Overview of essay series

This is the first in a collection of three essays exploring and ultimately defending the idea of choosing what feels wholesome as a heuristic for picking actions which are good for the world. I'm including a summary of the series here, before getting to the essay proper.

The two main generators of my thinking about this were:

• Reflecting on major mistakes that have been made in EA, and wondering how EA might have been different at a deep level in ways that could have averted those mistakes.
• Reflecting on and trying to name certain core praiseworthy behaviours of people whom I especially admire.

In the first essay, Acting Wholesomely (= the rest of this post), we see that the regular English concept of acting wholesomely can be action-guiding, especially if taken with a flavour of “paying attention to the whole of things”. [...]

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Outline:

(00:02) Overview of essay series

(03:02) What does it mean to act wholesomely?

(03:06) The basic idea

(05:59) Exploring the concept

(10:18) Comparisons with related concepts

(10:23) Virtue ethics

(10:54) Consequentialism

(11:28) Pre-theoretic deontology

(12:08) Clean / traditional living

(12:59) Sincerity

(13:35) The internal motions of wholesome action

(14:43) Leveraging emotional intelligence to track downsides

(15:51) Identifying wholesomeness as a skill

(17:00) Making space for good judgements

(18:12) Wholesome vs virtuous vs right?

(19:51) Meta-level wholesomeness

(19:55) Nothing is fully wholesome

(21:51) Failure modes in relating to unwholesomeness

(22:10) Pretending it isn’t there

(22:59) Treating it as toxic

(23:39) Wholesomely relating to unwholesomeness?

(26:27) More posture than goal?

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.