If you eat honey, you are causing staggeringly large amounts of very intense suffering. Eating honey is many times worse than eating other animal products, which are themselves bad enough

Naturally, this made a lot of people very angry.

I.

Arguments for veganism—particularly moral ones—tend to produce rather intense reactions. The writer is, after all, accusing animal product consumers of participating in an act of extreme evil. The average U.S. resident consumes over 1.3 lbs. of honey per year. If Adelstein’s claims are correct, then you and I are likely responsible for causing untold suffering upon the lives of millions (of bees).

Nobody likes to be told they are a bad person; they certainly don’t like being told this by a smarmy college student with questionable metaethics.

But here’s the thing: I like Adelstein—I am a paid subscriber to his blog. Sure, he sometimes has takes that I find totally absurd and unpalatable, but that’s part of the fun. After all, I myself was once a smarmy college student with questionable metaethics, so I really am in no position to be casting stones.

So let us leave personal indignation at the door for a moment and engage with the object-level discussion. If somehow you have not read the original piece or Adelstein’s follow-up post, I would encourage you to do so, but the rough argument is this:

Bees in the honey industry suffer tremendously: they are subject to stressful living conditions, have short lives, and experience painful deaths; Adelstein estimates that a farmed honey bee’s life is ~10% as unpleasant as that of a factory chicken (which is very bad)

Many more bees are required to create honey than are required to make other animal products: 200,000 days of bee farming per kg of honey vs. 23 days of chicken farming per kg of poultry

Bee suffering is a genuine moral concern: Despite their size, bees are estimated to experience suffering ~15% as intensely as humans (vs. 33% for chickens)1

Therefore, eating honey causes many times more suffering than other types of animal products and ought to be avoided

Now, there are many objections that one might make here,2 to the point that it might be easy to dismiss all of this discourse as a dumb sideshow.

You expect me to listen to an argument about bee suffering? Really??

Yet despite the cheeky comment I made in my last essay, I’m not going to argue for the complete moral irrelevance of bees. Nor am I going to pick a fight with Adelstein’s conclusion against eating honey per se. I may not be a vegan myself, but I’m generally supportive of those who are.3 I think they genuinely want to do what is best—which is more than can be said for many—and I’m open to the idea that they may even be right. If eating honey were the only thing at stake here, I wouldn’t be wasting so much digital ink.

No, the reason I feel compelled to write this essay is that I believe there is something deeply rotten at the core of this protreptic.4 A malignant tumor shifting underneath the surface that must be excised, no matter the author’s altruistic intent.

You see, a cursory reading of the no-honey argument would suggest that it is primarily about the immorality of human treatment of bees. That by using unethical farming practices, beekeepers cause their hives to suffer excessively and unnaturally. And so by consuming honey, we normal folk encourage said practices and cause more bees to suffer under those conditions. Ipso facto, eating honey is wrong.5

This is, after all, how most people talk about factory farming. It’s not the farming that is wrong; it’s the factory.

However, this reading would be incorrect—or at the very least incomplete.

For although Adelstein does believe that the beekeeping industry is brutal, this belief is not actually all that load-bearing. As he was clear to point out in follow-on discussions: even if the lives of farmed bees were much better than those of wild bees, that fact would not absolve the practice of bee farming.

How? How could giving bees a better life than what they would have in the nature constitute a morally wrong act?

Simple. Because if the honey industry didn’t exist, then those bees would never have been brought into this world in the first place. And to Adelstein, to give life to a bee is to condemn it. He thinks the average bee would be better off if it simply never existed.

Adelstein is, in other words, a honey bee anti-natalist.

To those not versed in things like negative utilitarianism,6 I expect that this sort of anti-natalist position may appear uniquely bizarre, if not downright unsettling.

After all, if creating 10,000 bee lives is bad, does that mean preventing 10,000 bee lives is good? Wouldn’t this imply that we should take actions which reduce bee populations, such as sterilization and ecosystem destruction? Even worse, wouldn’t this mean that full-blown extinction is actually an ethically desirable outcome?

Well, it turns out that Adelstein has written about insect welfare quite a lot and his answers to these questions are quite clear: yes, yes, and yes.

Or, to boil it down to a single quote:

I think that killing insects is probably good because [they live] bad lives.7

Perhaps now you understand my true motive for writing this essay.

Subscribe now

II.

Animal anti-natalism is nothing new—it is a view most famously advocated by Brian Tomasik, a thinker whom Adelstein cites frequently. Nor am I the first person to express outrage at these sorts of arguments. I think an instinct to ridicule is a natural reaction to statements such as these (emphasis mine):

The good news is that mass extinctions have effects that last millions of years and that these lower productivity and diversity8

But while I thoroughly believe that you ought to regard such positions with skepticism, suspicion, and even outright contempt,9 I do think that many of the objections to anti-natalism are poorly made. These critics confuse the impossible with the unjustifiable and mistake dangerous arrogance for mere absurdity.

This essay seeks to remedy that.

But in order to understand the true error at the core of anti-natalism, we must first examine why the most common objections fail.

You see, the first and most natural temptation when faced with an appalling worldview such as anti-natalism is to treat it as a reductio ad absurdum—to argue that because we have reached an insane conclusion, one of the premises must therefore be necessarily false.

This seems fair: it does appear prima facie absurd to argue in favor of species-wide genocide on behalf of the species in question—surely there is no possible universe where exterminating a living organism could be to its benefit! Surely an act so horrible and extreme could never be the solution! Surely it must always and forever be the most evil of sins!

Right?

Well, not so fast. Let us steelman the anti-natalism argument a little bit here, shall we? Note that since I don’t care about the ethics of honey specifically, the argument that I’m going to reconstruct will be a little different than the one I summarized above.10

The first major premise of Adelstein’s broader anti-natalism argument is simple: bees and other insects live terrible lives. He paints the picture of stressed, exhausted creatures, working under dangerous and vile conditions, subject to all manner of pain, suffering, and death, with little in the way of compensating pleasure. A life so destitute that it would be better off not to exist.

Moreover, he imagines that this poor, miserable life is not merely an outlier, but the norm11 across millions of hives and trillions of bees. From the coasts of California to the valleys of the Italian Alps, there are but two certainties in a bee’s life: honey and suffering.

If you want to understand how a person could possibly justify something as drastic as involuntary mass extinction, just imagine what this actually means. Imagine a life of true wretchedness, one so painful and hopeless that if offered the choice between that life and oblivion, you would voluntarily choose the latter. Then imagine that life repeated at an unimaginable scale.

