✶Explainer
Why every generation rediscovers the same moral truths
Science compounds: each generation inherits the last one's building blocks and iterates on top of them. Ethics can't do this because coming to terms with morality is a personal journey of self-discovery, informed by experience and intuition rather than transferable knowledge. That's why we haven't a better grasp of the good than Plato did.
- Science hands the next generation building blocks to build upon; ethics can't be inherited this way
- Moral views are heavily shaped by lived experience (e.g. a formerly homeless person on the ethics of theft)
- Studying ethics won't make you a moral expert, but it can make you better than you were a few years ago
- Moral truth, if it exists, seems graspable by individuals but not universally settleable
“The wise of every generation discover the same truths.”
“It's not gonna put you in a better place than any of your ancestors, but it will put you in a better place than you…”
#ethics#philosophy#self-discovery#moral-truth
✶Explainer
Emotivism: 'murder is wrong' really means 'boo, murder'
Alex lays out emotivism, the meta-ethical view he holds. Building on A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic, he argues moral statements are neither empirically verifiable nor analytically true, so they can't be literally true or false. When you say 'murder is wrong', you're expressing a feeling — closer to 'boo, murder' or 'don't murder' — a unique emotion for which the word we use is simply 'wrong'.
- Ayer: only empirically verifiable or analytically true statements are meaningful
- Moral claims fit neither category, so they carry no truth value
- 'Murder is wrong' = an expression, like 'murder!' with an angry emoji
- The moral feeling is its own distinct category, not reducible to anxiety or disgust — 'wrong' is our word for it
“When someone says murder is wrong, what they're really saying is something like, boo murder, crudely.”
“Imagine we lived in a world where there was no word for anxiety.”
#emotivism#meta-ethics#aj-ayer#non-cognitivism
✶Explainer
Why a good utilitarian shouldn't act like a utilitarian
If you calculate the pleasure-maximising choice for every decision, the hedonic calculus itself becomes harmful — an EMT who stops to compute lets the patient die, and constant calculation paralyses you into misery. Alex separates the criterion of the good (what actually maximises pleasure) from the decision procedure (the rules of thumb you actually live by), showing crude utilitarianism self-defeats and pushes toward rule utilitarianism.
- Doing a hedonic calculus for every act can cause more suffering than it prevents
- An EMT computing at the roadside runs out of time and the patient dies
- Under utilitarianism almost no action is amoral — everything nudges pleasure/suffering, so you become paralysed
- Split the criterion of good (actual pleasure) from the decision procedure (livable rules) — this leads to rule utilitarianism
“What if it's the case that the act of doing the hedonic calculus is actually more harmful? Well, then you shouldn't do the hedonic calculus.”
“Living as a utilitarian is wrong by a utilitarian standard.”
#utilitarianism#hedonic-calculus#rule-utilitarianism#decision-making
✶Explainer
The asymmetry: why we treat suffering as heavier than pleasure
Drawing on David Benatar's Better Never to Have Been, Alex argues suffering counts for more than pleasure. Evidence suggests humans are suffering-minimisers, not pleasure-seekers — most would decline five minutes of the worst agony even for five minutes of the greatest bliss. The tell: you may break someone's arm unconsensually to prevent greater suffering, but not to grant them a great pleasure that would outweigh it.
- Benatar argues even a mostly-pleasant life isn't worth beginning
- Most people refuse to trade five minutes of worst suffering for five minutes of best pleasure
- You can inflict suffering without consent to prevent greater suffering — but not to grant greater pleasure
- This built-in permission asymmetry reveals we don't weigh pleasure and pain symmetrically
“Would you take five minutes of the worst suffering imaginable if afterwards you got five minutes of the greatest pleasure imaginable? Most people say no.”
#antinatalism#david-benatar#suffering#asymmetry
✶Explainer
The nuclear-war test for whether you really believe in rights
A genuine right is inviolable — immune to how much suffering violating it would prevent. Alex tests it: if someone will launch every nuclear weapon on Earth unless you kill one innocent person, would you? If you say yes, the right was never truly inviolable; it was just a rule you thought maximised welfare. This exposes rights-based deontology and utilitarianism as contradicting each other.
