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
Month: December 2020
Alienation and meta-ethics (or: is it possible you should maximize helium?)
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?)
Wholehearted choices and “morality as taxes”
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”
Thoughts on being mortal
(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