The Sabbath Was Made For Man

Abstract. This paper argues that a rule, to have normative force, must provide for its own persistence, and shows that the axiomatic-universalist approach of modern moral philosophy cannot do so. If this is the case, evolutionary stability logic limits the space of valid moral norms, and demands at least enough parochiality in moral obligations to maintain the assortativity of moral communities. Influential moral frameworks such as Singer’s effective altruism and Benatar’s antinatalism are ruled out. Partiality is thus understood not as a moral failure, but as constitutive of moral behavior, although there are failure modes when circles of obligation conflict. The paper concludes with a challenge to adherents of modern moral ideologies that the persistence of their moral community as such is a valid, urgent, and sometimes even overriding, moral concern.

Following Elon Musk’s interview on the Joe Rogan Podcast in February 2025, a meme went viral on X (formerly Twitter) juxtaposing a remark from that interview, that

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.

with an apocryphal quote from Hannah Arendt,

The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.

doubtless with the implication that Musk is insufficiently committed to empathy as a moral norm.

The basic argument of this paper is that to commit to a normative value, such as empathy, also commits one to maintaining the conditions of its continued existence. In conjunction with a dynamic where a maximalist commitment to that norm undermines its continued existence, resistance to maximalism should be understood as a defense of that norm, and not as inimical. There is, in other words, no conflict between Musk and the apocryphal Arendt in principle.

This paper advances an ontology of normativity grounded in its ability to solve cooperative dilemmas in human social life. This is well-trod ground with well-demarcated pitfalls. First, we explicitly distinguish Nash equilibrium from evolutionary stability as a solution concept, noting that many game-theoretic accounts of human moral life reduce to egoism (or at least stochastic egoism) for failure to do so. This is not a “debunking” of moral conviction. The other danger of such an approach is a genetic fallacy; in other words the naïve move from is (or, worse, was) to ought. Although (we will show) the content of moral norms cannot be derived from stability conditions (as the wide variety of human moral systems suggests), stability conditions can limit the space of permissible moral norms. We will show that affirming the reverse – that stability conditions do not bear on the validity of a moral norm – has absurd entailments.

Having established that stability considerations do limit the space of valid moral norms, we show just how strong this condition is. Far from a tautological endorsement of any existing moral norm, it can be shown that universalizing and maximalist moral philosophies – many of which have substantial purchase both in academic philosophy and in folk morality, such as Benatar’s antinatalism and Singer’s effective altruism – are ruled out. Indeed, at some level, any stable moral system must be parochial in the sense of proscribing cooperation with an outgroup, although this may be defined at different levels of abstraction. We conclude with a challenge to believers in modern moral ideologies such as liberalism, feminism, and environmentalism whose dynamic stability is in doubt: believers must seek the minimal changes to ensure their continued survival, and maximalists who resist these efforts should be understood, not as overzealous supporters, but as opponents.

What Is Normativity?

Normativity, which includes but is not limited to moral rules,¹ is (1) a human behavioral trait, (2) consisting of coordinated assignment of normative valence to actions, (3) with the function of defining and solving social dilemmas in large groups.

While a comprehensive defense of this position against all alternatives is beyond the scope of the paper, it will be worth sketching what this claim implies – and what it does not imply – about the shape of human moral life.

Normativity is a central capacity in carving out the human evolutionary niche, which consists in large-scale cooperation in social dilemmas, i.e. the willingness to refrain from benefiting one’s self at the expense of the larger group.² Social dilemmas in which humans cooperate despite the temptation to free-ride range all the way from cooperative hunting to modern corporations and political systems. They include the classic two-person prisoner’s dilemma, on which much ink has been spilled, but also larger (and more difficult) n-person dilemmas such as commons problems, public goods problems, collective action problems, and free-rider problems. Without normativity, which coordinates the willingness to refrain from defecting in such situations and to punish those who do, human society would not be possible – and indeed no other animal cooperates at a remotely similar scale with non-kin.

