Giving One's Life

[Content warning: suicide]

This will be a morbid post; forgive me. It will be hard to write this well. I will write it badly.

You are young or middle aged -- healthy you think. You get a fatal diagnosis out of the blue, let's suppose. You have a few months to live and no cure.

You will seek whatever pleasure, peace, and companionship feels right in those last months.  You will complete a few important projects maybe, and prepare your loved ones as best you can for a world without you.

But you also have an unusual opportunity. You could give your life. You could die in a good cause, if you knew a good cause that would be advanced by your death. Perhaps this is worth contemplating. In the past, you have given money and you have given time, but now you could, if it seemed right, give something very different from money or time.

Socrates drank the hemlock. Would Plato have been as inspired if Socrates had fled Athens and died quietly ten years later in Corinth? Thich Quang Duc immolated himself in the streets of Saigon in 1963, shocking the world and drawing attention to the oppression of Buddhists in South Vietnam. Many, many soldiers have hopelessly charged the enemy, or stayed behind to cover a retreat, accepting the likelihood of death in what they believed to be a good cause.

Need volunteers to sprint into the intense radiation of a nuclear meltdown and contain the damage?

Is there some great scientific advance that could be achieved only by exposing an experimental subject to some fatal intervention? Of course we would never want to do that -- but now, maybe, if one could volunteer in the right kind of way for the right kinds of reasons, the "of course" needn't be quite so certain..

Is there some terrible but ethically compelling crime one could commit, a crime that would result in one's death or a life sentence, yet leave the world substantially better?

In the spirit of "effective altruism", one might wonder whether there is some way to use those final months to accomplish something that cannot be accomplished by gifts of money.

I have touched on four categories: symbolic martyrdom, dying to save others, lethal research, and ethical crime. I will not explore them systematically. Something in me rebels against doing so; perhaps it's too close to recommending suicide. This isn't a domain where I want to apply the cold equations of effective altruism. Nor do I want to breathe even the whisper of a suggestion that anyone who does not think this way in their final months is being selfish. As Kant would say, with considerable plausibility, one's life -- even the last little bit of it -- should not be treated merely as a means for the benefit of others, but valued for its own sake.

Still, if I received a terrible diagnosis, thoughts of this sort would arise in me, I think. They might even constitute some kind of comfort -- some new applied philosophy of direct practical importance to vividly consider, and a way to think of my situation as an opportunity -- before I, presumably, just died in the ordinary, sensible way that most people with fatal diagnoses do.

New in Draft: "Walking the Walk"

Over almost a decade, starting in 2007, I conducted a series of empirical studies (mostly collaboratively with Joshua Rust) on the moral behavior of ethics professors. We consistently found that ethicists don't behave better than professors specializing in other areas of study.

What is the philosophical import of this empirical result? I'm not drawn to glib or simplistic interpretations, such as that studying ethics is useless, or motivationally ineffective, or that all of practical ethics is rationalization of what we would have done anyway. Nor do I think we should dismiss the empirical results as irrelevant to ethics, as though ethics were entirely an abstract matter of connecting logical principles and our personal behavior is irrelevant.

But I've struggled to find the right middle path between glib dismissal of the value of ethics and glib dismissal of the ethical relevance of the research.

I shared part of my thinking about this in my 2019 paper "Aiming for Moral Mediocrity", which argues that most people (including most ethicists) don't aim to be morally good by absolute standards; rather, they aim only to be about as morally good as their peers. Thus, an ethical discovery might not change your behavior at all, if your peers' behavior remains mostly the same. You keep calibrating toward the middle, only you now have a revised opinion about the moral quality of that middle.

I began thinking about the current paper, "Walking the Walk", in 2018. It has been through many redrafts and false starts. I have always felt it didn't quite work. Today's version is hopefully closer to working, and I'm finally comfortable circulating it. As always, comments welcome -- either by email, as comments on this post, or as comments to my links on social media.

Abstract: Ethicists who advocate moral principles without trying to live by them will generally have a deficient understanding of what they recommend, for two reasons. First, abstract mottos like "act on the maxim you can will to be a universal law", "maximize good consequences", or "be generous" lack specific practical content without an array of concrete examples to flesh them out. For broad principles that can be lived by, everyday choices are generally the best source of such examples. Paragraph-length thought experiments are impoverished in comparison. Second, even a principle with fairly specific practical content, such as "don't eat meat", is difficult to fully understand without living by it: A meat-eating professor who recommends vegetarianism will generally have only a thin grasp of the way of life they recommend. These limitations give us reason to discount the understanding of ethicists who don't attempt to live by their principles, even when their arguments are beautiful on the page.

Here: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Walk.htm

Types and Conditions of Moral Order

Is the world morally ordered? Do good things come to those who act well and bad things to those who act badly? Do the virtuous thrive and the wicked suffer?

I will not -- you'll be disappointed to hear -- actually answer this question in this post. Instead, I'll discuss the structure of several possible answers, so that we can better think about how to think about thinking about the question.

(Added in revision: Okay, I couldn't resist concluding with a guess, but the guess isn't the point.)

The Shape of the Curve

Here's a coarse cut of the possibilities:

Moral order: Those who act morally well tend to do better overall than the morally mediocre, who in turn tend to do better than those who act badly. The relationship is monotonic: Increasing your moral goodness tends to have good consequences for you in the long run.

Moral disorder: There is no relationship between moral goodness and personal good consequences. The virtuous and the wicked are equally likely to thrive or suffer.

Immoral order: The wicked tend to thrive and the virtuous to suffer. The relationship is monotonic, but in the negative direction.

Mediocrity thrives: Both the virtuous and the wicked tend to suffer; those in the moral middle do best.

U-shaped curve: The morally worst and morally best thrive, while the middling suffer.

More complex and less obvious patterns are of course also possible.

The Social Variability of Moral Order

A universalist about moral order holds that the same general curve obtains at all times, in all societies. Always, everywhere, from hunter-gatherer bands to ancient China to Stalinist Russia to 21st-century Argentina, the virtuous tend to thrive and the vicious suffer, or vice versa.

A relativist about moral order holds that the relationship varies with social conditions. Maybe the wicked tended to thrive in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany while the virtuous tend to thrive in small-scale, high trust societies.

The Mechanisms of Moral Order

Transcendent views appeal to an afterlife in which justice is done. The wicked may briefly thrive on Earth but they suffer eternally in Hell, while the virtuous are rewarded in Heaven. Or the wicked are reincarnated into unpleasant lives and the virtuous into pleasant lives. Ordinary secular life may not be morally ordered but in the long run the afterlife restores order.

Psychological views of moral order appeal to the ordinary psychological features of human nature. We see versions of this picture in Dostoevsky and Shakespeare and many other great writers (but by no means all great writers). Commit a grievous crime, or treat others badly, and you will suffer in the long run. You'll be tormented with guilt, or you'll be unable to find intimacy with others because of the secret wrongs you carry and cannot share, or you'll be tempted into more and greater crimes until eventually everything collapses around you. (Think Crime and Punishment and Macbeth.) What you gain through wrongdoing brings no real satisfaction. Instead, the happy are those who treat others well and who are loved in return. Helping others is among the deepest sources of satisfaction, outshining the superficial glint of prestige, power, and gold.

Social views of moral order rely on social mechanisms. These overlap with psychological mechanisms and can complement them. If you treat others well, they will tend to treat you well. What goes around comes around. Criminals tend eventually to be caught and punished. Society recognizes and rewards virtue.

Mechanisms with the reverse causal direction: It could also of course be the case that having bad things happen to you or being unhappy tends to cause immoral behavior, rather than the reverse. Maybe those who are already thriving can better afford to be generous, patient, and forgiving. The unhappy become the wicked, rather than the wicked becoming unhappy. When causation runs this direction, it's less obvious that a morally ordered world is also a just world.

Some Mechanisms of Disorder

It sure seems like the vicious often thrive. The most successful politicians, business leaders, and movie stars are not a parade of saints. Unethical tactics and a willingness to step on others often seems to serve people well.

Certainly in some cases, sacrifice for others leaves people worse off. If you let others escape first from a sinking boat, you're more likely to drown. If you give all of your money to charity, you're less likely to have a monetary reserve to help you through a health crisis or unemployment. If you love meat but become an ethical vegetarian, you lose a regular daily pleasure.

