Practical Ethics

• Good
  • Can something be “good” apart from humans?
  • Yes. E.g., “And God said it was good.” Other animals have preferences that indicate they have a sense of something being “good” (e.g., birds selecting a mate).
  • What makes a car “good”? It seems that it depends on the needs of the person evaluating the car. Most people have similar needs. They need an affordable, safe, reliable, fast, and comfortable means of transportation. Thus, we can speak about a “good” car in the sense that the car fulfills the needs of the typical person. That is what online reviews accomplish.
  • False dichotomy between “absolute” and “relative” good. E.g., the ten commandments are absolute.
• Motivation
  • Proposition: No clear distinction can be drawn between “big” ethical choices and “smaller” everyday choices.
    • The standard definition of ethics tends to focus on what we should not do.
      • ethics, n.: “moral principles that govern a person's behavior or the conducting of an activity”
      • This definition is actually quite in line with how I’d define it.
      • I think many Americans, when they hear the “ethics”, focus on the ethics of “an activity,” like medical ethics, or AI ethics, or legal ethics.
      • Perhaps the focus on the negative comes from the ten-commandments, which are more on the negative than the positive.
      • Perhaps this is in part due to our love of liberty within the US: nobody wants to tell you specific things you should do. Thought: Contrast with more collectivist cultures where there’s more focus on both what we should do and should not.
    • Many people may not want to feel like they need to be so organized and intentional about how they live. It may feel constraining.
  • This implies we should optimize our everyday choices too.
  • Practical ethics, for me, is about how to do what’s “good” or what’s “right” once you approximately know what it is. It’s similar to prudence in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
  • We must have a clear understanding about where we’re heading; we need goals.
  • Without consciously setting big goals, setting smaller goals, and budgeting our resources (in particular, time and money) towards these goals, you are likely going to waste resources on things that don’t align with your goals, and you’re less likely to meet your goals.
  • Proposition: The idea that our ethics should focus on little things hasn’t been written about much.
    • (I’m not sure if this is true or not. I should try to find material on this.)
    • If it hasn’t, perhaps it’s because people thought there wasn’t much generally applicable content to share.
    • Or perhaps most people haven’t had enough resources and freedom to be able to spend time thinking about the plan for their life, and it’s only with our technological progress that many people can think about these things (seems unlikely.)
• Timescales
  • Goals can be categorized by their timescale. For example, we may have:
    • Life Goals
    • 10-year Goals
    • New Year’s Resolutions (1-year goals)
    • Quarterly Goals (businesses like this level of granularity)
    • Monthly Goals
    • Weekly Goals
    • Daily Goals
    • Smaller-level goals (e.g., Pomodoros, Agenda’s for a meeting, etc.)
  • A quick note about my terminology: I’ll call the longer-scale goals “big” and the shorter-scale goals “small” and I’ll say we move “up” or “down” between the time-scales.
  • Bigger goals tend to be more abstract.
    • “To be virtuous.”
    • “To enjoy life.”
    • “To help my spouse be happy.”
    • “To help my children be virtuous.”
• Moving up
  • We don’t all consciously set goals, but we do all fill our time doing activities and making choices. For each, we may ask why did I act as I did, why did I make those choices?
  • The question why, because it concerns causal chains of events, is used to move to longer timescales.
  • Smaller goals should be traceable up bigger ones, and ultimately up to our Life Goals.
  • If you can’t trace a small goal to anything bigger, then why are you doing it? Was it a mistake?
  • For each activity of your day, ask why, and you’ll quickly identify your big goals. Then ask why about these again, and you’ll move to even bigger goals. If you keep asking over and over, you end up with what is good for itself.
• Moving down
  • When you have a big goal, you can reach it by breaking it down into smaller goals.
  • Breaking down bigger goals into smaller ones is only useful to the extent that it alters your immediate choices. Spending more time on it than is necessary can be wasteful.
  • Risk management is about identifying and mitigating obstacles to meeting your goals.
  • Since uncertainty decreases at shorter timescales, our goals should become more concrete as they get smaller.
• Setting big goals
  • Leadership is about setting goals and helping guide people to them. You need to envisioning the future.
  • Fiction (and perhaps biographies) can help you envision the future.
• Multiple Stakeholders
  • Different stakeholders have different goals.
  • It’s usually necessary to plan further ahead for goals with multiple stakeholders, because you can’t update the plan as quickly, and therefore you need more coordination.
• Many goals
  • When you have multiple goals, you must evaluate which is more important; you need a scale and you need to say one is better or more important than the other.
  • It’s easy to be overwhelmed with too many goals, and to go in circles jumping between small goals.
  • Time, and our sequence of activities and choices we can make, is the first natural limitation.
  • Money, rooted in the scarcity of resources, is next. Budgeting is also about tradeoffs and making value decisions.