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 world:

—
1) EXTERNAL CAUSES

1i) Nature or evolution (e.g., malaria, cancer) -> Potential solutions: technological development, such as medical cures

1ii) Bad luck (e.g., landslides, earthquakes, droughts) -> charity, government programs providing social safety nets

1iii) Scarcity (e.g., insufficient food or water in an area) -> migration away from high scarcity areas, technological development to increase food production

—
2) FAILINGS OF HUMAN NATURE

2i) Highly selfish actions by non-evil people (e.g., some of the crimes that are committed, some of the manipulation that occurs) -> cultural norms discouraging selfishness, cultural norms to punish those taking highly selfish actions

2ii) Harmful actions taken in highly emotional, confused, or desperate mental states (e.g., crimes of passion, harmful, desperate reactions out of fear, harm caused during extreme mental illness) -> widely available and effective mental health treatment, widespread education/training related to mental health and emotional regulation

2iii) Well-intentioned ideologues who are convinced that their simple but wrong model of the world is the absolute truth (e.g., some of the genocides and wars, many harmful yet well-intentioned policies) -> rationality education/training, a robust culture of respectful disagreement and debate

2iv) Cognitive biases leading to actions with severe negative consequences (e.g., greatly misjudging whether a project will bring enough benefit to be worth the cost, excessive fear towards or devaluing of ‘othered’ outsiders leading to mistreatment or harm to outsiders, lack of preparation for likely occurrences that are not salient) -> rationality education/training, careful design of systems to counteract biases, strong moral norms of respect towards all, moral circle expansion

2v) Retaliation or revenge (e.g., cycles of retribution) -> a culture of forgiveness, effective dispute resolution methods and institutions, reliable enforcement of laws

2vi) Evil people acting alone (e.g., serial murder, child abuse) -> effective police forces, high crime clearance rates, enforcement of laws, scientific investigation into the root causes of evil

2vii) Evil people who rally supporters (e.g., some genocides and wars, some extractive government policies) -> strong norms around truth telling and social punishment for lying, a robust culture of respectful disagreement and debate, a culture of empathy toward and acceptance of those who are different than you, a well-educated and informed citizenry, scientific investigation into the root causes of evil, a strong constitution, a strong independent judiciary, strong norms around maintaining freedom and independence of thought

—
3) CHALLENGES OF COORDINATION AND INFORMATION

3i) Negative-sum competition (e.g., fighting over food when there isn’t enough to go around) -> technological innovation to increase abundance, thoroughly enforced laws forbidding negative-sum behaviors

3ii) Unintended side effects of actions that are not innately unethical (e.g., addiction caused by the invention of social media, new promising-seeming medical treatments that turn out to have horrendous side effects) -> a robust and low-transaction cost systems for those who were harmed to be compensated by those who caused the harm, hard to undermine enforced regulation requiring organizations to ameliorate harms once they have been identified

3iii) Collective action problems and negative externalities caused by individually reasonable behavior (e.g., pollution, climate change, overuse of resources) -> methods for assigning prices to negative externalities so that someone bears the cost, regulation to limit negative externalities

3iv) Prisoner’s dilemmas and difficulties of pre-commitment and coordination (e.g., arms races, such as with nuclear weapons) -> technology to facilitate coordination and simultaneous action, public projects by governments and private donors

What other broad causes of bad things or potential types of solutions am I missing?

This piece was first written on November 2, 2025, and first appeared on my website on November 17, 2025.

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.

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.

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.

1. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
2. Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
3. Gates’ Law: Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
4. Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
5. Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or, don’t invoke conspiracy when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence).
6. Acton’s Dictum: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
7. Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
8. Benford’s Law: In a diverse collection of unrelated statistics, a given statistic has roughly a 30% chance of starting with the digit 1.
9. Betteridge’s Law: Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.
10. Brooks’ Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
11. Chesterton’s Fence: Reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
12. Claasen’s Law: Usefulness = log(technology).
13. Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right, but when they state something is impossible, they are probably wrong.
14. Cromwell’s Rule: Nothing but logical impossibilities have a prior probability of 0 or 1.
15. Cunningham’s Law: The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.
16. Doctorow’s Law: When someone puts a lock on a thing you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.
17. Dunbar’s Number: Most people can’t maintain stable social relationships with more than 150 people.
18. Eroom’s Law: Drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology.
19. Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: You’ll believe articles outside your area of expertise, even after acknowledging that neighboring articles in your area of expertise are completely wrong.
20. Gibson’s Law (or the Expert Witness Law): For each PhD (to use as an expert witness for one side) there’s an equal and opposite PhD.
21. Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
22. Morley-Souter’s Law (Rule 34): There is porn of it (no exceptions).
23. Greenspun’s Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
24. Hebb’s Law: Neurons that fire together wire together.
25. Hubble’s Law: Galaxies recede from an observer at a rate proportional to their distance to that observer.
26. Hume’s Guillotine (Is-Ought Problem): Normative statements (about what’s moral/immoral/right/wrong) cannot be deduced exclusively from descriptive statements.
27. Humphrey’s Law: Conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance.
28. Kranzberg’s Law: Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
29. Lamarck’s Principle (or “Use it or Lose it”): Use it or lose it (evolutionarily speaking, but also in the brain).
30. Lewis’s Law: The comments you’ll inevitably find on any article about feminism justify feminism.
31. Littlewood’s Law: Individuals can expect miracles to happen to them, at the rate of about one per month.
32. Maes–Garreau Law: Favorable predictions about future technology will fall at the latest possible date they can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the predictor.
33. Metcalfe’s Law: The value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.
34. Miller’s Law: To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.
35. Moore’s Law: Computation per dollar grows exponentially (or: number of transistors per circuit doubles roughly every 24 months).
36. Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
37. Alder’s Law: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
38. O’Sullivan’s Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.
39. Pareto’s Principle (80/20 Rule): For many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.
40. Peter’s Principle: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
41. Poisson’s Law (or Law of Large Numbers): For independent random variables with a common distribution, the average tends to the mean as sample size increases.
42. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In bureaucracy, those devoted to the bureaucracy get control, those devoted to what it’s supposed to achieve lose influence.
43. Putt’s Law: Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.
44. Rosenthal Effect (Pygmalion Effect): High expectations lead to an increase in performance, low expectations to a decrease in performance.
45. Schneier’s Law: Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.
46. Shermer’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.
47. Zipf’s Law: The frequency of use of the nth-most-frequently-used word in any natural language is approximately inversely proportional to n (few words are used often, most are used rarely).
48. Wirth’s Law: Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster.
49. Sturgeon’s Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud.
50. Stigler’s Law: No discovery is named after its original discoverer, including this one.

This piece was first written on July 6, 2020, and first appeared on my website on May 30, 2026.

The framework divides things that are sometimes claimed to be “true,” or that we might say “exist,” into seven different realms (or “spaces”) in which they might be said to be true or to exist.

I’ll introduce the framework and show how it can be used with some example applications. Note that this framework is intended merely to provide useful language and categorizations for thinking about these sorts of philosophical questions; it is not itself intended to make any metaphysical claims about what’s true.

The seven realms of truth (brief overview):

There are a number of ways that something can be claimed to be “true” or different “realms” these truths can be about. To make it easier to clarify thinking, I divide these truth and existence claims into different “spaces”:

(1) Some things “exist” in the sense that they are in physical reality, like atoms (in “Matter Space”).

(2) Other things may “exist” in the sense that they are real experiences conscious beings have, like the taste of pineapple (in “Experience Space”).

(3) Other things may “exist” in the sense that they are shared constructs across multiple minds, like the value of money (in “Consensus Space”).

(4) Other things may “exist” in the sense of being conclusions derived from frameworks or sets of premises, like consequences of economic theories (in “Theory Space”).

(5) Some may “exist” in the sense that they are represented in systems that store or process information, such as the information in a database (in “Representation Space”).

(6) If universal moral truths “exist” (e.g., objective facts about what is right and wrong), then we can talk about moral rules existing (in “Morality Space”).

(7) Finally, if supernatural entities “exist,” such as spirits (meaning that not all beings inhabit Matter Space), then these beings are in a different realm than us (in “Supernatural Space”).

To further explain the spaces themselves, we can use the consistent example of atoms:

(1) It is true that atoms exist (Matter Space).

(2) It is true that I have internal experiences that are caused by the existence of atoms (Experience Space).

(3) It’s true in English that “atoms” are constituents of matter (Consensus Space).

(4) It’s true that the existence of atoms is a consequence of the standard model of physics (Theory Space).

(5) It’s true that Wikipedia contains information about atoms (Representation Space).