While it would be tempting to construct an argument directly from the phylogenetic history of human normativity, this would involve us in a genetic fallacy. Normativity encompasses the entirety of valenced actions. To explain the origin of normativity from the outside does not necessarily bear on the structure of normativity from inside a normative system. To claim (plausibly) that morality is “for” cooperation (e.g. Curry 2016; Curry et al. 2019) does not necessarily imply that cooperation – or anything else – is good within a normative system. Moral systems are not, in other words, self-justifying (Hayek 1988). In order to draw inferences, we would have to start within, with a normative claim that refers to something outside itself, and not without, with an empirical claim.

We will see, however, that the origin may have indirect relevance. We begin with two key propositions:

PROPOSITION 1. A moral rule assigns a valence to an action (the substance of the rule).

This assignment may be explicit (“It is bad to steal”) or implicit (“The natural environment is good” implies “it is bad to litter”). The process of moral rationalization (Weber [1956] 2019: 108) involves progressively replacing explicit action-valences with implicit reasons as the boundary conditions of explicit rules becomes too unwieldy for simple statement – that is, simple reasons can imply complex actions and generalize better to novel situations (cf. Harwick 2026a). But contra modern externalists, who raise this rationalization to a moral imperative itself by defining morality over world states, all normativity ultimately consists in valencing actions and not just states of the world.

PROPOSITION 2. A moral rule assigns positive valence to itself (the efficacy of the rule).

That is, a moral rule must, in addition to its substantive claim, also claim that it is good to follow the rule; it must vouch for itself. A proof by contradiction is easily sketched: a rule that assigned itself zero or negative valence – “it is bad to steal, but it is also bad or indifferent to think so” – would have no normative efficacy, and is nonsensical as a normative rule.³

A rule, of course, is abstract, and it is not immediately obvious what Proposition 2 means in practice. Normative rules are actually instantiated in human communities that follow them. The important implication of Proposition 2, then, is that a rule that assigns a positive valence to action A must also assign positive valence to the continued existence of a community of A-doers. This does not have to be the community itself, in terms of any specific thread of continuity. Although implications regarding parochialism will be discussed below, parochiality – or even basic self-interest – are not built into the assumptions.

Normative claims are invertible. That is, the assignment of a positive valence to action A implies the assignment of a negative valence to ¬A, and vice versa. If it is bad to steal, it is good to respect property. If it is good to be courageous, it is bad to be cowardly. And so on.

If this is the case, Propositions 1 and 2 imply:

LEMMA 1. To commit to a moral rule also commits one to the conditions of its persistence.

In other words, dynamic stability is an important metaethical obligation. To assume otherwise would run Propositions 1 and 2 into a contradiction. If action A is good, the continued existence of a community of A-doers is good, and the cessation of A-doers is bad. But if A is not compatible with the persistence of a community of A-doers, then a moral norm assigning positive valence to A is, ipso facto, a contradiction.

If Lemma 1 is true, there is a bridge from is to ought, not through the history of human normativity, but through its ongoing stability. Although an origin story may inform the conditions of ongoing stability, note that even if human normativity evolved entirely through drift – that is, with no bearing on human fitness at all – it would still be obligatory for humans, endowed with whatever normative sense they have, to act in accordance with its ongoing stability so far as possible.

But how wide a bridge is this? Nothing has been said about the content of moral norms. Proposition 1 does not restrict the assignment of valence at all, and no substantive content is derivable from Proposition 2. Instead, we should understand Lemma 1 as limiting the space of valid moral norms. Thus,

CONCLUSION 1. A moral rule that is not compatible with its own persistence cannot be valid or normatively binding.

The Stability of Human Normativity

Stated at this level of generality, Conclusion 1 can replace Kant’s (1785) Categorical Imperative – also intended as a formal limitation on the space of valid norms – that one should “act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”. The force is similar, in the sense of subjecting a rule to a generalizability standard. But the passing condition is not a transcendental standard of practical reason, which does not answer the question of why one should care about generalizability (or moral standards more generally), but a more objective robustness condition.

Conclusion 1 therefore invites a social-scientific consideration of what kinds of moral norms are indeed compatible with their own persistence. We can thus bring evolutionary game theory, the study of the stability of norms in populations, to bear on the question of human normativity.

