Public Philosophy
I think that insights from philosophy can (and should!) shape how we live. My work explores what fundamentally matters and what we should do in light of that. So alongside my academic publications, I try to make the underlying arguments available to any who might find them illuminating.
Good Thoughts
My Substack newsletter, Good Thoughts (2022–present), covers moral philosophy and applied ethics for a general audience, and has over 6,000 subscribers. This is where I share my most important thoughts.
Some favorite posts:
- Bleeding-Heart Consequentialism spells out my general approach to ethical theory, and where I think the standard caricatures of consequentialism go wrong.
- Puzzles for Everyone explains why it's a mistake to see the problems of population ethics and decision theory as a distinctive problem for utilitarianism. Every complete view has to say something about these puzzle cases.
- Analytic vs Conventional Bioethics — too many ethicists seem more interested in laundering vibes than in principled reasoning. We need more of the latter.
- The Train to Crazytown explores the relation between ethical theory and practice, or how to balance radical abstract reasoning against conservative common sense. Argues for an indirect approach that reaps the low-hanging fruit of abstract reasoning while limiting the downside risks.
- Beneficentrism — when we strip away the most controversial aspects of utilitarianism, we're left with a core claim about beneficence that everyone (non-consequentialists included) should be on board with.
- What "Effective Altruism" Means to Me — the claims I take to be important and true that seem widely neglected outside of EA circles. Comments are open for any who disagree with these claims!
Utilitarianism.net
I'm the lead author and editor (with Darius Meissner and William MacAskill) of An Introduction to Utilitarianism, a free, peer-reviewed online textbook covering the theory and its practical implications. A print edition, An Introduction to Utilitarianism: From Theory to Practice, was published by Hackett in 2024.
Op-Eds & Essays
- ‘Pandemic Ethics: The Case for Experiments on Human Volunteers’ (with Peter Singer), The Washington Post (2020). An op-ed making the case for human challenge trials, written while COVID-19 vaccines were still awaiting testing. [The companion academic paper is ‘Pandemic Ethics: The Case for Risky Research’.]
- ‘Commonsense Clues: A Defense of Longtermism’, The Latecomer (2024).
- ‘Is It OK to Have Kids?’, Aeon (2015).
Discussion Notes
Journal replies are slow, gated, and read by few. As a faster-moving alternative, I've written 60+ “discussion notes” — informal but substantive critical replies to recent academic work, published openly on my blog. I'd encourage other philosophers to try the genre: it offers much of the intellectual value of a published reply, with less time-investment and less lag.
- For example, Slater's Objections to Satisficing responds to a couple of neat papers by Joe Slater, objecting to my view in 'Willpower Satisficing'.
Engaging with Critics
I'm always interested in exploring objections to my views. Utilitarianism and Effective Altruism are both often caricatured, and I'd like to see more critics engage with the best versions of these positions. So a lot of my work involves trying to make these "best versions" clear. Especially comprehensive responses to common objections can be found in the following open-access publications:
- Utilitarianism.net: Objections to utilitarianism and responses.
- ‘Why Not Effective Altruism?’, Public Affairs Quarterly (2024), 38 (1): 3–21.
If you think I've missed an important objection, I'd love to hear from you! Feel free to comment on a relevant post or shoot me an email.
Philosophy, et cetera (2004–2022)
Before Substack existed, I blogged at Philosophy, et cetera: over 2,000 posts and 5 million page views across eighteen years. The archive remains online. One curious legacy: it was reportedly among the most influential philosophy sites in a major LLM training dataset — on a par with PhilPapers and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. So if your chatbot is annoyingly enthusiastic about consequentialism, I apologize!