(6) Many people think it’s true that moral claims are not just claims about whether atoms have a particular configuration (Morality Space).

(7) If supernatural entities exist, it’s true that they are not merely made of atoms (Supernatural Space).

But if you say “it’s true that atoms exist,” do you mean “true” in the same sense as when you say “it’s true that in English “atoms” are constituents of matter?” Are these notions of truth identical? What about when you say, “it’s true that murder is immoral?” Is that the same meaning of “true”? Or when you say that “atoms exist,” does the word “exist” as used there mean the same thing as when you say “numbers exist”? If we have a claim that something is “true” or is “real” or “exists,” then having these “seven realms of truth” in mind allows us to follow a process of clarification.

So suppose that we are considering a particular philosophical claim about what is true or existent.

1. First, ask yourself about which “space” this claim is being made. For instance, does the speaker mean “murder is wrong” as a claim about Experience Space or about Morality Space, or about some other space?

2. Second, consider what we mean when we say that something in that Space is “true”/”real”/”exists.” For instance, we may think that claims about Morality Space are true in a very different sense than claims about Experience Space or Matter Space. We might even think that there are no such thing as true or false claims about some of these spaces.

Once you have determined what Space the claim is about, and you know how you think those sorts of claims should be interpreted for that Space, you now have a way of evaluating that claim!

A few very important points before continuing:

• I do not intend to imply that all these spaces actually “exist” or are “real,” and I especially don’t intend to imply that they all “exist” or are “real” in the same sense as each other. For instance, it could be that some of these spaces don’t exist at all, and it could be that some of those that do “exist” do so in very different senses of the word “exist.”

• I also don’t intend to imply that these spaces are necessarily all different from each other or that they don’t subsume each other (e.g., someone might think that space X is just subsumed into a combination of spaces Y and Z, which is fine).

• This post is NOT intended to make metaphysical claims about what’s true; rather, its purpose is to provide a simple “language” and process for clarifying thinking and communication around difficult-to-think-about philosophical questions. For instance, with this language of “spaces,” you can ask yourself questions like, “do I think that Experience Space is just a part of Matter Space, or is there an important sense in which they are different?”, or questions like, “do things in Theory Space actually exist in the same sense that things in Matter Space do?” This language of spaces is intended to provide concise mental categories that we can then ponder and discuss.

• There are many (perhaps an infinite number) of such “spaces” one could imagine adding to this list. This list is merely intended to be pragmatic: it is designed to cover many of the cases that non-philosophers tend to debate with each other. I sought to include the most important cases only.

• Another use for the concept of these “spaces” is that they can help you disambiguate your beliefs. For instance, you can ask yourself, “when I say that it’s true that 1+1=2, do I mean that it’s true in the sense of Theory Space, or do I mean it in some other sense?”

Let’s now dig into each of these seven realms of truth more thoroughly.

The seven realms of truth in detail:

(1) Matter space: the realm of what physically exists, such as atoms, waves, and photons.

It is true (in Matter Space) that hydrogen atoms can be divided into subatomic particles and that electrons have a certain amount of electromagnetic charge.

A claim like “this painting is not art” is not a claim about Matter Space.

If someone claims “everything is subjective,” a natural clarifying question to understand their claim is to ask whether they are saying this applies to Matter Space: “do you mean that the question of how much electrical charge an electron has is also subjective, or do you only mean to claim subjectivity for cultural beliefs (Consensus Space) or internal experiences (Experience Space)?”

Physics (as in the theories that humans have invented about reality), being a set of ideas, are not part of Matter Space directly, but they attempt to describe Matter Space.

(2) Experience space: the realm of what we experience internally, such as emotions, colors, and sensations.

It is true (in Experience Space) that the ocean is blue (as experienced by me), that food tastes good (to me), and that being pricked with a pin hurts (me).

A claim like “French fries are not a French food” is not a claim about Experience Space.

If someone claims that a particular painting is not “art,” a natural clarifying question to ask is whether they mean this only in terms of Experience Space: “do you mean that your own experience when you view the painting is not the experience you would require to call something art, or do you mean that you don’t think this painting satisfies the shared cultural understanding of what art is (Consensus Space), or something else?”

If there were no conscious beings in the universe, then Experience Space would be empty.

(3) Consensus space (i.e., “intersubjective facts” ): the realm of shared ideas whose truth depends on a simultaneous belief by multiple minds, such as cultural, linguistic, and societal constructs.

