One reason people often disagree about what's immoral is that they have different values. But there's another important reason that I think few are aware of: there are at least four different kinds of moral evaluations of behavior, and it's easy to conflate them. I argue that only one of these categories is actually sufficient grounds for judging an *action* as immoral, despite many people using the other categories to evaluate the morality of actions. I think they are making a subtle (and comm...
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morality
At what step do you disagree regarding the ethics of factory farming?
At what step do you stop agreeing with this logical argument relating to animals? For each step, I'm also showing the percentage of disagreements on social media that involved this step (either direct disagreements with the step or disagreements with its premise). (There were a total of 63 such disagreements described across my posts on Facebook and X.)
Note: any time the argument mentions something being wrong or immoral, you can treat it either as referring to something being (a) objec...
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Arguments For and Against Longtermism
Thanks to William MacAskill's excellent new book on the topic (What We Owe the Future), lots of people are talking about longtermism right now. For those not familiar with the concept, "longtermism" is the ethical view that "positively influencing the long-term future should be a key moral priority of our time."
Below are some of my favorite arguments for longtermism, followed by some of my favorite against it. Note that I borrow from Will's book heavily here in the section on arguments ...
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Ten weird moral theories
1. Occamism: the simpler a moral theory is, the more likely it is to be true. Hence (a priori), the most probable two moral theories are that (a) everything is permissible or that (b) nothing is.
2. Majoritarianism: an action is morally right if and only if the majority of conscious beings capable of understanding that action and its consequences think it's right.
3. Restraintism: if you have the desire to do something, then you don't get moral credit for doing ...
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The “seven realms of truth” framework
Here’s a framework I use to think more clearly about complex debates and philosophical questions about whether something is “true,” “exists,” and is “real” (e.g., “is this painting art?”, “is everything subjective?” and “is morality real?”). I find that thinking in terms of this framework can make it easier to figure out what’s being claimed and to clarify what I myself believe.
The framework divides things that are sometimes claimed to be “true,” or that we might say “exist,” into seven dif...
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Understanding the Scope of Human Morality
Written: April 18, 2018 | Released: June 27, 2021
What is the scope of morality?
If we look across cultures (including micro-cultures that exist within other cultures), there is a vast number of things that people view as immoral. However, if you eliminate those that are only viewed as immoral because they are believed to lead to other things viewed as bad, the list becomes a lot smaller.
So, what are those things that at least some human cultures view as inherently immoral, that is, a...
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