These four categories of moral reactions to behavior are:

1) Disgust: A visceral, emotional reaction to a behavior (which appears connected to the moral realm) that’s perceived as gross or disgusting.

Examples:

• The disgust that most people would have at the idea of someone eating human flesh (even in a survival scenario where there is no other food available and a person has died of natural causes).

• The disgusted reaction that some (but not most) people have to the idea of gay sex. For instance, in one study I ran, about 40% of Americans said that imagining themselves having sex with someone of their own gender caused them “an emotion of disgust.”  

I think that people sometimes confuse the visceral emotion of disgust in response to a behavior with the behavior itself actually being immoral. Jonathan Haidt’s “moral dumbfounding” experiments support this point of view, where people insist a situation is immoral but can’t explain what is immoral about it (because the situations were carefully crafted not to violate moral principles and not to involve harm).

2) Character judgments: when a behavior is seen as indicative of an unethical character, even in cases where the behavior itself has no actual effects.

Examples:

• A person going to watch the daily operations of a slaughterhouse because they are intrigued by the idea of watching an animal die

• A person who enjoys daydreaming about stealing items from people they know, even though they have never stolen before

Cases like these provide evidence (some would argue, though it’s perhaps debatable) that a person has bad moral character, even if the behaviors themselves are not immoral. But people can jump to thinking an action is immoral because the sort of person that does it is more likely to be immoral, which I’d argue is, a mistake. While immoral actions are evidence of bad moral character, some actions that are evidence of bad moral character are not themselves immoral actions!

3) Heuristics: when a behavior is (collectively) judged as being “bad” because it often either causes harm, involves unethical behavior, or involves defecting on a social contract of some sort. These negative judgments can apply even if the behavior in question isn’t causing any harm in the specific situation where it’s being witnessed.

Examples:

• Driving fifty miles an hour over the speed limit is generally categorized as bad behavior, but if someone did it because they were driving a dying person to the hospital, we’d say that was actually okay.

• The head of an organization dating one of their employees is generally viewed as bad behavior because it often leads to harm, but there are instances where many people would say that in that particular case, it was ethically okay, such as cases where the employee insistently initiated the relationship leading to the pair ending up happily married

It’s easy to think of violations of heuristics like these as being bad, but really what’s going on is that we’re socially agreeing they are bad because it’s a good and helpful rule of thumb to treat them that way. But special circumstances can make them fine. Because of this, it’s not unreasonable to judge actions as probably bad when they fall in these categories (when we lack other information), but we should be sensitive to the specific details of the case since they are not necessarily bad.

4) Fundamentally unethical: a behavior that is, in and of itself, actually unethical according to at least some people’s deep ethical values. These actions don’t necessarily cause a feeling of disgust, and don’t merely appear bad because they are the sort of thing bad people do, and aren’t merely matching a heuristic about what’s bad – they are actually bad because of the precise action for some ethical values that people hold.

Examples:

• Poisoning your toddler because you don’t want a child

• Pretending you love someone when you don’t because you lack the courage to be honest

• Secretly spying on someone so you can see them naked

• Violating a promise you swore to uphold merely because you’re feeling lazy

When we treat an action as fundamentally unethical merely because it produces a feeling of disgust, or because it’s the sort of thing that provides evidence of bad character, or only because we have a societal heuristic against it because actions in that category tend to be harmful, I think we’re making a mistake. These categories are easy to conflate with an action being immoral, but they aren’t the same thing.

This piece was first written on November 16, 2024, and first appeared on my website on January 20, 2025.

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) objectively wrong (if you believe in objective moral truth) or (b) wrong according to your own personal moral values (if you don’t believe in objective moral truth).

Step 1: Mammals (like dogs, cats, and pigs) and birds (like parrots and chickens) are capable of suffering.

1.6% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 2: It’s wrong to cause suffering to dogs and cats if the reason you do it is just because it leads to you getting a small amount of pleasure relative to the suffering caused (e.g., if someone finds it fun to kick dogs and cats, it’s immoral for them to do so merely for pleasure).

11.1% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 3: It’s wrong to cause suffering to pigs and chickens if the reason you do it is just because it leads to you getting a small amount of pleasure relative to the suffering caused (e.g., if someone finds it fun to kick pigs and chickens, it’s immoral for them to do so merely for pleasure).

None of the disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 4: It’s wrong to cause suffering to pigs and chickens if the only reason you do it is a small amount of convenience relative to the suffering caused (e.g., if kicking a dog or pig in the face is more convenient because it causes it to go into its pen a little faster, it’s immoral to do so merely for this convenience).

6.3% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 5: It is wrong to cause suffering to pigs and chickens merely for pleasure and convenience, even if the mechanism by which you cause this suffering is by paying someone else who then creates the suffering (e.g., if you pay someone to kick an animal because you enjoy seeing an animal be kicked, or you pay someone to kick an animal because the animal is in your way, that is still immoral even though you didn’t cause the harm with your own body).

4.8% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 6: On large factory farms in the U.S., most of the pigs and chickens suffer a great deal and experience more pain than pleasure (i.e., net negative utility) throughout their lives (e.g., most egg-laying hens live in tiny cages where they can barely move most of their lives, and pigs are often kept in crowded barns with concrete floors and no ability to roam).

11.1% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 7: The vast majority of egg and (non-fish) meat products sold at stores in the U.S. come from large factory farms.

None of the disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 8: By purchasing egg and pork products from stores that use large factory farms as the suppliers for these products, throughout your whole life, you increase the number of chickens and pigs raised on factory farms (in an expected value sense – just as predicted by standard economic theory regarding what happens to production when demand increases).

1.6% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 9: The vast majority of people in the U.S. could switch to a diet that doesn’t involve eating factory-farmed pork and eggs without increasing the amount of money they spend on food (e.g., most could find an egg-free vegetarian diet that is as cheap or cheaper than their current diet, or a diet that otherwise avoids factory-farmed pork and eggs).

12.7% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 10: The vast majority of people in the U.S. could switch to a diet that doesn’t involve eating factory-farmed pork and eggs without sacrificing their health (e.g., most could find an egg-free vegetarian diet that’s as healthy or healthier for them than their current diet, or a healthy diet that otherwise avoids factory-farmed pork and eggs).

19.0% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 11: Something having been done naturally by our ancient ancestors, or being a tradition, or being a result of evolution, does not make something morally okay (e.g., even if it was common for humanity’s ancient ancestors to commit rape, or if a group had a tradition of committing rape, or if human evolution favored those who raped, that would not make rape any less immoral).

3.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 12: For most Americans, the only sacrifices they’d be making to switch to a well-thought-through diet free of factory-farmed pork and eggs would be a reduction of some pleasure (if they enjoy factory-farmed pork and eggs) and a loss of some convenience (when alternative food is not as convenient to obtain).

22.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 13: In most cases (e.g., when there aren’t overriding health concerns, dietary restrictions, or a lack of availability of alternative foods), it is immoral for Americans to buy most pork and egg products from most stores in the U.S.