It is important to distinguish this path to the application of game theory to human morality from other possible pathways, many of which have justifiably been rejected. In the first place, because our concern is dynamic stability and not individual rationality, we use evolutionary game theory, whose solution concept is the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS). An ESS is a behavioral rule followed in a population that can outcompete “mutant” rules; that is, it constitutes a best response both to itself and to alternative strategies and is not vulnerable to “exploitation” by them. In a replicator dynamic model (Hofbauer & Sigmund 1998), behavioral rules that do better than average reproduce themselves and increase as a proportion of the population, and behavioral rules that do worse than average fail to reproduce themselves and decrease as a proportion of the population, possibly going extinct. Such models capture actual selection dynamics remarkably successfully. We may restate Conclusion 1:

CONCLUSION 1’: A moral rule is normatively binding only when it is an ESS.

This argument may be understood at several different levels: (1) individual rules (one may make a new year’s resolution), (2) bundles of rules (one may convert to a religion), or (3) normative wholes, encompassing the entire moral life of a community, however delineated (one may analyze the competition between different cultures). In addition to particular rules or ruleplexes at any of these three levels, it will also apply to (4) normativity in general, that is, to the human behavioral trait of coordinating normative assignments of actions at all.

Each of the above must be evolutionarily stable in order to be normatively binding. However, evolutionary stability is not global – that is, there exist no rules or sets of rules which are robust to invasion by all possible variants (Lorberbaum 1994; Skyrms 2010; Harwick 2026b), and for this reason the possibly tempting path to an evolutionary moral realism (Sternly & Fraser 2017) is closed. It may be the case, therefore, that a norm binding in ordinary times becomes permissibly suspended under conditions in which the continued existence of the community comes into conflict with the continued practice of that norm. Schmitt’s (1922) ‘state of exception’ is thus naturally integrated into this perspective: although the practical determination of such a state cannot be rule-bound for similar reasons, we have a reason in principle for admitting the possibility of such states, something that an axiomatic approach to morality does not provide. Thus,

LEMMA 2. No moral obligation is unconditionally binding, i.e. under every conceivable circumstance.

The domain of applicability may be larger or smaller (and it may be unconditional within that domain), a rule or complex of rules may be stable against a larger or smaller set of rules in competition, but it is never the entire space of possible human experience (Harwick 2026a).

The ESS is related to, but importantly different from, the more familiar solution concept in classical game theory, the Nash Equilibrium (NE). A NE consists of a set of behavioral rules (strategies) such that, given the strategies employed by other players in a game, no player can do better by switching strategies. “Do better” is defined in terms of rational self-interest using the homo æconomicus construct. Although there have been attempts to explain certain features of human moral life using NE, the concept is fundamentally tied to self-interest. Explanations of human moral behavior using NE must show that it can be reduced to “rational self-interest” – that is, there is no way to escape egoism on this assumption.⁴ It can also be shown that human-scale institutions are never a NE under reasonable assumptions (Harwick 2020). By NE, there is no way to reconcile two apparent facts about human moral life:

1. Human morality genuinely demands countermanding self-interest, and cannot be reduced to it (Bowles & Gintis 2005).
2. Human moral communities exist and prosper.

ESS and NE are formally similar, and are even sometimes regarded as interchangeable. Indeed, in well-mixed populations where every individual is just as likely to meet any other individual, the set of ESSs is just the subset of NEs that is locally robust to mutation. To directly pursue one’s own self-interest is the only behavioral rule that can be guaranteed to do no worse than average under these circumstances.

However, in assorted populations, where different “types” – those employing different behavioral rules, for example cooperators and defectors, or Christians and Muslims – can preferentially assort with each other, there are ESSs that are not NE. That is, strategies that countermand the self-interest of the individuals employing them can be stable in a population if and only if they preferentially benefit others employing the same strategy (Skyrms 2005; Bowles & Gintis 2010: ch. 4). There are various ways of ensuring assortativity – signaling, kin selection, multi-level selection (Sober & Wilson 1998), population viscosity (Taylor 1992) – but assortativity is a necessary feature of anything we would recognize as morality.

