On Crypto's Moral Compass (or lack thereof)

I finally had time to read this and then had to come and find you (Naomi) on WC to follow you. I'm not active on CT, and now I don't even know how I found your Paragraph, but I sub and enjoy it. Thank you for writing.

I also read that post by @polynya and have been reflecting on it. I'm relatively new to crypto, but I'm not new to thinking about ethics and philosophy. My bachelor's degree is in religious studies, and my freshman year of college was 21 years ago. Religious studies combines philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, anthropology, and religious theory into a degree that's largely unmarketable but teaches you a lot about reading a ton quickly, synthesizing everything you read, and then communicating what you've learned in writing. For a career in tech, it has been surprisingly helpful.

My perception of the crypto community (as if such a thing existed as a monolith) has evolved as I've experienced more of it first-hand over the last year. One of my most salient takeaways is that no technology compensates or controls for sin. I think many look to crypto and its ethos of "don't trust, verify" to end corruption and the ability for greed, vice, or underhandedness to negatively impact others because we should be able to inspect smart contracts. The contracts should enforce fairness and openness. It shouldn't be possible to hide duplicity. However, in practice, not only do we see the negative impacts of bad actors, but the truth is that no on-chain financial instrument can prevent people in real life from harming others.

I often think about a story I heard about a group that dug a well in Africa for a family there. The family had to walk an hour and a half one way for water, and the well was a huge boon for them. But after the group that dug the well left, the government came with troops and guns and demanded that the family pay taxes on the water they were using. Since they couldn't, they were evicted from their home, and now no one uses the well.

The well-meaning group caused more harm than good, and providing that service and benefit to the family directly didn't prevent others from coming and taking it away.

With that in mind, I don't know if it even makes sense to assign a moral compass to crypto. In the story above, crypto wouldn't be the group digging the well or the government. Rather, it would be the water. It is a thing of value, and it has no system of ethics beyond what we project onto it.

Does the crypto community have, or lack, a moral compass? It certainly lacks a singular and unified one because the crypto community, such as it is, is multinational with a tremendous diversity of worldviews and life experiences. This is one of the challenges in discussions of morality because what seems moral to some will seem immoral to others.

This brings me to ethics, which is a more concrete system than morality. Even then, it depends on the ethical system to which one subscribes. By way of example, I am a deontological contractualist, which means

1. I think the means must be just; the end does not justify the means, and

2. I think a lot about what we owe to each other and the ties that bind us (or don't, as the case may be).

My ethics guide me away from PVP memecoins because the outcome of engaging in memecoins is that someone is left holding the bag, and that seems unjust to me. We owe each other better than deliberately engaging in a form of trade designed to take money from one another in a zero-sum fashion.

A rationalist in the model of Ayn Rand would probably disagree, though, and may see no problem engaging in memecoin shilling, buying, and selling.

To me, quitting crypto due to its lack of moral compass is like quitting a river because it didn't flow the direction you want. It's fully your perogative, and as someone who doesn't necessarily enjoy floating, I won't blame you for wanting to leave the river. However, I also think the reason is based on a flawed supposition.

Whoever told you the river flowed in a different direction?

Whatever made you think that crypto had a moral compass?