3.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 14: The majority of Americans are acting immorally in their current purchasing behaviors regarding pork and eggs, but most of them could switch their behavior without excessive difficulty so as to have more ethical food purchasing behaviors (e.g., by adopting an egg-free vegetarian diet, or by avoiding buying animal products that come from factory farms, etc.).

3.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

This piece was first written on November 9, 2024, and first appeared on my website on January 22, 2025.

If someone “wastes” $100, someone else now has $100 extra to spend. Even burning bills deflates the currency, making other bills more valuable.

But people’s time genuinely can be wasted. The tragedy of someone spending hundreds of millions of dollars building a yacht is not the dollars spent but the enormous quantity of people’s time and all of those resources that could have gone towards much more societally valuable pursuits.

If you don’t believe this, just consider what happens after the yacht has been built – those dollars spent are now in the hands of the shipbuilders, ship captain, crew, boat insurance provider, etc., who can spend it themselves. So the money is not lost – not even a single dollar of it disappears; it just goes to other people to use! But all of those people’s time and most of the materials used in building the yacht are lost forever.

What do I mean by “lost” here? Well, time and resources can be spent creating lots of what conscious beings intrinsically value (e.g., happiness, positive relationships, freedom, justice, etc.), or they can be spent producing little to no value. Time and resources are “lost” when they produce little to no value in the process of using them up.

Someone buying an expensive yacht gets some genuine value out of it: some pleasure for them and their friends, social status, etc. But that amount of value is really tiny compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars of labor and resources permanently used up in the process (that could have been used to produce far more value). That vast sum of labor and resources could have produced large amounts of value for many people, but instead produced a small amount of value for one person.

This line of thinking has a surprising consequence: frivolous spending on things that are expensive due to labor and resource usage is much worse societally than frivolous spending on things that are expensive only due to taste preferences. It is much worse for society if someone builds a yacht for hundreds of millions of dollars than if that person spends the same amount on a lost Leonardo da Vinci painting that someone recently found in their attic. The latter scenario mostly just involves money moving around (which causes no harm), whereas the former scenario not only moves money around but ALSO uses up a ton of labor and resources.

There is a libertarian counterargument that may seem to refute what I’m saying. It goes like this: if people enter into transactions willingly and with full knowledge of what they’re giving and getting, then they are better off because of those transactions, so all transactions are good, even ones involving buying frivolous yachts for hundreds of millions of dollars.

To take this to an extreme, let’s suppose a billionaire goes around paying people to undergo torture (let’s assume that, like most people, these people hate torture). The billionaire offers enough money that these people are willing to accept the offer even though it is absolutely awful for them. Now by standard libertarian logic, the world is still better off since the billionaire chose to pay them, and the participants being tortured were willing to do it.

On the other hand, compare how much worse off the world is in that case compared to if the billionaire instead paid people to make beautiful things, or to run non-profits that seek to make the world better, or used that money to fund new startups, or just gave the money directly to those same people instead of requiring that they be tortured for it. In fact, the world would be better off if the billionaire did “nothing” with the money – leaving it in the bank so others can borrow it rather than using it to pay for torture.

The issue is not that the world is strictly worse off if a billionaire pays people to undergo torture (you could imagine a world where both the billionaire and the torture sufferers are slightly better off post-transaction – this only requires that the torture sufferers accept the deal with complete knowledge of the consequences and that they really do value the payments enough to make the torture worthwhile according to their values).

The issue is that there is a tremendous loss of value if a billionaire pays people to undergo torture relative to what could have been if the billionaire used the money for almost anything else. Paying people to be tortured does not destroy money (the money merely exchanges hands), but it does unnecessarily destroy value (people’s time is spent being tortured, which is horribly dis-valuable, instead of doing things with that time that are valuable). In this hypothetical example, the billionaire’s huge sum of money could have been spent on numerous things that would have produced value, and yet, they found one of the very least valuable ways to spend via voluntary exchange (by purchasing people’s suffering).

Buying a yacht is far less extreme than paying people to be tortured, but the torture example helps illustrate the point: using money never destroys that money; money always just moves hands, and some uses of money produce a lot of value in the world, and some don’t (and some even destroy value). Another way to put it is: buying a multi-hundred-million-dollar yacht creates VERY little value relative to the resources and amount of labor it consumes. A ten-million-dollar yacht, as a point of comparison, might make the billionaire slightly less happy, but it would produce a lot more value per unit of labor used. And a one-million-dollar boat is even better still on this ratio.

Since people’s time and physical resources are finite, when they are used on one thing, they are necessarily not used on another. To take it to extremes in order to illustrate the point, a society that spends most of its resources and work hours on making luxury goods that produce just a modest benefit for only a small number of people (as with yachts) is far worse at supporting human values than one where labor, time, and resources produce widespread benefit, with a higher “unit of what humans value” produced per hour of labor. A society that spends its time and resources building public parks and quality roads is a better one for flourishing than one which focuses instead on building pyramids to bury kings (even if the laborers are paid the same amount in each case).

I’m not saying it’s unethical to spend money on things you enjoy (I don’t think it is unethical so long as you don’t harm others). But it’s interesting to consider that, for very large expenditures for enjoyment (like multi-hundred-million-dollar yacht purchases), the amount of labor and resources they consume relative to the value they create may be bad societally relative to other equally frivolous-seeming purchases.

Note: as some commenters pointed out, there is substantial value in buying a yacht in terms of redistribution of wealth – it’s usually better for the world that the wealth moves from the billionaire to the yacht crew, etc. That’s absolutely true, but it would also be true for most usages of the money spent by billionaires, and the points I’m getting at here (about usage of labor and resources) are separate and independent from redistribution effects.

This piece was first written on February 24, 2023, and first appeared on this site on April 30, 2023.

Ethical force 1: Emotion 

The vast majority of us experience empathy and compassion. We tend to feel happy when seeing others happy and feel bad when we see others suffering. These feelings guide our ethical behavior at an interpersonal level, causing prosocial behavior. For instance, people who behave kindly tend to have more compassion than average.

Ethical force 2: Mimicry 

Most of the time, most of us copy the behaviors of our social peers without even thinking. If everyone stands up, we’ll stand up. If everyone dangles a funny piece of fabric around their necks, we’ll do it too. Copying seems to be deeply rooted in us.

Social mimicry limits bad behaviors that aren’t the sort of thing that our peers do. For instance, in most subcultures in the US, punching someone when you feel angry is considered wildly inappropriate. So mimicry, in this case, can reduce violence.

Ethical force 3: Punishment 

Most of us have a strong desire to belong. We don’t want to be ostracized, which encourages avoiding unethical actions that our social group condemns. If we hurt someone, they may personally take revenge on us. And nobody wants to go to jail, which helps reduce the frequency of people committing crimes.

Some unethical behavior is avoided just to avoid punishment.

