Moral philosophy

1 Ethical consumption

See ethical consumption.

2 Effective altruism

See that page.

3 Morality in governance

On aligning our brutish heroism with the needs of a global society. You can also call this political economy, realistically, but I won’t because terminological assumptions in this domain are tedious.

Enlightened imagination for citizens

In a raging flood, a man risks his life to save a swept away child, but two years earlier he voted against strengthening the levee whose breaching caused the flood. During an epidemic people work tirelessly to help the stricken, but ignored elementary sanitation processes that could have prevented the outbreak. More astoundingly, as many as 200,000 Americans die each year from diseases spread by their own doctors who have been ignoring elementary sanitation (including simply washing their hands when needed), but who then work diligently to try to save the patients they have infected. Studies show that about 80% of Americans are “highly concerned” about climate change, yet this percentage drops to less than 20% when the issue is combined with what it will cost to actually deal with these changes. […]

In our world, we have enough power to topple our most important systems, but not the power to restore most of them.

Being heroic in the face of disaster — as humans often are — will not help in most of these cases. This means that we have to “learn about consequences before they happen”. We have to be able to summon vivid enough imaginations of the disasters to be heroic long before they happen.

Also, Libertarianism: a Philosophy of Discipline and Self-Control is an articulation of what an attitude would be that would make hard libertarianism the best possible system.¹

Connection to safetyism.

4 Incoming

In moral philosophy, we usually start by trying to find universal ethics, but why not start from the other side: What ethics can our monkey brains support? What does biological moral philosophy look like? See moral wetware.

• Is ethics a memetic trap?

• Fake Consensualism

  I’ve written a bit before about fake consequentialism, where people who have nonconsequentialist reasons for what they believe make up consequentialist ones so they can appeal to the general populace. I don’t think anyone has ever been convinced gay marriage is wrong because of sincere concern about the fate of children adopted by gay couples, but that argument keeps getting trotted out again and again because it’s one of the few anti-gay-marriage arguments that sounds remotely consequentialist. Or people who dislike porn claiming it will encourage viewers to rape people, even though as far as anyone can tell exactly the opposite is true.

  And where there is fake consequentialism, not far behind you will find fake consensualism. Suppose there’s something you don’t like, but every time you argue against it, people say “Well, it’s all consensual and it doesn’t harm anyone except the people who have agreed to it, so mind your own business”. You can come back with “Yes, but how can we be sure the people involved in it really consented? Deep down? I bet they didn’t”! Or even “I bet this would lead to something nonconsensual happening somewhere else down the line”! Consensual BDSM? Just going to glorify abuse and lead to more nonconsensual abusing, right?

5 References