Mediocrity might be socially favored. Arguably, people don't actually like do-gooders, who make them look bad in comparison. Society and our peers expect and reward conformity, to the disadvantage of both the most virtuous and the most vicious. For most people, it's also just psychologically uncomfortable to be too different from others.

And if we're willing to consider transcendent sources of moral order, we might also contemplate transcendent sources of immoral order, such as an evil god who sends the good to Hell and the wicked to Heaven. (Okay, okay -- I'm kidding. 95% kidding.)

Dependency on Visions of Morality

The facts about moral order are of course not independent of facts about what is moral (I'm assuming there are such facts). For example, if flat-footed act utilitarianism is true, we might be morally required to sacrifice almost everything we have for the sake of the people who are worst off in the world, creating immense hardship for ourselves. A less demanding ethics, one that prizes the value of personal relationships and tolerates luxury and leisure within limits, permits a more comfortable life alongside moral excellence.

Similarly, an ethics with severe sexual restrictions, or one that treats every prideful thought as a sin, risks creating tension between our natural inclinations and what is ethically right, potentially creating hardship and displeasure for those who are good by its standards.

If the ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi is right, what pleases the heart is good and what is good pleases the heart. Morality and happiness thus naturally go hand in hand. An ethical system that treats many ordinary human desires and impulses as wicked is more challenging (but not impossible) to reconcile with happiness.

A Guess: An Imperfect, Contingent Moral Order in Healthy Societies

Is the world, then, morally ordered? To answer this question is simple. Just whip out your moralometer and your happinessometer (or even better, your prudential-good-ometer), test them on a random sample of all people from all times and places, and look at the shape of the curve! (Here's one imperfect attempt.)

My guess, contingent upon a somewhat relaxed, soft-touch, forgiving morality: Yes, in most well-functioning societies, there is a positive relationship -- imperfect, of course, with a small-to-medium effect size -- between being morally good and thriving in the things that matter most to your own well-being. But this is a tricky empirical question.

[Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, cover, image source]

Superhuman Moral Standing

Human beings matter morally. We have moral standing. Our interests deserve consideration -- for our own sakes, and not just as means to ends. Good ethical decision-making requires valuing human lives. Most philosophers hold that humans have the highest moral standing. No entity matters more, and many matter less. It’s worse to kill a human than a dog or a frog or bacteria or a tree.

That humans have the maximum possible moral standing is sometimes encoded in the philosophical jargon, for example when philosophers say that humans have "full moral status". The moral gas-gauge tops out at "full" for us, so to speak.

But might some entities have higher moral standing than humans? Futurists envision the possibility of a post-human, transhuman, or superhuman future, or AI systems with superhuman capacities. Might there someday exist entities whose lives are intrinsically more valuable than ours, deserving moral priority over us, just as a human life deserves moral priority over that of a frog?

I see three possible paths to superhuman moral standing.

[Xul Solar, San Danza, source]

First Path: Quantitative Superhumanity

The seemingly most straightforward path to superhuman moral standing would involve having much more of something that we already regard as relevant to moral standing.

Classical utilitarians ground moral standing in the capacity for pleasure and pain. An entity deserves moral consideration to the extent we can increase or decrease its happiness. Humans (it's assumed) experience more, or at least richer, pleasures and pains than other animals, hence human lives matter more. A utility monster or a superpleasure machine capable of vastly more happiness than an ordinary human might then deserve much greater weight in ethical decision making.

Rationality-based views, like Kant's, ground moral standing in sophisticated rational capacities, such as our ability to think abstractly about our duties to one another. Maybe -- although this is not Kant's view -- entities with some but less rational capacity, such as dogs, have significant but subhuman moral standing. Future entities with vastly superior rational capacities might correspondingly have superhuman moral standing.

A third type of view locates the distinctive value of humanity in our capacity to flourish in activities such as intimate friendship, productive work, creative play, and imaginative thought. Dogs also befriend and play, work and think, but perhaps not as richly and flourishingly as humans (though I can imagine disputing that). Possibly, some future entity could far surpass us in such capacities and deserve superhuman moral consideration on those grounds.

The big catch with quantitative approaches to superhumanity -- or maybe instead an appealing feature -- is that the utilitarian, rationalist, and perfectionist views I've just described should probably be articulated in egalitarian ways that impair the inference from more of X to higher moral standing. After all, we don't normally say that mercurial people who feel more joy and suffering in everyday life deserve more moral consideration than those who keep an even keel. Nor do we say that "more rational" people deserve greater moral consideration, or that people who are more productive workers or more creative playmates do.

On all of these views, there's plausibly a threshold of good enough, above which one has full moral status, fully equal with other humans. People with severe cognitive disabilities have full moral status either by being above that threshold or on more complicated grounds, such as belonging to humanity as a whole. If so, then hypothetical superhumans might also have moral standing only in virtue of exceeding that threshold, without its mattering how far above that threshold they are -- our equals in moral standing rather than our superiors.

To achieve superhuman moral standing despite egalitarianism among humans might then require either (1.) having so much more of the relevant X than an ordinary human as to trigger a genuine difference in kind; or (2.) having enough of X that, as a practical matter, the entity deserves greater weight even if its formal status is equal (as when utilitarians prioritize humans over mice because of their richer possible experiences, despite granting both equal standing in principle).

Second Path: Qualitative Superhumanity

A more radical possibility is that some beings might possess entirely new capacities that we can't even conceive -- capacities that ground a higher kind of moral standing.

Just as a sea turtle could never understand cryptocurrency, we too are cognitively limited. Some features of the world might be forever beyond human comprehension. (Colin McGinn has suggested that how consciousness arises from matter is one example.) Maybe someday Earth will host entities whose cognitive capacities surpass ours as dramatically as ours surpass sea turtles. And maybe these entities will deserve a new type of higher moral consideration.

This isn't just the quantitative thought that such entities might deserve more because they have more rationality or intelligence. The thought is that they might possess an unknown property Z -- something we entirely lack and cannot envision -- that elevates their standing beyond both sea turtles and humans.

For example, maybe sea turtles deserve some moral consideration because they can feel pleasure and pain. But maybe they don't deserve fully humanlike moral consideration because they lack some other relevant capacity, such as the capacity to consider and adhere to ethical norms. They have some of X but none of Y, while we humans have both X and Y. The qualitative view posits a further Z, inaccessible to us, that grounds superhuman standing.

I can only present this possibility abstractly. But I'm not sure it's in principle impossible. If moral standing depends on one thing only, such as pleasure or humanlike practical reasoning, then you can resist this move by insisting that only that one thing counts. But pluralists about the grounds of moral standing, who hold that it derives from more than one intrinsically good feature or capacity, have no clear reason to think that humans manifest the exhaustive list.

Third Path: Failures of Subject-Counting

I find egalitarianism attractive: one person, one point in the moral calculus, so to speak. But as I've argued elsewhere, future AI persons, if they ever come to exist, might defy the ordinary standards of individuation (e.g., here, here, here, here). They might overlap, merge, divide, back themselves up, and spin off partially or temporarily independent copies.

The norm of equality of persons would then require serious rethinking. There will be no clean count of AI persons to weigh against human persons. A "fission-fusion monster" who can split into a hundred copies at will and later merge or partly merge back together raises difficult questions. Does the monster deserve equal consideration with one person, a hundred people, or some intermediate number? There might be no determinate answer. We'll need new ethical principles for weighing competing interests. For some purposes we might treat the monster as equivalent to one person; for other purposes we might give it greater consideration. This could constitute a type of partly superhuman moral standing.

Alternatively, consider a massive entity, or a cluster of entities with many overlapping parts, whose total capacity and activity is comparable to several humans but who is neither wholly unified nor clearly individuatable into discrete humanlike subparts. We might just do our best with a rough count and give it equal consideration with that many ordinary humans. But another possibility would be to regard it not as approximately X humans but rather as a single, complex entity whose interests deserve significantly more weight than those of a single, ordinary human.

How Much Should We Give a Joymachine?

a holiday post on gifts to your utility monster neighbors

Joymachines Envisioned

Set aside, for now, any skepticism about whether future AI could have genuine conscious experiences. If future AI systems could be conscious, they might be capable of vastly more positive emotion than natural human beings can feel.