It is true (in Consensus Space) that money can be used to buy things, that the U.S. is currently a country, that “man” is the singular form of “men,” and that murder is illegal. If only one person in the world believed these things, they would cease to be true in Consensus Space. So their truth is inextricably linked to some form of consensus across minds.

A claim like “the player moving first in the game of Connect Four has an advantage” is not a claim about Consensus Space.

If someone claims that “some rights exist, but healthcare is not a right,” you could ask a clarifying question regarding whether they are making this claim purely about Consensus Space: “Do you mean that there is no societal consensus that healthcare satisfies the properties of a right, or do you mean that according to a specific theory of morality (Theory Space) healthcare is not included as a right, or maybe you mean that when you reflect on healthcare you don’t get the same feeling (Experience Space) about its universality and importance that you do about other things that you’d say are rights?”

If conscious beings were unable to communicate with each other (that is, there was no language, even in rudimentary form), then Consensus Space would be empty.

(4) Theory space: conclusions that are implied by a set of premises (or modeling assumptions, or rules), such as implications of theories and frameworks.

For instance, it is true (in Theory Space) that in standard economic theory, the price of a good will be exactly the price where the supply and demand curves intersect (even though this is not precisely true of real markets in the physical world). And it is true, according to Newtonian mechanics (i.e., the simplified/approximate theory of physics, but not necessarily precisely true in actual physical reality itself), that if you start exerting a constant force on a stationary billiard ball, it will accelerate with an acceleration inversely proportional to its mass.

A claim like “my social security number is stored in some government database” is not a claim about Theory Space.

If someone makes a claim like “increasing the minimum wage does not increase unemployment,” you might follow with a clarifying question like: “are you saying that standard economic theory (Theory Space) does not imply that increasing minimum wage will increase unemployment, or are you saying that you think that, due to inaccuracies in theory, in the real world (Matter Space), measured unemployment does not rise when the minimum wage is increased?”

Even though human minds can invent and remember theories, Theory Space does not hinge on the existence of human minds. If, for instance, all humans were to die out, but one day an intelligent alien race were to invent a theory mathematically identical to Newtonian mechanics, truths about the consequences of that theory would be identical to truths about the consequences of our version of it (since those truths merely follow from their premises).

(5) Representation space: truths about systems that store or processes information, such as truths about what’s stored in (or available to be experienced in) video games, VR worlds, databases, books or websites.

For instance, it is true (in Representation Space) that in the game Minecraft, there are six kinds of “wood” you can make stuff out of, or that Wikipedia has more than five million articles in English, or that the book Moby Dick contains discussions of whales, or that my computer has files on it.

A claim like “animals have souls so go to heaven when they die” is not a claim about Representation Space.

If someone makes a claim like “it is impossible for software to ever be conscious or feel pain,” you might ask a clarifying question like “do you mean that it is impossible for software to store the same information and do equivalent information processing as a human brain (Representation Space), or do you mean that even if the software were to store the same information and do the same information processing as a human brain, it still wouldn’t be conscious and capable of feeling pain (Experience Space)?”

Representation Space encompasses questions about what information is stored or what ways information is processed, regardless of the storage or processing medium (e.g., software running on silicon, writing on papyrus, or neurons in a rat or human brain).

(6) Morality Space: the Space for moral “facts,” if such facts “exist” or are “true” in any meaningful sense.

For instance, many people think that moral claims like “murder is always wrong” can be objectively true or false, much like it is objectively true or false whether you are reading this right now.

A claim like “the more accurately you measure a particle’s position, the less accurately you know its momentum” is not a claim about Morality Space.

(7) Supernatural Space: where non-physical spiritual and religious entities would exist (not the idea of them, but the entities themselves) if they were real.

For instance, if you believe in God/heaven/hell/ghosts/spirits etc., then you think they exist (in Supernatural Space) unless you think that, say, hell is literally inside the center of the Earth, or, say, heaven is literally on a particular planet. If you are completely non-spiritual and non-religious, then presumably, you’d say that Supernatural Space is empty (i.e., there is nothing in Supernatural Space).

A claim like “it is wrong to lie” is not a claim about Supernatural Space.

If a person were to claim that they believe in souls, you might try to clarify their belief by asking, “by that, do you mean that you think that after we die, there is a place we continue to exist in that is not the material world (Supernatural Space), or that there is a physical part of us that is our soul that is in principle detectable scientifically (Material Space), or something else?”