Ethical force 4: Belief 

Many people believe in specific ethical systems. Examples include Christians who adopt God’s commandments and the subset of Effective Altruists who adopt a flavor of utilitarianism. Belief can guide ethical behavior even in the absence of the other forces.

Individual Differences

People differ in how strongly they experience each of these four ethical forces. For instance, sociopaths (by definition) have a diminished capacity to experience #1 (especially empathy and compassion). From my observations, they also seem to be less influenced than usual by #2 (mimicry) and #3 (punishment). Hence, unless they have a strong #4 (belief system) or are especially fearful of punishment, they can be at a greatly elevated risk of unethical actions.

When someone engages in unethical behavior, we can return to this Four Forces framework to help make sense of their action. Most people would avoid that behavior due to some combination of the four forces described above. So, which of those forces were missing in this person’s case?

These Forces Can Also Promote Unethical Behavior

It’s also worth noting that each of these four forces can work in reverse. Whereas compassion discourages unethical behavior, emotions like anger can cause it. 

Whereas mimicry encourages good behavior in some ways, in an unjust society, it can encourage bad behavior (e.g., you may harm the outgroup because your ingroup normalizes it).

In a society with highly unjust laws, punishment can actually promote unethical behavior (e.g., requiring that you discriminate against a certain group).

And some belief systems lead to unethical behavior as well (e.g., if you join a cult whose leader teaches you that you must commit mass murder to become a martyr). 

Situational Factors

Some situations have little to no influence on one’s moral behavior, whereas other situations tend to create a strong pull toward or away from ethical behavior.

For example, there are some situations that would cause a substantial percentage of normal people to behave unethically. For instance:

• When there is a very strong social mimicry force in favor of unethical behavior (e.g., everyone you know thinks it’s good to hurt people from group X)

• When there is an extremely large personal gain to be made from behaving unethically, with no risk of punishment and with no identifiable victim (e.g., you have a chance to steal ten million dollars by taking pennies each from lots of people and it’s almost impossible for you to be caught)

• When there is an extremely large punishment for not behaving unethically (e.g., you’ll be tortured if you don’t commit a heinous act) 

So when we’re considering whether a person will behave unethically, we need to consider both personal factors (e.g., do they experience strong compassion for others) and situational factors (such as those described above).

This piece was first written on December 9, 2022, and first appeared on this site on January 7, 2023.

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 in favor of longtermism.

Five of my favorite arguments FOR longtermism:

1. We value future people. If someone creates a hidden nuke set to explode in 150 years, we can agree this is highly immoral, even if we’re sure none of the people harmed exist today. And we can agree it’s wrong to neglect the world so much that it’s a hell hole for our grandchildren.

2. There may be VAST numbers of future people. We can agree that harming more people is worse than harming fewer and that helping more people is better than helping fewer. So if our choices affect all future people, that puts a large moral weight on those actions.

3. We may live at a pivotal time to influence the future. Because of technologies that might cause existential catastrophes for humanity (e.g., nuclear bombs, human-engineered viruses, advanced A.I.), our choices today could have a massive impact on the future of our species.

4. It’s neglected – relatively little work goes into improving the far future. News cycles, political terms, profitability requirements, and many other factors push us towards thinking near-term. It seems likely that less than 1% of current resources go into trying to improve the long-term future.

5. Future people don’t have a say. When we take actions impacting the environment or our chance of extinction or technological development, we do so without input from the future people that may be affected. Historically, groups with no say are often ethically undervalued.

Six of my favorite arguments AGAINST prioritizing longtermism:

1. The future may not be big. Much of the pull of longtermism comes from assuming the future could have FAR more people than alive today. But if there’s a lower bound on the yearly probability of extinction that you can’t change, the expected length of the future may not be long.

2. Humans need tight feedback loops. My opinion is that without such feedback toward a clear objective, human behavior usually spirals off into something weird (e.g., impracticality or status signaling). It can be VERY hard to tell if we’re positively influencing the long-term.

3. There may be valid reasons to discount the future. Empirically, few people care about far future people nearly as much as those alive today (the further out, the less they care). If there’s no such thing as objective moral truth (a debatable question), they aren’t making a mistake.

4. Longtermism is less compelling than other arguments for similar goals. Most people really care about humanity not going extinct and want the world to be a good place for our grandchildren (even if they don’t now have grandchildren). Bringing in considerations of humans in 20000AD makes these important topics less convincing.

5. YOUR probability of creating far future positive change may be tiny. Longtermism says if YOU have a 1 in a million chance of non-negligible far future influence, that’s incredibly valuable. And more generally, it can be very hard to figure out what to do now that will positively influence the world (with any significant degree of confidence) hundreds or thousands of years from now. I think it may be wiser to focus on a higher probability of, for instance, preventing calamity in 30 years (rather than, say, focusing on preventing it from occurring in the far distant future).

6. It’s debatable whether it’s better for more people to exist. Philosophers don’t agree whether a world with vastly more people is better than one with fewer (see discussions of “population ethics”). I think that most lay people also prefer a world with billions of very happy people to one with quadrillions of very slightly happy people (even if the latter sums up to far more total happiness). While we are not necessarily forced to choose between these options (maybe we could have a world of a huge number of very happy people), it’s not obvious we should be aiming for a vast future rather than one with very high levels of good things (e.g., only tens of billions of people but where everyone has very high well-being, freedom, self-actualization, etc.).

This essay was first written on August 30, 2022, and first appeared on this site on September 1, 2022.

A libertarian, a socialist, an environmentalist, and a pro-development YIMBY watch an apartment complex being built. The libertarian is pleased – ‘the hand of the market at work!’ – whereas the socialist worries that the building is a harbinger of gentrification; the YIMBY sees progress, but the environmentalist is concerned about the building’s carbon footprint. They’re all seeing the same thing, but they understand it differently because they inhabit different worldviews.

We can think of worldviews as snow globes. We each occupy our own snow globe, and when we’re inside it, it can seem like the whole world. If it’s snowing in our snow globe, we think it’s snowing everywhere; if our snow globe is made of green glass, everything looks green to us. We might not even realize that there’s anything beyond our snow globe! But if we can step outside, we see that our view from inside was only part of a much larger picture. If you can step outside your snow globe – and visit other people’s – you’ll be able to see a more accurate representation of the world and communicate better with others. For every snow globe you master, you’ll gain a powerful new lens through which to see the world – and you’ll see that no single snow globe has all the answers.

What makes a worldview?

Worldviews are a type of story we learn about how the world works and about what things matter and why. In this post, we put forward a theory of worldviews that will help you understand how different worldviews work. We call this “Snow Globe Theory.” Every worldview includes many beliefs, but after reflecting on a wide variety of worldviews, we believe that almost every one has four central components. There are other common elements that some worldviews have but others don’t – for example, a strong culture, or a theory about trustworthy sources of knowledge – but this article will focus on these four central elements:

1. What is good?
2. Where do good and bad come from?
3. Who deserves the good?
4. How can you do good or be good?

You can understand a worldview quite well if you know what thoughtful people with that worldview would all answer in response to these four questions. While each individual member of a group will have somewhat different answers to the questions above, it is the portions of their answers that most members of that group share with each other that compose the group’s worldview. Let’s explore Snow Globe Theory and the four components it assigns to worldviews.

