2023 in Review

Many ideas, big and small

This year I wrote another 50-odd posts, and got another 1000 free subscribers, bringing my 2-year total to ~100 posts and over 3000 subscribers (see 2022 in review). Below, I’ll summarize the year’s blogging, bolding the handful of posts that I most recommend to anyone who missed them the first time around.

DALL·E’s vision of a philosopher at work. I wouldn’t mind the enchanted library!

The Big Picture

My Big Ideas highlights and explains five major themes from my work:

1. Beneficentrism (or why utilitarian-style beneficence is not exclusively utilitarian)

2. Telic Ethics and Moral Priorities

3. The Need for Positivity in Ethics (i.e. Don’t Valorize the Void)

4. Valuing Concrete Individuals, and

5. Normative Disambiguation: Fittingness and Deontic Pluralism

It’s probably the best place to start if you want to learn more about my research!

Bleeding-Heart Consequentialism sets out my general approach to moral theory (and why I think most objections to consequentialism so badly miss the mark).

Morally Risky Philosophy explains why I think free inquiry is so important, despite the possibility of error. Along the way, I refute Brennan & Freiman’s interesting “precautionary” argument against moral philosophy.

Philosophical Myth-Busting flags the persisting “myths” of moral philosophy that tend to bother me the most (and points the way to detailed corrections).

Hidden Challenges and Missed Engagements — lamenting the scarcity of cross-camp engagement in moral philosophy, I set out the main challenges I’d like to see my philosophical opponents address, and invite others to share what they see as the most important challenges to my views. (Still awaiting serious engagement from other philosophers!)

Ethical Theory

I wrote a series of posts highlighting what I take to be some central flaws of conventional deontology, clearing the path for consequentialism:

• Reactive vs Goal-Directed Ethics notes that “much of conventional ethics is concerned with how we react to events that unambiguously impinge upon our lives,” which really undersells how worthwhile it is to positively seek to do good. (This is, in a nutshell, why I think Effective Altruism is so good and unusual.)

• Ethics without Sin draws a structural analogy between deontology and conservative sexual ethics, situating consequentialism as the natural implication of universal “transgression-skepticism”.

• Life Isn’t Sacred similarly argues that deontology seems to treat life and/or agency as sacred, prioritizing agential purity over prosaic harm-reduction. Consequentialists, by contrast, value life in the ordinary sort of way, and conceive of agency in instrumental terms (the point of action being to realize apt goals).

• The Normativity Objection to Deontology — what argument can be offered against a beneficent amoralist who just wants to help people and doesn’t care (non-instrumentally) about your moral rules? Indeed, why should anyone care non-instrumentally about mere rules? Seems a weird thing to care about! Worse, it seems blatantly immoral to prioritize rules over lives. This is the heart of my objection to deontology: it reflects bad (unfitting) fundamental concerns.

• Should We Care about (Optimific) Rights Violations? A deep dilemma for deontologists.

• Deontic Fictionalism — Distinguish practical norms from the theoretical question of what justifies them. We can justify the norm Rɪɢʜᴛs (don’t violate rights, even if you think it’s for the best) on purely instrumental/consequentialist grounds. Still, any who find two-level consequentialism hard to fathom might instead simply accept deontic fictionalism, i.e., the view that one should behave as if a (suitably beneficentric) version of deontology were true. Either way, we can endorse “deontological”-looking norms without the theoretical baggage.

• Three Arguments for Consequentialism:
  (1) Utilitarian Pre-commitment vs Deontological Defection
  (2) The Teleological Argument
  (3) My “Master Argument” from reflective equilibrium: consequentialists can accommodate appealing deontological intuitions about “obligation” via deontic fictionalism or two-level norm endorsement; deontologists cannot accommodate appealing consequentialist intuitions about what fundamentally matters. So consequentialism can better accommodate our intuitions, all things considered.

• Mark Significance with Attitudes — not all moral differences are action-relevant.

• Revisiting "Philosophical" Utilitarianism (contra Scanlon): Well-being is what matters, but it needn’t exhaust the moral facts. The claim of exhaustiveness is trivially false.

• Evaluating Acts and Outcomes — Often we can “naturalize” a putative counterexample by replacing actions with purely natural causes, and ask whether or not we should prefer for a gust of wind to trigger outcome X. If X isn’t actually preferable—i.e., better—then consequentialism trivially agrees that we shouldn’t bring about X. In that case, the example fails in its ambition to distinguish consequentialist and non-consequentialist views.

Future Lives

This may be the area in which I think it’s most common for other philosophers to overconfidently hold indefensible views. I’d especially urge such folks to read the first post in this series:

• Death, Extinction, and the Epicurean Fallacy — People often make confused metaphysical arguments that creating lives can’t be good because failing to do it wouldn’t harm anyone. This post clearly explains why this common reasoning is fallacious.

• Against Conditional Beneficence explains my objections to what is widely regarded as the best extant defense of the procreation asymmetry. It turns out that the best arguments offered in support of the asymmetry are really bad: a mix of equivocation and outright question-begging. And the resulting view rests upon a deeply unappealing—even disrespectful—view of the value of our lives.

