2024 in Review

This year I wrote 70 posts and gained 1,500 new subscribers (passing 4,500 in total), including three dozen paid subscriptions since introducing the option in June. I appreciate all my readers, but it’s especially nice to know that some people value my writing enough to find it worth paying for! (If you’re an academic with a research budget to cover such costs, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if the aggregate value you got from the posts listed below is greater than that of a marginal academic book purchase.) Alternatively, I’d be delighted to offer a complementary 1-year subscription to anyone who donates an extra $100+ to an effective charity.¹

Two big themes from my writing this year involve (1) the rejection of naive instrumentalism, and how different consequentialist thinking looks when combined with a more reasonable non-ideal decision theory instead; and (2) critically probing deontic concepts, why we should be wary of taking deontic verdicts at face value, and how ethical theorists can learn more from asking “telic” questions about preferability instead.

My year’s blogging—which includes much on the above themes, and even more that isn’t—is summarized below, bolding the handful of posts that I most recommend to anyone who missed them the first time around.

Academia and Meta-philosophy

• Philosophers Should Blog! - it’s good when intellectuals and experts share their thoughts more widely.

• Tracking Philosophical Impact - An awkward ask, but feedback here would be very helpful (if my work has had a significant effect on your moral thinking and/or behavior)!

• Discussion Notes shares 60+ informal critical replies that I’ve written in response to others’ academic work over the years.

• Suggested Readings offers reading suggestions (for course syllabi) that colleagues might not otherwise think of (drawing especially, but not exclusively, from my work and Helen’s), and invites others to do likewise.

• What am I most wrong about? - a very popular open thread! Along the way, I explain my general philosophical orientation on which: (1) reasoned inquiry and intellectual virtue is supremely valuable; (2) status quo bias is a grave force for ill in the world; and (3) words don’t matter. I tend to especially like & think well of people who share this general orientation, even if they come to very different first-order views than I do. (Conversely, I really struggle with naive instrumentalists who prioritize political goals over intellectual integrity.)²

• It’s OK to Read Anyone - Can you believe there are “philosophers” who deny this?

• Reflections on Peter Singer (on the occasion of his Farewell Conference), and how inspiring I find his combination of deep intellectual integrity and practical beneficentric concern.

• Philosophy’s Digital Future explores how a future “PhilAI” could construct and maintain a “PhilMap” of the literature—“situating (e.g.) every paper in the PhilPapers database according to its philosophical contributions and citation networks”—better enabling the transition to a “publish then filter” academic model that no longer relies on journals or other gatekeepers to pre-filter what gets shared (or “published”).

• Contestable vs Question-Begging Arguments: They’re not the same thing! It’s depressingly common for even academic philosophers, when they happen not to accept a premise, to level charges of “begging the question”. I suggest four “tests for vacuity” to help referees (and others) better tell the difference. I argue that false charges of this sort are bad for the same reason that genuinely begging the question is bad. Both errors deprive us of interesting, contestable, substantial philosophy.

General Philosophy

• A post on “recent media appearances” (including a YouTube discussion of psychophysical harmony) goes into some depth on why I’m untroubled by the causal inefficacy of philosophical (moral, phenomenal) truths, and don’t think that adding supernatural causes would actually improve our epistemic situation.

• Hypothetical Imperatives and Normativity explains, via an “irrigation model” of hypothetical imperatives, why I don’t think you can get normativity on the cheap via this means. (You get what you pay for in this case, i.e. nothing.)

• The Best of All Possible Multiverses: The obvious solution to the Problem of Evil - the basic account can be read for free. (Further details and responses to objections are behind the paywall.)

Non-Ideal Decision Theory

• Naïve Instrumentalism vs Principled Proceduralism: Not your standard consequentialism-deontology distinction argues that “naïve instrumentalism is a false theory of instrumental rationality that critics ignorantly associate with consequentialism.” One can be a principled defender of free speech and other liberal norms in the sense that one robustly endorses these norms and isn’t open to carving out exceptions simply on the basis of one’s first-order judgments of the merits of the dispute (e.g. whether one agrees with the speech or not). It doesn’t require a deontological theory of why the norm is worth so robustly endorsing. Seen in this light, the common claim that “utilitarians have no principled objection to slavery” is silly and deeply misleading.

