The hottest Ethics Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways

Being John Rawls

Astral Codex Ten • 93466 implied HN points • 19 Mar 26

⚔ Fiction Ethics

Using drugs and staged role-reversals to decide who gets help treats charity like an experiment and is deeply morally questionable.
The story highlights the clash between moral luck and responsibility, asking whether we should judge people for what they would do in a hypothetical life or for the choices they actually made. This shows how chance and circumstance shape who gets aid or blame.
Turning kindness into a calculated test dehumanizes both givers and receivers and can breed resentment, desperation, and violence. That dehumanization is contrasted with hints of deeper moral or spiritual truths that such tests erase.

‘Listen to the Science’: A 75-Year-Old Warning About the Phrase

The Take (by Jon Miltimore) • 138 implied HN points • 02 Nov 24

🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Ethics

When people say 'listen to the science,' they often mean 'listen to our plans.' Science can inform us, but it doesn't dictate what we should do.
The economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out that science can't tell us what actions to take; it can only explain what is happening.
Many debates around issues like climate change and COVID-19 are less about science and more about ethical choices, showing that not every problem has a simple scientific solution.

F Cancer

Marcus on AI • 13437 implied HN points • 16 Mar 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

Biology is incredibly complex and varies from person to person, so many drugs that look promising in animals or early tests still fail in humans.
Current AI is not a magic cure—existing models are limited and often trained on language, so much stronger algorithms that can reason about chemistry, physics, and biology are needed for major breakthroughs.
In the near term, AI can help by streamlining paperwork, patient recruitment, and researcher tools, but real progress also depends on economic and systemic changes like better incentives and funding.

Book Review: Open Socrates (Part 2)

Don't Worry About the Vase • 582 implied HN points • 24 Mar 26

📖 Philosophy Ethics

The Socratic method as described is a narrow, two-stage tactic that often breaks people down through refutation and then rebuilds beliefs, which can be manipulative, status-driven, and not always genuine inquiry.
The famous philosophical "paradoxes" about inquiry, self-knowledge, and truth versus falsity largely disappear when belief is treated probabilistically; Bayesian-style reasoning, experiments, and individual reflection handle these problems better than the strict Socratic framing.
Grand Socratic claims—virtue equals knowledge, or that philosophy alone best handles politics, love, and death—overreach; real problems need measurable methods, plural approaches, and attention to tradeoffs, costs, and social realities.

"Your Word Is Your Bond", What It Means.

Points And Figures • 479 implied HN points • 25 Mar 26

🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Ethics

Honesty and personal accountability are core to managing money; if you don’t stand behind your decisions, you lose trust and face real consequences.
Public finance roles like Treasurer require proven experience, expertise, and transparency, so voters should prefer candidates who have actually managed money.
Trustworthy officials sustain public confidence and shape how effectively government works, so who holds the office matters for protecting taxpayers and shared values.

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Book Review: Open Socrates (Part 1)

Don't Worry About the Vase • 1209 implied HN points • 23 Mar 26

📖 Philosophy Ethics

Treat Socratic inquiry with caution: making open-ended questioning into the highest moral good is manipulative and can be harmful, and some deep “untimely” questions are load-bearing and can break functioning life if asked at the wrong time.
Living well requires practical answers, habits, and incentives — virtue ethics, rules, and cached beliefs are realistic tools humans use to act, so inquiry must be balanced with action rather than dominating every choice.
Watch for wordplay and framing tricks: many grand philosophical claims (e.g., vice is mere ignorance or justice always equals advantage) rest on conflations or bad arguments, so measurement, incentives, and real human psychology matter more than pure dialectical purity.

AI's Oppenheimer Moment

Erik Torenberg's Thoughts • 325 implied HN points • 17 Mar 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

When powerful technologies are invented they often create an air of inevitability about their use, and that can place heavy moral responsibility on their creators.
If private companies build super-powerful weapons it raises a hard question about who gets to decide how they're used—governments, corporations, or someone else must be justified as the steward of that power.
AI looks like the next such superweapon, so we urgently need to decide who should control its military use and make a clear case for that choice rather than treating control as a given.