• Accepting Merely Comparative Harms argues that comparatively bad things may yet be absolutely good, and so preferable over nothing at all. Three important implications: (1) Avoiding wrongdoing should not be an end in itself; (2) it isn’t inherently objectionable to create happy lives that will be greatly harmed by premature death; and (3) the “risk” of mistakenly granting rights to (actually non-sentient) AIs doesn’t necessarily give us any reason to refrain from creating AIs of dubious moral status (contra Schwitzgebel).

• Benatar’s Fallacy — expands upon an interesting recent paper from Kaila Draper, explaining why anti-natalism doesn’t really follow from Benatar’s asymmetry.

Decision Theory

• X-Risk Agnosticism — suggests that dismissals of existential risk are wildly overconfident, and a position of modest uncertainty should instead lead us to take prudent precautions.

• It’s Not Wise to be Clueless argues (again contra Schwitzgebel, always an interesting foil) that radical agnosticism about the far future is not rationally ideal. Rather, our priors should favor the value-concordance thesis that worse medium-term outcomes are also likely to be worse over the longer term. For example, we should expect that global nuclear war would be overall bad for humanity.

• All Probabilities Matter offers a simple counterexample to the common view that you can simply ignore tiny probabilities. (It then goes on to explain how we can nonetheless avoid falling victim to Pascal’s Mugger.)

Applied Ethics

• Review of Animal Liberation Now — highlights some key lessons from (and questions for) Peter Singer’s revamped classic book.

• Confessions of a Cheeseburger Ethicist explains why I think there can be genuinely unjustified actions that nonetheless shouldn’t bother us too much.

• Why Not Effective Altruism shares some highlights from my new paper of the same title. It turns out that common philosophical critiques of EA are… well… let’s politely go with “not cogent”.

• Review of The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does — a whole book lacking anything resembling a cogent argument, and published by OUP, no less. (The referees really failed to do their job when they let this one through.)

• Text, Subtext, and Miscommunication — how cognitive differences between “high” and “low” decouplers can lead to misunderstandings and false accusations.

• Uncertain Optimizing and Opportunity Costs — it’s very hard to know how best to prioritize between (lower stakes) “sure things” and (higher stakes) “moonshots”. Yet many people act as though the former is obviously the way to go. These people are being very stupid, and should instead acknowledge that uncertainty cuts both ways.

• Truth in Medicine — why the FDA should not blanket prohibit unproven treatments (but should instead prefer a combination of informative labelling together with bans of clearly harmful drugs).

• The Promise and Perils of Brain-Computer Interface — on the importance of distinguishing real vs sham ethical concerns, and focusing debate on the former.

• Anti-Altruistic Paternalism — there’s something very strange about the apparent impetus some feel to discourage others against altruistic (net-positive) sacrifice.

• Burning Kidneys — might be even better than donating one, if done right?

Miscellany

• Git-Pandoc Academic Workflow — a simple system for producing nicely-formatted PDFs of your academic papers, with automatic backups and version control. Recommended for tech-savvy grad students who might otherwise resort to LaTeX.

• Commonsense Moralists should be Idealists — the former give more weight to surface phenomena than to underlying structure, which should also lead them to like the latter view! (Though idealism can also be given a more principled footing, so needn’t inclined one towards commonsense morality.)

• The Best Possible World (of those subjectively indistinguishable from our own) would be an idealist world. How should we then divide our credence between materialist and idealist conceptions of external reality?

• Psychophysical Harmony — we should all agree that disharmony is possible. The challenge is just to explain why it’s unlikely. It would be nice to have a principled explanation, but I’m also OK with brute probabilities if needed.

• Words Don’t Matter — against philosophical language-policing (especially in ethics).

• Against Confidence-Policing: It's generally good for academics to share their honest, considered opinions. People criticizing this, without any object-level criticism to suggest that a different credence level is better justified, are playing silly status games.

• Evaluating Philosophy — many referees don’t seem very good at it. I suggest some guidance that might help (and invite further suggestions for improvement).

Off the blog

I had an absolute blast guest-teaching a session of a graduate seminar at Princeton University on “non-deontic ethics” back in mid-October. (I was lucky to visit in person, which led to some of the best philosophical conversation I’ve had in years. But I’m also open to guest-teaching via Zoom if other folks are excited to discuss my work in their grad seminars: just shoot me an email!)

This year saw several significant updates to utilitarianism.net, including:

• General website improvements, thanks to webmaster Boris!

• AI-narrated audio (via the excellent Type III team).

• Several fantastic new guest essays published, including from John Broome, Nir Eyal, and Jeff McMahan. (With more to come!)

• A fun new section on “the utilitarian’s toolkit” (for responding to objections).

• Refocused the Arguments chapter to better expand upon the veil of ignorance (and its limits), and to introduce ex ante Pareto.

• Added new articles on the cluelessness and abusability objections, and expanded the practical ethics section on respecting commonsense norms.

I also have lots of exciting (to me, at least) research projects in the works, and look forward to sharing the details as they come to fruition…

Happy New Year!