Component 1: What is good?

Different worldviews come with different primary intrinsic values. Intrinsic values (as opposed to “instrumental values”) are things that people care about as an end in and of themselves, not merely as a means to other ends. They are the traits and states of the world that people who share the worldview treasure and want to promote. People who hold the worldview don’t just think that these things are good – they care about them deeply and feel strongly motivated to pursue them. Examples:

• Some libertarian intrinsic values are freedom, personal choice, and individualism.
• Some intrinsic values of social justice advocates are justice, equity, and protecting the vulnerable and oppressed.

Here is our categorization of intrinsic values. You can find out your own with our Intrinsic Values Test.

Component 2: Where do good and bad come from?

Worldviews usually have a simple causal explanation for the origin of good and bad things. Examples:

• Christian conservatives think that God grants good things to people who obey him and follow his will. Bad things come from the Devil, from humans’ failure to trust God, or from humanity’s flawed and sinful nature.
• Effective altruists have intrinsic values of increasing happiness and reducing suffering. They think that people can make the world better by using reason and evidence to figure out which actions will create the most happiness and reduce the most suffering. Suffering comes from a combination of nature and human foibles and biases, which present obstacles to improving the world.

Component 3: Who deserves the good?

Worldviews tend to include beliefs about who deserves good things (or who most deserves them). Examples:

• Socialists think that most people deserve good things, but workers, in particular, deserve to reap the rewards of their labor; capitalists who exploit others are less deserving.
• Libertarians think that hard-working and ingenious people particularly deserve to be rewarded since they create value. If you create a successful business, then you deserve the wealth that comes from that business.

Component 4: How can you do good or be good?

Worldviews often include beliefs about what people should do to be good or to cause good things to happen. Examples:

• Conservatives think that to be good, we should fulfill our obligations to our family and community.
• Social justice advocates think that to be good, we should try to understand our privilege and implicit prejudices, and stop contributing to oppressive systems, such as white supremacy.

Other elements

There are other elements that worldviews commonly have, but that are not near-universal like the four components described above are.

Culture

Worldviews don’t exist in a vacuum. People who share a worldview cluster together, either because the worldview spreads within existing communities or because believers in the worldview seek each other out. This means that worldviews develop their own unique cultures. Some parts of a worldview’s culture are related to its intrinsic values and stories about where good and bad come from. For example, libertarians are more likely than socialists to work in finance, at least in part because they believe that the financial sector is a force for good. However, some aspects of these cultures are more arbitrary, and arise due to coincidences about where a worldview happened to take root. For example, Christian conservatives in the U.S. often live in the countryside and own guns. These aspects of Christian conservative culture aren’t directly related to the Christian conservative worldview – the Bible doesn’t forbid people from living in cities and, based on the pacifist content of the New Testament, you wouldn’t necessarily expect that Christians would own weapons. But for historical reasons, there is a demographic link between Christian conservatism in the U.S. and gun ownership.

Outgroups

Some worldviews also have an outgroup. This doesn’t just mean “everyone who doesn’t share the worldview” – rather, the outgroup is a specific group (or sometimes groups) of people who are seen as the particular enemies or adversaries of a worldview. For example, the outgroup for social justice advocates might be the alt-right.

Theories of knowledge

Worldviews often privilege certain sources of information over others. It’s intuitive that people who hold a certain worldview seek out media produced by those who share that worldview – we’re familiar with the fact that liberals prefer liberal media while conservatives favor conservative media. Some worldviews also involve the belief that certain kinds of information or sources of knowledge have a stronger connection to the truth than others. For example:

• Adherents of religious worldviews often see holy texts as an important source of knowledge.
• Social justice advocates believe that it’s important to pay attention to people’s lived experiences, particularly if they belong to a marginalized group.

Worldviews within worldviews

Worldviews exist at many levels. Many worldviews contain smaller, more granular worldviews within them – for example, American Christian conservatives share a broad worldview, but you could also sketch the worldviews of individual denominations with Christianity. Similarly, there are broad overarching worldviews that unify some of the different worldviews we’ve listed below – for example, democratic socialists, communists, and social justice advocates all share a broad ‘progressive’ or ‘left-wing’ worldview. The broader you get, the less specific a worldview tends to be.

Why it’s important to understand worldviews

The truth lies outside any one worldview

Most of us are taught a worldview growing up, or we pick up one in college or from media that we consume. It can be tempting to stay in that snow globe forever. However, being stuck in just one worldview limits our ability to see the world as it truly is. Worldviews tend to be simplistic, which has some advantages – it’s easier to understand the world and relate to other people if you share simple stories about good and bad, right and wrong. But because worldviews are simple, and the world is complex, any one worldview necessarily misses a lot of nuance. Just about every worldview has some truths that it is good at seeing accurately, and some truths that it is systematically blind to. But you don’t have to be stuck in just one worldview. The more worldviews you understand, the more accurately you’ll see the world.

Occupying many snow globes lets you better understand the world and communicate more effectively

You might think, ‘Ok, but I know that my worldview is correct – otherwise, it wouldn’t be my worldview! Why should I waste my time understanding people whose beliefs are flawed or toxic?’ For instance, if you’re strongly committed to one of the progressive worldviews, you might not see the value in understanding the point of view of one of the conservative worldviews, and vice versa. However, it’s useful to know how other people think even if you believe that their worldview is deeply wrong. Governments, corporations, non-profits, religions, political parties, and other powerful groups are often guided by a particular worldview. If you don’t understand that worldview, then you’ll be unable to predict what these groups will do. You will also struggle to communicate with them in a way that they care about or persuade them to do things differently. When people engage with others who have a different worldview, they frequently make the mistake of relying too much on the stories and assumptions of their own worldview. But this is unlikely to work well, because the person they are talking to does not share these assumptions. To be really convincing to one another, you have to be able to see things from their perspective. To give a topical example: in abortion debates, pro-choice progressives often misunderstand the worldview of pro-life conservatives. We’re publishing this article only a few days after Roe v Wade was overturned; since then, abortion has been banned or restricted in several U.S. states.

We originally drafted this section before the overturning, and know that some of our readers will be feeling immense grief or distress at this ruling, and that abortion is an exceptionally fraught and emotionally-charged issue at the best of times. No matter how much you believe that the overturning of Roe v. Wade was harmful and wrong, and even if your only goal is to win a political victory, we believe it’s still going to be useful to understand what pro-lifers really think: that way, you’ll be better placed to predict what they’ll do, or persuade them of your own point of view.