There are three trillion bees globally, roughly 30 times more than the total number of humans who have ever existed. In addition, there are estimated to be another 10^18 total insects worldwide, which Adelstein asserts to be suffering a similar fate.

And so if the anti-natalists are right—if insect lives truly are horrible—then the scale of this collective suffering is unimaginable. It means that hell on earth is not limited to the war zones of Sudan or Ukraine—it is happening right now, in your backyard. If insects could scream, their agony would drown out the world.

We’ll revisit whether this bleak view of the world is correct or not. But for now, just imagine that this truly is the natural state of things. Does such an extreme situation not call for extreme action? How could it not?

This is where Adelstein’s second major premise comes in: we ought to take actions which reduce the amount of suffering lives, up to and including the prevention of those lives from ever existing.12 In essence: if one life is negative in expectation, then it is good to prevent it; if an entire species’ lives are negative in expectation, then it is good to exterminate it.

Now let’s ask the key question: is any of this impossible? Are either of these premises necessarily false?

Despite my strong objections to anti-natalism, I’m not so sure.

Imagine, for example, a species that truly does suffer horribly from the moment it is conscious to the moment that it dies. No matter where it is or what it does, this creature experiences pain as if it were being repeatedly stabbed in the stomach—a full life whose very moment-to-moment existence is nothing but torture. Let’s call this creature a Miserodon.

Is it possible that the Miserodon is better off extinct?

I think the answer here is obviously yes. After all, no matter how much we value life, there must be some amount of suffering which is so great that non-existence is preferable. To deny this claim would be to deny that suicide can ever be rational. To deny this claim would be to argue that even the biblical Hell must be a gift.

Note that this mere possibility alone already justifies Adelstein’s second premise—if it is possible to promote extinction, even if this requires extreme circumstances, then premise two cannot be necessarily false. But what of premise one? Is it even possible that insects are actually suffering this much?

After all, you may object: if the Miserodon’s suffering is so vast, wouldn’t a creature such as the Miserodon simply kill itself? Wouldn’t it choose to end its own suffering? And doesn’t the fact that bees (and wild animals generally) seem to never engage in suicide suggest that they are not, in fact, like the Miserodon?

Well, here Adelstein has two more responses:

First, we can imagine that the Miserodon, despite suffering immensely, is simply incapable of killing itself. Perhaps the thought never occurs to it because it lacks the ability to cognize such an option—it doesn’t know what death is and doesn’t realize that it has the option of dying. Perhaps it has no ability to kill itself given the contents of its surroundings. Perhaps it still feels the urge to do tasks which keep it alive, such as eating or sheltering, even though it would prefer not to be alive at all. In this case, the lack of suicide would not indicate a lack of desire to end one’s life, and it would certainly not constitute a judgement that its life is worth continuing.

Second, we can also imagine that the Miserodon is not suffering every waking moment. Instead, we can imagine that it lives for two days, but then dies a horrible, horrible death, full of the most excruciating pain that one can imagine. So, even though during those two days the Miserodon may not experience a life that is inherently net-negative, when it’s all said and done and the body is cold, the total life of the Miserodon is still not worth living.

What would it even mean to say that a life wasn’t worth living until it was over? Well, let us imagine that you could talk to the Miserodon in the afterlife, immediately following its horrible demise. You ask it a simple question: knowing how your life just went, including how you died, and knowing that this is typical for members of your species, do you want to reincarnate as a Miserodon once more?

We can then assume that the death of the typical Miserodon is so painful, and their remaining life so short and mediocre, that every single member of this species would say no. They would all choose oblivion over existence, despite having not made that choice during their own lives.

I don’t think either of these scenarios are all that implausible. Evolution does not select for lives which are happy per se; it selects for lives which are good at reproducing. A miserable yet efficient replicator is still a good replicator. And if we imagine that we are living in the Least Convenient Possible World, it certainly seems that the existence of the Miserodon is not fully precluded.

In fact, Adelstein argues that the life of most fish largely resembles the second option, with a very brief life followed by painful death:

Remember, we’re asking if the animal’s life is positive in expectation, i.e., if the probability-weighted life of this creature is worth living taken as an average across all of its kin. The fact that some species are r-strategists does mean that most of their lives could plausibly be horrible. And so if we also then assume that the lives of the few who do survive are not so incredibly net positive as to outweigh this,13 then the expected value of each new life could be negative as well.

But hold up! Now look where we are. What started as an attempt to show that anti-natalism is absurd has seemingly shown that both of the key premises underlying it are, at least in some universe, quite reasonable.

That’s the thing about anti-natalism. If it were just a silly internet argument that was easy to disprove, that would be one thing. We could dismiss it offhand and pay it no further mind. But that is simply not the case.

Brian Tomasik is a well-known name in the effective altruism and animal-ethics spheres. Adelstein himself is probably one of the more well-known EA bloggers, and he regularly advocates for arthropod population reduction not merely as a small ethical fancy, but as the single greatest ethical issue of our time.

This is not a niche cause.

Anti-natalism is not dangerous because it is absurd; it is dangerous because it isn’t.

Subscribe now

III.

I think where a lot of commentators go wrong on this issue is that they attempt to argue against anti-natalism and species genocide as a theoretical matter—that, as a matter of principle, causing the extinction of a species is always, universally bad. In essence, this constitutes a claim that it is impossible for there to exist a world where driving a species into extinction is a morally desirable outcome.

But this is, of course, false. We already inhabit such a world. In another essay, Adelstein points to the new world screwworm, a species whose reproductive cycle relies on laying its eggs in the flesh of other animals so that their maggots can eat their way out. This no doubt causes immense suffering and I’d be perfectly willing to consider an argument for said species’ extinction, just as I would for mosquitos that transmit malaria or yellow fever.

The difference between the screwworm and the bees example is, of course, that screwworms cause harm to others, and so extinction is a punishment rather than a supposed blessing. But from a theoretical standpoint, that hardly seems to matter much. As we saw with the Miserodon, you can easily imagine a species which, when born, causes the exact same amount of suffering as the screwworm but simply to itself or its kin, and the calculus barely changes.

But while anti-natalism doesn’t fail on theoretical grounds, we can show that it fails as a practical matter: that as limited beings in this universe, we are not justified in concluding and acting upon the belief that large swaths of animal species are better off extinct.

The benefit of switching to this practical lens is twofold:

1. It modifies the question from a theoretical concern about what is welfare maximizing to a practical concern of whether we are justified in taking specific action (e.g., sterilization, genocide, etc.)