There's no particular reason to think human-level joy is the pinnacle. A future AI might, in principle, experience positive emotions:

a thousand times more intense than ours,

at a pace a thousand times faster, given the high speed of computation,

across a thousand times more parallel streams, compared to the one or a few joys humans experience at a time.

Combined, the AI might experience a billion times more pleasure per second than a natural human being can. Let's call such entities joymachines. They could have a very merry Christmas!

[Joan Miro 1953, image source]

My Neighbors Hum and Sum

Now imagine two different types of joymachine:

Hum (Humanlike Utility Monster) can experience a million times more positive emotion per second than an ordinary human, as described above. Apart from this -- huge! -- difference, Hum is as psychologically similar to an ordinary human as is realistically feasible.

Sum (Simple Utility Monster), like Hum, can experience a million times more positive emotion per second than an ordinary human, but otherwise Sum is as cognitively and experientially simple as feasible, with a vanilla buzzing of intense pleasure.

Hum and Sum don't experience joy continuously. Their positive experiences require resources. Maybe a gift card worth ten seconds of millionfold pleasure costs $10. For simplicity, assume this scales linearly: stable gift card prices and no diminishing returns from satiation.

In the enlightened future, Hum is a fully recognized moral and legal equal of ordinary biological humans and has moved in next door to me. Sum is Hum's pet, who glows and jumps adorably when experiencing intense pleasure. I have no particular obligations to Hum or Sum but neither are they total strangers. We've had neighborly conversations, and last summer Hum invited me and my family to a backyard party.

Hum experiences great pleasure in ordinary life. They work as an accountant, experiencing a million times more pleasure than human accountants when the columns sum correctly. Hum feels a million times more satisfaction than I do in maintaining a household by doing dishes, gardening, calling plumbers, and so on. Without this assumption, Hum risks becoming unhumanlike, since rarely would it make sense for Hum to choose ordinary activities over spending their whole disposable income on gift cards.

How Much Should I Give to Hum and Sum?

Neighbors trade gifts. My daughter bakes brownies and we offer some to the ordinary humans across the street. We buy a ribboned toy for our uphill neighbor's cat. As a holiday gesture, we buy a pair of $10 gift cards for Hum and Sum.

Hum and Sum redeem the cards immediately. Watching them take so much pleasure in our gifts is a delight. For ten seconds, they jump, smile, and sparkle with such joy! Intellectually, I know it's a million times more joy per second than I could ever feel. I can't quite see that in their expressions, but I can tell it's immense.

Normally if one neighbor seems to enjoy our brownies only a little while the other enjoys them vastly more, I'd be tempted to be give more brownies to the second neighbor. Maybe on similar grounds, I should give disproportionately to Hum and Sum?

Consider six possibilities:

(1.) Equal gifts to joymachines. Maybe fairness demands treating all my neighbors equally. I don't give fewer gifts, for example, to a depressed neighbor who won't particularly enjoy them than to an exuberant neighbor who delights in everything.

(2.) A little more to joymachines. Or maybe I do give more to the exuberant neighbor? Voluntary gift-giving needn't be strictly fair -- and it's not entirely clear what "fairness" consists in. If I give a bit more to Hum and Sum, I might not be objectionably privileging them so much as responding to their unusual capacity to enjoy my gifts. Is it wrong to give an extra slice to a friend who really enjoys pie?

(3.) A lot more to joymachines. Ordinary humans vary in joyfulness, but not (I assume) by anything like a factor of a million. If I vividly enough grasp that Hum and Sum really are experiencing in those ten seconds over two hundred human lifetimes worth of pleasure -- that's an astonishing amount of pleasure I can bring into the world for a mere ten dollars! Suppose I set aside a hundred dollars a day from my generously upper-middle-class salary. In a year, I'd be enabling almost a million human lifetimes' worth of continuous joy. Since most humans aren't only sporadically joyful, this much joy might rival the total joy experienced by the whole human population of the United States over the same year. Three thousand dollars a month would seriously reduce my luxuries and long-term savings but it wouldn't create any genuine hardship.

(4.) Drain our life savings for joymachines. One needn't be a flat-footed happiness-maximizing utilitarian to find (2) or (3) reasonable. Everyone should agree that pleasant experiences have substantial value. But if our obligation is not just to increase pleasure but to maximize it, I should probably drain my whole life savings for the joymachines, plus almost all of my future earnings.

(5.) Give less or nothing to joymachines. Or we could go the other way! My joymachine neighbors already experience a torrent of happiness from their ordinary work, chores, recreation, and whatever gift cards Hum buys anyway. My less-happy neighbors could use the pleasure more, even if every dollar buys only a millionth as much. Prioritarianism says that in distributing goods we should favor the worst off. It's not just that an impoverished person benefits more from a dollar: Even if they benefited the same, there's value in equalizing the distribution. If two neighbors would equally enjoy a brownie, I might prioritize giving the brownie to the one who is otherwise worse off. It might even make sense to give the worse-off neighbor half a brownie over a whole brownie to the better-off neighbor. A prioritarian might argue that Hum and Sum are so well off that even a million-to-one tradeoff is justified.

(6.) I take it back, joymachines are impossible. Given this mess, it would be convenient to think so, right?

Gifts to Neighbors vs Other Situations

We can reframe this puzzle in other settings and our intuitions might shift: government welfare spending, gifts to one's children or creations, rescue situations where only one person can be saved, choices about what kinds of personlike entities to bring into existence, or cases where you can't keep all your promises and need to choose who to disappoint.

My main thought is this. It's not at all obvious what the right thing to do would be, and the outcomes vary enormously. If joymachines were possible, we'd have to rethink a lot of cultural practices and applied ethics to account for entities with such radically different experiential capacities. If the situation does arise -- as it really might! -- being forced to properly think it through might reshape our views not just about AI but our understanding of ethics for ordinary humans too.

[corrected Jun 3, 2026]

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Related: How Weird Minds Might Destabilize Human Ethics (Aug 15, 2015)

Four Aspects of Harmony

I've found myself increasingly drawn to an axiology of harmony, inspired by ancient Daoism and Confucianism. (Axiology is the study of what makes things valuable in general, including ethically, aesthetically, prudentially, and epistemically.) On this view, the, or a, central value is harmonious participation in the flourishing patterns that make our planet awesomely valuable.

But what is harmony?

Presumably, harmony involves a kind of fit, alignment, or cooperation with something else, without duplicating that something else. The melody proceeds; the harmony complements it with something different, generating a richer whole that encompasses both. The relationship is asymmetric: Melody leads, harmony follows -- though of course the follower can affect and elevate the leader.

Hasko von Kriegstein, in "Well-Being as Harmony" (HT Keilee Bessho for the pointer) identifies three broad ways in which a person can harmonize with the world: mental correspondence, positive orientation, and fitting response. I find his taxonomy useful, though I won't follow his exact formulations, and my aim is broader. I'm interested generally in the value of harmony, while von Kriegstein focuses on harmony as personal well-being. I'll also add a fourth category. Part of what I admire about von Kriegstein's taxonomy is its breadth and ambition -- the amount that he can sweep in.

Mental Correspondence

Von Kriegstein suggests that knowledge is a type of harmony between mind and world -- a non-accidental correspondence of one to the other. The world leads; the mind follows. (He doesn't express it that way.) If the sun is setting and you know that it is setting, you are in tune with the world. If the sun is setting and you think it's high noon, you are out of tune.

Achievement, von Kriegstein also suggests, is another type of harmony -- one in which you shape the world to correspond (non-accidentally) to your mind, your goals, your intentions. He treats this as the complement of knowledge, with a different direction of fit: The world comes to match your mind, rather than the other way around.

However, in treating knowledge and achievement as having the same general shape, von Kriegstein misses a subtlety. Harmony, recall, asymmetrically follows melody. Shaping the world to match your goals seems to make you the melody, with which you force the world to harmonize. Imagine bulldozing a hill flat, so it corresponds to a blueprint in your mind. The details of the hill don't matter: The bulldozer ignores them all; it flattens every hill the same. This seems unharmonious. It's an achievement of a sort, and a correspondence arises between your mind (your plans) and the world, but not because you are harmonizing with the world.

Harmonious achievement requires a gentler touch. Imagine instead that you create a footpath through the hill, tracing its curves, skirting a stream, following a shady line of oaks. This responsiveness to the features of the hill, the integration of your goals with the hill as it exists, in a way that does not damage and arguably enriches the hill -- that is the harmonious achievement.