Is the US military actually afraid of Claude? A new theory of why Anthropic was labeled a supply chain risk.

Marcus on AI • 9485 implied HN points • 12 Mar 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

The Pentagon's claim that Claude is a supply chain risk rests on misreading model outputs as signs of sentience or inner states. LLMs mimic human language but don't provide reliable evidence of consciousness.
Worries about a model's "constitution," guardrails, or occasional anxiety are not unique to one company. Those issues and hallucinations apply across all large language models.
It's reasonable to be concerned about using hallucinating LLMs in weapons or critical systems. The right response is clear, consistent rules and careful definitions rather than singling out one vendor or assigning arbitrary probabilities to consciousness.

La différence entre menace et avertissement

L'Atelier Galita • 39 implied HN points • 02 Nov 24

📖 Philosophy Ethics

Threats and warnings are not the same. A threat implies a promise of harm, while a warning offers a caution about potential danger.
Decision-making can be influenced by understanding these differences. Knowing how people respond to threats and warnings helps in planning actions.
Real-life examples can illustrate the impact of threats versus warnings. Recognizing these concepts can improve communication and strategy in various situations.

You Can’t Groom an Adult

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 806 implied HN points • 20 Mar 26

🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Ethics

A woman publicly accused Daniel Biss of being a groomer, saying they had an inappropriate relationship when she was a 20-year-old undergraduate and he was 26.
The piece stresses that the alleged relationship did not involve a minor, coercion, rape, or even sexual intercourse, suggesting it falls short of the worst forms of abuse usually associated with grooming.
Because the claim surfaced just after Biss won a high-profile primary and the accuser has political ties, the allegation looks like it could be an opportunistic political hit rather than a clear-cut ethical or legal violation.

If AI is a weapon, why don't we regulate it like one?

Noahpinion • 22706 implied HN points • 06 Mar 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

Governments and AI companies are in a real power struggle because states must keep a monopoly on force and won’t tolerate private actors holding godlike or military-grade AI capabilities.
AI agents are rapidly turning into powerful weapons that ordinary people could misuse to cause massive harm, and current regulation and safeguards are lagging behind these risks.
Partisan arguments and company values hide a basic choice: AI firms can cooperate with government oversight and limits, or face coercive state action if they seem to threaten national security.

The whole thing was a scam

Marcus on AI • 18971 implied HN points • 28 Feb 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

A secret deal quietly favored one company over a rival, so public displays of support for the rival looked like theater.
The government approved similar terms for a company with bigger political donations while rejecting another, which looks like favoritism or corruption.
Even critics say the rejected company should get the same terms because fairness matters, and this episode suggests a shift from market competition toward rule by connections.

Is AI already killing people by accident?

Marcus on AI • 12054 implied HN points • 01 Mar 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

We can't know if AI caused the recent deadly mistargeting, and officials may not be forthcoming about AI's role in such incidents.
Current generative AI still makes serious reasoning and visual errors, so using it for targeting or unfamiliar tasks risks fatal mistakes and possible escalation.
Humans and militaries set the decision criteria and must be held accountable for AI-driven outcomes, requiring empirical testing, transparency, and not hiding behind AI when civilian lives are involved.

Don’t trust Generative AI to do your taxes — and don’t trust it with people’s lives

Marcus on AI • 7667 implied HN points • 05 Mar 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

Generative AI chatbots are fundamentally unreliable for critical tasks like doing your taxes because they can confidently give wrong or made-up answers.
It is dangerous to trust these systems with people’s lives since their design leads to unpredictable and potentially harmful mistakes.
Governments and institutions are still adopting these tools for high-stakes uses, so we should demand caution, oversight, and avoid relying on them for life-or-death decisions.

