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What are good moral and epistemic frameworks for unintelligent people?
One of the issues I keep coming back to is the unspoken assumption a lot of society have that stupidity is a moral failure. That being stupid means you are a bad person, and if you were a better person you would just be smarter. I suppose a blank slatist has to believe this, because they believe everyone has the same potential and therefore if you aren't intelligent it's an intentional failure on your part.
I wholeheartedly reject this. Clearly intelligence is at least part genetic. Some people are just born dumb and it's not their fault. Further, looking at people makes it obvious that intelligence is not the same thing as morality. They're probably positively correlated, but that correlation is not 1, and it's much closer to 0 than it is to 1. There are a lot of really nasty evil smart people, and a lot of kind, wholesome, good people who are dumb as a sack of bricks but somehow brighten the lives of the people around them. I've been friends with several unintelligent people, and I would gladly take them over some college educated scammy salesman or woke busybody. It is obvious to me from empirical evidence that unintelligent people can be good people. But how? How do you reliably determine what is good and bad when everyone is disagreeing on what those mean, and are smarter than you? How does someone with an IQ of 80 ensure that they're actually being a good person and not just being manipulated by virtue signalers?
I think that Humility and/or Fealty is a partial answer. Humility being you don't get yourselves involved in politics or culture warring and just act locally on things that have obviously good first order effects. Work hard, be kind to people, contribute to charities. And most importantly, don't go around lecturing people about morality because you know you are wrong all the time and thus have low confidence in all of your beliefs. Fealty being you pick a person or people smarter than you who seems genuinely kind and you put your trust in them. Whenever complicated moral dilemmas come up you ask them for advice and trust their opinions. The danger here is if you put your faith in the wrong people then you end up just as bad as they are. Being maximally humble and loyal with a random target to trust should allow someone to approximate an average morality (if they choose truly randomly), but also adds the risk of being taken advantage of if the person knows you're trusting them and is a bad person.
Religion is also a partial answer. Many of the unintelligent but kind people I've known have been Christians. You take the teachings and the community around it, learn from it, and trust it. It's harder to be led astray by copying individuals if there's a textual basis for what good and bad means. But even then, this is still subject to issues. There are a lot of different interpretations for what each line means, what's literal and what's metaphorical, and a lot of different variants even within one religion. Someone who just blindly goes to church and believes whatever they're told to believe is likely to end up a better person on average than someone of equal intelligence who just thinks for themselves, but they still risk ending up in a cult or supporting a corrupt pedophile, or just ending up in an evil religion if we're taking enough of an outside view and considering this globally. How does the unintelligent person who isn't good at logical or moral reasoning tell the difference between a good church and a bad church?
Overall I think my question is underspecified, because I'm not entirely sure how to properly adopt an outside view here and set aside my own personal beliefs about what is good and consider a general principle that's simple enough for someone who isn't already me and is less intelligent than me to use to eventually arrive at some approximation of goodness (which I believe is equal to my specific beliefs about what is good, even if I don't always live up to them). But it's not sufficient to just say "do things that seem good." because that doesn't always work. How does someone without the sophistication to understand second order effects not just get one-shot by virtue signallers who sacrifice the greater good in favor of optics and first order appearances?
While I don't disagree that clever evil people exist (nor unintelligent but kind-hearted people), I would caution you that your perceptions of the relative frequency of both is heavily contaminated by selection effects and the availability heuristic.
From the perspective of media coverage, an idiot who's violent and can't be reasoned with is a dog-bites-man story in a very literal sense: many violent people are so because they're literally too stupid to understand the harm their actions cause. By contrast, evil geniuses are man-bites-dog stories: writers of fiction and journalists alike can't get enough of intelligent people who outwardly seem normal and civilised but who are really vicious and cruel. It follows that a given news outlet will devote far more attention and column inches to the crimes and misdeeds committed by intelligent and seemingly civilised people than they will to the crimes committed by idiots. There are ideological reasons for this (progressive outlets don't want to pay much attention to the crimes committed by idiots lest their readers draw conclusions favourable to HBD; for reasons of slave morality/sour grapes, unsuccessful people of either political stripe love to hear stories confirming their belief that everyone who's more successful than them is a moral mutant), but even leaving these aside, an intelligent and seemingly civilised person who's secretly a vicious sociopath is just a more incongruous (hence compelling) story on its face than an uncivilised idiot who's also a vicious sociopath. "Intelligent sociopath" is a man-bites-dog story; "idiotic sociopath" is a dog-bites-man story; "intelligent, law-abiding person who works hard and pays his taxes" is not even a story at all.