2. It shifts the burden of proof onto the anti-natalist, for reasons we shall see shortly

So with that in mind, let’s revisit those key premises:

P1: Are Bee Lives Terrible?

Earlier we established that, conditional on bee lives consisting of net suffering, their cumulative suffering and the moral worth of said suffering is almost certainly vast. We also established that this scenario isn’t a priori impossible. But is this actually the case? Are bee lives actually net negative?

Adelstein’s argument here is not terribly comprehensive—it’s honestly rather flimsy. But it essentially boils down to three claims:

1. A bee’s life contains a lot of negative experiences

2. A bee’s death is typically very painful

3. A bee’s life does not contain enough positives to outweigh the above two facts

Let’s look at the evidence.

P1.1: A bee’s life contains a lot of negative experiences

First, do the day-to-day lives of honey bees, excluding their manner of death, include a lot of negative experience? Here’s what Adelstein has to say about farmed honey bee conditions (emphasis mine):

They’re mostly kept in artificial, conditions, in mechanical structures that are routinely inspected in ways that are very stressful for the bees, who feel like the hive is under attack…

In order to prevent this, the industry uses a process called smoking…Sometimes, however, smoking melts the wings of the bees (though my sense is this is somewhat rare)…

The industry also keeps the bees crammed together, leading to infestations of harmful parasites…

Bees also undergo unpleasant transport conditions…The transport process is very stressful for bees, just as it is for other animals…

They’re overworked and left chronically malnourished…

Ehhhhhhhh?

Stressful inspections? Cramped beehives? Rare instances of mishandled smokers melting wings?

Look, I don’t want to sit here and nitpick the details,14 but none of this strikes me as obviously horrific. Perhaps some are a bit unpleasant, but it all seems pretty low stakes—at least in the context of anti-natalism. The malnourishment that Adelstein cites is related to micronutrients, not famine. The unpleasant transport conditions only seem to occur, at most, 3 times a year to 2/3rds of bee colonies, which due to the average lifespan of a bee means that only 13% of US bees experience this annually.15 And the “artificial mechanical structures” look like this:

Not to be dismissive, but I don’t think the bees are experiencing much psychological distress at the apiary equivalent of Ikea furniture.

In fact, many beekeepers were quick to point out that some of the conditions which Adelstein describes, such as low thermal insulation or crowded quarters, are perfectly normal, if not worse, for bees in the wild.

Granted, Adelstein would surely argue that those wild bees are also living through hell, but frankly, I’m not convinced. If bees have evolved to densely occupy their nests then why would we assume they find such conditions unpleasant? Why wouldn’t they simply enjoy the close company of their kin?

As for parasites, I won’t pretend that mite infections are good or comfortable experiences, but I’m skeptical that they amount to truly ghastly conditions in expectation. Only a fraction of bees suffer from them, and the report which Adelstein cites points out that beekeepers are the ones actively trying to prevent these parasitic outbreaks. If anything, this is a point in favor of beekeeping as a welfare improving activity.

All in all, none of this is sufficient to convince me that the average day in the life of a bee is some unspeakable horror. I certainly could not, on the basis of these experiences alone, justify the extinction of an entire species!

Yet perhaps Adelstein’s single strangest assertion is that bees are “overworked”, as if they are slogging through their honey-making labor like a bad 9-to-5.

I’m sorry, but this is just an incredibly pessimistic way to view the world. Making honey is what bees live for! It is their purpose, their calling, their apis raison d'être! The notion that they could only experience this work as a net negative requires an absolutely bizarre account what living is like. It is the sort of position that one could only reach if one were actively looking for reasons to think that bees are suffering…

…it is the sort of position that one could only reach if one were actively looking to justify a mercy killing.

For the rest of us, the notion of gaining satisfaction and utility from one’s work is obvious. Ask a carpenter how it feels to see a shelf completed. Ask a painter how it feels to stand before a finished piece. Ask a mother how it feels to see her child eat.

Look, all I’m saying here is that if my questionably autistic uncle can derive what seems to be immense pleasure from building model trains, then surely we can hypothesize that bees might derive similar pleasure from building their hives. One must imagine the manic pattern builder happy.

In a livestream discussion on The Bees with fellow blogger , Adelstein made a comparison to gambling addicts. He argued that gambling addicts demonstrate a case where agents can have preferences and desires without experiencing actual hedonic pleasure from satisfying those desires.16 Moreover, we as outsiders can judge that the act of fulfilling said desires is actually harmful for the gambling addict, no matter how unwilling they are to stop.

Similarly, I imagine Adelstein might argue here that just because bees seem to want to build their beehives, it does not mean they actually derive pleasure from that experience.

But notice: I am not asserting that bees necessarily love building their hives or collecting flower nectar, merely that such a scenario is highly plausible. This is what I meant by the shift in burden that results from this practical lens. Whereas before the anti-natalist was able to defend the mere plausibility of hell on earth, now it is incumbent upon him to demonstrate its reality. This means it is not enough to show that bees could be like gambling addicts; we’d actually need positive evidence that they do not derive pleasure from the very activity they dedicate their lives to.

I consider this burden shift to be wholly appropriate—if you are going to advocate for the extinction of a species, the destruction of a habitat, or even just the mass prevention of new life, it is on you to justify that action, and the bar for certainty ought to be, frankly, astronomical. You are asserting a great deal of authority and power over creatures that are helpless to stop you. Their lives hang in the balance. You cannot unring that bell!

Given all of the above, I’d say that the negative day-to-day experiences of honey bees are largely insufficient to justify the hell-on-earth scenario we had before. In fact, I’d be willing to guess that the typical day of a honey bee is net positive, all things considered. Certainly if I was given the options of living as a bee under those conditions vs. never existing, I’d happily pick the life of a bee.

Okay, but that’s just living as a bee, what about dying as one?

Subscribe now

P1.2: A bee’s death is typically very painful

You see, the pain of dying is actually the core thrust of Adelstein’s argument. Consider this quote from his essay Against Nature (emphasis mine):

Most insects have short and terrible lives. Reducing the number of insects that are born into a brief and hellish nightmare of an existence before being painfully killed is a very good thing…

…is living for a week and then being eaten alive or starving to death a life worth living? Obviously not. If a human baby lived for about a week and then was eaten alive, no one would think their happiness during the week could offset the harm of being eaten alive. This is especially so if that week of existence was filled with hunger, thirst, and fleeing from predators. I don’t know exactly how many months or years of happy life I’d have to be guaranteed to be willing to endure the experience of being eaten alive, but it’s sure as hell more than a week.