In short, human moral life must be understood, at both the general and particular levels, as a non-Nash ESS. Indeed this divergence is what creates an is-ought gap in the first place: one’s own biological fitness constitutes the is side of motivation (thus there is no gap for an egoist; what ought follows straightforwardly from what is). But the evolutionary stability of non-fitness-maximizing strategies implies that the coordination of valences with a moral community supersedes the correspondence of these valences with any objective fitness interest.

On the one hand, this provides us a way to reconcile the two facts of human moral life above. Moral rules present themselves to individuals as non-instrumental ends-in-themselves, and we do not have to “debunk” genuine moral feeling by reducing it to self-interest. On the other hand, normativity must be instrumental from the perspective of a moral community as a whole. The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. In conjunction with the argument of the previous section, this analysis reveals the conditions a moral system must satisfy.

PROPOSITION 3. Non-self-interested behavioral rules, such as human morality both in general and in particular, are only dynamically stable under assortativity.

CONCLUSION 2. All normatively binding moral rules must be parochial in the sense of directing altruism toward others following the same rule (Choi & Bowles 2007).

Conclusion 2 is both a limitation on the space of valid moral systems, and a claim about the ontology of human morality. It is almost axiomatic in Western moral philosophy that “accidents” – such as the community one belongs to – should not bear on the substance of one’s moral obligations; that to act “morally” entails transcending the particularistic attachments to one’s own communities (e.g. Rawls 1971: 587). This is taken to extremes by “effective altruists” such as Singer (1981; 2015), who believe that the circle of moral concern should be not only maximally wide – possibly including many animals – but also maximally flat in the sense that one “should” not prefer cooperating with one’s own friends and family over a stranger on another continent, or even some consciousness-weighted quantity of shrimp (Fischer 2024), if the latter has greater need. Effective altruism is, in other words, in practice a moral demand for the abolition of assortativity – which per the above argument is, in the long run, a demand for the abolition of morality and altruism itself. It is not that effective altruism is overdemanding (as argued by e.g. Cullity [2004]) – moral communities very frequently have nominally obligatory but practically aspirational standards and tolerate some amount of hypocrisy – it is that it is self-undermining. An effective altruism that directs its cooperation primarily to non-effective-altruists, one that relies on the ephemeral persuasiveness of its universalistic norm among rationalists to spread, is one that must eventually extinguish itself.⁵

Conclusion 2, then, should be understood as refuting the Kant-Rawls-Singer view that morality entails taking the view of eternity. Instead, moral rules should be understood as constituting a normative community within which moral self-sacrifice can be appropriately – and stably – directed.

These moral communities are not necessarily monolithic. One can belong to nested or overlapping moral communities that direct varying levels and forms of cooperation. One shares a great deal of moral overlap with one’s family and one’s church, which can accordingly obligate intense and open-ended forms of cooperation (Iannacone 1992 is a classic model of intensely assortative religious groups). Firms and organizations, to the extent normal contractual mechanisms fail to align incentives sufficiently, also constitute moral communities with more or less clearly circumscribed domains of cooperation (Miller 1992 discusses “company culture” in these terms). One may share less normative common ground with one’s neighbors or countrymen, with correspondingly weaker (but not nonexistent) moral obligations. This moral overlap may (but does not have to be) be self-referential and self-constituting, in the case of loyalty to a community as such – and note that ethnocentrism or nationalism in this sense is a very small subset of properly parochial moral communities. In the limit, this is also a moral theory of war, a situation where irreconcilable moral differences nullify most or all moral obligations to another community. It is not a question of whether “human rights” exist in war, but a question of what obligations to members of another moral community are compatible with the survival of one’s own. There are situations – hopefully but not inevitably rare – where that set approaches null.

Nor is parochiality necessarily a virtue as such. Gross et al. (2025) note that parochiality at a small scale (e.g. nepotism or ethnocentrism) can undermine cooperation at large scales, and identification with larger moral communities (e.g. nationalism) often demands the renunciation of partiality at smaller scales. Universalism, in this respect, is the far end of this spectrum. The question of the appropriate scale of primary identification is, of course, itself subject to the requirement of dynamic stability: it may be the case that there exists a scale that persists more effectively than both larger and smaller scale communities, and it may be the case that the set of stable scales changes over time. Nationalism for example is a relatively recent scaling up of an important circle of obligations, and principled universalism more recent still.

