Morals Are Your Biggest Blind Spot

People are especially likely to be wrong about whether their community’s morals are adaptive because social pressure rewards blind loyalty, moral concepts are hard to measure, and the best evidence (which societies thrive) is rarely looked at dispassionately. Hanson’s BLINDED mnemonic lists the incentive, epistemic, and social reasons why moral adaptiveness is both important and understudied. — If true, it means major public debates (policy, culture, law) are driven by unanalyzed moral commitments rather than evidence about what social rules actually work, so democratic and institutional decision‑making is vulnerable to large mistakes.