General purpose technologies can be used for good or ill, for serious or frivolous purposes. The internet is the home to cat videos and the sum total of human knowledge. The crypto world has more than its fair share of memecoins and sh*tcoins, which some dismiss and others consider a deep reflection of the global attention economy. The roots of crypto are ideologically purist. The suggestion in this article to use open-source methods and a DAO to build a secular moral code returns to these roots and attempts to apply new technology to a higher purpose. The eye of the global attention economy craves instant gratification and is ever seeking. We must ask ourselves, for what?
Moral choice architecture
It is my observation and experience that many people experience doubts about their traditional religious belief system and then end up in an existential dead end. Some are attracted to the militant atheism of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens and others go to the far extreme of nihilism. Everyone who departs from religion has a problem to choose a moral code to live by. One might not give this much thought and go with the flow of the prevailing culture. Others might pick and choose from a variety of teachings, while a crazy few might attempt the impossible task of constructing a logically consistent moral framework from scratch. In any event, everyone except the religious faithful and the nihilists need a moral code.
Humanism
Sophisticated friends are often in the humanist camp. They believe that morality is a human construct, although when pushed they might agree that there is evidence that some other animals do appear to have a sense of right and wrong. A humanist might even be convinced that an advanced alien species could also be expected to have developed rules of society that facilitated co-operation rather than mutual destruction. Nonetheless, humans are the only folk we can discuss morality with, so we reach the conclusion that a non-religious moral code is something that humans construct.
Open source morality
If a large number of humans must collaborate to create a non-religious moral code, what might be the best way to create such a corpus? We might nominate a council of the great and the good, send them to a mountain retreat and ask them to bring down the secular rulebook for our consideration. Such a project would run into obvious difficulties - how to nominate the wise ones, how to triangulate differences of opinion and how to update the rulebook going forward. The same difficulties in creating a secular moral code are experienced in creating computer code, and they have been solved by the open source movement.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
The seminal text on open source software development is ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’, by Eric S. Raymond. It contrasts two alternative ways to develop code:
Cathedral
· traditional closed source with tightly managed contributions
· centralised, elite team of developers working in isolation
· code is released when finished as revealed truth.
Bazaar· decentralised and open to contributions from anyone
· frequent and early releases to allow everyone to test and debug
· development through diversity, iteration and iterative improvement.
Raymond argues that the Bazaar model is superior when creating complex, adaptable, efficient and innovative software. The canonical example of the success of this approach is the development and maintenance of Linux, created by Linus Torvalds. It is apt that Raymond chose the cathedral metaphor to represent closed source development. The grand religious structures created over centuries find themselves with fewer adherents these days, but they still need a moral code to live by. So perhaps we can back-propagate Raymond’s insights on computer code and apply the to the development of a secular, open source, moral code.
Moral code on GitHub
At the risk of alienating two constituencies with one suggestion, it is possible to build a secular, open source moral code on GitHub. The first group who may be appalled by this suggestion is the software development community, as it co-opts their tools and methods for an unintended purpose. GitHub is a tool for building open source software, but software is just text. In the same way that many developers can collaborate to create an open source codebase on GitHub, so a group of moral humans can use the same tool to articulate a moral code. This may not be what GitHub was created for, but the tool is perfect for the job in hand. The second group who may be aghast at this suggestion is everyone else in the world. What has software development go to do with morality? What on earth is GitHub? Everyone on the planet other than the deeply religious and the nihilists who think we live in a computer simulation needs a moral code to live by. Thoughtful people from time to time ask themselves what that code might be. GitHub might appear unfamiliar and a tool for the coding elites, but this is not the case. There is a very easy tutorial on the GitHub website that will make anyone familiar with the tool in less than an hour. (This is worth doing whether you are interested in contributing to the open source moral code project, or not - it is an insight into a world you may be unfamiliar with.)
The moral code open source project
The moral code open source project is live on GitHub now. Once you are familiar with the fun mechanics of creating your own branch and making pull requests, it will be very easy for you to contribute to building a secular moral code. The project includes a repository for moral precepts, the first one of which is: thou shalt collaborate with fellow humans in good faith for the common good. There is also a repository for the narratively gifted of you to contribute parables that illustrate one or more of the moral precepts. Through the contributions of many, we might create a guidebook for those who have departed from traditional religion but still might value a guide for how to comport oneself in human society for the greater good. The first step for many will be to learn about GitHub then make a contribution to the code base, however small.
Moral code project governance
Who decides what contributions are accepted into the main branch? I am glad you asked. The answer is, we all do through the Moral Code Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO). To build a secular moral code we are not only co-opting the open source movement, but also the crypto movement. Don’t be intimidated by the technology or terminology. This is also an opportunity for you to get hand on experience in the crypto world. A DAO is just voting with tokens. If you have 10 tokens you have 10 votes in proposals that are submitted to the DAO for consideration (we will leave the complications of quadratic voting and other things until much later). Committing suggested changes to the main branch of the moral code project - think of this as the sacred timeline if you are a Marvel fan - needs to be done in a democratic and decentralised manner. To achieve this, a DAO has been set up on a Solana-based platform called Realms: suggestions from the GitHub community to update the moral code main branch will be submitted as proposals to the Moral Code DAO for voting and ratification. To begin with, there will be a degree of centralisation and coordination by a set of high priest like council members, but the end state is quite interesting - open source collaboration through GitHub on the text, with final commitment to the main branch being ratified through a DAO.
Playful beginnings
This journey began with the observation that many people find themselves stuck in existential dead ends. They had doubts about religion and jumped directly into militant atheism. Some are so despairing that they think we are living in a computer simulation and play the game of life as if other people are non-player characters (NPCs). For the rest of us, we need a moral code to live by. Morality might be built into the structure of the universe or maybe we are the inheritors of an early morality that our ape ancestors evolved to facilitate complex social interactions (consider that, all of you who believe that morality is human). Unless we want to live thoughtlessly, there is a need to create a secular moral code. The lack of such a code is expressed in mental health problems, drug misuse and the void of pouring our limited lifespans into mindless consumption of excess products and social media that can never fill an existential void, no matter how many hours spent. Building a secular moral code through an open-source project on GitHub is to my mind a fun, educational and intellectually stimulating way to do it. Combining it with distributed governance through a DAO makes it even more fun and thought provoking. Now, if only I could think of a way to incorporate AI into the mix, all bases would be covered… 😀
Actions:
· ask yourself whether you are at an existential dead end - if no, stop.
· if yes, proceed to step 2.
· visit GitHub and do the tutorial - if boring, stop. If interesting, proceed to step 3.
· make a contribution to the open source moral code project: https://github.com/moralcodex/moralcode. Please use the pro forma for all submissions. If boring, stop - if fun, proceed to step 4.
Visit the Moral Code DAO and get a Phantom or other crypto wallet. If boring, stop. If interesting, then get involved in DAO governance. That is all… except to say that the Cathedral and Bazaar tells us that open source projects are successful when the users want to benefit from the code that they contribute to. That is what drives their passion and contributions. So, are you motivated to contribute and use a moral code that we create together? That is the question….
This article first appeared in Digital Bytes (4th of February, 2025), a weekly newsletter by Jonny Fry of Team Blockchain.