A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “morality”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott critiques self-proclaimed moral nihilists who claim to not care about strangers' suffering, by pointing out their passionate response to the British grooming gangs scandal reveals they actually do care.
Scott examines why early Christianity's strategy of unconditional cooperation succeeded despite game theory predicting it should fail, and explores what this means for modern moral strategies.
Scott Alexander summarizes and responds to reader comments on his article about Matt Yglesias and Nietzschean philosophy, exploring various perspectives on master and slave morality.
Scott Alexander examines Nietzsche's concepts of 'master morality' and 'slave morality', analyzing their modern manifestations and exploring potential compromises between these opposing moral frameworks.
The review critically examines and then steelmans Robert Wright's claims about meditation and enlightenment in 'Why Buddhism Is True', concluding with personal reflections on meditation's effects.
The post explores how correlated variables can diverge at extreme values, applying this concept to happiness measures and moral systems.
Scott Alexander speculates on how concepts from decision theory and AI could lead to the emergence of a God-like entity across the multiverse, which judges and potentially rewards human behavior.
Scott explores moral offsetting, introducing a framework distinguishing axiology, morality, and law to argue that we can offset axiological but not moral violations.
Scott Alexander examines how recent AI progress in neural networks might challenge the Bostromian paradigm of AI risk, exploring potential implications for AI goal alignment and motivation systems.
Scott proposes adapting DW-Nominate, a political spectrum analysis tool, to study morality through real-life decisions, exploring its potential implications and limitations.
Scott Alexander explores whether atheists can fully appreciate Chesterton's work, arguing that the moral beauty in his writing stems more from modern humanism than Christianity itself.
Scott Alexander uses a king-and-viziers analogy to argue that people can be inherently good even when their actions seem selfish, and explores the nature of evil and human goodness.
Mike humorously recounts grounding morality in IHOP's waffles after a meta-ethics discussion, highlighting the challenges in reaching agreement on such topics.
Scott Alexander argues that virtue ethics is neither how people naturally think about morality nor an effective way to make people more moral, proposing alternative methods and using a grammar analogy to illustrate his point.