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Moral Terrain — On ethics in the wild

• [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.
• [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.
• [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.
• [article] When groups go bad — 3 Jan 2025
  Without more tasteful social behaviours to sample from, we’re liable to attach very strongly to the behaviours of our group. Add a hostile environment, normalised physical and emotional violence, and a lack of mental and physical resources, and you have the ingredients for atrocity.
• [article] Saving the planet is an illusion — 15 Apr 2023
  Sustainability discussions often prioritise saving the planet, missing the fact that the planet doesn’t care about climate change. Maybe we should focus on the imminent death and disease instead of the planet’s feelings.
• [article] Trans-opportunism is boring — 22 Nov 2022
  Focusing on edge-cases of “trans-regret” is missing the point. If you actually care about these cases, then the interesting issue are the underlying vulnerabilities that lead to regrettable decisions. But probably you shouldn’t care.
• [article] Solving the Paradox of Tolerance — 24 Feb 2021
  Every now and then a proponant of ‘tolerance’ will cite political philosopher Karl Popper’s ‘paradox of tolerance’ to justify their suppression of the tolerant. Shame Karl Popper didn’t see it as much of a paradox, then.
• [article] Existential Therapy — 13 Feb 2021
  Existential therapy seems like an ideal way to go about psychological healing, given the philosophy it grew out of. Unfortunately, like existentialism it suffers from ‘great man’ syndrome—a huge number of idiosyncratic practices that make it difficult to know how good it really is.
• [article] The sophists: natural justice or social justice? — 4 Oct 2020
  Greek philosophers argued whether social morality was a creation of the weak to control the strong, but of course this is simply another form of strength.
• [article] Who was Plato and Why Should We Care — 22 Apr 2020
  Plato has become something of a synonym for philosophy. A figurehead that encapsulates the idea of searching for meaning. In doing so, his philosophy has escaped us. And yet, his works from almost 2500 years ago reflect on matters that we still grapple with today.