Things I believe about ethics and personal development

Published

2024-01-15

This isn’t exactly an abandoned draft, in that it’s more or less complete as it is, but it’s pulled out of an old Google doc and I wanted it to be somewhere more permanent and visible.

There is a core to my self-work that I struggle to articulate and that end up mostly showing up as empty space that I write around. I’d like to articulate these, with a particular focus on providing clear statements of belief that are easy for others to disagree with.

Many of these probably require deeper articulation, I am trying to resist the urge to articulate them. If there is one that you’d like to discuss, I’m happy to elaborate as much as you need.

By self-work I mean “things that are sort of like therapy”. Anything that is designed to in some way change your experience of yourself as a person, your emotional responses, etc.

1. You can, and probably should, change your nature as a person.

   1. “Self-acceptance” in the sense of not constantly beating yourself up is important and you should do that one.
   2. “Self-acceptance” in the sense that you’re fine as you are and don’t need to change is bad for you and bad for others.
   3. You can get better at things that matter with you.
   4. Things that make you unhappy or hurt others are problems, and you can likely fix them or work around them.
   5. Very little of the things that you think of as inherent features of yourself are actually immutable. If you want to change or compensate for them you probably can.
      1. But it’s sometimes going to be a lot of work.
      2. And sometimes you’re better off just leaning into them.

2. What you do matters.

   1. People will evaluate you based on your actions and they are right to do so.
   2. Self-work fundamentally needs to start with acting in the world.
   3. It is important to change how you think and feel, but it is more important to change what you do and change the others in support of that.
   4. By this I mean change now, not later when you’re done healing.

3. Self-work can and should be directed towards becoming a morally better person.

   1. Without this, it is doomed to fail.
   2. Attempting “ethics-free” self work will likely make you a morally worse person.
   3. One of the central links between self-work and ethics is your relationship with guilt.
   4. Becoming a morally better person does not usually mean feeling guiltier.
   5. Feeling easily overwhelmed with guilt is in fact a moral failing.
   6. Never feeling guilt is also a moral failing.
      1. Either you’ve suppressed the feeling of guilt, which means you can’t tell when you’re doing a bad thing.
      2. Or you’re over-scrupulously avoiding doing anything that makes you feel guilty, in which case you are ineffective.

4. Conversely, ethics is fundamentally grounded in self-work.

   1. It is useless to ask what you should do in the abstract, because the most important ethical question is “How do I become the sort of person who does that?”
   2. Making yourself miserable in the pursuit of ethics probably in the long run produces worse results than learning how to be happy being a good person.

5. Community building is vitally important for both self-work and ethical development.

   1. Self-work is fundamentally interpersonal, because being a person is fundamentally in relationship to others.
   2. If you do not have a community supporting your self-work you will fail.
   3. If you are leading such a community, your self-work needs to at least be partly directed to being the sort of person who can lead a community, or your community will fail and it will be your fault.

6. Moral realism is clearly fake and distracts from the actual role of realism in ethics.

   1. Ethics shape actions and actions have consequences.
   2. Ethics shapes relationships and relationships shape people.
   3. There is no objective point of view for ethics. Ethics starts from subjects and their relationships to others.
   4. A core feature of ethics is “alliance building” - I behave this way because you agree to also behave in a complementary way.
   5. But ethics goes beyond alliance building because of the way group norms shape people. It’s not just about building alliances but about becoming the sort of person with whom explicit alliances are not needed.
   6. Moral language is in one sense just expressing a personal preference, but these preferences are not devoid of content, they are rooted in consequences. e.g. engineering has many ethical judgements around competence and care that are ultimately rooted in preferences like “It is bad when bridges fall down”.
   7. When we use moral language we are expressing something that is more than personal but less than fully objective - “X is good (bad)” means something like “according to the sort of people who I would consider good, X is (un)desirable, usually based on its outcomes, but sometimes something intrinsic about it.”

7. Ethics is fundamentally about conflict in the Schelling sense - the best thing for me is not the best thing for you and vice versa, but there is an outcome where we cooperate that is better for each of us than not cooperating.

