Morality as Trust at Every Scale - Part 1

Morality often involves the tension between different conceptions of rational self-interest. When you decide to eat a cookie, you're typically prioritizing your present self over your future selves, as almost all the benefits accrue to the present self while the costs are shifted to future selves.

One interpretation is that your present self simply doesn't care about your future selves. A more charitable view is that your present self doesn't trust your future selves enough to make this sacrifice. If your present self could be reasonably confident that abstaining from the cookie now would lead to much healthier, happier, and fitter future selves, it would most likely make the trade.

Our present self is capable of acquiescing to long-term payoffs when the expected value is clearly positive. We willingly submit to the unpleasantness of having our teeth drilled or our wisdom teeth removed because we're certain of the long-term benefits: preventing severe pain, maintaining oral health, and avoiding more serious complications in the future.

However, foregoing the cookie once only incrementally improves your chances of building healthy eating habits. Each of your future selves has to reinforce your present self's choice by making sacrifices themselves until this choice becomes the default (habit). If it extrapolates from how past versions of you have behaved and the strength of its current desires, it seems reasonable for your present self to assume that future versions of you will likely defect in this prisoner's dilemma, making it rational for it to defect as well.

Habit formation, then, is about changing your prior beliefs about yourself or, in simple words, trusting yourself. But to trust yourself, you need evidence, and to build evidence of better behavior, you probably need to behave better. But if you knew how to behave better... you get the drift. We're stuck with a chicken-and-egg problem.

This isn't literally a catch-22 because most of us do build new habits sometimes. One plausible path is to find other ways to convince yourself of your changed identity. This is probably why people report that buying new equipment or clothes often helps build new habits, as they signal a legible change, albeit superficial. Or you could introduce a different physical or psychological payoff to compensate your present self for each time it forgoes the cookie. Or you could somehow break the association between cookie and feeling good, such that the present self is starting from a much more neutral place that can be moved by a much smaller chance of future success.

My intent here is not to give people habit formation advice. Much of this has already been said, and this framework won't necessarily help make that more actionable. Instead, I want to point out how this concept of trust informs morality at every scale - while negotiating with ourselves, interacting with other people, and in interactions between tribes, groups, and nations. More on that in Part 2.