Hands and Cities

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 →

In a previous post, I tried to gesture at the possibility of a certain kind of wholeheartedness in ethical life. In this post, I want to examine a question about meta-ethics that seems to me important to this wholeheartedness: namely, whether you can be completely alienated from what you should do. By this I mean:… Continue reading Alienation and meta-ethics (or: is it possible you should maximize helium?) →

In Peter Singer's classic thought experiment, you can save a drowning child, but only by ruining your clothes. Singer's argument is that (a) you're obligated to save the child, and that (b) many modern humans are in a morally analogous relationship to the world's needy. (Note that on GiveWell's numbers, the clothes in question need… Continue reading Wholehearted choices and “morality as taxes” →

(Content warning: discussion of death and intense pain) This post is an amalgam of thoughts about death, prompted centrally by Atul Gawande's book Being Mortal.  I. Gawande's book describes a lot of different people who are dying, at different speeds, with different kinds of suffering and support. I often found it piercingly sad, in a… Continue reading Thoughts on being mortal →

A number of people I know are illusionists about consciousness: that is, they think that the way consciousness seems to us involves some fundamental misrepresentation. On an extreme version of this view (which Frankish (2016) calls "strong illusionism"), phenomenal consciousness simply does not exist; it only seems to exist (I'll say more about what I… Continue reading Grokking illusionism →

Lots of people want to do big things -- start a big company, write a bestselling book, participate in an important project. I'll call this the "accomplishment desire." Often this is centrally tied to social status; the relevant type of "bigness" is highly correlated with what would seem cool at, e.g., a college reunion. But… Continue reading The impact merge →