Hands and Cities

(Content warning: descriptions of cruelty) Lots of people I know think that what you should do depends, ultimately, on your contingent patterns of care and concern (suitably idealized), as opposed to some sort of objective "normative reality." And I find various views in this vicinity pretty plausible, too. To others, though, such views seem like… Continue reading Subjectivism and moral authority →

This post distinguishes between two different ways of deferring to future humans who understand a lot more about the world than we do. I. Some futuristic minds Consider a futuristic version of human civilization, in which human-like capacities for cognition and understanding have dramatically improved. Let's say, in particular, that humans have figured out how… Continue reading Two types of deference →

In thought experiments descended from Nozick's classic "experience machine," you consider how being plugged into a machine that generates the experience of a certain kind of life (generally, a very pleasant one) compares with some alternative. Such comparisons are meant to tease apart the purely experiential aspect of life from other factors -- in particular,… Continue reading Contact with reality →

I. The ants Recently, my housemates and I started seeing a lot of ants in the house. They marched in long lines along the edges of the basement and the bathrooms. A few showed up in the drawers. My girlfriend put out some red pepper, which was supposed to deter them from one of their… Continue reading Killing the ants →

There is a scene at the end of the movie Tenet, in which the main character accuses the villain of solipsism: Protagonist: "You don't believe in a God, or a future, or in anything outside of your own experience!" Villain: "The rest is belief, and I don't have it." In the context of the film,… Continue reading Believing in things you cannot see →

I often find myself wanting to refer to a certain dimension of emotional experience, which I'll call "clinging." This post tries to point at it. I also suggest that understanding this dimension can resolve a common confusion about Buddhist philosophy and other types of spiritual/therapeutic advice -- namely, how "non-attachment" or “letting go” can be… Continue reading On clinging →

Life in the future could be profoundly good. Many people accept something like this in principle. But I think it often goes underestimated in practice, especially once we imagine society's most glaring problems fixed, and ask where we might go from there. The difference in quality of life between a fixed-up version of our current… Continue reading Actually possible: thoughts on Utopia →

This post describes what I see as a basic but powerful objection to treating certain deontological distinctions as justified via some intrinsically important moral difference they reflect or respond to. In brief, the objection is that the distinctions in question are not, in the right way, important to the potential victims of harm. I focus… Continue reading Shouldn’t it matter to the victim? →

This post is about a certain type of normative realism, and a related type of despair (I don't think "despair" is quite the right word, but I haven't found a better one). My aim is to question an assumption underlying this realism and this despair, using a toy robot as an analogy to illustrate the… Continue reading The despair of normative realism bot →

This post describes a type of thought experiment I sometimes perform in thinking about what to do. I find it a helpful tool for stepping back from what's immediately salient to me. It's mostly just a somewhat hokey variant on a classic type of thought, and I'm not sure how helpful it will be to… Continue reading A ghost →