Nihilism and Denialism

The universalist style of moral thinking is deeply rooted in Western moral thought. There are at least two tempting pitfalls to avoid in the above argument, both of which involve incompletely abjuring universalism.

The first temptation is to judge the above argument by universalist standards. The argument is immoral because it is not universalistic. This is the approach taken by, for example, Bruner (2021) and Gross et al. (2025), both of which make arguments very much along the lines of the present paper that assortativity and parochialism are necessary for cooperation, and then conclude that cooperation is problematic because is is parochial. Bruner (2021) concludes that “mechanisms [to improve altruism] open the door to conditional cooperation… This realization should… motivate scholars to investigate ways to promote cooperation that do not usher in tag-based [i.e. parochial] strategies.” Gross et al. (2021) similarly claim that “Group cooperation further necessitates defining who belongs to the group, fostering exclusion and intergroup conflict. Free-rider concerns fuel scapegoating and polarization.”

If parochial altruism is the only stable altruism, to stand in judgment of human cooperation on the grounds that it does not live up to the historically anomalous standards of modern universalistic sentiments is question-begging. Better instead to flip the modus ponens with the modus tollens and conclude that morality should not be dictated by these sentiments, lest we undermine the conditions for moral behavior entirely. We may justly find certain forms of discrimination, exclusion, and so on distasteful, which we may understand as an obligation to a larger-scale moral community overriding or circumscribing obligations to a smaller-scale moral community. But to start with the premise that discrimination and exclusion should be abjured altogether – particularly of those outside even the larger community⁶ – is again to demand the well-mixing of the human population, under which circumstance morality cannot exist at all.

The second temptation is to conclude that if a universal moral standard derivable from rational considerations and applicable to all people does not and cannot exist, there are no moral rules. This is to accept the universalistic standard for morality even while rejecting universalism itself. By contrast, if obligations within nested moral communities are what morality is, to say that moral claims obtain within a particular moral community does not diminish them, make them subjective, or prevent them from taking a truth value.

Language – itself a normative system of signs – is a useful model. The grammaticality of a sentence can take a definite truth value that is independent of any particular mind (and therefore objective from the perspective of any individual), even if it is not independent of all minds. “I is happy” is objectively ungrammatical, not because I derived a universal grammar from the rules of practical reason, but because I belong to a community of English speakers within which the sentence can be judged.⁷

Similarly, I can validly claim that nepotism is wrong, not because practical reason provides some objective standard by which to judge it, but because I belong to a liberal moral community where impersonal rules trump kin obligations under many circumstances. The fact that there exist communities where nepotism is obligatory does not make my claim any less valid, forceful, or binding on those with whom I have moral leverage, because my assertion is to my moral community and a claim upon it. I can even validly claim that a moral system in which nepotism is condemned is better than a moral system that does not do so – indeed, by Proposition 2, to claim that nepotism is wrong entails this secondary claim. And again, this validity – while local to a moral community – is not diminished and does not lose force by the fact that there exist moral communities within which people would make the opposite claim, so long as we do not illegitimately presuppose a universalist standard.

For the same reason, the stability consideration is not necessarily incompatible with other more substantive metaethical criteria. Just as I can make valid normative claims within a moral community, I can also make valid metaethical claims, such as the importance of harm or suffering, so long as these are understood as efforts to influence the self-conception of the moral community of academic philosophers and not as axioms of a logical system. Indeed because stability as such provides no guidance as to substantive moral content, it will be necessary to put such stakes in the ground, subject only to the constraint of dynamic stability.

A Challenge to Modern Moralities

Parochialism, in this broad sense, was taken for granted in practice until the development of both Continental and English Enlightenment moral philosophy. Many of our modern convictions – all the way from specific values like authenticity or the natural environment, to the broader universalizing or rationalistic “style” of moral reasoning – are relatively new in human history.