If you ignore the sensationalist bit about human babies, here we start to see a more reasonable argument for the dreadful life of bees. The main argument is that, because bees and insects have very short lives, and their deaths are quite painful, then that means they don’t have much time to “offset” the pain of dying. In a sense, every bee is born into this world in utility debt owing to the suffering entailed by its inevitable demise. A depressing proposition indeed, but let’s examine it.

In the honey article, Adelstein lists off various causes of death for bees including:

• Freezing during the winter

• Overheating

• Predation

• Parasites

• Pesticide poisoning

• Being crushed to death after hive inspections

• Stinging

• Starvation

Some other causes of death include:

• Wing-failure / wear-and-tear (allegedly this is the most common cause of death for workers)

• Mating (drones only)

Now, many of these do sound quite painful. But I’m also not convinced that all of these are unspeakable horrors either. Being crushed to death could be very quick. Freezing to death is an inherently numbing experience even if it is still painful. Dying in the defense of your hive could easily be as glorifying as it is painful. Hell, death by orgasm is probably a net positive experience, even if it involves your abdomen ripping apart.17

My point here is not that these forms of death do not entail great suffering—my point is that it does not seem inconceivable to me that a life punctuated with one of these experiences could still be worth living, particularly when you consider that not all bees die this way.

Which brings us to the last premise:

P1.3: A bee’s life does not contain enough positives to outweigh the above two facts

As we’ve already established above, I think the day-to-day work of a bee may be quite a pleasant experience. I certainly don’t have overwhelming reasons to believe otherwise. Let’s also not forget that bees can fly, which on its own sounds pretty sweet.

Yet Adelstein’s crux is that he thinks any positives which do exist in a bee’s life cannot possibly outweigh the negatives above—particularly the pain of death. Most of his argument here simply stems from the lifespan of the bee, and the limited time they have to capture positive utility.

I do grant that the short lives of bees pose an issue, though it is worth qualifying that we cannot be sure if bees experience time the same way as us. They are small creatures with very different brains—a human baby can’t do much in three weeks, but who’s to say that this same time period for a bee is insufficient for a full and happy life?

As such, the only real question we need to ask is what sort of positive value could a bee accrue during this time, and could that ever outweigh being squished?

Here, Adelstein once again downplays the benefits available to bees. In that same livestream discussion with Trace, he argued that bees are limited to purely hedonic pleasures—unlike humans, they cannot experience higher virtues from art or love or learning. And sure, I’ll grant that these more intellectual pleasures are inaccessible to our fuzzy friends. Yet I still find this argument to be incredibly peculiar.

After all, Adelstein clearly believes that honey bees are capable of experiencing suffering in much the same way that human beings do (adjusted for their level of consciousness). He thinks that a bee getting squished is just like a human getting squished, only ~15% as intense.18 In general, he does not seem to think that the worst forms of suffering are unique to humans, yet he does think that this is true for pleasure. In a sense, he imagines that bees experience only a narrow slice of the possible valence spectrum, where that slice includes all of the worst possible valences but none of the most positive ones.19

I’m not going to get into the metaphysics of consciousness here to rigorously test the plausibility of this theory, but it does strike me as odd to imagine that evolution would not make full use of the potential degrees of positive and negative that are available. It is odder still to judge the valence spectrum of a bee on the basis of our own. I will have more to say on this another time.

For now, even if we do adopt this asymmetry of valence and hold that bees are capable of great suffering but not great pleasure, I still believe that Adelstein’s argument misses the mark. Because what is common to all of these anti-natalist screeds is that they tend to heavily discount—if not outright ignore—the simple value of being alive.

I take this value to be self-evident and fundamental.

It is the rhapsody of being that permeates every moment and the miracle of consciousness that we lucky few must cherish. It is the source of that stubborn and universal will to live which resides inside every creature on this earth and it is the innate vitality that keeps us striving even in our most desperate moments. It is the wave of regret that hits right as you jump from the bridge.

It is joie de vivre in its purest sense.

It is the reason I am so terrified of death.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then please, go outside right now and breath some fresh air. Experience the ecstasy of existence and the bounty of being. Squish your feet into the marshy soil of the stream and run your hands along the skin of a sycamore tree. Go feel the sensation of the world at your fingertips and thank God you get to experience the miracle that is life for at least one more day.

Sure, all of the above acts are largely pleasurable, but I don’t think the pleasure alone is all of what makes these experiences magical. Some of us may grow so accustomed to these omnipresent slivers of grace that we become numb to them. But if you are willing to step back and examine them with a true child-like curiosity and wonder, you should see that it is quite literally the qualia of experience and consciousness itself that is inherently sublime.

What I’m saying is that even in the absence of some grander teleology, the meaning of life is life itself, and it has a majesty all its own—a merit not merely reducible to pleasure or comfort or the absence of pain, but an intrinsic value that comes from the wondrous effervescence of existence.

And this underlying value of living means that, even if an activity comes with overall negative valence experiences—experiences that I would disprefer over literally doing nothing—I’d still choose them over not existing.20 I would take a sweaty day in an Atlanta heatwave or an evening eating chicken wings covered in Da Bomb hot sauce over a day not lived. I do not want to turn off my brain and hide from the pain.21 I do not want to shelter myself from experience. I want to be alive and all that that entails.

Yes, I am essentially telling anti-natalists to touch grass. But it’s true!

The very moment-to-moment experience of being alive is filled with so many tiny miracles, so many cherished sensations and qualia that anyone who is skeptical of the desire to live is either being pedantic or clinically depressed. I realize that negative utilitarians are probably tired of hearing this objection—but I am deeply sorry to inform you that it is common for a reason!

If I am being frank, I think the claim that wild animals are better off unborn is a rather embarrassing admission—you are, in a sense, telling on yourself. You’re saying that if deprived of all your modern conveniences—your apartment, your dishwasher, your Lululemon pants—and forced instead to fend for yourself in the wild, you would be despondent. You would give up. You would sooner be euthanized.

This is abnormal! Most humans will go to great lengths to stay alive. ~10% of US healthcare spending comes in the last 12 months of life. That’s ~$430B spent on what accounts for 1.25% of our time on this earth—a figure that doesn’t even account for the generally poor quality of that time. Patients will regularly buy hundred-thousand-dollar lottery tickets for a chance at another year. And sure, much of that money probably isn’t worth it—it could be better used elsewhere for even more life-fulfilling activities. But the fact that we spend it anyways shows just how much we value life itself even if the quality of that life is poor.