• Astronomical Cake: argues against treating tidy thought experiments as a model for messy real-world ethical quandaries. I especially critique public comments from renowned senior ethicists Kieran Setiya and Seth Lazar regarding SBF’s fraud. Both implicitly assume naive instrumentalism, which underlies what I call philosophy’s “high stakes moral distortion”.

• Good Judgment with Numbers - Too many people implicitly assume that the role of quantitative tools in practical decision-making must be all or nothing. Against both extremes, I argue that moral agents should instead use good judgment informed by quantitative considerations.

• Risk Aversion as a Humility Heuristic argues that prominent formalizations of “risk aversion” go wildly off the rails, and that commonsense risk-averse attitudes are best understood as pragmatic protections against misjudgment (given asymmetric risks from higher-order uncertainty). It’s a neat example of how philosophers too often mistake pragmatic non-ideal norms for fundamental commitments to be built into the ground level of our normative theorizing. Not everything important is fundamental!

• Commonsense Clues: A Defense of Longtermism [published off-blog] critiques Schwitzgebel’s objections to longtermism, arguing that they assume a naive approach to decision theory that we should reject. We should instead combine longtermist ends with good practical judgment about how to wisely pursue those ends.

Ethical Theory

• Beyond Right and Wrong - an overview of my next book, and an open invitation to provide comments and/or participate in an online workshop once I have a complete (enough) draft ready. (See also my related chat with Bentham’s Bulldog.)

• Axiology, Deontics, and the Telic Question - A better framing of the normative landscape—a simple new “lens” that will help you to instantly see core issues in ethical theory much more clearly.

• Deontic Ambiguity - there are many distinct deontic concepts that could be invoked by a term like “wrong”, and no reason to expect that different moral theorists are all talking about the same one. I argue that confidence in utilitarianism’s supposed “counterintuitiveness” may stem from illicitly conflating ideal and non-ideal concepts.

• What Permissibility Could Be - contrasts “rationalist” vs “sentimentalist” understandings of sub-maximalist permissibility. I argue that it’s a mistake to think that permissibility renders us justified in prioritizing our self-interest over distant children’s lives. We are, at best, excused. (I think this is a really important point that isn’t sufficiently widely appreciated. Hopefully my book will eventually change that.)

• The Utilitarian Tradition is Conceptually Stunted - in which I argue that orthodox utilitarian dismissals of fittingness as a normative concept are ideological foolishness.

• Deontology and Preferability - why it’s important (and deeply illuminating) for the former to consider the latter.

• Two-Level Deontology - A neglected region of logical space, worth recognizing.

• Stakes Can be High - Argues that high-stakes “abusability” concerns are as applicable to moderate deontology as to consequentialism. (The two views are equivalent in high-stakes scenarios, after all.) If you’re opposed to political assassinations, for example, it isn’t enough to think that killing is intrinsically wrong, since the badness of that can obviously be outweighed. You’d do better to argue that, as a matter of non-ideal theory, even morally-motivated assassination attempts have negative expected value. I conclude: “We should not expect reasonable ethical judgments to be completely unhinged from reasonable empirical expectations about what would, or would not, actually be for the best.”

• How Intention Matters explores why you might care about quality of will, without having to care about Kant. I also argue for a “constraint on warranted hostility” (often violated in online discourse, alas) that “you need to demonstrate ill will and/or unreasonableness on the part of your target.”

• Beneficentric Virtue Ethics discusses “the good intentions behind utilitarianism and effective altruism” that I think make it deeply unreasonable for people to be so hostile towards these views! (I could see someone reasonably disagreeing with the former view, and at least abstaining from the latter project, but I don’t think either could reasonably be regarded as inherently ill-willed or unreasonable.)

• Non-Fungible Hedonism proposes a new form of hedonism designed to address the objection that equally-pleasant goods aren’t thereby interchangeable. But I argue that it still isn’t enough. (Future paper title: ‘Sex and Candy: the fungibility objection to hedonism’.)

• The Value of an Action (and how the baseline may depend upon fitting attitudes) responds to an interesting argument from Norcross that seeks to establish that actions cannot be evaluated as absolutely good or bad.

• Slater’s Objections to Satisficing - my responses to two recent objections to my Willpower Satisficing view.

Population Ethics

• The Profoundest Error in Population Ethics explains what’s wrong with (common but confused) metaphysical dismissals of procreative beneficence. In short: once you grant that existence can harm (as it clearly can), there’s no principled basis for the “asymmetric” claim that existence cannot benefit. The conceptual moves necessary to make existential harm coherent also render existential benefits clearly coherent.

