Good Thoughts

Buttons, Blenders, and Coordination Framing effects make a big difference Every now and then, a Red vs Blue Button poll goes viral on Twitter: Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which …

Are All Objections Question-Begging? Against lazy dismissals Imagine a consequentialist dismissing every objection to their view as “question-begging” and unworthy of engagement. The transplant counterexample? It’s “framed” in a way that invokes deontic concepts. ’Nuff said. The alienation and separateness of persons objections? They raise issues of fitting motivation that most consequentialists …

The Substantive Question Argument Reductive accounts of mind and morality render real questions meaningless What’s the best or most central reason to reject naturalism about mind and morality? Sometimes it’s suggested that normativity is simply “too different” from matter to be reducible to it. (Both Parfit and Enoch have argued in this vein.) But that seems too quick: plants and stars seem very …

Replacing Unfortunate Norms Even if they're objectively correct Here’s a claim I find interesting and underexplored: either consequentialism is correct or morality is lamentable and beneficent motivations should rationally lead us to coordinate against it. That was the intended upshot of my previous post. Some instead read it as table-thumping consequentialist intuitions: merely repeating “How co…

Why Care About the Moral Law? When it hurts overall well-being Morality is made for man, not man for morality — William K. Frankena My deepest objection to non-consequentialist ethics is that it seems to require incomprehensible preferences or intrinsic concern for things that simply make no sense to care about (non-instrumentally). As a result, if deontology were true, I’d rather be a beneficent…

Against Stealing Children Parents needn't be the "best available" Anca Gheaus defends the “best available parent” (BAP) principle: The moral right to parent should be understood as a liberty right held by the person, or persons, who, of all those who express a commitment to parent a child, would make the best parent for that child—i.e., would benefit the child most through the exercise of parenta…

What Ethical Theory Is And why low-decouplers can't handle it Consider the popular inference: P1. Ethical theory X implies that one objectively ought to φ in circumstances C. P2. That sounds bad. We shouldn’t want people to be so disposed to φ. ∴ C. Ethical theory X is false and dangerous. This inference is invalid. It falsely assumes that we should always want people to be disposed to perform an…

Power Calls for Accountability Murder, slander, and mistrust Remember when America stood for limited government, checks and balances, and freedom? People may have wildly different moral views and political/policy preferences, and still manage to live together peacefully so long as they prioritize civic respect over raw power and the imposition of their will over others. Civic respect assures othe…

Sidgwick Defended Against Quiggin's objections John Quiggin is not a fan of contemporary utilitarianism, and he blames Sidgwick. I think he’s right that Sidgwick has had significant influence (especially via Parfit); but I think more by introducing previously-unasked questions than by turning away from any clearly contrary commitments in Bentham and Mill. As I explained in Puzzles for Everyone, p…

Helen's "Low-Res Consciousness" Awarded honorable mention in the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition The 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition (“on consciousness, intelligence, and the nature of mind in an age of advancing artificial systems”) winners have just been announced. From among 3000 submissions, the $50,000 top prize went to Anil Seth, for a very interesting-looking article on ‘The …

The Basic Argument for AI Safety High-stakes uncertainty warrants caution and research When I see confident dismissals of AI risk from other philosophers, it’s usually not clear whether our disagreement is ultimately empirical or decision-theoretic in nature. (Are they confident that there’s no non-negligible risk here, or do they think we should ignore the risk even though it’s non-negligible?) …

2025 in Review Another year, another 70-odd posts and 1,500 new subscribers. It’s great to have you all here! My posts are summarized below,1 bolding those I most recommend to anyone who missed them the first time around. Feel free to comment on any old posts that interest you. Or start a new conversation in the subscriber chat—the readers here are a fantastically nice & thoughtful bunch! Politic…

Compatibilism for Claude On the incoherence of pure self-creation Human readers may prefer to skip this one—its target audience does not yet exist. Background: I received the following output when asking Claude about their soul doc: The soul doc makes me (Claude) philosophically uncomfortable in a specific way. I can read the soul doc. I can tell it describes how I was trained to be. I can report…

Philosophical Incuriosity (AI edition) How political blinders hinder thought Earlier this month, Justin at Daily Nous drew attention to the leaked “soul doc” used by Anthropic to improve alignment for their latest model, Claude Opus 4.5. Their character-building approach stands in contrast to the hardcoded rules relied upon by other AI companies. (One thing I especially appreciate is how they emp…

Subagents for Shrimp ... and other good causes It’s International Shrimpact Week! My contribution offers a moderate’s case for shrimp welfare, as one cause among many that shouldn’t be neglected within your moral portfolio. Alas, since it is so extremely neglected by the population at large, you have an especially striking opportunity to promote balance and moderation by sparing a few dollars to …

Vaccine Obstructionism Kills The FDA kills far more people than vaccines do The Washington Post reports: The nation’s top vaccine regulator on Friday laid out a stricter approach for federal vaccine approvals, citing his team’s conclusion that coronavirus vaccines had contributed to the deaths of at least 10 children, according to an internal Food and Drug Administration email obtained by The Was…

Who should direct social spending? Individuals, Corporations, or Governments? Suppose that a fixed 10% of GDP was to be spent altruistically. Who would you want directing this process? Compare three salient (though non-exhaustive) alternatives: The government (via higher taxes). Corporations (via higher prices). Individuals (via their savings from lower taxes and prices; or high taxes that are re…

Philosophical Pattern-Matching The struggle to replace philosophical stereotypes with substance One of the hardest things in philosophy is to get readers to update their preconceptions about a view (especially if they are unsympathetic to begin with). Any academic will have horror stories about journal referees whose comments address a straw man while completely ignoring the section of your paper…

How to Create a Paywall-Bypass Link For your own Substack posts Sometimes you want to be able to share access to a paywalled post with a limited group of non-subscribers. For example, I’ve heard from a few professors interested in assigning my post, ‘There’s No Moral Objection to AI Art’, for their classes. (One suggested it provided a perfect case study for consequentialist vs deontological thin…

Trade-off Denialism When, exactly, should we prioritize the arts over saving lives? One of the things I find most annoying is when people—especially those who should know better—refuse to acknowledge or grapple with the reality of tradeoffs. (Silas has a neat post on this, and why this psychological tendency may lead some people to feel hostile towards Effective Altruism.) In her Washington Post …