Adelstein asks if any of us would choose to live for an additional three weeks of mediocrity if we knew that said period might end in a pain and suffering—and the answer empirically seems to be yes! I would imagine that many bees might feel similarly!

I realize that many of my arguments here haven’t been terribly philosophical or rigorous. You could reasonably chalk much of this up to vibes and aesthetics. That is because this is a topic that mostly consists of debating alien hypotheticals. We must reason about a creature whose experiences we have never shared, making a choice that it has never been offered, by weighing preferences that almost nobody agrees on. If you think being “transported in a stressful manner” is bad enough to commit suicide,22 then honestly, I don’t know what to say to you besides: “You are a massive pansy, please do not make decisions about other beings’ lives if you value yours so little!”

And it is that last claim there—that you have the right to make decisions about the lives of others—that I feel I must repudiate most viciously. Just because you would prefer oblivion over being, doesn’t mean you get to decide for anyone else.

So let us turn to that second major premise.

P2: Should we prevent lives from existing if we expect them to be net negative?

Remember our thought experiment with the Miserodon—the creature that lives the terrible, unbearable life? Remember how we ultimately stipulated that, when given the choice to be reincarnated, every single member of its species opts instead to embrace the void?

Well, you see, that stipulation was load-bearing.

Because imagine if that wasn’t the case. Imagine if, despite its endless suffering, this poor little creature kept coming back for more. Imagine if every time it arrived at the threshold of the beyond, it chose again and again to be reborn, knowing full-well what lay in store.

Would you still be justified in terminating its lineage? In denying it the life it so desperately seeks? Would you be righteous in overriding its desires and snuffing out the lights for good?

A creature so constructed would be one that clearly values consciousness over cursedness and anima over agony. It is a creature that would gladly trade another day of suffering in exchange for one last sunset.

Who are you to tell it otherwise?

This is my greatest objection to anti-natalism. Beyond the absurdity, beyond the pessimism, beyond the cowardice—it is the hubris that disturbs me most. The belief that because you have judged another creature’s life to be unworthy that this somehow gives you the right to extinguish it.

Sure, some preferences can be overridden by a knowledgeable authority. A gambling addiction. A terrible ex. Being a Jets fan.

But the desire to live simply isn’t one of them.

My problem with anti-natalists is not that they don’t mean well in trying to grant suffering creatures the gift of extinction. My problem is that it’s simply not their gift to give.

I do not consider this a minor transgression. Think of the “liberation” wars in the Middle East, or the communist revolutions, or the forced sterilization campaigns in India. All of them claimed to come with good intentions. All of them were trying to help. All of them were disastrous. And these were human interventions! We know what causes humans to suffer and flourish! We are much further removed from animals, let alone insects.23

What belies all of these decisions, all of these horrific and disastrous mistakes, is an unshakeable, all-encompassing arrogance. The belief that some group is capable of moral patienthood but not moral agency—that it is therefore your job to choose what is best for them.

There are times when this is appropriate and necessary, children being the most notable example. But parents at least have been children themselves once, and the responsibility that parents have over their children is one which is demanded of them rather than sought by them.

It is entirely different to claim the mantle of representative—to put the fate of an entire species in your hands as their advocate and executioner. To justify such an act must require a level of certainty that our experiences cannot yield and which current science does not allow. It must require the eye of God. And so as a question of practical justification, the extinction of a foreign species for its own benefit is simply untenable.

I’m not saying that all animal welfare advocacy is bad. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t seek to make the world a better place. I’m not saying that trying to reduce suffering is not noble or good, nor am I saying that you may never advocate or speak on behalf of others.

Of course, you may.

You may speak for yourself.

You may speak for those over whom you bear direct responsibility.

You may speak for your family, for your country, or for your kin.

You may speak for the victims of horrors you yourself have suffered from and you may speak for the beneficiaries of gifts you yourself have received.

And if the circumstances are dire, and your certainty assured, perhaps you may yet speak for those who beg and plead for death.

But you do not speak for the bees.

Ethics is a lot like driving. Everyone insists they know what they’re doing, and yet somehow we’re constantly crashing into each other.1

Moreover, like driving, ethics is one of those domains where those who are putatively at the pinnacle of the profession appear to engage in the activity in a manner which seems almost entirely alien from that of the everyday man.

For example: 4-time F1 champion Max Verstappen drives a custom-built, carbon-fiber race car with a 1.6 L turbo-hybrid V6 engine pumping >1,000 horsepower around a 3+ km FIA Grade 1 asphalt circuit with hairpin turns at speeds of up to 360 km/h. His main concerns include:

• His pole position

• Current wear and temperature on his tires

• Remaining fuel reserves

• Brake temp and balance

• The speed and angle he needs to hit for next turn-in point to nail his racing line

I drive my sedan to Target. My main concern is whether I can make the next green light.

Academic philosophers ask if the theoretical possibility of a Utility Monster would justify enslaving the rest of humanity to make said monster the happiest it could possibly be.

I ask if I really have to spend the time sorting my food-court lunch waste into the blue, green, and brown bins.

We Are Not The Same.

Yet while I don’t think it would even occur to a professional F1 driver to criticize the average commuter for not optimizing their turn radius in the Denny’s parking lot, academic philosophers have a much more direct, and often fraught relationship with the intuitions of what we might call “common sense morality”. Verstappen is not trying to give an exemplary model for how you should cruise the 105, but Kant does at least purport to give a rigorous account of how you and I ought to act in order to behave ethically.

But if these ivory tower know-it-alls claim to be giving us actual moral guidance, then why do the didactic ramblings of the academy and the intuitive judgments of our common sense morality seem, at times, so violently dissimilar?

Subscribe now

II.

Part of the tension here comes down to an issue of what we might call the source of authority. Philosophers may construct grand theories to articulate the moral truth of the universe, but for all their talk of “a priori” truths, they do not arrive at the feet of Plato or Parfit as moral virgins. Rather, the same common-sense intuitions which many academics come to regard as shallow and deceptive are, in fact, the very starting point from which they first assemble their ethical theories and principles.

Which raises the question: when our intuitions say one thing, yet our theories say another, who exactly deserves the boot?

On one hand, to the extent moral philosophy is science-like—itself a highly dubious claim—our common sense moral intuitions would be akin to discrete observations in an experiment. They are the evidence around which we weave our theoretical threads. Our theories must cohere in some way with these intuitions lest they fail to properly explain the “evidence”.

