The Weight Problem: Can Invented Morality Support Real Conviction?

The Weight Problem

Status: Position sketch. This is a flag planted, not a resolved argument. I expect to revisit this after reading de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity and Sen’s Development as Freedom.

The Tension

I hold two positions simultaneously:

Morality is invented. Ethics is a human-built technology for social cooperation — context-dependent, revisable, not a set of discovered objective truths. It emerged from evolution, from biology, from the complex interplay of survival pressures and social learning. There is no transcendent moral order.
Some things are genuinely wrong. When I consider that a child’s zip code predicts their health outcomes better than their genetics, I don’t think “I, Wesley, happen to dislike this arrangement.” I think this is wrong. When I run a Rawlsian veil of ignorance exercise on property-tax-funded schools, the conclusion isn’t a preference — it lands with the force of something discovered, not something I made up.

These two positions pull against each other, and I don’t have a clean reconciliation yet.

Where It Surfaced

The question came up simply: can’t we arrive at “it’s wrong for a kid to attend a worse school purely because of where they were born” through a straightforward Rawlsian veil exercise?

Yes. Obviously. No rational agent behind the veil would design that system. The procedure works.

But the follow-up question is harder: what makes the veil’s conclusion right?

If morality is just a technology I built, then the veil of ignorance is a clever tool that leverages self-interest under hypothetical uncertainty. It tells me what I’d prefer if I didn’t know where I’d land. That’s useful, but it’s not the same as wrong. “I wouldn’t want this for myself” is not the same force as “no child should endure this.”

And yet — when I use the veil, it doesn’t feel like preference. It feels like I’m tracking something real about what humans need. Something that would be true whether or not I personally felt it.

The Evolutionary Escape Route

My instinct is to ground this in biology. Morality is a suite of evolved behaviors — cooperation, reciprocity, care for offspring, fairness intuitions. The veil works because it formalizes the logic of cooperation under uncertainty. We don’t need transcendent moral facts. We just need primates smart enough to model hypothetical scenarios and selfish enough to hedge their bets.

I’ve heard biologists like Forest Valkai make this case more rigorously than I can. And I find it compelling. Mostly.

But here’s what nags: my entire Flourishing as a Luxury thesis is built on the claim that survival isn’t enough — that there’s something better than mere persistence that humans are owed. The evolutionary account explains why we cooperate. It doesn’t explain why I believe a child deserves to flourish. “Deserves” is doing work that natural selection didn’t assign it.

The Open Questions

Can “morality is a technology” support the weight of “this is genuinely unjust”? Or am I smuggling in a stronger moral realism than I’m willing to admit on paper?
Is there a middle ground between full moral realism (moral facts exist independently of us) and the pure invention story? Something like: morality is constructed, but not arbitrarily — it’s constrained by facts about what kind of creatures we are and what we actually need?
Does the capability approach help here? Sen and Nussbaum might offer a way to ground “this is wrong” in objective facts about human functioning without requiring capital-M Moral Truth. A child who can’t read isn’t failing to meet a cosmic standard — they’re being deprived of a capability that’s constitutive of human life. That might be the bridge.
Iris Murdoch’s challenge: She argues that careful attention to another person reveals something that behaves like objective moral reality — not God, not Platonic forms, but the undeniable quality of another person’s genuine need. Is that just biology with good PR, or is she pointing at something my framework can’t fully capture?

Where I Am

I think the evolutionary account is probably mostly sufficient. But “mostly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and intellectual honesty requires me to sit with the gap rather than paper over it.

The fact that “it seems plainly obvious” to me that morals come from biology is itself a reason to be suspicious. When something seems plainly obvious, that’s the confirmation bias alarm. And I’ve already admitted I have a bias toward frameworks that confirm my pre-existing Absurdist commitments.

So this stays open. I’ll come back to it.

This sketch emerged from a conversation about reading recommendations and confirmation bias — specifically, whether I’ve ever given a sustained hearing to a thinker who challenges my Absurdist foundations at the metaphysical level, not just the ethical one. The honest answer was: not really. That’s a gap worth closing.