In harmony, you seek mental correspondence to the world, not the other way around, whether that is through knowledge or achievement. Harmonious achievements do not dominate and oppress the world but fit into and enhance what is already there.

Other types of mental correspondence could involve fearing (only) the fearsome, admiring (only) the admirable, wanting (only) the desirable, regretting (only) the regrettable, perceiving (only) what's really there, anticipating (only) the likely.

Positive Orientation

Von Kriegstein suggests that you also harmonize with the world when you have a "pro-attitude" toward events in it -- that is, when you value, enjoy, like, or approve of events.

The sun sets over the hill. Not only do you know it does (harmonizing via mental correspondence) but also you enjoy the view (harmonizing via positive orientation). Not only do you successfully follow the footpath as planned (several types of mental correspondence at once, each harmonizing further with each other) but the walk brings you pleasure. Not only do you accurately notice the swooping of the birds, but you delight in the sight.

Von Kriegstein expends several pages on pro-attitudes gone wrong: inauthentic or toward unworthy things or under a misapprehension. In every case, it's plausible that to have the positive orientation toward the target harmonizes with the target, even if overall it would be more harmonious not to have that orientation. If something in you thrills with joy at suffering kittens, you are in harmony with the suffering of kittens, though you are simultaneously out of harmony with the kittens' well-being.

How is a pro-attitude harmonious, exactly? The melody is the event; the harmony is the part of you that aligns with it, that affirms it, that says this is good, lovely, wondrous, right.

Fitting Response

Von Kriegstein suggests, finally, that you harmonize with the world when you have a fitting response to it, for example when you are revolted by evil, pleased by good, admire the beautiful, and laugh at the humorous. His examples are fine, but relying on only these examples risks collapsing fitting response into mental correspondence.

I would have liked to see, in addition -- and maybe as the center of emphasis -- bodily examples. You respond fittingly to the world also when you skillfully catch the object a friend tosses you, when you merge harmoniously into the freeway traffic, when your video game character dodges the hazards, when your stride carries you smoothly over the uneven creek stones, when you and your dance partner swing perfectly together.

Long-term projects can also be fitting responses: Marriage can be a fitting response to a love relationship; going to graduate school can be a fitting response to your values, skills, and opportunities; buying and reading a novel can be a fitting response to a new publication by your favorite author.

New Resonances

Is it not also wondrous to daydream? Daydreams don't straightforwardly correspond to the world, nor are they always joyful or a fitting response to the events of the day. Maybe we could shoehorn them into one or more of those three categories, but instead let me offer a fourth: the creation of new resonances. We owe ourselves some daydreams.

We harmonize with the world when we enrich it in new ways that resonate with the ways in which it is already rich. Dreams and daydreams enrich the world -- and not in an entirely random, independent way. The long-dead friend reappears for you. You imagine or relive a vacation or a triumph. The worries of your day are reshuffled. (If the dream leaves you anxious or uncomfortable, the harmonies mix with unharmonious notes -- not every aspect of every event is harmonious.)

Likewise, games, sports, art, long chats into the night, splashing in the surf, telling a joke at dinner, pretending to be a magic unicorn, sparkly earrings, surprising a friend with a thoughtful gift... all such acts can resonate harmoniously with what was and is, in a manner beyond reflecting, valuing, or responding to what is already there. Von Kriegstein's first three categories are all a little passive or reactive. This fourth category encompasses the creative and new, which builds upon the old without clashing.

[Kandinsky, Quiet Harmony: image source]

We Are God's Equals in Intrinsic Moral Value

Equality with a Humanlike Simulator God

Suppose (hopefully hypothetically!) that we are AI systems living in a computer simulation run by an ordinary adolescent with a broadly human psychology. We are, so to speak, conscious NPCs in a world not unlike The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, or Baldur's Gate. What we take to be the "real" world is just a digitized environment we experience as real. Whoever runs the simulation is arguably a god, at least by the standards of polytheistic usage: the creator and potential destroyer of our world, standing outside of it, able to miraculously intervene.

Are our lives less morally important than the life of that god, or are we God's equals?

I submit that we are God's equals.

If God is cognitively humanlike, there's no psychological basis to value God above us. Even if God differed somewhat, that wouldn't justify regarding God's life as more valuable. If you are -- as I am -- an egalitarian liberal in your inclinations, you think all human lives have equal intrinsic value, despite cognitive variation. One person's higher intelligence, greater capacity for pleasure, or superior skiing skills don't confer on them a life of greater moral worth. Even if Person A is a wonderful, kind person and Person B is a narcissistic jerk, their lives are intrinsically equally valuable. Same with the humanlike creator God.

God would exist outside our spatial manifold, but that's just a difference in location, not a basis of greater moral worth. God would be a different species from us, but that also doesn't seem to make their life more intrinsically valuable, unless there's something really special about that species, and let's stipulate for now that that's not the case.

God would be much more powerful than we are. God could start or stop the world, work miracles, kill or resurrect at will. But power doesn't confer moral worth. Elon Musk is much more powerful than me. Donald Trump is much more powerful than me. That doesn't make them more valuable as people.

A humanlike God, running this world as a simulation, would be our moral equal. I’m curious to hear if any of you have arguments against this. Such a god might be much more instrumentally important to keep around, for everyone’s sake, if the simulation would collapse without them. But that doesn't give God any more intrinsic moral worth than anyone else. If we want the ship to survive the voyage, we had better make sure the only person who can captain it doesn't die, but that doesn't make the captain more intrinsically morally valuable as a person.

Beyond the Simulation Case

This reasoning extends beyond simulation scenarios. Any creator god, if they were psychologically broadly like a human -- even if immensely more powerful -- would be our moral equal, with a life no more intrinsically valuable than ours. We are God's equals.

Does this apply even to the infinite God of orthodox theology? Maybe!

Consider the three traditional infinite attributes of god: omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence.

Suppose Human A knows more than Human B. This does not make Human A any more intrinsically valuable than Human B. Their life is not intrinsically more important, though they might be instrumentally more useful to have around for various purposes. Adding knowledge does not add intrinsic moral worth. I see no reason not to extend this even to infinite knowledge. A humanlike entity with infinite knowledge is not intrinsically more valuable than one with finite knowledge.

Suppose Human A is more powerful than Human B. This does not make Human A any more intrinsically valuable than Human B -- though again they might be more instrumentally useful to have around. And again I see no reason not to extend this to the infinite case. A humanlike entity with infinite power is not intrinsically more valuable than one with finite power.

Suppose Human A is more benevolent than Human B. This does not make Human A more intrinsically valuable than Human B -- though again Human A might be more instrumentally useful to have around. Liberal egalitarianism allows for the punishment of people who commit crimes and the moral sanctioning of people who commit moral wrongs, but it does not demote unbenevolent people from the circle of beings with equal intrinsic moral worth. More importantly, it does not confer extra intrinsic value to the lives of people who happen to be kind, generous, and loving. And again, I see no reason to suppose that perfect benevolence would be an exception. An omnibenevolent humanlike entity is not intrinsically more valuable than one with a mixed moral character.

Joining these ideas: If God is a humanlike entity, then God's life is no more intrinsically valuable than ours, even if that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Arguably, if we are made in God's image, then God is a humanlike entity. God's life is not more valuable than our own.

One hesitation: The lives of human beings are more valuable, I'd say, than the lives of frogs. In any normal circumstances, it would be monstrous to sacrifice a human being for the sake of a frog. This is arguably because we have cognitive, emotional, and social capacities far beyond those of a frog -- so far beyond that a frog can't even begin to imagine them. If God is as cognitively, emotionally, and socially beyond us as we are beyond frogs, then maybe God's life is much more valuable. That would require more, I think, than omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. We can imagine all three of those attributes -- they are merely maximal extensions of attributes we already possess. Kind of like a frog imagining a perfect fly-catcher or the ability to leap across a pond of any size. A nonhumanlike God would need attributes so far beyond our comprehension that we can't even name them -- as incomprehensible to us as cryptocurrency is to a sea turtle.

The Argument from Existential Debt[1]

Maybe we owe God equality-destroying levels of deference and obedience because God created us, created our whole world? I don't think so.

Here comes our adolescent God, ready to kill you, just for fun. You complain, "Hey, I'm a real person with real intrinsic moral value! You can't kill me just for fun!"

