Categorizing The Causes Of Bad Things In The World

November 17, 2025

What causes bad things? It sounds like a huge question, but maybe it's not as big as it seems. Here's my updated/improved list of high-level causes of bad things in the world. Note that these are not mutually exclusive categories. I've also added some potential solutions for each cause. I'd be interested to know: what is missing from my new list of causes of bad things and potential types of solutions? Thanks to those of you who commented on my prior version! Causes of bad things in the w...

What Is The Range Of What We Humans Find Immoral?

April 18, 2018

If we look across cultures (including micro-cultures that exist within other cultures), there are a huge 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, acts they would still think of as immoral even if no other consequences of that behavio...

How to make companies into engines of good: make harm unprofitable

July 20, 2017

One oversimplified but potentially useful way to think about corporate regulation is to prevent it from being profitable to cause harm. Of course, this can be very challenging to achieve, and one can debate what "harm" means, how broadly it should be construed, and what to do in cases where there is substantial uncertainty about how to make harm unprofitable. But insofar as it's unprofitable to cause harm, and companies behave as profit maximizers, companies are basically forces for good. ...

How Companies Can Cause Harm

July 18, 2017

I often have heard it said that if people buy the product a company is selling, then the company must be creating value in the world. After all, why would someone buy a product if that product were not creating value? It would be nice if this were a valid argument (since then more units sold = more societal benefit). Unfortunately, it's not valid. To help put the argument to rest, here's a list of 13 situations where a product that doesn't add net value to the world may still get bo...