- Ideal of impartiality taken too far. - what to do about psychology of the moral philosophers - How to think value and care - social role of philosophers... moral entrepreneurs. - social cognition. - The Paradox of Perspectivism - Bernard Reginster https://www.jstor.org/stable/2653601 - https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/perspectivism - Great Endarkenment Things I want to look at: - Nietzsche vs Sidgwick on metaethics and impartiality; [[Moral intuitionism]] - Maybe Sharon Hewit-Rawlette - Maybe Nagel - esp the passage that PHB sent - Maybe the Singer and Radek "Does anything really matter?" book again - Friend of JC: John Richardson "Nietzsche's Values" - Bernard Williams - SEP on reason, practical reason - [[-EA Forum post drafts]] - Beyond Selflessness - Bernard Reginster: Affirmation of Life - Hurka on perfectionism? SEP on? - Josh Greene on deep pragmatism - Compare Iason Gabriel, Runciman, Hobbes, Railton. - Mayyybe John Haidt - Contemporary psychologists evaluating Nietzsche's psychological claims - William James, Peirce, Rorty - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/ - Bernard Williams vs Rorty - Maybe [[=Richard Posner]] - Maybe Girard - [[=Luke Burgis]] - See also [[§Interesting questions]] Reading list: Search for best things to read with [learn thing](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1upca7zFakXjHxEjbEAvhK7ozm14LM_HBT5WW7Pfdl5I/edit#gid=0). - [[Impartiality]] - [ ] https://leibniz.stanford.edu/friends/preview/impartiality/ - Sidgwick - Methods of Ethics on self-evident intuition - Lazari-Radek book - Roger Crisp book - Hewitt-Rawlette - [ ] Gus' notes - [ ] PhD - Nietzsche - - Nagel - [x] View from Nowhere Ch 10, §4-5, per Pamela rec - Bostrom - [ ] Digital Minds paper? - Other - [ ] LW / EAF value drift tag - [ ] #todo check my inbox --- ## Meta Why am I doing this? 1. I want to stabilise and clarify my views on: 1. moral realism 2. **impartiality** 3. metaethics / meta-moral philosophy 4. Hedonism vs pluralism 2. I want to be able to stop thinking about these themes! And get on with getting on. 1. They've been bugging me for a decade, since I read Nietzsche and Williams, but also since I read evolutionary psychology stuff, e.g. Trivers on self-deception. 2. I want to get "bored" of philosophy, and shift to more practical matters. Like... how do I actually reduce risk of particular kind of catastrophe. Why does this matter? - Philosophy on a deadline: I think this does have implications for how we should relate to digital minds; possibility of value lock-in this century. - If moral realism: stakes seem higher. - If not moral realism: we should focus on digital minds that reflect/promote/are continuous with our values. - Digital minds seems similar to having children. It's just... children who might really surpass you... - Help me understand what the EA movement is really about. Philosophers trying to reshape the world according to their prejudices, or something more selfless, more timeless? - What is the role of moral philosophy, if not to merely describe our current mores? Can I make sense of the idea of "improvement" instead of just "change"? - What's the better analogy for a moral philosopher? A scientist discovering truths about the world? Or a creative artist or prophet, forging new ideals? - How do our moral intuitions work? How do we recognise reasons as reasons? How do we learn to weigh them? - This question about how much to take selflessness as an ideal seems central to me. EA messaging seems too selfless, too into impartiality, at some level. And I think this is part of the reason the aesthetic is bad. - What methods should we use? If we expect liberal convergence via rational debate that's one thing. If we don't, we might want to use a much broader toolkit of seduction, persuasion, carrots and sticks. - What outputs do I want to generate? - [ ] An EA Forum post - [ ] Some Evergreen notes for my notes website - [ ] ? Contributions to the EA Forum wiki? - [ ] \>= 1 tweet - [ ] (?) II Salon Who in the past did great work like this? - Contemporary: masters, PhD students and academic researchers, I guess. - Earlier: gentlemen in their libraries. How did they succeed? - Read and write a bunch. - Read what? - Basics: textbooks, summary articles, primers, readers - Then: ...? - Talk with and write to peers. - Nietzsche walked, suffered, was more solitary. - What if there was a Masters course on this topic? What would that look like? - There would be a syllabus. It would have some survey articles, some essay collections, some key reference works. - There would be lectures and seminars. - #todo -- are there any online courses on roughly exactly this? - #todo -- who should I ask for reading recs? Who can help me? - Rorty - EJT - Stephen West (Philosophise this) - Sidgwick - Lazari-Radek - Roger Crisp - Nietzsche - Robert Haraldsson! - Psychology and moral philosophy - Stefan Schubert - Sharon Hewitt-Rawlette - General philosophy tutoring - Rabbi Zohar Atkins - Nigel Warburton - Julian Baggini - Pamela - Agnes Callard - Arden - I really want to ask her what her process was with the Nietzsche reading. - Joe Walker - General philosophy discussion - Gus - Aron - Arden - Pamela - Mike McCormick - ... - ... - ... - Learning and note-taking process - Andy Matuschak? Stubborn Attachments That all said, most normative work is connected to some gut-level intuition, and this exposition is no exception. I have the feeling—and yes, I am willing to describe it as such—that we should look more than a bit beyond our currently perceived constraints. It is easy enough to perform the obviously beneficial small tasks; the most important policy advice should not always feel comfortable or practical. We should strive to significantly augment future human well-being over long spans of time. I would therefore like to be more suspicious of our little voice in favor of supreme short-run pragmatism. I wish to suggest that it is a vice, the thinking man’s equivalent of the savage’s short-run gratification. It is our latest adaptive mechanism for feeling good about ourselves, at the expense of letting Rome burn. I suggest that we should instead turn our political energies to thinking about the long-run fortunes of our civilization. That means focusing on the future of freedom, wealth, science, and healthy, wellfunctioning institutions governed by rules and rights.