Glossary of Moral Concepts

Some core moral concepts interpreted through the lens of Communionist moral philosophy. These are meant to apply irrespective of the diameter of an ingroup’s circle of empathy, be it Beduin or Humanist.

Morality: The righteous beliefs about good and bad behavior that defines and binds a social group together as an “Us” against the competing influences of outsiders and our own individual self-interest.

Ingroup: An “Us” group forming part of your social identity for whom you have empathy. Attachment, protection, and expansion of an ingroup is the instinctive source of most human’s feelings of self-worth, who they are, and meaning in life. Good moral conduct assures continued social standing and bad moral conduct produces hostility, imprisonment, exile, or other methods of deterrence or punishment and creates feelings of sadness, loneliness, and depression.

Outgroup: Any group framed as “Them” whose conquest validates and sustains ingroup integrity. Most outgroups are projections of the ingroup’s own shadow (that which they cannot accept about themselves but fear could be true — that they are average, weak, mortal, cruel, illegitimate, etc.). An individual’s own ego is an outgroup relative to the many ingroups of which they are composed socially. The relationship among these identities is both vertical (self, family, tribe, chiefdom, environment…) as well as horizontal (gender, race, religion, class, culture, other living beings).

Primordial Ingroup: Common group memberships ingrained instinctively by our evolution and common patterns of human development. The most important example is family, followed by tribe. Having spent 99% of our post-ape evolutionary history in small bands of a few dozen people, we only have two instinctual ways to relate to others: either as, essentially, family; or as subhuman enemies. We have developed ways to sublimate this social ontology through symbolic cultural group formation (e.g., cliques, clubs, class, race, religion, and so on), but our instincts are primarily wired for binary opposition between family and everyone else. Primordial ingroups play a special role in changing righteous minds, because the suffering of children and mothers in any outgroup usually evince the same emotional responses as our own.

Soul: The answer to the question, who am I? Your soul is your membership in those social groups who, when you perform acts to protection them, makes you feel honored — bigger than yourself. And whose betrayal haunts your conscience. And whose memories of ancestor self-sacrifice are honored by your ingroup culture. To “lose your soul” is to have betrayed your people. Soul has magnitude: the magnitude of your soul is the breadth of your circle of empathy. Increasing the magnitude of your soul is human evolution (group individuation of less diverse biodiversity into more diverse biodiversity).

Conscience: A moral compulsion, ingrained in your soul, to protect your ingroup.

Shame: Acute self-loathing triggered by the public exposure of your violation of shared ingroup morality.

Guilt: Internalization of shame by your conscience.

Redemption: To be reclaimed by your ingroup after a period of betrayal, by putting yourself on the line to save it from the threat you had previously posed; in turn, (usually) betraying your former outsider affiliation. Similar to salvation. The true heart of justice.

Forgiveness: To have one’s ingroup membership affirmed by the person or group you had harmed.

Revenge: An archaic instinct to play Tit for Tat for wrongs done to your ingroup, usually murder. Designed to discourage future attacks and restore one’s honor.

Honor: Putting your ingroup before your individual self-interest when they come into conflict; the reputation that accrues from doing that publicly, often requiring exaggerated and neurotic defense in cultures without criminal justice systems and norms of personal integrity.

Justice: Retribution by the ingroup for wrongs done to it. Group-administered revenge (usually).

Right (moral): Nurturing and protecting your ingroups.

Wrong (moral): Harming your ingroups.

Evil: Harming your ingroups (esp primordial ingroups such as family, children, society that raised you) without shame or guilt by exploiting, corrupting, and undermining the bonds of trust that bind the group together.

Altruism: Helping others in your ingroup for the good of the ingroup; unmotivated by the expectation of direct, personal, transactional return on investment

Heroism: Saving your ingroup at great risk to yourself.

Sublime: The feeling the comes with the experience of becoming part of something greater than yourself.

Narcissism: A dysfunction of ego development, possibly caused at least in part by parental attachment disorders early in life, that makes a person unable to clearly differentiate between their own ego and that of the social groups to which they belong, resulting in an inability to empathize, to notice social cues, and a need to be noticed by everyone and be the center of attention. Conversely, suffering from crushing self-loathing and insecurity when not being continually admired.

Sociopathy: An inability, probably genetic, to form ingroup attachments; to be, essentially, without a soul; to be mindblind, to lack empathy and prosociality in one’s motivations; to therefore treat everyone as objects, as means to selfish purposes; to be locked into the appetites of the lower ego and be capable of no higher calling; to have an appetite for something greater than yourself, but no way to experience it; to be remorselessly rational in deceiving and manipulating others for selfish ends; to be insensitive to their life or suffering except to the degree that poses inconveniences to getting what one wants. To be regulated by fear and force only. To be incapable of redemption. The only human condition deserving of the term “abomination”; who yet might serve a dark evolutionary purpose at certain bottlenecks in human history, as spies or assassins. In all the ways that really count, not human all. To be less than even most mammals. Affecting 2% of the population and rising, with no clear diagnosis and no known cure.

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