About this site

Every semester, someone in one of my ethics classes asks some version of why they should be ethical. And practically every semester, I have given a different answer--which is to say that I have never really had a good answer.

But, over the last couple of years, I've started to settle on an answer. The answer is that, if you're not ethical, then you're an asshole. I don't think that's true by definition exactly, but it's almost true by definition, and that's interesting enough. It's also almost exactly the right level of answer: the universe doesn't collapse on you if you do something immoral, but there are real costs. But the costs are hidden if you're with people who are also assholes, asshole-adjacent (sycophants, social climbers), or excluded entirely from the people who would call them assholes (the ultra wealthy, the extremely marginalized poor).

I like this as (most of) an answer, but what it leaves out is that history is full of great people who have done great things and who are also assholes. And sometimes they were able to do great things because they were assholes. That's the part that has really been puzzling me: wouldn't it be a strange conclusion if ethics demands that you not be an asshole, but being an asshole is a path to doing great things? Should you not try to do great things? Or could we be wrong about what makes great things great? Or is ethics capable of assessing great things at all? If it is, do ethical standards change as you go from promising your spouse to promising a friend to promising a stranger to promising an electorate to promising a negotiating partner as part of an international agreement?

Some of these questions I have some tentative answers to, and some I don't, or I don't know yet if I do. And some of my answers are definitely wrong. I'm going to write them out here to figure out what I think and, if I'm lucky, whether I'm wrong, or maybe even if I'm right. I don't get to talk and discuss these topics as much as I would like, but there's only so much talking I can get others to do on the topics that I'm interested in, and writing is also a great way of thinking. So I'm writing.

When I first started having some of these ideas, I tried writing on substack, but I wasn't far enough along to know what exactly I wanted to write about, so I stopped; and, by the time I figured it out, substack was promoting free speech for nazis. So I started this by importing the few posts I'd made there for my own records, and so that my initial blank screen wouldn't be so blank.

This site is set up for newsletters and social interactions, which isn't my goal right now. I need better thoughts before I I'd want to share them. So this is a newsletter more like Dear Mr. Henshaw, where Mr. Henshaw is whatever data scraper wanders nearby. "Socratic blogging" is not a well-known path to truth, but I'm not sure yet what I want to say, and the agora is crowded with bots and nazis, and assholes doing great things.