This is not, by itself, an argument against these modern concerns or styles. After all, monotheisms have been universalistic in principle but parochial in practice for millennia (and in this sense one must distinguish a universal invitation into a moral community, which is perfectly compatible with stability in principle, from the universalization of moral obligation, as with the Effective Altruists).⁸ And indeed the academic enterprise in which this paper is engaged presupposes a great deal of very modern normative understandings. However, there are reasons to fear that many specifically modern moral concerns are liable to fail the stability test. This should not be taken as a refutation of these moral concerns, but as a challenge to their believers – the present author among them – to seek and implement the minimal changes to ensure their stability.

Consider, for example, environmentalism, the assignment of positive valence to the natural environment. In terms of concrete actions, many – both academic and in popular conception – have taken this to imply antinatalism, the assignment of negative valence to having children (e.g. Conly 2015). To the extent that environmentalism spreads by vertical transmission, such a norm is obviously self-defeating. But to the extent that environmentalism spreads by horizontal transmission, or evangelism, it is not obvious that it is.

Let us distinguish, then, between moral commitments at varying depths. Explicit moral commitments we will call ideologies. Ideologies, including religions, are amenable to rapid horizontal spread. Environmentalism is one such ideology. It is tempting to think, therefore, that horizontal transmission is primary and the natalism question is irrelevant.

This would be a mistake. At a deeper level, there exist tacit, unexamined moral commitments; these we will call culture. For example, individualism and collectivism (Greif & Tabellini 2017), or WEIRDness (Henrich 2020; Harwick 2023) – the moral syndrome of Western modernity – are proper moral orientations in the sense of assigning valences to actions, even if these are mostly too deep to ever be articulated as such. Culture changes only on a very slow timescale, and rapid ideological upheaval can be compatible with (and even symptomatic of) cultural stability. Indeed, ideological sweep typically happens because of a complementarity between a new ideology and existing cultural values. Cultural change is mostly glacial, and predominantly transmitted vertically. Horizontal transmission of ideologies across cultures typically results in extremely different moral practices: the main fractures within Christianity and Islam, for example, largely (though not perfectly) fell along ethnic boundaries, not because religious disputes were “really” about ethnic or national interests, but because different ideologies will bear more or less complementarity with different cultures.

From this perspective, antinatalism can be seen to be self-defeating despite the fact of horizontal transmission. Explicit antinatalism is a moral position with appeal only to the exceptionally culturally weird. If this is the case, particularly virulent forms of antinatalism, such as those following from environmentalism, can extinguish not only environmentalists themselves, but also (to the extent horizontal transmission is successful) the entire suite of cultural norms amenable to environmental concerns in the first place.⁹ Naturally, the same applies with even more force to explicit antinatalism (Benatar 2006), which however – fortunately – has less widespread purchase than environmentalism.

This argument is emphatically not a refutation of environmentalism, understood as a concern with the natural environment. Rather, it is a challenge: in addition to the direct obligation to stewardship of the natural environment, environmentalists must understand themselves as having an obligation to the vertical transmission of environmentalist norms and the cultural values that support them. Indeed, pronatalism is practically a necessary commitment for any moral community.

The same would apply to feminism, to the extent it devalues or discourages childbirth. To the extent there exists an appreciable fertility difference between Western-feminist and traditional cultures with no respect for women’s rights, the long-term future of gender equality is bleak. Again, this is emphatically not an argument against feminism, but a challenge to feminists, that believers in gender equality must provide for the future existence of feminists.

The same, again, applies to incidentally antinatalist ideologies or moral systems. Although liberalism does not specifically devalue childbirth as environmentalism and feminism tend to, within (and likely beyond) Western countries, more liberal parties have appreciably lower birthrates than more conservative parties (Fieder & Huber 2024). Across countries, modernization – the adoption of at least some liberal values, especially female education – portends precipitous declines in birthrates, a trend that has accelerated globally since 2008. It is notable that, with a single exception, the only regions in the world with above-replacement birthrates are appallingly illiberal in moral orientation. This raises the uncomfortable possibility that modernity as a moral syndrome may itself not be stable (Anomaly & Faria 2023).