But on the other hand, a degree of coherence is not perfect obedience. If, during the course of some scientific experiment we discover, after repeated testing, that a certain measurement appears to have been erroneous, then we are justified in throwing out said measurement. Similarly, if we find that one of our moral intuitions flies completely in the face of our best theories, and we can identify some source of flaw in how this intuition may have arose, then we may similarly choose to discard it.

What might be the source of said flaw? Well, as much of evolutionary and moral psychology suggests, our moral instincts are largely, well, instincts. They are inherited dispositions and inclinations for pro-social and pro-survival behavior. We might then expect these instincts to be wrong just as our instincts about physics or statistics are wrong. Ask any child if a bottle of rocks will fall faster than a bottle full of feathers. Ask a teenager who hasn’t learned special relativity if velocities are purely additive. Ask a college grad about the Monty Hall or Linda problem.

That our intuitions are strong is no guarantee that they are right.

But if such instincts are untrustworthy and yet moral realism remains true2—in the sense that there exist some “objective” moral facts—then you would expect the set of true moral propositions to have some significant areas of divergence from our moral intuitions. Given how strong our instincts are, you would expect at least some of these to be severe.

Yet while in scientific discovery we have experiments and data that, in theory, allow us to get closer to ground truth and provide an alternative source of knowledge against which we can test and validate our physical intuitions, in ethics we have no such thing. There would seem to be no empirical fact of the matter that we can test, no sensor that we can construct, no alternative source of knowledge at all which we can place in opposition to our intuitions as a way of validating their content. All we have are intuitions to test against other intuitions. It’s turtles all the way down.

Here’s where we hit the real issue: given modern evolutionary psychology evidence regarding the origins of our moral intuitions, the ethicist faces a conundrum, either:

1. Our moral theory perfectly agrees with our moral intuitions. Such an outcome would be surprising. Our intuitions are almost certainly the result of evolutionary survival pressures. Why on Earth would they correspond perfectly with objective moral truth? Shouldn’t we question whether such an agreeable theory is any more than ex-post rationalization of what our genes tell us to believe?3

2. Our moral theory strongly disagrees with our moral intuitions. This would, almost by definition, seem prima facie false. Moreover, if our moral intuitions aren’t guiding our ultimate judgment of which moral propositions are true or false, what is? On what grounds would we possibly justify moral truth?

3. A secret third thing.

So disagreement is baseless, yet agreement is suspect.

What is one to do?

Well, one answer is that ethics is, at least in part, an exercise in reflective equilibrium—an iterative process through which we test our concrete moral intuitions against our abstract moral principles and vice versa until we get a coherent output. It is a push and pull, a dance, a spring.

Our intuitions form the starting point, as well as any socially ingrained moral principles—which may as well be intuitions to the extent they are merely recitative mantras rather than rationally cognized maxims. We then attempt to formalize these intuitions into something more abstract, coherent, and principled. In the process, we notice some intuitions that do not play nice with each other and resist mutual coherence and co-existence. We may for a time attempt to square the circle, to solve the dissonance, but eventually we may be forced to make a meta-judgment: to decide that one of these initial judgments was given to us in error. We clear the clutter and begin anew. Through this process we shift from the common sense morality that sits disorganized within our hearts to a sharper, more rigorous theory that can stand up to the likes of Kant and Hume.

I expect most moral philosophers would agree, at least in part, with this characterization of moral reasoning.

Personally, I kind of hate it.

For one thing, it gives moral reasoning a formalistic, ethereal quality that I find personally dissatisfying—as if we’re all just sorting puzzle pieces with no guarantee they’re even from the same set.

Moreover, I find that this framing gives moral philosophers a bit too much leeway to discard intuitions at the first sign of trouble.4 Many of the standard first and second-order conclusions of utilitarianism and deontology are, on face value, fucking absurd; and the typical philosopher response to these absurdities often seems to be a push to double down or bite the bullet—to prioritize the formal and the elegant since, in a sense, that’s all they really have.

Perhaps I have been deluded by vain notions of the internal consistency of my own beliefs, but I’m not willing to give up that easy. Maybe it’s worth seeing if we can rescue more of these intuitions than standard philosophical inquiry would have us believe. It certainly can’t hurt to try.

III.

I have thought about many ways to kick off this blog.

In some ways the first post is the least important, in that it will almost certainly be read by the fewest people. On the other hand, it is actually quite hard to start writing about philosophy when you don’t have an established reference point to jump off from. I do not want to re-derive deontology and consequentialism from first principles.5 I want to get at the good stuff.

So I figure that one way to make that shōnen time-skip is simply to list out as many of my own intuitions as I can think of, focusing in particular on those that I expect to clash with each other. The challenge then over the course of this blog’s lifespan is whether I can find ways to resolve these tensions, or whether some of these intuitions simply must be discarded. I like to imagine that all the internally consistent intuitions will gather around and drag the ugly ones out back to be executed, Mafioso-style. Snitches may get stitches, but bad ethical intuitions get treated as mere means rather than ends.

This exercise was partially inspired by Theo Jaffee’s Enlightened Centrist Manifesto on Trans Issues, but I also just think this is good epistemic hygiene for philosophers or thinkers in all fields to exercise before seriously engaging with a difficult topic. It helps avoid “philosophical p-hacking” by pre-committing to a set of “predictions” about what you think moral philosophy ought to conclude. It can help separate motivated thinking from genuine discovery. And perhaps it will serve as an anchor to ground any future readers should they need to figure out how I got into this whole mess. If I were an Intro to Ethics professor, this is the first exercise I would assign to my students.

Two caveats before I start listing:

First, I have tried to bucket these by topic as best I can, but I have prioritized keeping together any intuitions which exhibit some natural tension with one another. These are, after all, the places where my commitments are at their most vulnerable—where I may be forced to sacrifice My Truth™ at the altar of reason. So if something appears to be in the wrong bucket, don’t worry, I know. It’s just that often the juxtapositions which create the most tension are those where a sensible meta-ethical view conflicts with a strongly held applied ethics view. And so category errors must abound.

Second, I realize that not all of these are, strictly speaking, intuitions. Sure, some of them are base intuitions, but some are much closer to considered judgments, while others still are merely political beliefs that masquerade as ethical intuitions. I think to not include these latter types of “intuitions” would be an act of willful self-deception—these beliefs are just as hard for me to sacrifice as any “brute” intuition, perhaps harder. Nevertheless, there are several intuitions here which I already suspect will need to be thrown out. See if you can guess which!

Now, without further ado, let us begin:

Metaethics & Moral Realism:

1. Moral obligations are real: You have an obligation to be a good person even if you don’t want to, even if it accrues you no personal benefit, even if there is no God to judge you, no Hell to punish you, no witnesses to praise you, no ego to satisfy you. Be a good person. Don’t be a bad person; mom would be sad.