If we want to say that supernatural entities exist, but they never reside in Supernatural Space, then, by definition, they either (a) don’t exist or (b) are merely physical entities (in Matter Space), not actually supernatural ones. A “spirit” that was in our world permanently and completely made of atoms (obeying all the known physical laws) would be not so much a “spirit” as an animal or form of human or physical phenomena that scientists just haven’t yet developed an understanding of (just as it once was that we had no scientific understanding of clouds).

What about beliefs?

You may wonder: where do beliefs fit into these seven spaces? The answer is that they can be perceived in many different ways, depending on which Space’s perspective you are adopting. So the different spaces can provide different perspectives on the same phenomena.

Through the lens of Matter Space, beliefs are patterns of molecules in our brains which, if removed or sufficiently altered, would cause us to no longer have those beliefs. From the perspective of Experience Space, beliefs are those thoughts that come with a feeling of “I believe this” or that produce a memory of our believing them when we access them, or that are immediate and obvious consequences of other things about which we experience the feeling of “I believe.”

Through the lens of Consensus Space, we note that there is a subset of beliefs that can only be true by virtue of them being believed by multiple parties. For instance, some might argue that you cannot “be in a relationship” with someone who doesn’t (on any level) know you are in a relationship with them. If you buy this, then the truth about your belief that you are in a relationship hinges on this belief persisting across multiple minds. Consensus Space is about those beliefs that can only be true if they are shared.

Through the lens of Theory Space, we note that some of our beliefs are merely beliefs about the consequences of sets of premises; for instance, we may believe that given the rules of the game of checkers, if both players play perfectly, it will always produce a tie.

The perspective of Representation Space, I think, tells us most fundamentally what beliefs are: information coded in our brains in a certain way. Much like a database may contain facts, our brains have information stored in them that corresponds to what we believe. We decode this information when we think.

From the view of Morality Space, there is a special class of beliefs that are claims about what is moral. For instance, if you believe that it is morally right to do a particular thing in a particular situation, it may be that you’re expressing beliefs about Morality Space.

Now that you have an understanding of the “7 realms of truth” framework, I can more succinctly describe to you a number of things I believe regarding complex philosophical questions (whether or not you agree with my conclusions).

For instance, here are some of my tentative beliefs about reality.

(1) I do not think that all of these spaces “exist” in the same sense. For instance, I think that Matter Space exists in a very different (and much more “real”) sense than the way in which Theory Space “exists.”

(2) When people take psychedelics leading to experiences that they consider spiritual and profound, I think these experiences can only be helpfully understood as being in Experience Space, not Matter Space or Supernatural Space.

(3) I think morality can be best understood in terms of both Experience Space (an evolved sense we have that is then programmed via culture), Consensus Space (a set of norms adopted in societies), and Representation Space (beliefs encoded in our memories about what we consider good or bad) but I don’t think morality can be made sense of via Matter Space (i.e., I think there is no objective morality in the sense of it being a property of certain configurations of molecules, analogous to the way that particles have mass).

(4) I think that Supernatural Space is empty.

(5) I think that math, like theories of physics (but not physical reality itself), is best placed in Theory Space. By that, I mean that “1+1=2” is true only in the sense that “1+1=2” follows as a consequence from the premises of our mathematics (or as a model of certain aspects of physical reality, like putting one ball in a bag and then another in the same bag). Plenty of philosophers and mathematicians disagree with me on this. There is also, of course, a shared cultural consensus that “1+1=2” (Consensus Space), but what’s interesting and useful about math is usually not the consensus aspect (and highly complex mathematical statements don’t have this consensus property because nobody remembers them).

(6) I think the question “what is beauty” is a lot easier to answer if we ask it about each space one by one. If we consider ONLY Matter Space, beauty can’t be found. In Experience Space, beauty is whatever causes the experience of beauty to conscious beings. In Consensus Space beauty is whatever we agree to apply the word beauty to, as well as whatever properties are required for beauty according to cultural consensus. In Representation Space are our beliefs about what things are beautiful (not because we are experiencing them at that moment, but because somewhere in our brains, the information about what things we believe are beautiful is stored). Beauty, in Theory Space, only exists as the consequence of logical theories about beauty (“something is defined to be beautiful if and only if it has properties X, Y, and Z”). And, some people associate god with fundamental beauty (e.g., “that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.”), which could place some beauty in Supernatural Space.

