Speculative Prices as Moral Authority

Moral authority can be externally anchored not just in tradition or interior conscience but in market‑priced forecasts: organized futures markets could be used to rate how well group policies or cultural norms will perform adaptively, and those prices could be treated as an accepted guide for moral choices. Hanson argues this would let societies manage cultural evolution deliberately instead of drifting under activist change or opaque evolutionary forces. — If adopted, this recasts legitimacy: market signals could become a publicly recognized basis for moral decisions, reshaping who holds cultural power and tying moral claims to tradable, contestable forecasts.