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On Ethics — On conduct, ideal and otherwise

• [article] Stupid Questions — 1 Jan 2026
  Nature is just nurture over time, and nurture is far more obviously in charge; nothing changes if free will <em>isn’t</em> real; and the same is true of consciousness. They’re just complicated debates with no real outcomes.
• [article] Hydraulic Despotism — 1 Dec 2025
  Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. There are many vectors for control—we don’t need to hand them over.
• [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] Useful groups are biased groups — 27 Dec 2024
  The strength of our attraction to a group is a function of how different a group is from other groups in ways that we feel like we are, or like we want to be. Our participation in the group depends on how we see it benefitting us, and see us benefitting the group. The stronger both are, the stronger our biases to stay engaged.
• [article] Mob mentality is fine — 20 Dec 2024
  You could think of a collection of group dynamics like ‘groupthink’ or ‘deindividuation’ or whatever are bad. Or you could consider that our social identity is formed by making the distinctions between in- and out- groups clear. Then it all makes sense.
• [article] Catastrophic leadership is actually really hard — 13 Dec 2024
  For group dynamics to produce really bad behaviour, you really need to work at it. You have to train your authority figures to be cruel, prevent dissent or disengagement, and intervene all the time to stop people fixing things. It’s <em>hard</em>.
• [article] The Trouble With Objectivity — 21 Dec 2023
  The obsession over objectivity is a confusion of two things. There’s rationality, the desire to be less biased. Then there’s truth which is going to be necessarily biased toward whatever aspect of the world we’re trying to understand. In both cases objectivity is irrelevant.
• [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] Useful Pharmacology — 28 Jul 2022
  We absolutely love some drugs. Others terrify us. The difference is familiarity more than any other single thing and the result is confusion. A much more principled framework for thinking about drugs is thinking of them as tools.
• [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.