   1. Contra Schelling, we change our values each time we cooperate. By cooperating with you we build trust and love, and I value your wellbeing more, and vice versa, and this lowers the level of conflict because a good outcome for the other is also a good outcome for us.
   2. By repeatedly cooperating we become the sort of people who value cooperating.
   3. It is also important to value not cooperating with people who don’t cooperate. Altruistic punishment when someone behaves selfishly is an important part of this sort of interaction.

8. Judging people is good and is an important form of altruistic punishment.

   1. Many people fall short of their own standards, and it is right and proper to note that and think less well of them for that.
   2. You should have standards for other people that are at least as stringent as “Does not fail by their own standards”. e.g. Someone not treating others as well as you feel they deserve, regardless of whether they agree with you.
   3. This judgement does not require an objective morality to be useful and important. These are judgements by your moral standards.
   4. These moral standards are how you decide what sort of person to be.
   5. These moral standards are also how you decide what sort of relationships to have.
   6. In many ways those are the same thing.

9. Helping people is good.

   1. I think most people are reasonably altruistic and will feel good if they help others, and that if this is not the case they probably have unlearned altruism somewhere along the way.
   2. Regardless of whether you are intrinsically altruistic, being in a community that helps others is selfishly better than being in a community where people don’t help each other.
   3. One of the ways you should help others is to help them live up to their own standards.

10. Punishing people is good.

    1. When people fall short of your ethical standards, you can and should make them experience consequences for that.
    2. By default this shouldn’t go much further than expressing disapproval and maybe downgrading the relationship.
    3. This is how you express your preferences for what sort of person to be in community with.
    4. Sometimes this will result in breaking the relationship. This is a failure, possibly a big one, but it is usually better than not having attempted correction, and often better than many “successes” (e.g. having to put a huge amount of work into fixing a relatively unimportant relationship).
    5. For severe ethical failures it can and should go further (call outs, getting them fired, reporting for crimes, etc. In some cases physical violence may be appropriate though I’m not personally a fan)
    6. Without punishment for transgression of shared norms, communities die.
    7. Ideally punishment goes hand in hand with helping - “I will hold you to high standards and help you achieve them” but this isn’t always possible.

11. Competence is a moral issue.

    1. It’s no good having good intentions if you won’t put in the work to be able to act on them.
    2. Helping people learn to competently act on your shared ethics is one of the points of communities.

12. Taking responsibility is good.

    1. Bad things happen in part because people don’t stop them.
    2. People are over-focused on not being blamed for bad things.
    3. People should focus more on not wanting bad things to happen.
    4. It is definitely possible to take too much responsibility but most people do not take enough.
    5. This will sometimes result in you being blamed more (because you got involved and bad things still happen) and being OK with that is one of the reasons you need to be comfortable with guilt if you are to be more ethical.
    6. A common failure mode of this is feeling responsible for things going badly without actually doing anything to stop them from going badly. This is strictly worse than not feeling responsible.

13. Thinking about things is good.

    1. A lot of people in self-work space have had a very disordered relationship with thinking in the past and so have decided that thinking is bad. This makes about as much sense as “I was repeatedly punching myself in the face, so I cut off my hands to stop myself doing that”. Just stop hitting yourself, idiot.
    2. You shouldn’t ignore your feelings when thinking about things (you’re not doing very good thinking if you are), and you shouldn’t think to the exclusion of action, but thinking is an essential part of the acting/feeling/thinking cognitive triangle.
    3. Done well, thinking is fun.
    4. Part of why people don’t like thinking about things verbally is that they are conflict averse. If you express your thoughts too clearly then people can disagree with them.
    5. Rumination is not a central example of thinking, and is an example of the thinking/feeling part of the triangle going wrong together. You can often break out of rumination by doing thinking better - e.g. by writing down your thoughts as clearly as you can.