Even allowing that you know some kind-hearted but unintelligent people, you certainly aren't seeing the most unintelligent people (unless you work in a care home for people with Down's syndrome), and the unintelligent people you do know are heavily selected for kind-heartedness and responsibility. The Darwin Awards were set up to collect darkly amusing stories about people who inadvertently improve the genetic fitness of the population by selecting themselves out of the gene pool through acts of catastrophic stupidity. Along the same lines, prisons heavily select for idiots. (The latter point, in itself, does not prove a correlation between stupidity and criminality: there might be no correlation at all, and the ones who find themselves in prison are merely those stupid to get caught.) It follows that the unintelligent people you know are not a representative cross-section of the entire demographic, but selected for those who are law-abiding and who aren't careless enough to, say, point a loaded gun at their genitals with their finger resting on the trigger. I think it's reasonable to assume that a person who's careless about their own welfare will tend to be careless about other people's welfare, ceteris paribus.
Lastly, I want to talk about the Breakfast Question. For those unfamiliar, an anonymous poster on 4chan claimed to be a psychology researcher who was part of a team conducting intelligence tests in prisons, one of which concerned counterfactual hypotheticals: "If you hadn't eaten breakfast this morning, how would you feel right now?" Many respondents were simply unable to answer the question, insisting that they did have breakfast this morning. It's amusing watching people conduct informal replications of this "study" on social media and receiving similar results. For me, the interesting part of the post was after the titular question, when the poster hypothesised that many inmates in prison were so lacking in intelligence that they literally lacked the imaginative capacity to place themselves in another person's shoes and imagine how they would feel. Expecting these people to empathise with another person was as unreasonable a demand as expecting them to do calculus.*
Obviously this is just an anonymous 4chan post and we have no good reason to believe that the author is who he claims to be, nor that the results of the study he described are accurate, nor that the study itself even exists. Nonetheless, it is a fairly well-established finding in developmental psychology that theory of mind is not innate and must be actively, consciously taught to young children, and that some people (most notably, the severely autistic) really are too unintelligent to ever grasp the concept. (This is also why, as noted by @ymeskhout, unintelligent people make for bad liars: they lack the imaginative capacity to put themselves in another's shoes and thereby construct a lie that would seem convincing to someone in that position.) But the idea that a certain floor of intelligence is a prerequisite for empathy is a disquieting one, and punctures many of our intuitions about the orthogonality of intelligence and morality. How can you possibly expect someone to treat other people as they themselves would like to be treated when, for no reason of their own, they literally cannot imagine what it would be like to be another person?
*Last Friday I mentioned @naraburns's review of Freddie deBoer's The Cult of Smart, and there was one passage that really stuck with me:
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Traditionally, and even now, the route for moral uplifting of the dim was via religion and coercion to stay on the straight and narrow from different parts of society. Given that the second is peeled back in industrialized societies due to anomie, you are left with the first.
And given that religion isn't exactly doing all that well, we're left with very little.
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Not nearly as much as laziness!
If someone asks "why didn't you complete the assignment correctly?", "I'm incompetent" (phrased in a more tactful mannerof course) is actually a pretty decent answer. They'll be sympathetic (depending on context) and will help try to ameliorate your incompetence.
But if you say instead "I'm perfectly competent, and could have completed the assignment correctly, but instead it seemed more fun to just sit here and do nothing," that's a totally unacceptable answer. Many people just won't understand at all. They'll assume that you're being actively malicious.
Life is hard for us lazy people.
I think it stems from the fact that weakness of the intellect does not present as many philosophical difficulties as weakness of the will.
A truly competent lazy person would not say that, they would find the quickest way to get an okay mark without being hassled by the teacher. Or they would simply cheat and do just fine.
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Similarily, I learned at a young age that "I forgot" received much less pushback from parents & teachers than "I though this assignment was stupid and boring and so I didn't bother to do it."
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I thought the up-to-date version of this sounded more like "I have chronic fatigue syndrome, long covid, demand avoidance pathology and/or a tragic case of depression, and YOU are malicious for expecting more of me!".
