03 Sunday May 2026
Posted in Action, Analytic Tradition, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Virtue
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Amanda Askell, Anthropic, Ayn Rand, John Basl, Northeastern University, technology, trolley problem, virtue ethics
A few years ago I argued that utilitarian and Kantian ethics, with the trolley problem as their framing question, were suited for programming robots but not for human beings. It turns out I was wrong — not about the human beings, but about the robots.
Continue reading22 Sunday Feb 2026
Posted in Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Flourishing, Gratitude, Happiness, Health, Hope, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Pleasure, Politics, Psychology, Work
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André Comte-Sponville, autobiography, John B. Whitfield, Laos, Reinhold Niebuhr, Thailand, utilitarianism
I appreciate looking back on my 19-year-old self’s piece in praise of negativity because it highlights most the ways my views have changed since then. It’s not that I assess that specific situation differently: the Vector Marketing (Cutco) approach of getting desperate youth to sell knives to their families is an exploitative business model; working that job was bad and I don’t miss it one bit. But what’s in question is the lessons we draw from that situation.
Yes, we should be clear-eyed enough about the badness of our situations that we have an eye to changing them where possible. But what I didn’t realize then is the lesson of the Serenity Prayer: we also have to accept, and even be positive about, the bad things we cannot change. If we don’t do that – if we decide to see every 50% cup as half-empty – then we are undercutting our own goals.
Continue reading25 Sunday Jan 2026
Posted in Analytic Tradition, Certainty and Doubt, Economics, Flourishing, Humility, Politics, Truth
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academia, Alasdair MacIntyre, Elizabeth Barnes, expressive individualism, Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart Mill, Noah Feldman, utilitarianism
Freedom of thought, belief, speech, and expression is a principle long cherished in the West. In recent years it has come under the most sustained attack I have seen in my lifetime, from multiple quarters. I believe it is worth defending, and it’s time to say more about why.
On Liberty, generally attributed to the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, is the most famous and widely cited defence of this principle, and for good reason. I had a low opinion of Mill for a while, as his Utilitarianism did a bad job, overall, of defending the utilitarianism I broke from – and that was one of the key reasons I broke from it. But On Liberty is an entirely different story. It provides a powerful and, I think, largely correct defence of free thought and speech on two grounds – neither of which is particularly utilitarian!
Perhaps the difference is because it now seems likely the book was co-written with Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart’s wife – probably published without the woman’s name on it to make a Victorian audience to take it more seriously. (For that reason I’ll refer to On Liberty as written by “the Mills”.) It might be that Harriet was less of a utilitarian than John. But the point here is the two big grounds that the Mills provide for why freedom of speech is important.
Continue reading12 Wednesday Nov 2025
Posted in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, Emotion, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphysics, Mindfulness, Morality, Natural Science, Pleasure, Politics, Psychology, Self
≈ Comments Off on Mindform Podcast interview
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Alex O'Connor, Aristotle, authenticity, autobiography, Charles Goodman, conventional/ultimate, expressive individualism, Frank Lawton, Friedrich Nietzsche, interview, Jeremy Bentham, Kāma Sūtra, Madhyamaka, phenomenology, Śāntideva, Thailand, utilitarianism, virtue ethics
I was interviewed by Frank Lawton on a recent episode of the Mindform Podcast on self-development and wisdom, associated with Ryan A. Bush’s Designing the Mind. We begin with my formative story in Thailand and the anti-politics associated with it, proceeding to a critique of utilitarianism, a discussion of my gradual movement from Theravāda to Mahāyāna Buddhism, and finally to an exploration of expressive individualism. All told, I think it’s a very nicely rounded introduction to my philosophical thinking – even if my growing hair is in its awkward phase and I stammer a little too much!
28 Sunday Sep 2025
Posted in Certainty and Doubt, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Humility, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Self
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Candrakīrti, Charles Manson, drugs, Elon Musk, Ethan Mills, Jayarāśi, John Hick, Madhyamaka, MAPS, mystical experience, Nāgārjuna, narcissism, Roland Griffiths, Śāntideva
If Nāgārjuna, the great Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher, is known for anything, it’s his doctrine of the emptiness (śūnyatā) of all things. But in his most famous work, Nāgārjuna warns his audience about emptiness: “Misperceived emptiness ruins a person of dull intelligence, like a snake wrongly grasped.” (MMK XXIV.11) If you know how to pick up a poisonous snake properly, you can move it to a place where it will do less harm, or even milk it to help produce an antidote. But if you don’t, then trying to grasp it will get you bitten and maybe killed. Likewise, if you perceive emptiness wrongly, that’s worse than not perceiving it at all.