When talking about abortion, progressives sometimes say things like this tweet by @leilacohan which has been retweeted more than one hundred thousand times:

“If it was about babies, we’d have excellent and free universal maternal care. You wouldn’t be charged a cent to give birth, no matter how complicated your delivery was. If it was about babies, we’d have months and months of parental leave, for everyone.

If it was about babies, we’d have free lactation consultants, free diapers, free formula. If it was about babies, we’d have free and excellent childcare from newborns on. If it was about babies, we’d have universal preschool and pre-k and guaranteed after school placements.”

From a progressive worldview, this tweet is powerful and persuasive; but it’s unlikely to be persuasive to U.S.-based Christian conservative pro-lifers – the group that it’s apparently discussing – because it misunderstands their worldview. The argument is that if conservatives cared about babies, they would support babies and children through funding and social programs. The subtext is that since conservatives don’t support those things, they are being dishonest about what they care about, and just pretending that they care about not letting fetuses die. But the idea that we should try to make good things happen through government intervention is itself a progressive belief. Conservatives tend to think that individual responsibility is more important, and to be skeptical that large government-run social programs produce good outcomes. While modern Christians have a variety of views on abortion (depending on factors such as their denomination), and the Bible doesn’t address the topic directly, within the first few hundred years of Christianity there were Christian scholars arguing that life begins at conception (rather than birth). In the U.S., many Christian conservatives who oppose abortion believe that fetuses should have the same rights as born babies: we polled 49 people in the U.S. who say that they’re “very happy” that Roe v Wade has been overturned. Of these, 90% said that they think abortion is wrong because it’s murder (i.e., similar to killing an adult human).

From within a U.S. Christian conservative worldview, there is no tension between (1) thinking that abortion is murder and (2) not supporting free diapers and childcare. If you momentarily step inside the snowglobe of this worldview, it becomes clear that you can oppose what you see as murder without believing that the government should fund large programs aimed at improving people’s quality of life. Another common misunderstanding (from the other side of the political spectrum) is that conservatives sometimes label anyone left-of-center as a “socialist”, and believe that liberals oppose capitalism (see the chart below which demonstrates the misunderstanding). But this is a misunderstanding of the average liberal’s worldview: in the U.S., most self-identified liberals (for example, Democrat voters) aren’t ‘socialists’ in the sense of ‘people who want to abolish capitalism and private ownership.’ Most support capitalism, but they differ from conservatives in that they support an expanded social safety net and favor moderate wealth redistribution through progressive tax policies.

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If a popular argument seems irrational or evil, see if you understand the worldview behind it

When you read an argument that you know is popular, but it seems clearly wrong to you, check with yourself: do you understand the worldview motivating it? Here are some questions you can ask to understand another person’s worldview:

• What are this person’s intrinsic values?
• What is their theory of what makes the world better?
• What is their theory of what makes the world worse?
• Can I understand why someone with their values would think this?
• Can I understand why someone with their theories of what makes the world better and worse would hold the position they do?

If your answers would be insulting to the person holding that worldview, you probably haven’t understood your interlocutor’s worldview deeply. For example, if you think ‘this person’s intrinsic value is to oppress people,’ it’s likely that you haven’t found what truly motivates them. All worldviews feel right from within their own snow globe. While some worldviews do lead people to do great harm, reality has few cartoon villains; worldviews make sense internally and are aimed at making things better, even if (from an outsider’s perspective) they can seem deeply misguided. If you want to understand how other people work, or even just persuade them more effectively, try leaving your snow globe and visiting theirs for a while.

Many worldviews at a glance

Every identity group label is somewhat ambiguous, and within each worldview there will be people with differing beliefs. But that being said, identity groups tend to have specific worldviews attached. As we’ve discussed, different worldviews have different causal theories of how good or bad things come about. Rarely are any of these causal theories totally correct or totally false. There are things to be learned from each worldview about why people behave the way they do, and how the world functions. We recommend trying to understand worldviews that are very different from your own – the more snow globes you master, the more clearly you’ll see the world, and the more you’ll understand others (even if you still think your snow globe is the best). Below we list what we think are the critical elements of various worldviews. If you notice any mistakes, please let us know so that we can correct them.

✟ American Christian Conservatives

✞ American Christian Leftists

☭ American Communists

+ Effective Altruists

‘Family Values’ American Conservatives

Libertarians

New Atheists

Silicon Valley Techno-Optimists

Social Justice Advocates

Trumpers (fervent Donald Trump supporters)

Further reading and listening

See this article and spreadsheet for the idea of “memetic tribes” – a slightly different framing that partially overlaps with ours.

Thanks

Thanks to Elizabeth Kim for helping Spencer develop the ‘snow globes’ metaphor for worldviews. You can listen to their conversation on this topic here.

Thanks to Lovkush Agarwal, Corinne Clinch Gray and Lisa Greer for helping us write our infoboxes on (respectively) New Atheists, American Christian Conservatives, and American Christian Leftists.

And thanks to Richard Ngo for suggesting that we add a “view of history” to our article for each worldview.

Thanks to Holly Muir and Adam Binks for helpful edits and comments.

This essay was first posted on the Clearer Thinking blog on June 29, 2022, and first appeared on this site on July 15, 2022.

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 it (since the action is satisfying your OWN desire).

So, to maximize the good you do, become the sort of person that hates everyone and doesn’t want to help – then help a lot anyway!

4. Infinitarianism: god is infinite goodness. A finite number plus an infinite number is just the same infinite number again (left unchanged). All actions humans take can only create finite good. Hence, no human action can change the total goodness in the universe.

5. Virtue ethics prime: virtue ethicists are right – being good is only about having good character. But it turns out the only character strengths that count as morally good are cleanliness and moderation.

6. Purely positive utilitarianism: the only thing that matters morally is the sum total of happy mental states (suffering is irrelevant and doesn’t impact the calculation). Hence the attempts to airdrop MDMA into the forests.

7. Qualiaism: some actions are objectively morally right, and others are objectively wrong, but the criteria determining what is right is unique to each human and inaccessible to anyone who is not that person. Hence, each of us must discover our own unique, objectively-true morality.

8. Tegmark morality: for every mathematical structure, there exists some universe for which that structure is a complete description of what’s morally right. Hence, integer addition is a complete and correct moral theory (in some universe).

9. Similaritarianism: how kind you need to behave is determined by how similar someone is to you.

Hence you should be very nice to your parents, less so to strangers, and even less so to a rock. Since you are most similar to yourself, self-kindness is most important of all.

10. Unnatural law: we’re probably living in a simulation. Whoever the simulator(s) were, they were/are vastly more intelligent than us and hence far more likely to understand morality. We must study this creation of theirs (that we call reality) to figure out what’s good!

This piece was first written on March 19, 2021, and first appeared on this site on April 23, 2023.

Sometimes managers as a group get a bad reputation. Some people even wonder whether managers are needed at all since they don’t seem to do any of the “real work.” There are also plenty of bad managers who actually impede the people they manage. And there’s the pretty common phenomenon of a company having too many managers, which leads to frustration and inefficiency.

