Mere Goodness

What makes something valuable—morally, or aesthetically, or prudentially? These three sequences ask how we can justify, revise, and naturalize our values and desires. The aim will be to find a way to understand our goals without compromising our efforts to actually achieve them. Here the biggest challenge is knowing when to trust your messy, complicated case-by-case impulses about what’s right and wrong, and when to replace them with simple exceptionless prin­ciples.

—Rob Bensinger,
Biases: An Introduction

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Ends: An Introduction

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U
Fake Preferences

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257. Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone)
258. Fake Selfishness
259. Fake Morality
260. Fake Utility Functions
261. Detached Lever Fallacy
262. Dreams of AI Design
263. The Design Space of Minds-in-General

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V
Value Theory

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264. Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom
265. My Kind of Reflection
266. No Universally Compelling Arguments
267. Created Already in Motion
268. Sorting Pebbles into Correct Heaps
269. 2-Place and 1-Place Words
270. What Would You Do Without Morality?
271. Changing Your Metaethics
272. Could Anything Be Right?
273. Morality as Fixed Computation
274. Magical Categories
275. The True Prisoner’s Dilemma
276. Sympathetic Minds
277. High Challenge
278. Serious Stories
279. Value is Fragile
280. The Gift We Give to Tomorrow

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W
Quantified Humanism

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281. Scope Insensitivity
282. One Life Against the World
283. The Allais Paradox
284. Zut Allais!
285. Feeling Moral
286. The “Intuitions” Behind “Utilitarianism”
287. Ends Don’t Justify Means (Among Humans)
288. Ethical Injunctions
289. Something to Protect
290. When (Not) to Use Probabilities
291. Newcomb’s Problem and Regret of Rationality

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Interlude: The Twelve Virtues of Rationality