- A right always pairs with a correlative duty on someone else
- An inviolable right can't be overridden no matter how much suffering it would save
- Say yes to killing one to stop nuclear war, and you've admitted the 'right' bends to consequences
- Under strict rights, kill-1-to-save-10 vs kill-10-to-save-100 differ only by rights violated (1 vs 10), ignoring who's saved
“If somebody told me that they were about to launch every single nuclear weapon on the planet, unless you kill an innocent person, would you…”
#deontology#rights#utilitarianism#moral-dilemma
✶Explainer
Doing vs allowing: are you to blame for what a terrorist does?
If a terrorist will kill millions unless you torture your own daughter, refusing means millions of rights are violated — but not by you. Alex draws the doing/allowing distinction: you carry moral blame for the rights you violate, not for those someone else violates because you refused. It's the same logic behind refusing to negotiate with hostage-takers.
- Torturing your daughter is a right violated by you; refusing lets the terrorist violate others' rights
- You don't inherit moral blame for a third party's choice to do harm
- A minimise-rights-violations view would still favour one violation over millions
- This mirrors the real-world policy of not giving in to hostage demands even when hostages die
“You've allowed somebody else to violate someone else's rights, but that's not on you.”
#doing-vs-allowing#moral-responsibility#deontology#hostage
✶Explainer
If there's no free will, punish like a tornado is 'responsible'
Using Susan Wolf's real self view, Alex distinguishes actions that spring from your essential nature from accidental ones (tripping versus pushing someone because you find it funny). Without free will, no one is morally responsible — only descriptively responsible, the way a tornado is 'responsible' for flattening a city. That points to rehabilitative, comfortable confinement aimed at prevention, not retributive punishment.
- Susan Wolf's real self view separates essential-nature acts from accidental ones
- Treat whatever makes someone act badly as analogous to the tumor — confine, but humanely, and rehabilitate if possible
- You're responsible like a tornado is: causally, not morally
- Retributive justice is going out of fashion; prevention and deterrence make more sense; the insanity plea already separates the 'real self' from the crime
“You are responsible, but you're responsible in the way that a tornado is responsible for knocking down a city.”
#free-will#susan-wolf#justice#rehabilitation
✶Explainer
Ship of Theseus: what makes you still 'you'?
To ask whether someone is truly responsible, you first ask who the person even is. Alex uses the Ship of Theseus — swap every plank one at a time and it stays the same ship, but rebuild a second ship from the discarded planks and which is the original? Human bodies swap out their atoms roughly every seven years. Your history and upbringing, he argues, are load-bearing in defining who you are.
- Replace planks one at a time and the ship stays 'the same' — until you rebuild the original from the old planks
- Human atoms are largely replaced roughly every seven years
- Remove the tumor and you're still you; swap upbringings and it becomes unclear who is who
- Upbringing and history are central to personal identity, not incidental
“Once we've replaced every single plank on the ship of Theseus... we take all the planks that were discarded, and we build another ship out…”
#personal-identity#ship-of-theseus#philosophy#selfhood
✶Explainer
The Euthyphro dilemma: is good good because God commands it?
For anyone grounding ethics in God, Alex poses Plato's Euthyphro dilemma. Either God commands things because they're good — meaning a standard of good exists outside God, who then isn't the ground of ethics — or things are good because God commands them, meaning if God commanded rape it would become ethical (echoing Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac). Religious objective morality risks collapsing into divine subjectivity.
- Horn 1: God commands things because they're good → a standard exists above God, so God isn't ethics' ground
- Horn 2: things are good because God commands them → anything God commanded, even rape, would be 'good'
- The Abraham/Isaac story (celebrated at Eid al-Adha) dramatises horn 2's bite
- 'Objective' religious morality can collapse into divine subjectivity — the whim just moves from you to God
“The objectivity that you seek to find in religious morality collapses into something like divine subjectivity.”
#euthyphro#philosophy-of-religion#divine-command#plato