But good managers do a number of very important things, even though it isn’t always obvious what all of these things are. I think that even pretty well-established managers sometimes wonder what it would look like to do their jobs better (I know that I do).

To help you remember what it means for someone to be a good manager, just think to yourself that “a good manager C.A.R.E.S.” In short, a good manager cares about their team working effectively together as an interdependent unit (Cohesion), cares about achieving the mission of the overall organization (Aim), cares about the rules and regulations their team needs to follow (Requirements), cares about the individual efficacy of their team members (Effectiveness), and cares about the happiness of the people they manage (Satisfaction).

Below is the full framework.

(1) Cohesion – help the team to work constructively together as a cohesive unit so that all the important tasks get done.

More specifically, this may require a manager to do things such as:

• Source Staff – make sure the team has enough staff members and make sure that everyone is in an appropriate role in order to accomplish the team’s goals

• Source Skills – make sure the members of the team have the various skills needed to accomplish the team’s mission, or else call in external help from those with the requisite skills

• Enhance Efficiency – find ways to accelerate the productivity of the team as a whole

• Clarify Responsibilities – make sure team members take full responsibility for, and are clear on, their respective responsibilities that affect the team’s success, and avoid having multiple people believing they are in charge of the same thing

• Prevent Oversights – make sure that someone has taken responsibility for each important part of the work that the team needs to do so that nothing slips through the cracks

• Clarify Norms – encourage and clarify the setting of both work and communication norms to set expectations about behaviors (e.g., “What time are people expected to go home by?” or “Is it acceptable to call work colleagues on Sunday for work-related non-emergencies?”)

• Ensure Communication – ensure good communication so that those who have valuable information share it with those who can benefit from it and so that when someone needs information that someone else on the team may have, they can get it

• Avoid Duplication – prevent duplication of work, and make people aware of related work done within the team and elsewhere in the organization, so that team members know what others are doing and what has been done before that may be relevant to them

• Resolve Disagreements – identify problems between team members, and help them figure out a solution (e.g., interpersonal conflict or disagreements about what to do)

• Focus Team – make sure the team is on the same page about the team’s near-term goals so that the output of different team members is aimed in the same direction

• Set Processes – put in place team and individual processes that encourage productivity, good communication, and high-quality output

• Fill Holes – if important work suddenly can’t get done by your team (e.g., because someone got sick, or because of an emergency, or because someone quit, or because of a miscommunication, etc.), jump in and do the necessary work yourself, or find someone who can immediately step in

• Improve Processes – figure out how the existing work processes could be improved or made more efficient

• Promote Safety – help ensure that team members feel the psychological safety to be vulnerable and honest in front of each other, to put forth ideas that might turn out to be bad ideas, to ask questions that might come across as naive, to admit mistakes, etc.

• Set Deadlines – create non-arbitrary deadlines and timelines that help keep the whole team focused on efficiently achieving milestones together

(2) Aim – ensure that the team’s output moves the organization as a whole towards the organization’s overarching goals.

• Maintain Vision – make sure the team is producing work that targets the vision of the overall organization, and remind the team of the vision periodically when the team’s output drifts off course

• Set Goals – work with the team to set team level goals and milestones

• Make Plans – work with the team to form plans for how to efficiently achieve the team’s long-term goals

• Prioritize – help team members prioritize so that they are doing what is most useful for ultimately achieving the organization’s objectives

• Provide R.O.I. (return on investment) – make sure the team is producing a high “expected value” when it comes to the return on investment the team provides for the whole organization

• Promote Collaboration – make sure that the team cooperates with other teams in order to help other teams at the organization achieve their goals

• Decide – thoughtfully make critical decisions on behalf of the team about how a project should proceed, or help guide the team towards making their own well-informed decision (e.g., about which technology is best to use for a project)

(3) Requirements – make sure that the team doesn’t violate important legal, ethical, project and resource constraints.

• Follow Laws – make sure team members don’t break any laws

• Follow Rules – make sure team members don’t violate any important company policies

• Ensure Ethics – make sure team members don’t behave unethically

• Ensure Safety – make sure that work is carried out in a safe manner

• Handle Violations – intervene immediately if laws are broken, rules are broken, or unethical behavior occurs

• Get Resources – make sure that the team has the resources they need to succeed, for instance, by communicating with higher up management on behalf of the team

• Limit Resources – make sure the team doesn’t use more than its allotted resources (e.g., money or company equipment)

• Maintain Brand – Make sure the team doesn’t take actions that reflect badly on the company or organization’s image or brand; leave a positive impression on customers, journalists, and the public

• Avoid Toes – make sure the team doesn’t undermine or create conflict with other teams at the organization

• Fix Rules – if company-wide rules, organizational structure, or processes are preventing the team from working effectively, try to get that structure modified or the rules changed

(4) Effectiveness – help each individual team member be effective at carrying out their own independent work.

• Grow Skills – help team members figure out how to improve their skills

• Identify Weaknesses – make team members aware of their weaknesses in a way that doesn’t demotivate or offend them, and help them develop an effective strategy for improving

• Problem Solve – help team members problem solve any challenges that come up in their work and help them get unstuck if they aren’t sure what to do, can’t seem to get through a challenging problem, or can’t seem to make forward progress

• Track Performance – keep track of how each team member is performing, and if any team member is not performing sufficiently well, work with them to increase their performance; only fire them as a last resort

• Incentivize – incentivize good work, and disincentivize bad work

• Avoid Blocking – don’t slow down or delay the work of team members without good reason, and don’t keep team members waiting a long time for your feedback or help

• Give Feedback – give feedback on work, both as a way to help make that specific work output and as a way to help the team member improve similar work in the future

• Evaluate Quality – examine the work output of individual team members to evaluate what sort of work they are good at now (that they can do with little or no supervision), what requires supervision, what should be handed off to someone else who has stronger relevant skills, and what new work this person should be given

• Enhance Productivity – figuring out ways to help make team members more productive, whether through changes in the environment, the processes used, the equipment available, the team or communication structures, etc.

• Navigate Bureaucracy – help team members navigate the organization’s systems and bureaucracy to make sure they get the resources and information they need to do their job well

• Shield Team – protect the team from distractions and from low-value or unreasonable demands coming from above

• Encourage Risks – help team members feel comfortable in taking smart (i.e., high expected value and limited in magnitude) risks

• Establish Goals – make sure that each team member has relevant goals for their work that are specific, challenging, and attainable, and that these individual goals are moving the team as a whole towards its overarching goals

(5) Satisfaction – help ensure that the team members are happy and that they don’t want to quit.

• Motivate – help the team members stay excited about the work or feel meaning in it, remind them of the bigger picture of why their work matters (to others or to themselves), taking into account their individual motivations (e.g., learning, financial security, solving challenging problems, helping other team members succeed, improving the lives of customers, self-expression, etc.)