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This is exactly the problem of most secular ethical systems. As you say, in the end they have to be honest and just admit that they are subjective, relative and underspecified.
Bootstrapping ethics and morality from bottom up does not work and it was admitted since Hume that it is bankrupt endeavor. The main problem being that if you adhere to any kind of humanism and secularism where you start with human mind as the presupposition, then you do not have access to any justified universals. The frustrating thing is that many people holding these ethical systems either do not understand this conundrum, or they are just willfully ignorant about them.
This is often much worse for these supposedly "intelligent" people, especially if they adopt some form of utilitarianism and consequentialism, where they can rationalize their delusion and sometimes outright schizoid view of the world to promote a very let's say "interesting causes". Just look at Effective Altruism that is supposedly filled in with the smart people and they care about topics like insect welfare, rationalization of how purchase of 15th century UK luxury manor Wytham Abbey is actually in line with utilitarianism and many more.
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I'm guessing the decisive factor in this is that the hard labor of dumb people used to be necessary for society to even function. Nowadays not so much.
I have a buddy who works at a warehouse for a major grocery store chain in the United States. Relatively dumb people are still absolutely necessary for society to function. While they get to use tools like electric pallet jacks and scissor lifts, a lot of it is just guys on their feet wearing jackets and working in a giant room kept at the temperature of your refrigerator (or if they're really unlucky, your freezer) and unloading pallets from trucks as they come in, moving depallettized product around so that it can be put in long term storage, or loading it up into a truck and taken to a store.
I don't know if you'd consider it "hard labor", but the vast majority of Americans do not eat without those guys' work. Of course, I do expect the job to be automated away eventually (especially with the advances in robotics and AI we've seen), but for now all of those people's labor keeps most of the rest of us alive.
(I also don't know the specifics of the situation, but my understanding is that about half of the warehouse workers are only able to speak Spanish. I don't know if they're illegal immigrants, permanent legal residents, or citizens.)
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There's a lot of relatively hard labor being done by relatively dumb people that underpins everything we do in this society. When your power goes out, they don't send Harvard to fix the lines. Yale is not installing conduit. Brown is not running high-speed fiber down a dirt road. Any day you feel like you can get by without the dummies, you just disconnect every electrical and mechanical object you own, throw out your food and try to live on Hegel. What you remember, anyhoo. Printers are retards.
Automation, agricultural mechanization and deindustrialization and mass immigration have all happened though.
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Bold of you to assume that all woke busybodies are above average in intelligence.
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Maybe it's early in the morning, bu I haven't really noticed this. Can you provide some examples/evidence that this is the unspoken assumption?
As one example, this is a standard broadly liberal ethos for centuries. It goes with belief in tabula rasa and belief that humanism is the correct (liberal) atheist ethical structure can be gained by using science and reason. The whole liberal schtick for decades was that all it takes is a proper education and we will all live in Star Trek space luxury communism society.
You never encountered opinions that let's say Trump voters are uneducated stupid heliolites or that all Christians are science deniers or some version of this argument? It was very popular attack since my youth with new Atheism.
Roughly speaking, yes. With those examples, my interpretation of your claim is that stupid people are (sometimes) seen as less valuable, less worthy, lesser.
Anyway, the main problem I see with your argument is that when people attack Christians, or Trump voters, or whomever as "stupid," the point is to insult and degrade them. It doesn't matter whether or not they are stupid. So I don't see how your "epistemic framework" would make a difference. In a hypothetical world where "stupid" is no longer seen as an insult, people would just find another way to insult and degrade their out-group.
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Unintelligent people can still get good at stuff and attain skills. "Learn a valuable skill through hard work and make yourself irreplaceable" is still good career advice. Putting effort into relationships so you don't have to solve all your problems alone is also important in general, but especially for people who don't make smart decisions on their own.
So probably, the framework would be to focus on the basics of life. Making yourself valuable to others, being part of a community and so on, while being aware of your limitations and not worrying about things that you cannot predict or control.
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If anything ridding myself of the blank slatist position and accepting that some people just wouldn't be able to reach certain modes of thought has made me more sympathetic to the abstract persona of the slightly dim normie. It's not his fault, and indeed we shouldn't expect everyone to understand everything. Society still needs its cheapo Temu trinkets shipped, trucked and hauled in and out of cardboard boxes and delivered on the last mile.
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