Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
I enjoyed Cloud Atlas (fiction, both book and movie). It's a movie where relatively normal people did hard things because they were the right thing to do, not because movie morality entailed a just world hypothesis where good things happen to good people, or because the movie's characters were personally and emotionally invested in specific outcomes.
I think this is relatively rare in fiction, which is why I like the movie. I've told several EA friends about the movie and they liked it too.
I also watch movies about ordinary people resisting during World War II (eg, John Rabe for nonfiction and Jojo Rabbit for fiction), especially if it's from the perspective of the Axis.
+1, a lot of David Mitchell's metafiction-y books have EA vibes (huge scope, interwoven characters doing the right thing for unknown future others)