Newsletter
Moral Terrain and other things
June 20, 2025
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Excerpt: Most discussions about ethics centre on catastrophic scenarios. Situations where it’d be very difficult to avoid unethical behaviour. These scenarios aren’t really very interesting to me. What the average person probably wants to know is how to avoid the tamer moral lapses we encounter every day. What the average person wants to do is know how to avoid that single decision that might haunt them. So let’s explore a more practical ethics. This is the first in the series—getting a sense of the moral terrain.
Main idea: 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.
Was Caligula Depraved as Suetonius Would Have Him?:
it is hard to resist the conclusion that, whatever kernel of truth they might have, the stories told about him are an inextricable mixture of fact, exaggeration, willful misinterpretation and outright invention — largely constructed after his death, and largely for the benefit of the new emperor, Claudius.
Was Caligula depraved as Suetonius would have him? Or was he an example of what Hermann and Chomsky would call an anti-ideology. New archaeological evidence points us a little more to the latter than the former.
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The long history of association between God and unusual smells.
some scholars believe that the English language suffered from the “cultural repression and denigration of smell” during the Enlightenment, as improvements in hygiene and objections to “superstition” transformed the lived environment into one less sensorially confrontational.
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Adding to the point of Genetics is Nurture, this article suggests the same thing but the other way around. An environment is specified often by the preferences of the organism (in this case that of the child by the parent). Thus, the environment is an extension of the genetic predisposition. Either way you argue it, the distinction between nature and nurture really doesn’t exist in a meaningful way.
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Why Individuals Avoid Information:
A common hypothesis posits that individuals strategically avoid information to hold particular beliefs or to take certain actions—such as behaving selfishly—with lower image costs … We find evidence for other reasons why individuals avoid information, such as a desire to avoid interpersonal tradeoffs, a desire to avoid bad news, laziness, inattention, and confusion.
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for many of those who self-identified as “evangelical,” it is not just about devotion to a local church, but to a general orientation to the world.
The article highlights the enmeshing of US conservatism and religiosity. But the trend of religiosity becoming more political than spiritual is a cycle as old as time. The Roman state, the Chinese mandate of heaven, the European wars. Why is it surprising that structured spirituality (how people should live) aligns with structured politics (how decisions are made about how people should live)?
Anyway, if you pay attention to ‘heterodox thinkers’—i.e. modern gurus like Joe Rogan and Andrew Hubleman—you’ll see them taking a Christian turn. Another little piece of evidence that heterodoxy is oddly reminiscent of straightforward conservatism.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,