14. Health is heterogenous

    1. There is a sort of “perfectly spherical idealised human in a vacuum” generic version of health that a lot of spiritual and therapeutic practices try to push you towards. This is probably bad for you.
    2. The healthy versions of two different people will often look very different from each other.
    3. It is possible to have a very healthy life that is dominated by intellectual pursuits.
    4. It is possible to have a very healthy life that is dominated by physical pursuits.
    5. It is likely that the optimal healthy life for you involves more of the generic version of health than you are naturally inclined to (e.g. more physical activity, more intellectual activity).

15. Health is not mandatory.

    1. A healthy life is often something you should be pursuing, but it may not be achievable.
    2. Often it will be achievable but you correctly choose not to prioritise it - it’s too much work, it’s in conflict with other important things.
    3. Even if it’s achievable, it may take a long time to achieve.
    4. Also the world is better with broken people in it. Many of the most important changes in modern history have come from people who are clearly emotionally unhealthy, and who have given their lives to some overriding obsession and made the world a vastly better place as a result because e.g. they invented half of the vaccines we use today, or popularised stainless steel. Maybe any given one of their lives would be better if they were perfectly emotionally healthy, but their lives would be worse if the others were perfectly emotionally healthy.
    5. Even to the degree that you treat working towards health as normatively desirable, nobody is there yet, and punishing people for not being perfectly healthy already is unlikely to achieve the desired result.

16. Allowing for heterogeneity is important.

    1. This is because people are heterogenous and don’t magically become homogenous because you don’t approve of that.
    2. Many people cannot and will not conform to your ideal of how people should be, and you need to be able to coexist with them without a state of total war.
    3. Ideally you should be able to form friendships with people who are very different from you (although not all differences are possible, or desirable, to form friendships across)
    4. You should certainly be able to support people who are very different from you.

17. Exclusive communities are important

    1. Communities should be more homogenous than the general population. It’s important to have communities of people who are in some sense like you.
    2. These communities should have a degree of gate keeping to them, where people who do not fit the target demographic of the community are, if not outright excluded, at least expected to expend more effort fitting in.
    3. In particular these communities establish common knowledge within them, and it is reasonable to expect people who do not share that common knowledge to acquire it in order to participate.
    4. Communities also allow people to establish norms that would not work in the broader world. This can include both stricter norms of good behaviour, and also weaker norms in which behaviour that would not be tolerated between strangers is permissible.
    5. One of the functions of such communities is supporting people who struggle with the broader world. Ideally by helping them navigate it better, but in extreme cases by sheltering them from it and providing them an environment in which they can nevertheless contribute.

18. Loyalty is important

    1. People adapt norms for low-context low-trust environments to their private relationships, and this makes them bad people.
    2. A prior relationship with someone is in fact a reason to maintain that relationship and treat it as valuable and give them more leeway and benefit of the doubt.
    3. If you’re not prepared to do that, you cannot maintain healthy relationships.
    4. This does not mean that you should take arbitrary shit from people you are in relationship with, but it does mean that by being in that relationship it is reasonable to expect a certain degree of collaboration in fixing the problems with it.
    5. There is a degree of relationship failure past which this is not reasonable, but that degree has to be pretty severe or chronic before you break off the relationship.
    6. Because loyalty is important, treating other people’s loyalties as important is important. Just because you would not form a relationship with someone does not mean you should punish other people for maintaining such a relationship.

19. Disagreement and conflict are good and important (disclaimer: This section is something that I am currently still sorting my shit out on. I’m not actually good at it).

    1. One of the advantages of a high trust relationship is that it should be robust enough to support disagreement.
    2. One advantage of a low importance relationship is that if the disagreement breaks it that’s no big deal.
    3. Disagreement clarifies your thinking, and thinking is good.
    4. It also is the basis for understanding and improving your shared norms.
    5. If we cannot disagree, we cannot find the places where we agree.
    6. Disagreement is foundational in being able to orient towards good together.

Afterword

This feels unsatisfyingly lacking in an ending that pulls everything together, but I think that’s part of the point of writing it - I still haven’t figured out how to pull all of this together. I still think it’s mostly correct and important though.