So the next time you’re wrestling with a philosophical question about what is true, what exists, or what is real, I suggest you consider the problem from the perspective of the seven realms of truth: Matter Space, Experience Space, Consensus Space, Theory Space, Representation Space, Morality Space, and Supernatural Space. These realms do not necessarily actually “exist,” and if they do “exist,” they may not exist in the same sense as each other. Nor are they necessarily all distinct from each other. What this “space” approach does, though, is it provides a language for thinking about and discussing tricky philosophical topics, to hopefully make it easier for you to figure out what you believe and why.

This essay was first written on March 25, 2019, and was first released on this site on August 29, 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, acts they would still consider immoral even if no other consequences of that behavior were to occur?

Here’s my attempt at a comprehensive list of things that at least some cultures view as intrinsically wrong. Note that many of these items are related or overlapping.

UNFAIRNESS

• Injustice (e.g., helping a bad person avoid punishment or undermining someone’s just reward)
• Inequality (e.g., causing societies’ resources to be concentrated among just a few while everyone else is poor, or treating people differently based on gender or skin color)
• Abuse of authority (e.g., nepotism, or favoritism, or those in power giving rewards to those they like best instead of those who deserve it, or those who are given a certain position of authority not carrying out the duties of that position, or carrying that the duties poorly or in a self-interested manner)

HARM

• Harm (e.g., causing others suffering or purposely reducing the happiness of others)
• Murder (e.g., ending the life of another person, including in some cultures, animals, or allowing others to die needlessly)
• Genocide (e.g., the harming or killing of a specific, targeted group)
• Stealing (e.g., taking something that belongs to someone else or that should be no one’s property)
• Destruction (e.g., damaging or annihilating things of value, like ruining the environment, destroying ancient or beautiful artifacts, instigating societal collapse, or hunting a species to extinction)
• Slander (e.g., speaking ill of others or gossiping by spreading true but negative or harmful information about other people)
• Subjugation (e.g., controlling the body, mind, or choices of others, or restricting freedom)

DISRESPECT

• Disrespect of authority (e.g., being rude to your parents or disobeying your leaders)
• Disrespect of the vulnerable (e.g., treating people badly or not showing respect for members of a subjugated or vulnerable or oppressed group, or not paying proper respect to those who are victims, or disrespecting people living under hard conditions)
• Disrespect of the dead (e.g., digging up a grave, selling a dead body, necrophilia, cannibalism, speaking badly of the dead)
• Disrespect of god or gods (e.g., blasphemy, taking god’s name in vain, desecrating a place of worship, violating a commandment such as doing work on a day when work is forbidden, worshiping a carved idol instead of worshiping God, not engaging in prayer or thanks, questioning gods nature, or gods choices, or gods existence)
• Practicing other faiths (e.g., worshipping alternative gods, engaging in superstitions, engaging in practices or rituals of other religions)
• Rule-breaking (e.g., violating the laws of your country or the rules of your culture even if those laws are arbitrary or pointless)
• Violating tradition (e.g., non-conformity, or refusing to engage in the traditions of your culture, or flouting traditional roles or norms)
• Disrespect of opinions (e.g., not taking into account the opinions or desires of other people, falsely believing you know more or are wiser than others)
• Defiling (e.g., causing others to be impure, or causing others to take)

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. As a result of evolution and natural selection, most people have an innate emotional “moral” aversion towards murder.

4. Murder is against the law.

5. Murder is labeled as “immoral” by most people in my society.

6. Murder usually reduces the total net happiness of society.

7. The idea of murder provokes in me a morality-related emotional state of “wrongness”.

8. Nearly all philosophies forbid murder or say it should be avoided.

9. Nearly all societies have laws that punish murderers or have customs that ostracize them.

10. Most people would feel a sense of guilt if they committed murder.

Unfortunately, dictionaries cannot clarify for us what the word “moral” means. For instance, one dictionary defines “moral” as “conforming to a standard of right behavior”. Looking up the relevant definition of “right”, we find “being in accordance with what is just, good, or proper”. But the definition given for “good” is just as vague and circular as were the definitions for “moral” and “right”. Checking another definition, the result is no better. It defines “moral” as “conforming to accepted standards of behavior.” Accepted by whom, and for what reason? The dictionary does not answer these questions, and hence does not provide us with an unambiguous explanation of what “moral” means.

