be reconciled? what would be the essence of an efficient morality? We don't have to speculate, we can see it all around us: individuals banding together, exercising great kindness at local levels (family, friends, tribe, team, country) to advance their own cause but at the same time acting against the cause of others on a global level.
The truth is direct and simple: our own intelligence conspires with our circumstances to circumvent morality when it no longer yields a beneficial return. morality, it would seem, is situation-dependent. at some point it becomes un-scalable: the more people in a population, the harder it becomes to calculate an optimum solution for everyone and the easier it becomes to revert to self-interest.
Our chosen philosophical oxymoron of the day, efficient morality, would exist perhaps on the verge just before morality fails (as an adaptive strategy to life). Past that point lies a slippery slope to a cynic's Pyrrhic wet dream: an ocean of schemers.
The point of failure cannot be maneuvered solely by attempting to inculcate kindness in humans; a hungry man is an angry man. Biological impulse wins that race by a mile. We can, however, attempt to control the conditions that destabilize the verge IE to balance our behaviors we must attack the circumstances that generate them. in boring physical terms this means we must balance the supply and demand for resources by 1) controlling population growth and 2) working on new technologies to better provide (food, energy) for the population. this sounds neither noble nor glamorous, but it is necessary. If it's true what the cynics say -that moral actions barely exist outside the forms of a facade, a conspicuous commodity exchanged for kudos in the modern world- then as populations continue to grow, putting pressure on resources and making it impossible to provide for everyone, it is not improbable that we as a civilization are nearing a point where morality fails.
