Ricky Mouser

Effective altruism has a strategy problem. Overreliance on a strategy of donating to the most effective charities keeps us on the firefighter's treadmill, continually pursuing the next-highest quantifiable marginal gain. But on its own, this is politically shortsighted. Without any long-term framework within which these individual rescues fit together to bring about the greatest overall impact, we are almost certainly leaving a lot of value on the table. Thus, effective altruists' preferred means undercut their professed aims. Alongside the charity framework, the more effective altruist ought to consider a mutual aid framework, which better acknowledges and honors the unavoidably political commitments of effective altruism to reimagine and remake the world.

How should we think about public rioting for political ends? Might it ever be more than morally excusable behavior? In this essay, I show how political rioting can sometimes be positively morally justified as an intermediate defensive harm in between civilly disobedient protest and political revolution. I do so by reading political rioters as, at the same time, uncivil and ultimately conciliatory with their state. Unlike civilly disobedient protestors, political rioters express a lack of faith in the value or applicability of civility in interacting with the state under the political status quo. But unlike political revolutionaries who aim at separation from the state, political rioters paradigmatically seek fuller inclusion within it. By rejecting even the appearance of compliance with the political status quo’s systems of justice, political rioters can create a unique venue for systemically marginalized citizens to express warranted disrespect for the state that maintains them in ongoing subjection, as well as their inviolable respect for themselves as persons with dignity beyond the boundaries of civility.

Many instructors see the use of LLMs like ChatGPT on course assignments as a straightforward case of cheating, and try hard to prevent their students from doing so by including new warnings of consequences on their syllabi, turning to iffy plagiarism detectors, or scheduling exams to occur in-class. And the use of LLMs probably is cheating, given the sorts of assignments we are used to giving and the sorts of skills we take ourselves to be instilling in our students. But despite legitimate ethical and pedagogical concerns, the case that LLMs should never be used in academic contexts is quite difficult to see. Many primary and secondary schools are cutting back their writing instruction in an effort to teach to the test; at the same time, many high-end knowledge workers are already quietly expected to leverage their productivity with LLMs. To prepare students for an ever-changing world, we probably do have to teach them at least a little bit about writing with ChatGPT.

No one fully appreciated my worry that self-interest and well-being were importantly distinct until I started writing about assholes. But we need to talk about assholes anyway, because we live in an asshole world. Assholes dominate our politics (both parties), our economy, and our culture. And they’re willing to use their ill-gotten power to ensure that they stay on top. In response, we need to develop an ethical vocabulary for our time that begins with the firm conviction that being an asshole is very bad for you, and not just in the self-interested terms the asshole himself might recognize. But first, who is the asshole? Aaron James argues that in social settings, the asshole: 1) allows himself to enjoy special advantages 2) out of a sense of self-entitlement (he treats himself as morally special) 3) which immunizes him against our complaints (Assholes: A Theory, 5-6) Being an asshole isn’t a matter of what you do, but how you reason. It’s about your pattern of concern: what you care about and how you care about it. Crucially, the asshole’s pattern of concern is too narrow to fully appreciate the ultimate value of others, or even himself. The asshole likes himself, but he lacks the resources to truly love himself because of the outsized role that self-interested reasons play in his pattern of concern. (Even when he does heed any other sorts of reasons, it tends to be because they are merely useful for promoting his own self-interest.) Thus, the asshole fixates on the value that emanates from himself and is reflected back onto him by our usefulness for him. He fetishizes his own self-interest so much that well-being drops off his radar, and so he comes to live in a world sucked dry of almost all its value. In the limit, the asshole lives cosmically alone, surrounded (in his eyes) by more or less useful objects. And that is really bad for his well-being.