• Harman, Harm, and the Non-Identity Problem argues that Liz Harman subtly misdiagnosed the role that harm plays in explaining commonsense non-identity verdicts. The relevant “harms” are (in typical cases) better understood as “reduced benefits”; accordingly, it is still the case that nobody is wronged when we act wrongly in typical non-identity cases. The wrongness is, ultimately, impersonal.

• Types of Replaceability - I argue (against my past self) that we don’t need to reject Totalism (or shift to a hybrid view containing person-affecting reasons for action) in order to observe a normative distinction between death and failure to create. The asymmetry in person-directed reasons for regret may suffice. (Unless we additionally have overall reason to prefer that people live longer rather than be replaced; but examples of generational turnover cast doubt on that principle.)

Applied Ethics

• Why I give🔸10% — and you should too! It’s very likely the best decision you could possibly make, as ranked by the ratio of positive impact : willpower required. If you’re currently expending moral effort anywhere else, considering temporarily redirecting your efforts to this instead!

• What “Effective Altruism” Means to Me sets out what I take to be true and important when thinking about effective altruism. (Also lists some things that people sometimes associate with EA that I don’t agree with.)

• Imperfection is OK! - On honestly recognizing our failures to do as much good as we ideally ought to, without needing to feel bad about it. (Most people self-deceive because they think the reality would be too painful to acknowledge. I argue that it doesn’t have to be. You can just be honest with yourself, and do a decent amount of good, and feel good about it while recognizing that of course doing even more would be even better. Try it!)

• The Anti-Advisory Paradox - it’s actually very risky to advocate “Don’t Do Anything Risky!” It’s obviously inconsistent to universally advise against offering high-stakes advice (e.g. to pursue earning to give), when the latter might save lives—and hence preventing it could cost lives. Strangely, multiple anti-EA philosophers have engaged in this blatant hypocrisy. Do they not realize that preventing life-saving interventions is morally costly? I honestly have no clue how to make sense of their behavior. (Suggestions welcome!)³

• Genetic Reproductive Freedom: It’s deeply illiberal to deny women the right to choose their embryo. (Alas, most “bioethicists” seem to be unreflective propagandists for conventional thinking, with no real principles, liberal or otherwise.)

• Utopian Enemies of the Better - Removing options for supposed inadequacy, whilst failing to guarantee better alternatives, is a disturbingly common moral pathology (esp. on the political left). Decent people should be very wary of removing options, especially from those who have few options to begin with.

• The Dangers of a Little Knowledge: Paired Mistakes in Protective Equilibria surveys a range of “paired mistakes” where it’s pretty important not to only correct one part without the other. This may lead people to say that the true view is “dangerous”, but I think we’d do better to blame their second mistaken background belief.

• Moral Misdirection argues that honest communication aims to increase the importance-weighted accuracy of one’s audience’s beliefs. One can predictably undermine this goal without explicitly lying. Such misdirection is still dishonest and morally objectionable.

• Anti-Philanthropic Misdirection argues that Leif Wenar’s widely shared and celebrated article attacking GiveWell and Effective Altruism predictably undermined the importance-weighted accuracy of his audience’s beliefs. (It was a masterclass in how to exploit status quo bias to turn your audience into worse people.)

• The Singer/Crary EA Debate - and how it confirmed my impression that Alice Crary is intellectually dishonest.

• Against Tautological Motivations - Not everyone is selfish; not everyone cares about the impartial good.

• Explicit Ethics - some opposition to effective altruism may stem from people who prefer implicit and ambiguous norms over explicit goal-directed moral strategizing. Is there a reasonable case for thinking that the former is actually impartially better? (Obviously it’s better for those with the social skills to exploit ambiguity to their advantage. But that seems impartially bad!)

• Refusing to Quantify is Refusing to Think (about tradeoffs). More on the choice between quantitative vs vibes-based analysis, and how the latter often functions to entirely bury important considerations (e.g. animal welfare).

• Seeking Ripple Effects - a longtermist heuristic, and how it applies to the “global poverty vs animal welfare” cause prioritization debate.

• When are political donations worth it? - I wish I knew! People should research this more.

• Nagel on Cultural Liberalism: Wisdom from 1998

• Worker Protections against Cancel Mobs: A simple legislative solution to “cancel culture”?

