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Moral Terrain — On ethics in the wild

• [audio] Values Don't Matter — 24 Jan 2026
  Values are virtue ethics in disguise—traits we’re expected to cultivate. But virtues are context-dependent (courage for a soldier isn’t courage for a teacher) and the situation overwhelmingly drives behaviour. The real task is designing the context, not listing the virtues.
• [article] Mechanical Ethics — 1 Oct 2025
  Vincent’s S-CALM model describes the situational and cognitive factors that undermine ethical behaviour. Mechanistic thinking helps explain how those factors might operate, and thus, where we might intervene on them.
• [article] Navigating Moral Terrain — 1 Sep 2025
  I describe five levels that help understand how good people do bad things—neural, cognitive, situational, social, and cultural. Inject some norms into the stack, and you can explain (and predict) moral behaviour.
• [marginalium] Against McAskillian Longtermism — 10 Jul 2025
• [article] Practical Ethics — 4 Jul 2025
  To avoid rationalising poor ethical intuitions, we can use three tools to develop our ethical muscles. Sensitising ourselves to the small number of basic ethical motivations and the the mechanisms which allow us ignore them, before asking what a good person would do. It gets us most of the way there.
• [marginalium] Critiquing Utilitarianism — 2 Jul 2025
• [article] Moral Blindspots — 27 Jun 2025
  Most people think better ethical decision-making is just a matter of stopping to think before acting. But many moral judgements are intuitive, and then we rationalise them to ourselves. We have to train both intuition and reasoning, not rely on one to correct the other.
• [article] Moral Terrain — 20 Jun 2025
  You could try to make ethical decisions by reasoning through. You want to do good, so you work out what good means. Then you work out what you should do to achieve the good. Or, you could do what most people do and wing it. Just make sure you reflect on what you’re doing.
• [marginalium] On zoophilia — 12 Jun 2025
• [marginalium] Preferring skilled migration enhances xenophobia — 7 Jun 2025
• [marginalium] Policy-oriented political philosophy — 1 May 2025
• [marginalium] On Kahneman's assisted suicide — 10 Apr 2025
• [marginalium] The Roots Of Democratic Legitimacy — 3 Apr 2025
• [marginalium] Is Democracy Strong Enough for Trump? — 27 Jan 2025
• [marginalium] Tools for Thinking About Censorship — 9 Jan 2025