In this case, one issue is that liberals have not typically conceived of themselves as a moral community at all. Philosophical defenses run from natural law (Finnis 1980), public reason (Gauss 2011), or some such basis that is, in theory if not in practice, perspicacious to all right-thinking (i.e. weird) people. Besides the high-profile foreign policy failures arising from the failure to conceive of liberalism as culturally bound, it has also led to a neglect of the interests of the liberal moral community as such. Reconceptualizing liberalism, not as the universal birthright of humanity or the inevitable conclusion of rational thinking, but as a particular moral community with an interest in its own continuation, may be important to ensure that it does indeed continue. If liberalism is indeed not stable as constituted, liberal commitments obligate adherents to at least seek out the minimal conceptual, organizational, or practical changes necessary to render it stable.

Conclusion

We return then to the example of empathy, a moral emotion directing self-sacrifice for the benefit of an ailing other. Let us accept the premise, with Arendt, that empathy is good. Then the argument of this paper is that we are required to ask, with Musk, what are the normative limits of empathy such that its stability is guaranteed? Is a particular rule for the expression of empathy compatible with the persistence of empathy in general, or must it inevitably lead to the overextension, exploitation, and extinction of empathic norms?

This latter question is, of course, a matter of social-scientific judgment. Musk’s particular claim may be factually right or wrong. But we do claim that the reflexive condemnation of the question is self-undermining and illegitimate. Indeed, for someone who values empathy – or freedom, equality, the natural environment, or anything else – there is hardly a more important question to be asked.

Footnotes

1. Unlike some accounts that try to distinguish the ontology of normativity in general from morality in particular (e.g. Machery & Mallon 2010), we regard the boundaries of a “moral” domain within the domain of normative rules, to the extent one is distinguished, to be culturally defined. The paper will sometimes use ‘moral rules’ metonymously for normativity in general.
2. While there are some examples of nonhuman animals rewarding or punishing certain behaviors of conspecifics (thus implicitly assigning those behaviors a valence) (Boehm 1999), and some minor examples of cultural transmission such as birdsong or tool use (Whiten 2019), we know of no other animal that transmits normative understandings in an open-ended way.
3. While “noble lie” arguments have something like this structure, they are not – and indeed cannot be – moral or normative arguments, at least not for the intended believers of such lies. The lie itself, of course, will indeed usually be moral or normative, though the converse (that moral or normative claims are lies) is not true.
4. There are signaling models where ignoring one’s own self-interest brings benefits sufficiently large to outweigh the potential costs. For example someone who keeps strict accounts of favors owed by friends will have fewer friends than someone who doesn’t “count the cost”, and the increase in the number of cooperative friends might outweigh the costs of exploitative friends. Thus even self-sacrifice can be “ultimately” reduced to narrow self-interest, at least probabilistically. Whether these models are stable over long enough periods against the exploitation of such signals is doubtful without additional assumptions, however (Harwick 2026b).
5. This argument does not necessarily preclude the Effective Altruist concern with global welfare. What it does suggest is that, in order to accomplish its ends more effectively, a top priority of EA communities should be directing cooperation within EA communities. The 2022 controversy over the Effective Venture Foundation’s decision to purchase a manor house for its own events – with resources that could have purchased malarial bed nets for distant children – suggests that this concern is largely not on EA communities’ radar, although ‘longtermists’ (e.g. MacAskill 2022) are a partial exception.
6. Popper’s (1945) famous ‘paradox of tolerance’ pertains to this point. The virtue of toleration is an obligation to the community sharing the value of tolerance – which may of course encompass many “thicker” communities – and does not sensibly apply across the boundary of the liberal community.
7. It is also worth noting that a similar distinction obtains between the universal language faculty and particular learned languages. This is more than a suggestive parallel, as the culturally learned assignment of valence to actions likely rests on the symbolic capacity of a language-possessing species.
8. The parable of the Good Samaritan is often taken today to entail a mandate for universal altruism (Francis 2020). Historically however, the Church has interpreted the parable as a special obligation to those one is physically near and able to help (e.g. Augustine 397, I.28).
9. This does not necessarily entail the complete extinction, or even the quantitative diminution, of a weird population considered as a whole. Imagine a community with a distribution of commitment to modern weird cultural norms. If environmentalism preferentially “takes” among the upper tail, which then adopts antinatalism, the trait value of the entire population shifts away from weirdness, and therefore also propensity to care about the natural environment.