2. Morality exists even if God doesn’t: This is mostly an expansion of one element in the broader claim above, but it’s worth hammering: the existence of God is not necessary for the existence of ethics.6 In fact, the existence of heaven and hell would, if anything, dissolve all ethical considerations into an egoistic (though justified) desire to avoid eternal torment, which doesn’t seem very moral at all.

3. Morality isn’t typically adhered to because it exists: I mean this in the direct sense of the word “because”—i.e., that even if moral realism is true, most people’s moral behavior is incidental and emotion-driven based on evopsych factors in our lizard brain and/or cultural factors from our community or family. Considered judgments are rare in everyday situations; they are exceedingly rare in moral ones.

4. Ethical egoism7 is clearly wrong: And don’t get me started on outright sadism. Only doing what benefits you is Not Good™, and that’s true even if “what benefits you” includes your altruistic or other-oriented desires (e.g., that others being happy makes you happy). If you go around making others miserable just for your benefit, you’re a bad person.

5. A little egocentric bias is fine: You do not have an infinite duty towards others. That morality exists does not imply that all of your actions must be maximally aligned with the pursuit of The Good™. In many (most?) situations, you are allowed to prioritize self-interested, non-moral reasons over moral ones, even if that means producing outcomes that are less virtuous, righteous or beneficent.

6. Moral relativism is obviously false: It is not the case that human sacrifice by the Aztecs was morally acceptable because it was accepted in their culture. It is not the case that female genital mutilation in Somalia is acceptable because it is accepted in their culture. It is not the case that slavery was acceptable in the Antebellum South because it was accepted in their culture. These are not merely alternative moral perspectives that are true in the cultures within which they originate. They are objectively wrong.

7. Agent relativism is obviously true: This one is more technical, and it’s hard to succinctly define agent-relativity without creating undue confusion8, so I shall simply state the underlying intuition and leave the abstract principle as an exercise to the reader. Bear witness: it is possible for two agents to be wholly morally justified in taking actions which are diametrically opposed (i.e., actions such that for one agent to succeed in their action would entail the other agent failing theirs). This is the root of many tragedies—tragedies which are all the more tragic precisely because nobody has acted wrongly. It is perhaps best summarized in this phrase: “You do what’s right for you, I’ll do what’s right for me.”

8. Intentions matter: There is a difference between an act of malice, recklessness, or negligence. An act of commission is different (and generally higher valence) from one of omission, even if they net the same result. Manslaughter is bad, but it’s not murder. This is especially relevant for punishment.

9. Consequences matter too: Having good intentions while producing horrific outcomes is only an excuse up to a point. ‘I didn’t mean to’ is not a catch-all defense. Strict liability exists for a reason.

10. Intention and consequences are, at some level, fungible: If Alice intentionally kills 1 person, that is worse than if she recklessly causes the death of 1 person, yet it is clearly not as bad as if she recklessly kills 1,000 people.

11. Moral impermissibility and obligation are real: When we say “X is wrong” we do in fact mean that you should not do X, full stop. If we say “X is the right thing to do” then we do mean that you are obligated to do X, full stop. These are binary characteristics and they evaluate to true for some X.9

12. There are gradations of moral wrongness: It is not merely binary permissibility or obligation that we are concerned with. Two actions which are both impermissible can still have a binary relation such that one is worse than the other in some sense.

13. Similarly, impermissibility and obligation are not enough; supererogatory actions are real: If Alice donates 20% of her income and Bob donates only 10% of his, then Alice is, in some way, more virtuous than Bob (ceteris paribus). But that does not necessarily mean that Bob “ought to have” donated 20% instead, or that he acted wrongly in only donating 10%. We may well say that neither of their actions were obligatory, and they were purely operating in the “permissible yet better” space.

Evaluation of Competing Moral Theories:

1. Utilitarianism/consequentialism makes some good points: Promoting human flourishing is good. Creating human suffering is bad. We should strive to effect more of the former and less of the latter. Value is scalar-like, and pursing objective value means that we must consider not only our own pleasure, desires, and preferences, but also those of all other like beings and give them similar weight.

2. Deontology/Kantian ethics makes some good points: Respecting human dignity is good. Violating human rights is bad. We should feel obligated to ensure the former and avoid the latter. Actions are rule-like, and being a rational actor means that we must consider not only our own actions in isolation, but how those actions generalize to all other rational beings.

3. Utilitarianism, when taken to its logical extreme, is bad: The ends don’t always justify the means. There are times when the wickedness of the means through which we achieve an outcome outweighs whatever benefit that outcome entails. There are times where it is wrong to lie or to kill even if you think it’ll produce a better result.

4. Deontology, when taken to its logical extreme, is bad: There is an exception for every rule: obviously lying is okay sometimes, same with killing another human being. In fact, for almost any given duty there probably exists some outcome, even if it must be comically extreme, that justifies violating said duty.10

5. Virtue ethics is mostly just a cop-out: Consider the classic virtue ethicist’s mediating cry: “Actually moral value is plural and there are all sorts of incommensurate virtues which are good and should each be strived for independently!” Okay, thanks but you’ve added almost zero value to the conversation. Sure, virtues are probably a good guide for navigating every-day life. Cool. But you have offered no coherent decision theory that evaluates when considering any of the interesting cases we might want to address. No soup for you!

Specific Moral Judgments:

1. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you: Ah yes, the Golden Rule. We all learned this when we were five and it is only through the cruel, ego-construction of adolescence that so many learn to abandon it. I will posit that this playground principle covers 90% of morality in a practical sense. It’s not everything, but if you follow this one principle, in genuine good faith, and assuming you aren’t a weird bug person who likes being maltreated, you’ll handle most moral situations pretty well.

2. The answers to the Trolley Problem are obvious: You should flip the switch to kill one to save five. But you shouldn’t kill one patient in a hospital to harvest their organs to save five others. The fat man example is weird and deserves no consideration. How is a fat man going to stop a trolley? How do I know that he’s going to stop the trolley? What even is this? Next question.

3. You don’t have to sacrifice everything to save starving kids in Africa: Ordo amoris is probably somewhat true; you have a greater moral imperative to save your family over the drowning child that you spot on your morning walk, just as you have a greater moral imperative to save said drowning child than you do to save a starving kid in Africa. Moreover, there is no sweeping obligation to sacrifice even mere material benefits for those closest to you just because those resources would be better used elsewhere. A simple splurge is not an act of violence. You can have a sweet treat.