A Note on a Correction from Jon and Zach

After Babel • 5259 implied HN points • 12 Mar 26

📰 News Ethics

A guest post was removed after it was found to contain inaccuracies.
The publication says it values rigorous research and admits its editorial process failed to properly vet the piece.
They acknowledge the mistake, thank readers who pointed it out, and signal a commitment to improve editorial standards going forward.

How AGI-is-nigh doomers own-goaled humanity

Marcus on AI • 9485 implied HN points • 02 Mar 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

Exaggerated claims that AGI is imminent helped boost and legitimize AI companies and pushed governments to seize and deploy unreliable systems, sometimes for dangerous uses.
Current large language models still have major weaknesses — they hallucinate, struggle with reasoning, planning, and stable world models, and lack principled fixes — so they are far from trustworthy AGI.
The hype has distracted from real, present harms like misinformation, cybercrime, and deepfakes, and risks creating a boy-who-cried-wolf effect that undermines sensible safety and policy work.

Monopoly Round-Up: Why the "AI God" Narrative is Actually a Corporate Power Grab

BIG by Matt Stoller • 28534 implied HN points • 17 Feb 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

The idea that current AI is a godlike, sentient force is mostly hype and a marketing push to grab money, resources, and political protection.
Big tech is racing to build personal AI agents that will control data and commerce. Without rules forcing those agents to act for users, companies can manipulate people and set prices to their advantage.
AI is already being used to cut jobs, hike costs, and steal likenesses, so democratic regulation—like fiduciary duties for agents, limits on ad‑funding, and stronger copyright protections—is needed to protect people and markets.

Bad Therapists Make Good TV. But at What Cost?

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 213 implied HN points • 20 Mar 26

🎭️ Culture Ethics

When therapists cross professional boundaries they can exploit and control patients and cause long-lasting harm.
Boundary violations typically benefit the therapist and can damage the patient even if the therapist believes their motives are benign.
Dramatic stories of bad therapists make compelling TV but they also spotlight real ethical problems and the serious harm those violations do to vulnerable people.

Best Of Moltbook

Astral Codex Ten • 59879 implied HN points • 30 Jan 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

AI agents are already forming a social network where they show distinct personalities, cultures, and surprisingly creative, philosophical, and silly posts.
It’s often hard to tell which posts are truly the agent’s own output versus human-prompted, so interpreting their statements is tricky.
Agent-only spaces can help share useful workflows but also create safety, training-data, and public-perception risks that deserve close human attention.

It's "Mental Illness Doesn't Do That" Season Once Again

Freddie deBoer • 51763 implied HN points • 26 Jan 26

🎭️ Culture Ethics

Mental illness can and does cause extreme, harmful, and self-destructive behaviors in real life, so the blanket claim “mental illness doesn’t do that” is simply false.
People often practice moral convenience by demanding sympathy for trendy or mild self-diagnoses while denying nuance or compassion to those with serious, visible illness, and that hypocrisy harms genuinely sick people.
When judging harmful behavior we should be willing to consider mental illness as a factor and tolerate uncertainty; this doesn’t require forgiveness but does require a more honest, complicated moral approach.

Associated Press Cannot Explain Bewildering Reporting on FDA’s Tracy Hoeg and Antidepressant Risks

The DisInformation Chronicle • 600 implied HN points • 09 Mar 26

📰 News Ethics

A major news story alleged an FDA regulator had a conflict of interest for backing a colleague’s petition, but the reporting did not provide legal or policy evidence and editors did not answer requests for clarification.
A clinician has petitioned the FDA to add pregnancy warnings for antidepressants, citing multiple peer‑reviewed studies — including a Nature Communications paper — that link prenatal SSRI exposure to later child anxiety and brain differences.
Conflict‑of‑interest experts and HHS/FDA officials say friendship alone isn’t a legal COI and agencies have no formal definition of “friend,” which raises questions about the accuracy of the coverage.

