By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace
Image created using the A.I. DALL•E 2
This is the first of five posts in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism - here are the second, third, fourth, and fifth parts.
Many of us struggle at times to know what to do. We are surrounded by conflicting advice about how to live our lives - from our parents, peers, and communities, from ancient philosophers, and from modern gurus and intellectuals. Faced with these confl...
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mimicry
Four forces that tend to promote or impede ethical behavior
In my view, there are "four forces" behind why humans avoid unethical behavior. I think understanding these forces can be useful when seeking to explain people's actions (especially when someone does something truly terrible).
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 proso...
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Three big reasons we struggle to find the truth
As I see it, there are three main causes for our struggles to see the truth on any particular topic:
1. Mimicry: when our in-group promotes falsity that we copy
2. Incentives: when we predict that knowing the truth would feel bad or harm our objectives
3. Complexity: when the truth is hard to figure out
Examples:
1. Mimicry
• Some are Christians because all their friends and family are, too; some are atheists for the same reason.
• Some think that it makes sense to ...
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