4. You should probably be doing more to save starving kids in Africa: That’s right, JD Vance, ordo amoris doesn’t mean you get to ONLY care about those close to you. All human beings matter. Most of us probably can and should do more even if this obligation is not infinite per the above.

5. Discrimination is wrong: Wait, no! Hold up! I realize that for some readers, this may have just triggered the little political weasels in your brains, and perhaps one or two of you are already frothing at the mouth about DEI. But let me clarify: I simply mean that I think it is wrong to treat some people worse on the basis of arbitrary characteristics that they did not choose and cannot change. Why, you ask? Refer to point #1 of this section.

6. Meritocracy is good: By this I mean that it is good, proper, and perhaps even just to reward those who are most capable in society. Wait Corsaren, didn’t you just say it’s wrong to treat people worse on the basis of characteristics that they did not choose and cannot change? Isn’t some genetic portion of intelligence a trait which is unchosen and cannot be changed? Isn’t rewarding the intelligent essentially equivalent to punishing the stupid?11 Well, maybe, but that’s the point of this here intuition-listing exercise now, isn’t it?

7. Doctors, lawyers, and other professions have unique duties owing to the roles they play in society: A doctor must do no harm even if doing so could effect a greater good. A lawyer must defend their clients even if they are guilty. This is a subset of agent-relative norms, but it is an important one that is worth calling out because it is apparently not obvious to everyone.

8. Direct harm is not necessary for personal wrong-doing: It is possible to “harm” someone’s interests even without them experiencing harm (e.g., cheating, broken promises). Shielding them from the truth does not eliminate the wrongness of the act by preventing the consequences of them learning the truth from occurring. Similar logic applies for invasion of privacy.

9. Gay marriage doesn’t directly harm you, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t like it: If an activity doesn’t affect you in any real way, then your preference about it is not a legitimate moral concern. To object that gay marriage is gross or that it offends your sensibilities is a preposterous reason to label a practice as wrong. Gay marriage is between two consenting adults, and in general, if there is informed consent then it’s probably fine. This applies to sex, HRT, the food you eat, and low-externality economic transactions.12

10. Bestiality and incest are wrong because I think they’re gross: These are vile acts that others should not engage in, and even if there is consent amongst parties it is still wrong. Yes, I know this is hard to square with everything else I’ve said. It would have been a lot easier to stay silent on this topic, but…well…mamma didn’t raise no bitch.

11. We should care about future persons: We owe something to the future, and this obligation extends to those who do not have and do not plan to have children. You owe something to the future because you would strongly prefer that those before you acted like they owed something to you. That they may have failed to meet those obligations is no excuse for you to shirk yours. The duty to promote the flourishing of life extends to life which does not yet exist.

12. Abortion is morally permissible: Women ought to have a choice in the matter about whether they carry a fetus to term. Moreover, an embryo doesn’t really seem to be a person the moment after conception, and in many cases it seems like the birth of one child today merely offsets that of a different child in the future.

13. An abortion during the last week of a pregnancy is not permissible: The mere act of being born doesn’t really seem to significantly alter the moral worth of an unborn child, and so unless there is some other medical reason (e.g., danger to life of the mother/child, etc.), it seems like an abortion that late into a pregnancy would be prima facie wrong. Unfortunately, this means that we’ve now ruled out the only two clear-cut Schelling points for this issue.

14. The death penalty is fine in principle: Some people deserve to die. I reserve judgment over whether, as a practical matter, the death penalty is good law. But it seems clear to me that some humans are so vile, so evil, so—dare I say—inhuman that they really do deserve to be killed in a retributive, moral sense. That the state is the one vested with the power to kill also seems perfectly appropriate to me, though perhaps that’s a matter for political philosophy.

15. Bugs don’t matter: They just don’t. You are welcome to be nice to bugs if you like them but it is of literally zero moral consequence if you kill one just because it’s bothering you. I’d probably extend this to shrimp too but then I’ll really start to piss people off.

16. It is wrong to torture puppies: Need I say more?

And yeah, I’m going to say that “not torturing puppies” is as good of a place as any to end this. There are surely more moral intuitions I could tease out, but we don’t have all day.

IV.

Let’s instead take a moment to review: what does all of the above say about me?

For starters, it says that I am very much an e n l i g h t e n e d c e n t r i s t on moral philosophy, which I suppose lines up with my obvious neoliberal politics. I like both deontology and consequentialism. I would like to maximize human flourishing and respect human dignity. I wholly reject the notion that I must pick one or the other.

Moreover, a keen observer may notice that while I have been intentionally imprecise with my normative primitives, there are some clear patterns. If utilitarians are primarily concerned with value, and deontologists are primarily concerned with permissibility, then I am disproportionately concerned with blameworthiness. I care more about whether “you acted wrongly” than whether “your act was wrong”, even though the two are surely related. I am interested in ethics not merely as an abstract and objective account of The Good, but as a practical process and decision theory for conducting ourselves in a manner befitting of such good. Accordingly, I am less concerned with ideal ethics (i.e., what is “truly best” at any given moment from the view of an omniscient being) than I am with non-ideal ethics (i.e., what should I do given my limited knowledge and propensity for error).

Finally, I think this list shows that if I am committed to trying to hold onto a majority of these beliefs, then well…it seems I certainly have my work cut out for me. There is a lot of contradiction in here.

But that’s the fun part, right? I certainly think so.

I certainly hope so.

…

Then again, maybe it is all for naught. Maybe the last 5,000 words are nothing more than the manic cries of the delusional, desperately clawing for truth within the empty threads of his own epigenetics and cultural background radiation.

Perhaps.

But in a world stripped of God and meaning and what seems to be the very last remnants of sanity, I do know this for sure:

I want to believe.

***

If you’re curious to see whether my Sisyphean task pans out, then I invite you to stick around. Contrary to what the chaos above might imply, I do, in fact, have a plan to defend, interrogate, and reconcile much of what I’ve asserted above—I even have a particular ethical theory in mind that I wish to advance as a way of meeting this challenge. Getting there will take some time, however, and there will be many fun detours along the way in the form of miscellaneous musings on culture, politics, AI, and more. I hope that this blog can become a dialogue rather than a one-man rant, so do join me to help make that happen!

Frankly, if you persevered through what Substack informs me is a 25(!) minute article, then please consider subscribing below. I could use the motivation to write more.

And finally, if you think I missed any big moral questions, or you agree or disagree with any of my positions, then please leave a comment down below! You have my full permission to be mean and unfiltered.

C.