Many well-respected philosophers begin by assuming that morality is a single, well-defined thing and argue about what properties it must have. But if we haven’t defined morality, how can we derive its properties? Are we even talking about the same thing as each other – if we’re not, then of course we can’t agree on the properties of that thing. As the list of interpretations above shows, there are many very different things that we might reasonably call “morality”, including our genetic moral intuitions created by natural selection, the societal rules that are deeply ingrained in us, religious laws, and certain abstract concepts about how to treat each other.

Some people claim that whenever someone says that an action is “moral”, all that person is doing is expressing a feeling or emotion about that action. It’s easily falsified that this is ALL that talk of “morality” is doing – Christians, Kantians, and Utilitarians at least sometimes use the word “moral” to refer to actions that are compatible with biblical teachings, the categorical imperative, and the happiness principle, respectively. These individuals likely have an emotional feeling that their systems of ethics are worthwhile, but nonetheless, they often speak of morality in direct reference to their philosophical systems, independent of their personal feelings. Many people who speak about what is moral at least genuinely believe themselves to be expressing a fact.

Ultimately, before we can decide whether a statement like “murder is immoral” is true, we must first decide what we mean by “moral”. When we don’t know the definition of a word, it is difficult to have a meaningful discussion that relies on it. If we decide that morality is simply whatever the law says, or is determined by what the Bible says, or is a genetic characteristic of human beings, then the question of whether “murder is immoral” becomes an empirical and factual one. We need only check the laws for our country, or search through the Bible, or study human genetics and behavior in order to answer questions about what is moral.

In practice, though, typically when statements about morality are made, there is rarely any explicit or even implicit definition of morality being used. Your average person relies on an intuitive sense of what is right and wrong. This intuitive sense is influenced by many factors, including our genetics, the standards of the society that we live in, the religion that we practice, our personal experiences, and the philosophies that appeal to us. Unfortunately, it appears as though questions about morality are usually unanswerable without further specification about the sense in which “moral” is being used.

If the argument made thus far is true, then how can we understand the fact that nearly everyone seems to agree when it comes to certain ethical statements? For example, how can we account for the fact that almost all people in most of the societies that have ever existed have believed that most kinds of murder are immoral? Well, one relevant factor may be that a strong predisposition to viewing as bad the maurder of close others (especially the murder of family members) is inherent in the human genetic code. More generally, our sense of what is morally wrong appears to be strongly correlated with what we feel an emotional revulsion towards, and those things that we find repulsive are influenced by our genetics. If most humans share a “moral feeling” that is caused by the genes that we share in common, then that provides a plausible explanation of why, for example, murder is generally thought to be immoral.

It is not difficult to imagine that when pre-humans lived in groups, an aversion towards certain types of murder could increase an individual’s chance of survival (perhaps because would-be murderers had a high chance of being killed by their intended victim or the victim’s family). If this were the case, then the process of natural selection could help make a revulsion towards murder a common trait among our ancestors. It may be illuminating to note that many types of carnivores, though feeding daily on other (typically smaller) species, very rarely kill members of their own species (even during fights that break out). This is likely due, at least in part, to the fact that members of a single species are usually fairly evenly matched in strength and fighting skills.

A lion is very unlikely to be killed attempting to kill an antelope. Still, he is fairly likely to be killed or seriously injured when attempting to kill another lion, so lions that focus on eating antelope rather than killing other lions may tend to pass down their genes more effectively (even though there are obvious reasons why one lion might benefit if it does manage to kill another). What’s more, social species may ostracize the members of their group who they feel threatened by, which could dramatically reduce the chance of survival for a “murderer” (by which, in this context, I mean a creature that kills members of its own species). A “moral feeling” would be one possible way, among many, that our genes could urge us not to kill members of our own species.

Another reason for the high convergence in moral views about murder being bad may simply be due to the act itself – it is one that, on nearly any moral view, is bad. But different moral theories, while agreeing on its badness, disagree on why it’s bad and what exactly counts as murder. For instance, they may disagree about whether killing someone in self-defense is murder, or as part of war, or as a punishment for a serious crime.

It’s hard to make progress when discussing moral questions when people mean very different things by “moral,” which, very often, they do.

This piece was first written on July 22, 2009, and first appeared on my website on February 10, 2026.