Sure, and this type of moral education is actually done in schools. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and we had a unit on water conservation; a unit on energy efficiency; a play we wrote about rainforest destruction, endangered species, and global warming; recurrent reminders to recycle; programs for anti-drug and anti-smoking initiatives; sex ed; and pervasive lessons on respecting each other and authority.
I haven't had any connection to the school system since 2000, but from what I've heard, kids these days also get lessons on nutrition and on diversity & inclusion.
But here are three major complexities:
a.) A good portion of America believes that this sort of moral education is indoctrination. You're seeing the rise of Christian homeschooling as a reaction to it, for example, which proponents of these values find just as morally abhorrent.
b.) There's an opportunity cost to everything you teach. So while diversity & inclusion has gotten a lot more classroom time of late, the importance of free speech seems to have fallen by the wayside. While we hear a lot about global warming or fossil-fuel exhaustion, there's little about groundwater pollution, rare-earth mining, or labor rights.
c.) Once people get into the real world, they discover markets. Markets reward people who supply what others do not, which means that if you have a cohort of idealistic young conformists, the one defector can make lots of money simply by breaking the consensus. In many ways, this is exactly what moralists complain of, and what led off this article: people who break common ideas of virtue are getting very rich off of it. And yet we don't want to get rid of markets, because they supply the things that we want but somebody else would rather not supply us with.
That's a good analysis , particular the part about defectors .
And under that analysis, it seems that wisdom education , even of the deeper style that Buddhists or Christians do , will likely to fail, because a single defectors amplified by tech could do so much damage.
The trick is to teach people to express their values by consumption, not by production or investment. Most people have the intuitive sense that they are a moral person when they personally don't perform any acts they consider immoral. This sense fails when they can pay someone to perform an action that they would consider immoral but with a consequence they desire, all without their knowledge.
The one place, in a capitalist market economy, where values have a place is in the endpoint, at the consumer. Consumer markets really depend only on values; by definition, they are those goods that people buy because they value them inherently, not those that they buy to achieve another goal. The rest of the economy self-adapts to produce those goods as efficiently as possible, which often means production practices that people would find morally repugnant.
If people trained themselves to a.) seek out as much information as possible about the supply chains of the companies they buy from and b.) not buy from them if the externalities introduced by the company aren't in accord with their values, then the market would self-adapt to reflect those preferences. It effectively creates a market for intelligent entrepreneurs to do the right thing, by influencing consumption desires so that there's a profit potential in being good.
There are still some very significant challenges in bringing this information to the consumer, and in people integrating all that information into their choices. A lot of the benefits of market economies is that they condense a lot of information from each stage of the production process into one number, a price, which propagates throughout the value chain so that self-interested actors end up producing a good in the most maximally efficient way. If you want to encode moral judgments and pass them through the value chain, you need a lot more information to go from producer to consumer. And businesses have a lot of incentive to cheat and conceal this information, so accurately recording & transmitting it is challenging.
Actually, I just had a crazy half-baked idea around using vectors instead of scalars for prices and encoding this information in a cryptocurrency, but the margin of this HN comment is too small to contain it. Maybe someone else can run with it.
I haven't had any connection to the school system since 2000, but from what I've heard, kids these days also get lessons on nutrition and on diversity & inclusion.
But here are three major complexities:
a.) A good portion of America believes that this sort of moral education is indoctrination. You're seeing the rise of Christian homeschooling as a reaction to it, for example, which proponents of these values find just as morally abhorrent.
b.) There's an opportunity cost to everything you teach. So while diversity & inclusion has gotten a lot more classroom time of late, the importance of free speech seems to have fallen by the wayside. While we hear a lot about global warming or fossil-fuel exhaustion, there's little about groundwater pollution, rare-earth mining, or labor rights.
c.) Once people get into the real world, they discover markets. Markets reward people who supply what others do not, which means that if you have a cohort of idealistic young conformists, the one defector can make lots of money simply by breaking the consensus. In many ways, this is exactly what moralists complain of, and what led off this article: people who break common ideas of virtue are getting very rich off of it. And yet we don't want to get rid of markets, because they supply the things that we want but somebody else would rather not supply us with.