10 Sunday Aug 2025
Posted in Early and Theravāda, Flourishing, Human Nature, Metaphysics, Psychology, Self, Virtue
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Amber Carpenter, Bronwyn Finnigan, existentialism, expressive individualism, Four Noble Truths, Friedrich Nietzsche, gender, Pali suttas, Walt Whitman
One of the reasons Buddhists emphasize the idea of non-self so much, I think, is they see the kind of danger that can emerge from self-focused approaches like expressive individualism. That danger is when we identify with our bad qualities in a way that stops us from getting better. Buddhists emphasize the lack of an essential self so that we can shed our bad qualities, become better than we are.
Continue reading03 Sunday Aug 2025
Posted in Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Health, Psychology, Serenity, Virtue
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Charles Taylor, Daniel Mallory Ortberg, expressive individualism, Patrick Lee Miller, relativism
Like most of those around me, I feel the pull of expressive individualist ideas: I think it is a hugely important part of being human to be ourselves and express ourselves, in ways that express our own individuality and are not the same as others’. Yet there is also a grave danger in this ideal.
Continue reading06 Sunday Apr 2025
Posted in Family, Flourishing, Friends, Place, Politics, Social Science
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Alasdair MacIntyre, autobiography, Canada, identity, J.D. Vance, Jason Stanley, LARP, Mark Granovetter, United States
Canadians have always had a love-hate relationship with the USA; for obvious reasons, the hate side is stronger right at the moment. The US government is doing everything it can to make the country hateable – and harder to live in. When lawful permanent residents are detained without trial for exercising their free speech, this becomes a scary place indeed. So it’s quite understandable that many of those who can leave the US for Canada are planning on doing so – like the philosopher Jason Stanley making a high-profile announcement that he’s leaving Yale for Toronto.
It’s tempting to try to do something similar myself. But I’m not going to. And I want to talk about why.
Continue reading21 Sunday Jul 2024
Posted in Action, Daoism, Flourishing, Metaphysics, Protestantism, Serenity
≈ Comments Off on George Grant, Daoist
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Canada, Chris Fraser, George Grant, Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther, modernity, natural environment, Robert Meynell, Robert Sibley, Zhuangzi
I think George Grant is in many respects a Daoist. I don’t think he thought of himself as a Daoist. But key parts of his viewpoint seem very Daoist to me.
For those who don’t know Grant: he was a 20th-century Canadian philosopher best known for his Lament for a Nation, a book which claimed that the idea of Canada was to remain an outpost of the British Empire in North America, and thereby resist the influence of the United States – an idea which he thought had been lost. (In those ideas he was taking cues from John Watson, in the stream of Canadian Hegelianism.) I have little love for that view of Canada, so it’s not my favourite part of Grant’s thought. But there’s a lot more to Grant that I find much more exciting.
Continue reading05 Sunday May 2024
Richard Chappell recently had a lovely post asking people to disagree with him. I obliged by expressing my misgivings about what he calls beneficentrism, “The view that promoting the general welfare is deeply important, and should be amongst one’s central life projects.” I argued instead for
a relatively strong partialist account, in which one is obligated to promote the welfare of those one is directly engaged with – co-workers, family, friends, fellow organization members, maybe neighbours – but going beyond that is supererogatory. (Beyond that circle there are harms that one is obligated not to cause, but harm and benefit are not symmetrical.)
I liked Chappell’s main response, which seemed to deemphasize obligation, and I didn’t find much to object to:
we would do well, morally speaking, to dedicate at least 10% of our efforts or resources to doing as much good as possible (via permissible means). Whether this is obligatory or supererogatory doesn’t much interest me. The more important normative claim is just that this is clearly a very worthwhile thing to do, very much better than largely ignoring utilitarian considerations.
But he also linked to a backgrounder on obligation, and there I found much more to disagree with. I agree with Chappell’s most basic point in the backgrounder: that it is “unfortunate” that “Delineating the boundary between ‘permissible’ and ‘impermissible’ actions… has traditionally been seen as the central question of ethics”. But I disagree entirely with his reasoning for this view.
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