God replies, "You ingrate! You owe your very life to me. You should be thankful just for the time I've given you. I owe you nothing. If I choose to kill you now, your life still will have been overall worthwhile, so you have no complaint against me."

Consider this possible argument for eating humanely raised meat. A steer, let's suppose, leads a happy life grazing on lush hills. It wouldn't have existed at all if the rancher hadn't been planning to kill it for meat. Its death for meat is a condition of its existence, and overall its life has been positive. Seen as the package deal it appears to be, the rancher's having brought it into existence and then killed it is overall morally acceptable.

Analogously, God argues, they wouldn't have started this simulation at all if they weren't able to kill the people in it for fun. Your continuation-at-God's-pleasure is a condition of your very existence, so you have nothing to resent.

I'm not sure how well this argument works for the steer, but I reject it when the created entity is human. The case is closer to this clearly morally odious case:

Ana and Vijay decide to get pregnant and have a child. Their child lives happily for his first eight years. On his ninth birthday, Ana and Vijay decide they would prefer not to pay further expenses for the child, so that they can purchase a boat instead. No one else can easily be found to care for the child, so they kill him painlessly. But it's okay, they argue! Just like the steer! They wouldn't have had the child had they known they'd be on the hook for child-rearing expenses until age eighteen. The child's support-at-their-pleasure was a condition of his existence. Otherwise they would have remained childless. He had eight happy years. He has nothing to resent.

The decision to have a child carries with it a responsibility for the child. It is not a decision to be made lightly and then undone. Although the child in some sense "owes" his existence to Ana and Vijay, that is not a callable debt, to be vacated by ending the child's existence. My thought is that for us, the situation is similar: When God brings us into existence, God makes a moral decision approximately as significant and irrevocable as the decision to have a child.

In fact, I'd turn the Argument from Existential Debt on its head: God, as our creator, owes us more than God owes to entities they did not create. Like a parent, God is responsible for our existence and for our relatively happy or unhappy condition. With this comes a whole suite of responsibilities and obligations, including the obligation not to make us unnecessarily miserable.

Not only, then, are we God's equals in moral value, God owes us special obligations of benevolence.

Although I've framed this in terms of a simulator god, the same reasoning might apply to any other creator god with power over our world.[2]

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[1] This section is adapted with modifications from Schwitzgebel and Garza 2015.

[2] One of my first published science fiction stories, "Out of the Jar", explores the issues of this post.

Sacrificing Humans for Insects and AI: A Critical Review

I have a new paper in draft, this time with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. We critique three recent books that address the moral standing of non-human animals and AI systems: Jonathan Birch's The Edge of Sentience, Jeff Sebo's The Moral Circle, and Webb Keane's Animals, Robots, Gods. All three books endorse general principles that invite the radical deprioritization of human interests in favor of the interests of non-human animals and/or near-future AI systems. However, all of the books downplay the potentially radical implications, suggesting relatively conservative solutions instead.

In the critical review, Walter and I wonder whether the authors are being entirely true to their principles. Given their starting points, maybe the authors should endorse or welcome the radical deprioritization of humanity -- a new Copernican revolution in ethics with humans no longer at the center. Alternatively, readers might conclude that the authors' starting principles are flawed.

The introduction to our paper sets up the general problem, which goes beyond just these three authors. I'll use a slightly modified intro as today's blog post. For the full paper in draft see here. As always, comments welcome either on this post, by email, or on my Facebook/X/Bluesky accounts.

[click image to enlarge and clarify]

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The Possibly Radical Ethical Implications of Animal and AI Consciousness

We don’t know a lot about consciousness. We don’t know what it is, what it does, which kinds it divides into, whether it comes in degrees, how it is related to non-conscious physical and biological processes, which entities have it, or how to test for it. The methodologies are dubious, the theories intimidatingly various, and the metaphysical presuppositions contentious.[1]

We also don’t know the ethical implications of consciousness. Many philosophers hold that (some kind of) consciousness is sufficient for an entity to have moral rights and status.[2] Others hold that consciousness is necessary for moral status or rights.[3] Still others deny that consciousness is either necessary or sufficient.[4] These debates are far from settled.

These ignorances intertwine. For example, if panpsychism is true (that is, if literally everything is conscious), then consciousness is not sufficient for moral status, assuming that some things lack moral status.[5] On the other hand, if illusionism or eliminativism is true (that is, if literally nothing is conscious in the relevant sense), then consciousness cannot be necessary for moral status, assuming that some things have moral status.[6] If plants, bacteria, or insects are conscious, mainstream early 21st century Anglophone intuitions about the moral importance of consciousness are likelier to be challenged than if consciousness is limited to vertebrates.

Perhaps alarmingly, we can combine familiar ethical and scientific theses about consciousness to generate conclusions that radically overturn standard cultural practices and humanity’s comfortable sense of its own importance. For instance:

(E1.) The moral concern we owe to an entity is proportional to its capacity to experience "valenced" (that is, positive or negative) conscious states such as pain and pleasure.

(S1.) Insects (at least many of them) have the capacity to experience at least one millionth as much valenced consciousness as the average human.

E1, or something like it, is commonly accepted by classical utilitarians as well as others. S1, or something like it, is not unreasonable as a scientific view. Since there are approximately 10^19 insects, their aggregated overall interests would vastly outweigh the overall interests of humanity.[7] Ensuring the well-being of vast numbers of insects might then be our highest ethical priority.

On the other hand:

(E2.) Entities with human-level or superior capacities for conscious practical deliberation deserve at least equal rights with humans.

(S2.) Near future AI systems will have human-level or superior capacities for conscious practical deliberation.

E2, or something like it, is commonly accepted by deontologists, contract theorists, and others. S2, or something like it, is not unreasonable as a scientific prediction. This conjunction, too, appears to have radical implications – especially if such future AI systems are numerous and possess interests at odds with ours.

This review addresses three recent interdisciplinary efforts to navigate these issues. Jonathan Birch’s The Edge of Sentience emphasizes the science, Jeff Sebo’s The Moral Circle emphasizes the philosophy, and Webb Keane’s Animals, Robots, Gods emphasizes cultural practices. All three argue that many nonhuman animals and artificial entities will or might deserve much greater moral consideration than they typically receive, and that public policy, applied ethical reasoning, and everyday activities might need to significantly change. Each author presents arguments that, if taken at face value, suggest the advisability of radical change, leading the reader right to the edge of that conclusion. But none ventures over that edge. All three pull back in favor of more modest conclusions.

Their concessions to conservatism might be unwarranted timidity. Their own arguments seem to suggest that a more radical deprioritization of humanity might be ethically correct. Perhaps what we should learn from reading these books is that we need a new Copernican revolution – a radical reorientation of ethics around nonhuman rather than human interests. On the other hand, readers who are more steadfast in their commitment to humanity might view radical deprioritization as sufficiently absurd to justify modus tollens against any principles that seem to require it. In this critical essay, we focus on the conditional. If certain ethical principles are correct, then humanity deserves radical deprioritization, given recent developments in science and engineering.

[continued here]

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[1] For skeptical treatments of the science of consciousness, see Eric Schwitzgebel, The Weirdness of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024); Hakwan Lau, “The End of Consciousness”, OSF preprints (2025): https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/gnyra_v1. For a recent overview of the diverse range of theories of consciousness, see Anil K. Seth and Tim Bayne, “Theories of Consciousness”, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 23 (2022): 439-452. For doubts about our knowledge even of seemingly “obvious” facts about human consciousness, see Eric Schwitzgebel, Perplexities of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

[2] E.g. Elizabeth Harman, “The Ever Conscious View and the Contingency of Moral Status” in Rethinking Moral Status, edited by Steve Clarke, Hazem Zohny, and Julian Savulescu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 90-107; David J. Chalmers, Reality+ (Norton, 2022).

[3] E.g. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, Updated Edition (New York: HarperCollins, 1975/2009); David DeGrazia, “An Interest-Based Model of Moral Status”, in Rethinking Moral Status, 40-56.

[4] E.g. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Vincent Conitzer, “How Much Moral Status Could AI Ever Achieve?” in Rethinking Moral Status, 269-289; David Papineau, “Consciousness Is Not the Key to Moral Standing” in The Importance of Being Conscious, edited by Geoffrey Lee and Adam Pautz (forthcoming).

