Month: December 2020

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 →