Morality ultimately concerns the wellbeing of individuals. How then to promote individual wellbeing in practice?

All biological organisms are finely honed by natural selection to look after the interest of the replication of their genes in their ancestral environment. Sometimes this coincides with the subjective wellbeing of the individual and sometimes it does not.

Eating as much sugar as possible was healthy in humans’ ancestral environment where sugar was scarce and starvation a persistent threat. In today’s environment, it’s the opposite. Animals would live much better lives if they limited their reproduction so as to prevent starvation and disease. Such behavior is quickly eliminated from the gene pool by competitors who do not limit their reproduction.

Animals (including humans) are not always great at looking out for their own wellbeing. One thing they are generally even worse at (often much, much worse) is looking out for the wellbeing of others. The default for biological organisms is to exploit other organisms if they can get away with it. Most commonly by simply eating them.

There are exceptions. Parents are generally better at looking after the interests of their children than both the children themselves and anyone else, for obvious evolutionary and developmental reasons.

Even if interests were aligned and all intentions benevolent, practical problems with making decisions for others remain. Life is complex. Everyone is different. Everyone’s situation is different. Knowing everything about another person is really hard. Sifting through and integrating the continuous torrent of information and events occurring to oneself is hard enough, let alone simultaneously doing it for someone else (as many parents know).

So in most cases it is highly counterproductive to place the wellbeing of one individual in the hands of another. Neglect and exploitation is the expected outcome.

That is why power usually is bad. Power is the imposition of the will of one individual on another by force. A particularly pernicious form of power is collectivist power: power over individuals in groups exerted by other individuals in groups.

Collectivism is treating individuals the same as each other based on their membership in some group. Biological groups such as clan, people, race and species. Social groups such as religion, nationality, ideology, football team and school. Or lots and lots of others.

Collectivism can be very useful. When dealing with children you don’t know well you can have a rule to not leave children under X years of age alone longer than Y amount of time. Their parents might know them to be more or less capable than that, but without knowing them as well as their parents you sometimes have to make assumptions, have some margin of error, and hope for the best.

Collectivism can also be efficient. There can be economies of scale. An army can strongly incentivize the troops if it gets to shoot individuals who belong to a certain people and refuse to participate.

Combining power with collectivism means death and disaster. At its extreme, we get the mass killings, totalitarian oppression and starvation of the communist Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and North Korea. The more collectivist and centralized a society is, the worse for its individuals.

Unlike collectivism, where humanity has tried extreme totalitarianism many times, at scale, we have never tried full individual autonomy. We do notice, though, a clear tendency that is the reverse of that of collectivism. The more individual autonomy people have in a society and the more decentralized it is, the more it prospers. Culturally, scientifically, technologically and economically. Examples include Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Hong Kong.

The mechanisms involve institutional, commercial and individual competition, quirks of the tragedy of the commons, the local knowledge problem and many other things. More on that another time.

What’s at the maximum individual autonomy end of the spectrum? Anarchy. Literally ”no ruler”. Where people do not use violence to exert power over others. Where interpersonal interactions are voluntary. Where people join collectives by choice. That is, where individuals are sovereign.

There are already a few sovereign individuals in the world. They are members of various royal families. They are in charge of their own affairs. No one else is in a position of command over them. Otherwise, sovereign entities are mostly states along with a few standouts like the Roman Catholic Church and the Order of Malta.

At the level of these sovereign persons and organizations, the world is already anarchic. There is no world ruler. They interact with each other as equals in the sense that there is no higher authority to turn to. And they form a society. They group together by voluntary federation such as with NATO and EU. They have laws and courts that some mutually agree to be bound by. They have norms and forums for negotiation and cooperation like the UN. David Friedman’s book The Machinery of Freedom brilliantly describes how a society could function if a lot more individuals were added to the ranks of the sovereigns.

One beautiful example of anarchic organization (but in a limited domain) is the internet. The internet is not run by a company. No government is in charge over it. It’s a lot of entities connecting their networks together for mutual benefit. Individuals, businesses, universities and non-profits build and propose standards and protocols. The others adopt them or not based on merit, reputation or practical considerations. The whole vast system, comprising a significant chunk of global GDP, and being essential to the functioning of almost everything, is running on decentralized, organic, bottom-up, voluntary anarchy.

Can perfect anarchy be achieved in a society? No. If nothing else because no human society is likely to ever be entirely devoid of violent crime. But how about moving further in that direction than we yet have and see for how far things will keep getting better?