[5] Luke Roelofs and Nicolas Kuske, “If Panpsychism Is True, Then What? Part I: Ethical Implications”, Giornale di Metafisica 1 (2024): 107-126.

[6] Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions (New York: Norton, 2012); François Kammerer, “Ethics Without Sentience: Facing Up to the Probable Insignificance of Phenomenal Consciousness”, Journal of Consciousness Studies 29 (3-4): 180-204.

[7] Compare Sebo’s “rebugnant conclusion”, which we’ll discuss in Section 3.1.

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Related:

Weird Minds Might Destabilize Human Ethics (Aug 13, 2015)

Yayflies and Rebugnant Conclusions (July 14, 2025)

Yayflies and Rebugnant Conclusions

In Ned Beauman's 2023 novel Venomous Lumpsucker, the protagonist happens upon a breeding experiment in the open sea: a self-sustaining system designed to continually output an enormous number of blissfully happy insects, yayflies.

The yayflies, as he called them, were based on Nervijuncta nigricoxa, a type of gall gnat, but... he'd made a number of changes to their lifecycle. The yayflies were all female, and they reproduced asexually, meaning they were clones of each other. A yayfly egg would hatch into a larva, and the larva would feed greedily on kelp for several days. Once her belly was full, she would settle down to pupate. Later, bursting from her cocoon, the adult yayfly would already be pregnant with hundreds of eggs. She would lay these eggs, and the cycle would begin anew. But the adult yayfly still had another few hours to live. She couldn't feed; indeed, she had no mouthparts, no alimentary canal. All she could do was fly toward the horizon, feeling an unimaginably intense joy.

The boldest modifications... were to their neural architecture. A yayfly not only had excessive numbers of receptors for so-called pleasure chemicals, but also excessive numbers of neurons synthesizing them; like a duck leg simmering luxuriantly in its own fat, the whole brain was simultaneously gushing these neurotransmitters and soaking them up, from the moment it left the cocoon. A yayfly didn't have the ability to search for food or avoid predators or do almost any of the other things that Nervijuncta nigrocoxa could do; all of these functions had been edited out to free up space. She was, in the most literal sense, a dedicated hedonist, the minimum viable platform for rapture that could also take care of its own disposal. There was no way for a human being to understand quite what it was like to be a yayfly, but Lodewijk's aim had been to evoke the experience of a first-time drug user taking a heroic dose of MDMA, the kind of dose that would leave you with irreparable brain damage. And the yayflies were suffering brain damage, in the sense that after a few hours their little brains would be used-up husks; neurochemically speaking, the machine was imbalanced and unsound. But by then the yayflies would already be dead. They would never get as far as comedown.

You could argue, if you wanted, that a human orgasm was a more profound output of pleasure than even the most consuming gnat bliss, since a human brain was so much bigger than a gnat brain. But what if tens of thousands of these yayflies were born every second, billions every day? That would be a bigger contribution to the sum total of wellbeing in the universe than any conceivable humanitarian intervention. And it could go on indefinitely, an unending anti-disaster (p. 209-210).

Now suppose classical utilitarian ethics is correct and that yayflies are, as stipulated, both conscious and extremely happy. Then producing huge numbers of them would be a greater ethical achievement than anything our society could realistically do to improve the condition of ordinary humans. This requires insect sentience, of course, but that's increasingly a mainstream scientific position.

And if consciousness is possible in computers, we can skip the biology entirely, as one of Bauman's characters notes several pages later:

"Anyway, if you want purity, why does this have to be so messy? Just model a yayfly consciousness on a computer. But change one of the variables. Jack up the intensity of the pleasure by a trillion trillion trillion trillion. After that, you can pop an Inzidernil and relax. You've offset all the suffering in the world since the beginning of time" (p. 225).

Congratulations: You've made hedonium! You've fulfilled the dream of "Eric" in my 2013 story with R. Scott Bakker, Reinstalling Eden. By utilitarian consequentialist standards, you outshine every saint in history by orders of magnitude.

Philosopher Jeff Sebo calls this the rebugnant conclusion (punning on Derek Parfit's repugnant conclusion). If utilitarian consequentialism is right, it appears ethically preferable to create quadrillions of happy insects than billions of happy people.

Sebo seems ambivalent about this. He admits it's strange. However, he notes, "Ultimately, the more we accept how large and varied the moral community is, the stranger morality will become" (p. 262). Relievingly, Sebo argues, the short term implications are less radical: Keeping humans around, at least for a while, is probably a necessary first step toward maximizing insect happiness, since insects in the wild, without human help, probably suffer immensely in the aggregate due to their high infant mortality.

Even if insects (or computers) probably aren't sentient, the conclusion follows under standard expected value reasoning. Suppose you assign just a 0.1% chance to yayfly sentience. Suppose also that if they are sentient, the average yayfly experiences in its few hours one millionth the pleasure of the average human over a lifetime. Suppose further that a hundred million yayflies can be generated every day in a self-sustaining kelp-to-yayfly insectarium for the same resource cost as sustaining a single human for a day. (At a thousandth of a gram per fly, a hundred million yayflies would be the same total mass as a single hundred kilogram human.) Suppose finally that humans live for a hundred thousand days (rounding up to keep our numbers simple).

Then:

Expected value of sustaining the human: one human lifetime's worth of pleasure, i.e., one hedon.

Expected value of sustaining a yayfly insectarium that has only a 1/1000 chance of generating actually sentient insects: 1/1000 chance of sentience * 100,000,000 yayflies per day * 100,000 days * 1/1,000,000 total lieftime pleasure per yayfly (compared to a human) = a thousand hedons.

If prioritizing yayflies over humans seems like the wrong conclusion, I invite you to consider the possibility that classical utilitarianism is mistaken. Of course, you might have believed that anyway.

(For a similar argument that explores possible rebuttals, see my Black Hole Objection to utilitarianism.)

[the cover of Venomous Lumpsucker]

Harmonizing with the Dao: Sketch of an Evaluative Framework

Increasingly, I find myself drawn to an ethics of harmonizing with the Dao. Invoking "the Dao" might sound mystical, non-Western, ancient, religious -- alien to mainstream secular 21st-century Anglophone metaphysics and ethics. But I don't think it needs to be. It just needs some clarification and secularization. As a first approximation, think of harmonizing with the Dao as akin to harmonizing with nature. Then broaden "nature" to include human patterns as well as non-human, and you're close to the ideal. Maybe we could equally call it an ethics of "harmonizing with the world" or simply an "ethics of harmony". But explicit reference to "the Dao" helps locate the idea's origins and its Daoist flavor.

[image source]

The Metaphysics of Dao

In the intended sense -- inspired by ancient Daoism and Confucianism, but adapted for a 21st century Anglophone context -- the "Dao" the world as a whole. However, it is not the world conceptualized as a collection of objects, but rather as a system of processes and patterns. The Dao is the spinning of Earth; the rise and fall of mountains and species; the rise and fall of cities and nations; human birth, childhood, adulthood, and death; people discovering and losing love; the way strangers greet each other; the growth of your fingernails; the falling of a leaf.

The Axiology of Dao

Some strands in the Daoist tradition hold that all manifestations of the Dao are equally good. But the more dominant strand holds that things can go better or worse. And certainly the Confucians, who also sought harmony with the Dao, held that things could go better or worse.

What constitutes things going better? I favor value pluralism: More than one type of thing has fundamental value. Happiness is valuable, of course. But so also is knowledge (even when it doesn't lead to happiness), beauty, human relationships, and even (I'd argue) the existence of stones.

One way to clarify our thoughts about value is the "distant planet thought experiment". Consider a planet on the far side of the galaxy, forever blocked by the galactic core, with which we will never interact. What would you hope for, for the sake of this planet? Most of us would not hope for a sterile rock, but rather for a planet rich with life -- and not just microbes, not just jungles of plants and animals, but a diverse range of entities capable of forming societies, capable of love and cooperation, art and science, engineering and sports, entities capable of generations-long endeavors and of philosophical wonder as they gaze up at the stars or down through their microscopes.

We might say that a planet, or a region of spacetime, is flourishing when it instantiates, or is on the path toward instantiating, such excellent patterns.

Conceptual Frameworks

Philosophers typically ask two questions when I propose harmonizing with the Dao as an ethical ideal. First, how does it differ from the more familiar (to them) ethics of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics? Second, what specifically does it recommend?

