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...

Why do people often disagree about what’s immoral?

November 16, 2024

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...

At what step do you disagree regarding the ethics of factory farming?

November 9, 2024

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...

Arguments For and Against Longtermism

August 30, 2022

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 ...

Ten weird moral theories

March 19, 2021

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 ...

The “seven realms of truth” framework

March 25, 2019

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...

Understanding the Scope of Human Morality

April 18, 2018

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...

The Missing Definition Of Morality

July 22, 2009

It is common to hear discussions of whether something is moral or immoral, as if "moral" were a word with a specific, agreed-upon meaning. Unfortunately, the word has so many meanings that its interpretation is extremely difficult without extra information. For example, if I say "murder is immoral", I could actually mean any of the following: 1. Murder violates an abstract principle that I would like all people to live by. 2. The Bible (or some other religious text) forbids murder. 3. ...