• Questioning Beneficence: Excerpts

  • How Important is Beneficence?

  • Does Self-Sacrifice Make Beneficence More Virtuous?

  • How Much Should We Care about Future Generations?

  • Response to Arnold: Can Philanthropy Be Undemocratic?

  • Response to Brennan: Can We Exercise Beneficence through Business?

  • Response to Davis: Can Effective Altruism be Part of a Meaningful Moral Life?

Paywalled articles

• Adversarial Ethics: should we actively enable people to make bad decisions that are nonetheless within their rights? (I paywalled an especially controversial example — please don’t reveal the contents without permission.)

• The Best of All Possible Multiverses: The obvious solution to the Problem of Evil - though, in bad news for theists, it also generates a new psychophysical harmony argument against theism.

• Remedying Ideological Capture: What to do if Universities betray the public trust? A question few academics seem comfortable exploring. I argue for a return to norms of professionalism that have been egregiously violated by censorious activist-academics over the past decade. Academics ought to prioritize intellectual virtues over political ones in the workplace. (How insane is it that this even needs saying!?)

• How I'd like Democrats (and elite culture more generally) to Change: a wishlist. (#1: being more open-minded and receptive to disagreement from those who are less wholly bought-in to Leftist orthodoxies. Sometimes orthodoxy is wrong; and even when right, it is rarely worth demonizing those who disagree.)

• Woke Axiology: Is it worse to harm all bank tellers or just the feminist ones? - on how smaller problems get prioritized by conceptualizing of them as “injustices”, and the utter insanity of the 2022 AEA conference discussing pandemic policy only insofar as it involved differential race and gender impacts. The failure of practically-minded academics to care sufficiently (or even, it sometimes seems, at all) about universal issues is, I think, extremely serious and bad.

• It’s OK to Read Anyone - the paywalled bit offers a list of posts from Richard Hanania that make clear why I think he’s worth reading, even if you disagree with him.

Off the Blog

Professional Philosophy

I published two co-authored books this year - An Introduction to Utilitarianism: From Theory to Practice (with Darius Meissner and Will MacAskill), and Questioning Beneficence: Four Philosophers on Effective Altruism and Doing Good (with Sam Arnold, Jason Brennan, and Ryan Davis). The latter was especially fun and easy to write; I hope the new “roundtable” format is more widely adopted!

• Utilitarianism.net Updates - Besides the official print edition, this post also announces new translations and guest essays. A few new additions (the last for the foreseeable future) should be added within the next month or so.

• I enjoyed giving invited talks at UT-Austin, FAU, Texas Tech, and VCU (plus a virtual talk in Oxford). I also appreciated getting to share my work-in-progress with the good folks at UNC Chapel Hill while I was independently in town.

Suno (AI music)

I’ve had a blast playing around with Suno’s AI to create custom music. My best experience was helping my 7 y/o son design his own custom song. (He made up a fantasy-adventure storyline, featuring all his favorite characters, that we turned into lyrics with Copilot. We then pasted the lyrics into Suno with suitable style requests, sampled a few variations, and he picked his favorite tune.) Can 100% recommend to all parents of young children! (I’d previously made a song for him, which was also fun!)

To share some sample clips: I enjoyed, e.g., creating a Latin hymn to reason:

Romanian:

Or, more philosophically, a universal love song (trying to convey this idea):

I don’t imagine many others will be as quite as enchanted by my custom songs as I am, but maybe a couple of people will enjoy them; and for the rest of you, it at least offers a sense of what the AI can do. (Maybe you’ll enjoy your own creations more!)⁴

Conclusion

Thanks for following my work! If you’re new this year, you might also find some articles of interest from 2023, 2022, or my prior 18 years of blogging at philosophyetc.net.

Happy New Year!

1. E.g., GiveWell or any of the options on the GWWC donation platform. Please make the donation in my name, to avoid double-counting. (The idea being that if you’re independently committed to donating a certain amount to charity, this wouldn’t count towards that—it counts towards my total instead.) :-)

2. Though such people also tend to have bad priorities, in my judgment.

3. Relatedly: I find it very difficult to take seriously anyone who worries about “harm” from politically incorrect speech, but doesn’t care when others discourage cost-effective donations to save children who will otherwise literally die from malaria or other preventable causes. What do you think is going on there?

4. Feel free to use this invite code to get some extra free credits (after creating 10 songs).