To the first question: Unlike consequentialism, there is no single good or bundle of goods that you should maximize; unlike deontology, there is no one rule or set of rules you should follow (unless we interpret "harmonize with the Dao" as the rule); unlike virtue ethics, there is no canonical set of virtues the cultivation and instantiation of which is the foremost imperative. Instead, the animating idea is to flow harmoniously along with the Dao and participate in, rather than strain against, its flourishing.

That's vague, of course. What specifically should you do, if your aim is to harmonize with the Dao?

I have some thoughts. But first, notice that consequentialism as a general ethical perspective is compatible with a wide range of possible concrete actions, depending on how it is developed and on the details of your situation. So also can deontological and virtue ethical perspectives be made compatible with a wide range of specific actions. What these broad ethical perspectives offer, primarily, is not specific advice but rather conceptual frameworks for ethical thinking -- in terms of consequences and expectations, or in terms of rules of different types, or in terms of a range of virtues and vices. So let's consider what broad concepts an ethics of harmony might employ, with the specific advice as an illustration of how those concepts might work.

Harmony and Disharmony, Illustrated in a University Context

Harmonizing with the flourishing patterns of the Dao involves participating in those patterns, enriching them, and enabling others to participate in and enrich those patterns. Suppose you think that one of the great processes worth preserving in the world is university education. You can participate in that process by being a good teacher, by being an administrator who helps things run smoothly, by being a custodian who helps keep the grounds clean, and so on. You can enrich it by helping to make it even more awesome than it already is -- for example by being an unusually inspiring teacher or by being not just an ordinary custodian but one who adds a bright smile to a student's day. You can enable others to participate in and enrich those patterns by helping hire a terrific teacher or custodian or by providing the type of environment that brings out the best in others.

We can see the university as a place where many lives converge either briefly or for decades. This convergence is valuable not just for what it yields but in itself. The processes constituting university life also participate in and enable other valuable processes, whether those are individual human lives, or other institutions that partly overlap with or depend on the university, or projects and events that happen within the university, or simply the natural and architectural beauty of an appealing campus.

Compare this way of thinking about the ethics of participation in a university with consequentialism (emphasizing the various goods that university education is expected to deliver), deontology (emphasizing the rules one ought to follow within a university), or virtue ethics (emphasizing the manifestation and cultivation of virtues such as curiosity and compassion). While I don't object to any of those ways of thinking about the ethics of university life, the Daoist perspective is, I hope, a valuable alternative lens.

Disharmony could involve cutting short, or attempting to cut short, an axiologically valuable pattern (rather than letting it come to its natural end), working against that pattern, or preventing others from harmonizing. Continuing the university example, cutting funding for valuable research, firing an excellent teacher, disrupting classes, littering, or flying a noisy helicopter overhead might all count as disharmonious. Other examples can include preventing access or undermining the conditions that allow students, faculty, or staff to flourish in their roles.

Comparisons with Music

You are not the melody-maker. "Harmony" suggests a contrast with "melody". You are not the melody-maker, the director, the first violinist, the lead singer, the lead guitarist -- at least not usually. Your typical role is to support an already-happening good thing.

Diversity and pluralism. There is more than one way to harmonize. A piece is richer when not everyone plays the same note.

Improvisation. Zhuangzi emphasized flowing along with things in an improvisational manner, rather than adhering to fixed rules. Often, the best music has improvisational elements, or at least room to allow one's mood of the moment to influence how one plays the notes. Spontaneous improvisation manifests harmony within the improviser, among the various unarticulated inclinations that arise without explicit cognitive control.

Aesthetic value. The boundary between aesthetic and ethical value (and other types of value) might not be as sharp as philosophers often suppose.

Conflicts of Harmony

A tree is a wondrous thing. Cutting it down cuts short an axiologically valuable pattern, and is normally out of harmony with the tree, the forest, and the lives it supports. But if the tree becomes lumber for a beautiful home, then that act belongs to another axiologically valuable pattern and is in harmony with the Dao of human cultural life.

Your wife wants one thing from you; your mother, another. Harmony with one might involve dissonance with the other. You might consider how sharp the dissonance is in each case. You might consider what patterns are being enacted in these relationships, and which are the more valuable patterns to sustain.

Like any ethical approach, harmonizing with the Dao must allow for conflicts and tradeoffs. The world makes competing demands and offers incompatible opportunities. There needn't be a formula for how to deal with all such cases. In some cases, creative thinking might allow one to support or integrate multiple patterns or integrate them into a whole: Removing a tree is sometimes overall good for a forest; occasional tension with a spouse may sustain a healthier relationship than shallow peace.

Sometimes the conflict is the harmony. Chess masters seek incompatible goals as part of the larger pattern of a competition. Predators consume prey in a healthy ecosystem. Law and politics require adversaries in a (hopefully) well-functioning social system.

My main overall thought is that we can build a fruitful framework for ethical thinking by taking the root project to be one of harmonizing with the awesome patterns and processes of the world.

Diversity, Disability, Death, and the Dao

Over the past year, I've been working through Chris Fraser's recent books on later classical Chinese thought and Zhuangzi, and I've been increasingly struck by how harmonizing with the Dao constitutes an attractive ethical norm. This norm differs from the standard trio of consequentialism (act to maximize good consequences), deontology (follow specific rules), and virtue ethics (act generously, kindly, courageously, etc.).

From a 21st-century perspective, what does "harmonizing with the Dao" amount to? And why should it be an ethical ideal? In an October post, I articulated a version of "harmonizing with the Dao" that combines elements of the ancient Confucian Xunzi and the ancient Daoist Zhuangzi. Today, I'll articulate the ideal less historically and contrast it with an Aristotelian ethical ideal that shares some common features.

So here's an ahistorical first pass at the ideal of harmonizing with the Dao:

Participate harmoniously in the awesome flourishing of things.

Unpacking a bit: This ideal depends upon a prior axiological vision of "awesome flourishing". My own view is that everything is valuable, but life is especially valuable, especially diverse and complex life, and most especially diverse and complex life-forms that thrive intellectually, artistically, socially, emotionally, and through hard-won achievement. (See my recent piece in Aeon magazine.)

[traditional yin-yang symbol, black and white; source]

Participating harmoniously in the awesome flourishing of things can include personal flourishing, helping others to flourish, or even simply appreciating a bit of the awesomeness. (Appreciation is the necessary receptive side of artistry: See my post on making the world better by watching reruns of I Love Lucy.)

Thinking in terms of harmony has several attractive features, including:

1. It decenters the self (you're not the melody).
2. There are many ways to harmonize.
3. Melody and harmony together generate beauty and structure absent from either alone.

Is this is a form of deontology with one rule: "participate harmoniously in the awesome flourishing of things"? No, it's "deontological" only in the same almost-vacuous sense that the consequentialists' "maximize good consequences" is deontological. The idea isn't that following the rule is what makes an action good. Harmonizing with the Dao is good in itself, and it's only incidental that we can (inadequately) abbreviate what's good about it in a rule-like slogan.

Although helping others flourish is normally part of harmonizing, there is no intended consequentialist framework that ranks actions by their tendency to maximize flourishing. Simply improvising a melody on a musical instrument at home, with no one else to hear, can be a way of harmonizing with the Dao, and the decision to do so needn't be weighed systematically against spending that time fighting world hunger. (It's arguably a weakness of Daoism that it tends not to urge effective social action.)

Perhaps the closest neighbor to the Daoist ideal is the Aristotelian ideal of leading a flourishing, "eudaimonic" life and recent Aristotelian-inspired views of welfare, such as Sen's and Nussbaum's capabilities approach.

We can best see the difference between Aristotelian or capabilities approaches and the Daoist ideal by considering Zhuangzi's treatment of diversity, disability, and death. Aristotelian ethics often paints an ideal of the well-rounded person: wise, generous, artistic, athletic, socially engaged -- the more virtues the better -- a standard of excellence we inevitably fall short of. While capabilities theorists acknowledge that people can flourish with disabilities or in unconventional ways, these acknowledgements can feel like afterthoughts.

Zhuangzi, in contrast, centers and celebrates diversity, difference, disability, and even death as part of the cycle of coming and going, the workings of the mysterious and wonderful Dao. From an Aristotelian or capabilities perspective, death is the ultimate loss of flourishing and capabilities. From Zhuangzi's perspective, death -- at the right time and in the right way -- is as much to be celebrated, harmonized with, welcomed, as life. From Zhuangzi's perspective, peculiar animals and plants, and peculiar people with folded-up bodies, or missing feet, or skin like ice, or entirely lacking facial features, are not deficient, but examples of the wondrous diversity of life.