• Praise – Make sure to let team members know when they do a good job (e.g., giving at least 90% positive feedback and less than 10% critical feedback, since negative feedback tends to have a substantially stronger impact)

• Give Wins – Give the team regular wins, and the sense of completing goals, rather than a never-ending feeling of trudging forward

• Reduce Stress – Make sure that stress or anxiety caused by the work is not more than team members can handle

• Resolve Conflicts – Make sure to resolve conflict with and between team members as quickly as possible

• Build Trust – Help create trust with your team members (e.g., they should know that they can confide in you and that you are looking out for their interests)

• Communicate Care – make it clear to team members that part of your job is to make sure they are happy at work and that they should come to you if they are not

• Identify Burnout – identify when employees are struggling, and when it happens, show empathy, give support, and help them get back to a point where they aren’t burned out

• Improve Self – get robust (preferably anonymized) critical feedback about how you could be a better manager (e.g., by having both your team members and your boss fill out an anonymous survey with suggestions for how you can improve)

• Dissect Problems – when problems are occurring with a team member, make sure to get to a root understanding of what is actually happening so that you can develop an effective plan for resolving it (rather than developing inadequate solutions based just on what appears to be happening at a superficial level)

• Staying Professional – keep one’s own (and other people’s) appearance and actions professional, and avoid behaviors that might offend or upset others

• Contain Emotions – do not let one’s own negative emotions bleed into interactions with team members, for instance, by having one’s own anxiety stress out other team members or having one’s own irritability or bad day create a bad day for others

• Get Help – make sure that if you yourself are struggling to do your job well as a manager, or if you are burning out, you get the needed resources, rest, or help

• Get Buy-in – make sure the team is on board with the team’s overall goals and plan

• Identify Unhappiness – identify who is unhappy or thinking of quitting, and work to find ways to make them happier

• Develop – help team members grow into new roles and responsibilities, and give them opportunities and resources to improve their skills

• Avoid Micromanaging – help make sure that team members get their ideal level of autonomy, striking a balance between giving too little and too much guidance

• Give Credit – when a person or team does a great job, make sure they get credit and recognition for that

• Shield – shield team members from blame when they don’t deserve it or when it isn’t helpful for them to be blamed

• Communicate Upward – make sure higher-ups understand how the team’s work fits into helping the organization achieve its goals so that the value of the team is understood throughout the organization

• Set Norms – set positive norms for how team members treat each other (e.g., people being kind, respectful, helping each other, etc.)

• Communicate Impact – make sure the team is aware of the positive impact that their work has had on customers, other teams, and the organization as a whole

A SAILING METAPHOR

Here’s a sailing metaphor that I think helps make this C.A.R.E.S. categorization more intuitive.

Think of an organization as a squadron of sailboats. They are aiming to get to a particular place together, with each boat carrying a different essential cargo. The manager is the captain of one of these sailboats, and the manager’s team is the crew of that boat.

With this sailing metaphor in mind, here are the categories again, briefly:

Cohesion: this means making sure that the crew works together to raise the sails when the sails are needed. When rowing must be done, it means making sure the crew’s oar strokes are synchronized so that the boat goes as fast as possible. And it means making sure that every oar available in the boat is being rowed by someone.

Aim: this means the captain is making sure the boat is going in the same direction as all the other boats in the squadron. That way, the squadron as a whole can achieve its overall goal of getting to where it is going. This involves the captain communicating with their own crew, as well as with the captains of the other boats.

Requirements: this might mean, for example, making sure that the boat doesn’t go too close to protected coral reefs and making sure the boat doesn’t have more oars on it than it needs (that could be useful to use in other boats). It also might mean making sure that nobody smokes on the boat (which could be a safety hazard due to potential fire).

Effectiveness: this would mean making sure each individual team member is good at handling their particular duties on the boat, for instance, knowing how to tie strong knots and using proper form when rowing. And it means making sure that if an oar breaks, the team member it belonged to gets a new oar right away.

Satisfaction: this might involve reminding the team of the importance of the squadron’s overall mission and of their own boat’s critical role in that mission. And it means making sure that the crew is happy and that nobody wants to abandon ship.

Putting this all together: if the crew is working together cohesively, the boat is aimed in the right direction, the crew members don’t violate any important requirements, each crew member is doing their own job effectively, and everyone is satisfied enough to see the journey through, then the boat should succeed in doing its part to help the entire squadron get to where it’s going.

This essay was first written on October 22, 2019, and first appeared on this site on April 15, 2022.

Suppose there are two villages, “Smallville” and “Largeford,” which are a 5-minute walk apart. There are 100 people in Smallville and 200 people in Largeford – so Largeford has twice as many people in it.

According to their ancient traditions, ALL of the people in the two villages must meet once per month in one of the two villages to carry out a ritual. The ritual requires all people from BOTH villages be in one of the two villages at the same time. Hence, the people from Smallville must all go to Largeford, or the people of Largeford must all go to Smallville. For the sake of this thought experiment, we’ll assume that the ritual must be conducted, or else the world will end.

Unfortunately, despite the short distance between the villages, a painful, poisonous cactus patch lies on the only passable path between them. Any person who passes through the cactus patch gets poisoned, which is not dangerous but causes a lot of pain.

The feeling of being poisoned by these cactuses is awful, regardless of how many times they’ve experienced it before, but due to genetic differences, the people of Smallville experience 3 times more pain from the poison than the people of Largeford.

Now here’s the tricky question for you. Each month, either all the people of Smallville, who are three times more sensitive to the poison, have to cross the cactus patch to go to Largeford, or the people of Largeford, consisting of twice as many people, have to cross the cactus patch to go to Smallville. But it doesn’t have to be the same group crossing each time.

So, from an ethical perspective, what percentage of months should the people of Smallville have to be the ones crossing the cactus patch to get to Largeford (rather than the people of Largeford crossing the cactus patch to get to Smallville)?

Assume that one or the other group really does have to cross each month, the population sizes don’t change, and there is no way to clear away the cactuses or avoid the poison.

Once you give your percentage in the comments or give up on trying to answer, scroll down to see explanations for different possible percentages you could give!

Scroll down only after you’ve given your answer.

[Pedantic rules: the cactus patch is impossible to clear away given the current state of Smallville/Largeford technology. The population sizes of the two villages stay constant. Monthly meetings cannot take place anywhere besides one of those two villages. The villages cannot be moved. Assume the people of both villages are equally morally deserving and equally wealthy per capita. No armor or bridges, or antidotes are allowed.]

Possible answers to “What percentage of months should the people of Smallville have to be the ones crossing the cactus patch to get to Largeford?”

