From my latest essay.
When people confuse micro-morality and macro-morality, they make mistakes. Treating a micro-moral problem as a macro-moral problem is one mistake. Treating a macro-moral problem as a micro-moral problem is another mistake.
I think that a lot of the criticism of capitalism reflects an inappropriate application of micro-morality in a context where macro-morality is what matters.
A good essay; i.e., I (broadly) agree with you, and I think your point throws important light on contemporary moral-political discussions. I think you over-emphasize the Dunbar number: as group-size increases, from two on up, there is a continuous gradient in what are the appropriate rules of conduct; I see no sharp break at 150.
Morality evolved in a sub-Dunbar context. There isn’t that much moral disagreement around things like stealing, rape, murder, etc because they have obvious cooperative benefits to smallish groups of people. The more pro-social the behavior, the more it feels obligatory. But, there is no such “moral sense” in post-Dunbar size groups. We might try to extrapolate our small-scale sense where things seem obvious, but sometimes we get wildly different moral conclusions over the same set of facts.
IMO, the best way forward is to simply discard the entire language of morality at post Dunbar scales. Specifically, stop talking about “rights”. There are no truly solvable macro-moral problems. Your internal moral map that extends only to the boundaries of your local village is utterly useless when navigating a globe!
I swear I’m not picking nits here; I understand using the example as a way to explain something to readers sharing a common outlook and set of experiences.
However, as an interesting anthropological note regarding “moral intuitions of small forager groups in primitive settings”, there are several groups such as Efe pygmies and San kalahari bushmen who, one might guess, operated very near hunter-gatherer origins in their social organization and attitudes, and who engage in collective child-rearding / “it takes a village” alloparenting practices.
Though even in these cases, it seems there is correlation between contribution to shared child care and degree of kinship, and indeed, even in fully developed countries, grandparents often help out of a lot.
Socrates infamously proposed the radical version of fully-socialized “cooperative breeding” / child-rearing.
But the existence of human alloparenting makes the point that the moral intuitions of culturally flexible humans as regards the independence or collectivization, and the reproductive basics of sex, reproduction, and child-rearing are often hard to derive from introspection and often have a way of evolving to suit optimal strategies for overall economic circumstances and conditions (e.g., scarce or plentiful calories for big brained babies.)
The micro-macro moral friction resembles the rich-poor / forager-farmer moral friction in some ways, and perhaps another way of looking at it besides trying to teach people to comparmentalize their moral judgments and keep particular views restricte to their appropriate scales, would be to appeal for “Moral Scalability” in the moral general equilibrium, (maybe “micro-macro moral coherence”), in an effort to reduce such frictions to a minimum.
I have a hunch that the social process of arriving at such a scalable framework is a spontaneous (if contentious) one, and we are currently observing the fallout of it working itself out in, unfortunately, a very sub-optimal direction.