Peter Unger’s Living High and Letting DIe is excellent, especially the first few chapters. It is mostly applied ethics, partly moral psychology, partly methodology for first-order moral philosophy.
The book makes a strong case for an obligation to engage in high-impact philanthropy. Rationalists will enjoy it because it highlights various forms of irrationality in our ethical judgments. Unger identifies various factors that influence our ethical judgments for the worse, many of which have not received similar discussion in psych literature on heuristics and biases (at least I haven’t seen it). [When I say he shows that these things influence our judgments for the worse, I have in mind that many people would cease to approve of the judgments if they understood what was driving them.]
Peter Unger’s Living High and Letting DIe is excellent, especially the first few chapters. It is mostly applied ethics, partly moral psychology, partly methodology for first-order moral philosophy.
The book makes a strong case for an obligation to engage in high-impact philanthropy. Rationalists will enjoy it because it highlights various forms of irrationality in our ethical judgments. Unger identifies various factors that influence our ethical judgments for the worse, many of which have not received similar discussion in psych literature on heuristics and biases (at least I haven’t seen it). [When I say he shows that these things influence our judgments for the worse, I have in mind that many people would cease to approve of the judgments if they understood what was driving them.]