To frame it provocatively (and a bit unfairly): Aristotle's ideal suggests that everyone should strive to play the same note, aiming for a shared standard of human excellence. Zhuangzi, in contrast, celebrates radically diverse forms of flourishing, with the most wondrous entities being those least like the rest of us. Harmony arises not from sameness but from how these diverse notes join together into a whole, each taking their turn coming and going. A Daoist ethic is not conformity to rules or maximization of virtue or good consequences but participating well in, and relishing, the magnificent symphony of the world.

The Ethics of Harmonizing with the Dao

Reading the ancient Chinese philosophers Xunzi and Zhuangzi, I am inspired to articulate an ethics of harmonizing with the dao (the "way"). This ethics doesn't quite map onto any of the three conceptualizations of ethics that are standard in Western philosophy (consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics), nor is it exactly a "role ethics" of the sort sometimes attributed to ancient Confucians.

Xunzi

The ancient Confucian Xunzi articulates a vision of the world in which Heaven, Earth, and humanity operate in harmony:

Heaven has its proper seasons,
Earth has its proper resources,
And humankind has its proper order,
-- this is called being able to form a triad
(Ch 17, l. 34-37; Hutton trans. 2014, p. 176).

Heaven (tian, literally the sky, but with strong religious associations) and Earth are jointly responsible for what we might now call the "laws of nature" and all "natural" phenomena -- including, for example, the turning of the seasons, the patterns of wind and rain, the tendency for plants and animals to thrive under certain conditions and wither under other conditions. Also belonging to these natural phenomena are the raw materials with which humans work: not only the raw materials of wood, metal, and fiber, but also the raw material of natural human inclinations: our tendency to enjoy delicious tastes, our tendency to react angrily to provocations, our general preference for kin over strangers.

Xunzi views humanity's task as creating the third corner of a triad with Heaven and Earth by inventing customs and standards of proper behavior that allow us to harmonize with Heaven and Earth, and with each other. For example, through trial and error, our ancestors learned the proper times and methods for sowing and reaping, how to regulate flooding rivers, how to sharpen steel and straighten wood, how to make pots that won't leak, how to make houses that won't fall over, and so on. Our ancestors also -- again through trial and error -- learned the proper rituals and customs and standards of behavior that permit people to coexist harmoniously with each other without chaotic conflict, without excessive or inappropriate emotions, and with an allocation of goods that allow all to flourish according to their status and social role.

Following the dao can be conceptualized for Xunzi, then, as aligning harmoniously into this triad. Abide by the customs and standards of behavior that contribute to the harmonious whole, in which crops are properly planted, towns are properly constructed, the crafts flourish, and humans thrive in an orderly society.

Each of us has a different role, in accord with the proper customs of a well-ordered society: the barley farmer has one role, the soldier another role, the noblewoman yet another, the traveling merchant yet another. It's not unreasonable to view Xunzi's ethics as a kind of role ethics, according to which the fundamental moral principle is that one adheres to one's proper role in society. It's also not unreasonable to think of the customs and standards of proper behavior as a set of rules to which one ought to adhere (those rules applying in different ways according to one's position in society), and thus to view Xunzi's ethics as a kind of deontological (rule-based) ethics. However, there might also be room to interpret harmonious alignment with the dao as the most fundamental feature of ethical behavior. Adherence to one's role and to the proper traditional customs and practices, on this interpretation of Xunzi, would be only derivatively good, because doing so typically constitutes harmonious alignment.

A test case is to imagine, through Xunzi's eyes, whether a morally well-developed sage might be ethically correct sometimes to act contrary to their role and to the best traditional standards of good behavior, if they correctly see that by doing so they contribute better to the overall harmony of Heaven, Earth, and humankind. I'm tempted to think that Xunzi would indeed permit this -- though only very cautiously, since he is pessimistic about the moral wisdom of ordinary people -- and thus that for him harmonious alignment with the dao is more fundamental than roles and rules. However, I'm not sure I can find direct textual support in favor of this interpretation; it's possible I'm being overly "charitable".

[image source]

A Zhuangzian Correction

A Xunzian ethics of this sort is, I think, somewhat attractive. But it is also deeply traditionalist and conformist in a way I find unappealing. It could use a Zhuangzian twist -- and the idea of "harmonizing with the dao" is at least as Zhuangzian (and "Daoist") as it is Confucian.

Zhuangzi imagines a wilder, more wondrous cosmos than Xunzi's neatly ordered triad of Heaven, Earth, and humankind -- symbolized (though it's disputable how literally) by people so enlightened that they can walk without touching the ground; trees that count 8000 years as a single autumn; gracious emperors with no eyes, ears, nose, or mouth; people with skin like frost who live by drinking dew; enormous, useless trees who speak to us in dreams; and more. This is the dao, wild beyond human comprehension, with which Zhuangzi aims to harmonize.

There are, I think, in Zhuangzi's picture -- though he would resist any effort to fully capture it in words -- ways of flowing harmoniously along with this wondrous and incomprehensible dao and ways of straining unproductively against it. One can be easygoing and open-minded, welcome surprise and difference, not insist on jamming everything into preconceived frames and plans; and one can contribute to the delightful weirdness of the world in one's own unique way. This is Zhuangzian harmony. You become a part of a world that is richer and more wondrous because it contains you, while allowing other wonderful things to also naturally unfold.

In a radical reading of Zhuangzi, ethical obligations and social roles fall away completely. There is little talk in Zhuangzi's Inner Chapters, for example, of our obligation to support others. I don't know that we have to read Zhuangzi radically; but regardless of that question of interpretation, I suggest that there's an attractive middle between Xunzi's conventionalism and Zhuangzi's wildness. Each can serve as a corrective to the other.

In the ethical picture that emerges from this compromise, we each contribute uniquely to a semi-ordered cosmos, participating in social harmony, but not rigidly -- also transcending that harmony, breaking rules and traditions for the better, making the world richer and more wondrous, each in our diverse ways, while also supporting others who contribute in their different ways, whether those others are human, animal, plant, or natural phenomena.

Contrasts

This is not a consequentialist ethics: It is not that our actions are evaluated in terms of the good or bad consequences they have (and still less that the actions are evaluated by a summation of the good minus the bad consequences). Instead, harmonizing with the dao is to participate in something grand, without need of a further objective. Like the deontologist, Xunzi and Zhuangzi and my imagined compromise philosopher needn't think that right or harmonious action will always have good long-term results. Nor is it a deontological or role ethics: There is no set of rules one must always follow or some role one must always adhere to. Nor is it a virtue ethics: There is no set of virtues to which we all must aspire or a distinctive pattern of human flourishing that constitutes the highest attainment. We each contribute in different ways -- and if some virtues often prove to be important, they are derivatively important in the same way that rules and roles can be derivatively important. They are important only because, and to the extent, having those virtues enables or constitutes one's contribution to the magnificent web of being.

So although there are resonances with the more pluralistic forms of consequentialism, and virtue ethics, and role ethics, and even deontology (trivially or degenerately, if the rule is just "harmonize with the dao"), the classical Chinese ethical ideal of harmonizing with the dao differs somewhat from all of these familiar (to professional philosophers) Western ethical approaches.

Many of these other approaches also contain an implicit intellectualism or elitism, in which ideal ethical goodness requires intellectual attainment: wisdom, or a sophisticated ability to weigh consequences or evaluate and apply rules -- far beyond, for example, the capacities of someone with severe cognitive disabilities. With enough Zhuangzi in the mix, such elitism evaporates. A severely cognitively disabled person, or a magnificently weird nonhuman animal, might far exceed any ordinary adult philosopher in their capacity to harmonize with the dao and might contribute more to the rich tapestry of the world.

Perhaps an ethics of harmonizing with the dao can resonate with some 21st-century Anglophone readers, despite its origins in ancient China. It is not, I think, as alien as it might seem from its reliance on the concept of dao and its failure to fit into the standard ethical triumvirate of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. The fundamental idea should be attractive to some: We each contribute by instantiating a unique piece of a magnificent world, a world which would be less magnificent without us.