Utilitarian sum solution: 0% – minimize total suffering (the people of Smallville each suffer three times more from the poison than the people of Largeford, so even though there are 1/2 as many of them, 3*(1/2)=1.5x more total suffering occurs each time they cross the cactus patch than if the Largeford people do, so the Smallville people should never cross, hence 0%)

Capitalist trade negotiation solution: 0% – suppose that on average, the unpleasantness of the cactus patch for a person from Largeford is worth 1 unit of the Largeford/Smallville currency (so that a person from Largeford would be indifferent between crossing the patch and receiving 1 unit), and by extension, that crossing the cactus patch is worth three units of currency to a person of Smallville since people of Smallville suffer three times as much. Then the villagers of Smallville could (for example) each pay slightly more than two units to the villagers of Largeford in order for Largeford to have to do the walking every time, and it will be worth it for both sides to agree. However, a different bargain could also be struck (depending on the negotiating skills on each side and the impression that each side has of what will happen in the event of no agreement being struck).

Equal individual suffering solution: 25% – each person shares an identical amount of the burden by suffering an equal amount as every other person (if the Smallville have to cross the patch 25% of the time, then out of every four months, each member of the Smallville experiences total suffering from 0.25 ( 3 units of suffering, 4 months of each year = 3 versus 0.75 * 4 months * 1 unit of suffering = 3 for the Largeford people, so each person suffers equally regardless of which group they are in)

Equal total group burden solution: 40% – rather than each person sharing the same amount of the burden of suffering, we could have the two GROUPS each have the same total amount of suffering. If Smallville crosses 40% of the time, then that group’s total suffering per meeting is 0.40 x 100 x 3 = 120, compared to Largeford, which then has total suffering per meeting of 0.60 x 200 x 1 = 120. With this solution, the total sum of suffering experienced by each group is the same as what the other group experiences.

Group fairness solution: 50% – each group gets the same treatment as each other group, so each group walks half the time regardless of the number of people per group or amount of suffering per person (or a coin is flipped to see which group walks each time)

Individual equal action solution: 50% – each person has to walk as often as each other person (regardless of how much they suffer); hence each group walks half the time

Equal chance of choosing a solution: 66.66% – pick a person at random by having everyone draw sticks each time, and let the winning person choose which group walks that time (so each person, assuming they are acting selfishly, will choose to have the other group walk when they are chosen, but 66.66% of the people live in Largeford, so the Smallville walk 66.66% of the time)

Democratic majority vote solution: 100% – each person gets a vote, and the larger village wins the vote every time due to having the majority; hence the smaller village walks every time.

Note: I originally called this thought experiment the Poison-Cactus-Vampire-Ward Problem but I changed its name to make it simpler

Even medical experts in the U.S. and Europe can’t seem to agree about the benefits and costs. As one fairly recent paper put it:

The American Academy of Pediatrics recently released its new Technical Report and Policy Statement on male circumcision, concluding that current evidence indicates that the health benefits of newborn male circumcision outweigh the risks. The technical report is based on the scrutiny of a large number of complex scientific articles. Therefore, while striving for objectivity, the conclusions drawn by the 8 task force members reflect what these individual physicians perceived as trustworthy evidence. Seen from the outside, cultural bias reflecting the normality of nontherapeutic male circumcision in the United States seems obvious, and the report’s conclusions are different from those reached by physicians in other parts of the Western world, including Europe, Canada, and Australia. In this commentary, a different view is presented by non–US-based physicians and representatives of general medical associations and societies for pediatrics, pediatric surgery, and pediatric urology in Northern Europe. To these authors, only 1 of the arguments put forward by the American Academy of Pediatrics has some theoretical relevance in relation to infant male circumcision; namely, the possible protection against urinary tract infections in infant boys, which can easily be treated with antibiotics without tissue loss. The other claimed health benefits, including protection against HIV/AIDS, genital herpes, genital warts, and penile cancer, are questionable, weak, and likely to have little public health relevance in a Western context, and they do not represent compelling reasons for surgery before boys are old enough to decide for themselves.

When experts disagree we’re in a bind. We have little choice but to fall back on our own thinking and research to separate bias from the truth. There are, of course, many people who circumcise their children for religious reasons. For those who have no religious reason, is there any reason to do it?

It seems to me  that we can  formulate a pretty strong argument about circumcision, before we even start to dig into the evidence:  circumcision should only be performed routinely on all male infants if we can identify strong benefits to the child from doing so. That is, without a strong reason to perform the procedure, we should not do it. I conclude this for three reasons:

1. Some of the costs of circumcision are obvious to everyone and very real (e.g. the monetary cost to parents and insurance companies, the pain inflicted on the baby, and the very occasional surgical error, maiming and death). Performing the procedure only makes sense if there are compelling positives that outweigh these well-known costs.
2. The foreskin is a natural part of the human body, and therefore very likely promotes a useful survival or mating purpose. There have been different proposals for what this purpose might be (like keeping in moisture, protecting the penis, or increased sexual pleasure). But one can reasonably assume that foreskin is not merely a fluke, and therefore may well have some use we care about, even if we don’t know quite what that use is.  Because of this, it seems we should not remove the foreskin unless there is a pretty useful reason to do so.
3. Since adults can elect to get circumcised, we should be careful about forcing children to get this procedure at ages where they are too young to make such a choice. If a strong general reason to circumcise children is not found, it would make sense to let each person choose whether they want that procedure when they are old enough to make such a choice.

This line of reasoning leads us to ask: is there compelling evidence that circumcision adds significant value in the form of increased health, improved sexual function, or reduced disease transmission?

Well, you can take a look at the claims and evidence yourself. Here is a table I compiled of the many, many alleged pros and alleged cons of circumcision that I’ve heard made by people on the different sides of the debate. For each claim, I try to link to some studies that support or deny that claim. I focus on meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials, and randomized controlled trials themselves, since they provide far stronger evidence than other study designs. This does not provide a comprehensive set of all studies on male circumcision of course, nor is it a formal systematic review of the literature. But some conclusions quickly emerge:

• Some of the alleged pros and cons that people throw around have randomized controlled trials contradicting them, but continue to be used to support agendas anyway.
• A number of studies are themselves contradicted by other studies (for instance, various results about the impact of circumcision on sexual pleasure seem to point in opposite directions).
• Circumcision does seem to substantially reduce the rates of transmission of HIV from women to men in countries where HIV prevalence is very high.
• Even so, it’s not obvious that this HIV reduction effect is worth it for those who practice safe sex in areas of the world where HIV prevalence is low.
• There is some (small) amount of evidence that hints that male circumcision may make woman more at risk for HIV, but without more studies it’s hard to say.
• Many of the studies used to support claims on both sides are of low quality (for instance, a lot of the evidence of reduced urinary tract infections for circumcised infants is based on observational studies, which are very bad for answering this sort of question…we need randomized controlled trials).
• This topic is extremely complicated! There are tons of different claims being made and there are inconsistent research results for some of the claims. In many cases, few studies have ever been done in the first place, and even fewer high quality studies have been done (though keep in mind that this table is not anywhere close to a complete listing of all circumcision studies).

Click here for the complete table with studies that support and deny each claim.