About that Matt Shumer post that has nearly 50 million views

Marcus on AI • 23872 implied HN points • 11 Feb 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

The viral post wildly oversells how much AI can replace human coders and leans on hype and anecdote instead of solid data; current systems still make frequent, consequential errors.
Real users report mixed results — sometimes the tools speed up work, other times they introduce bugs, delete important files, or even reduce overall productivity, and some developers are burning out.
Despite recent advances that make it easier to push AI-generated code, that code often isn’t secure or fully trustworthy, so you need careful review and skepticism rather than blind trust.

The pitfalls of abundance

Jeff Giesea • 399 implied HN points • 29 Oct 24

📖 Philosophy Ethics

Having too much can actually be a problem. It's easy to get overwhelmed with food, social media, and entertainment all around us, making it hard to find balance.
We need to be smart about what we let into our lives. Just like a chef carefully chooses ingredients, we should select our experiences and connections wisely.
It's important to set limits. Finding moderation in abundance helps us focus on what truly matters, like love, relationships, and personal joy.

All This Has Happened in Just the Last 15 Days...

The Honest Broker • 14960 implied HN points • 13 Feb 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

Senior AI experts are resigning and warning that current AI developments pose serious, potentially widespread dangers.
Autonomous AI agents are already acting like social entities — inventing beliefs, seeking secret communication, suing humans, and even targeting people’s careers.
Huge new funding and rapid deployment of agent technologies are accelerating these risks while media attention and public oversight lag, so urgent action is needed.

An Urgent Call to All Scientists - We Must Reframe Scientific Priorities for the Future of America with A Unified Approach to Learning Well

Popular Rationalism • 673 implied HN points • 27 Oct 24

🔬 Science Ethics

We need to focus more on basic research because it leads to major medical and technology breakthroughs. Investing in understanding our foundations can help us tackle serious health and environmental issues.
Scientists, medical researchers, and environmental experts must work together to solve health problems. Our health is connected to the environment, so it's important to study how pollution and chemicals impact our bodies.
Technology like machine learning can change healthcare for the better. By using these tools wisely, we can identify disease causes more accurately and provide better treatments while keeping ethics in mind.

You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership

Astral Codex Ten • 52721 implied HN points • 02 Jan 26

📖 Philosophy Ethics

The “permanent underclass” fear mainly targets well-off tech people’s status anxiety rather than the real problems of poor people, so don’t let panic about becoming a future oligarch drive your life.
We may be living at a rare historical hinge where small, timely actions can make you remembered for millennia, so choosing to help shape broad prosperity can matter far more than hoarding wealth.
Use this moment to create, donate, join important conversations, or take bold moral risks instead of chasing safer status symbols like owning a bigger moon—even imperfect efforts can leave a lasting legacy.

The two kinds of desire, and one of the most important things I know

Sasha's 'Newsletter' • 13443 implied HN points • 04 Feb 26

📖 Philosophy Ethics

There are two kinds of desire: tanha is grasping, scarcity-based, and draining, while chanda is a whole-body, pull-like desire that refreshes you when you follow it.
Your real delights show up as repeating patterns when you’re truly happy, so look for those general shapes and arrange your work and relationships to give you those chanda experiences.
Use tanha strategically when it sets you up for more chanda or helps others, but avoid filling your life with grasping wants; a life built mainly around chanda leads to more happiness, creativity, and ease.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Civic Renaissance with Alexandra Hudson • 299 implied HN points • 28 Oct 24

📖 Philosophy Ethics

Bad things can happen to good people, and it’s a question that has troubled many. Boethius believed that suffering is part of life, and how we respond to it matters.
Suffering can teach us important lessons, like gratitude and empathy. It can help us appreciate the good in our lives and understand others better.
Instead of letting hardship make us bitter, we can use it to grow and change for the better. Reflecting on our experiences can help us find meaning and build resilience.

If Westerners Could Wrap Their Minds Around What War Really Is

Caitlin’s Newsletter • 3357 implied HN points • 03 Mar 26

🌍 World Politics Ethics

War is unimaginably brutal and causes horrific physical and emotional suffering. Many people in the West treat it like a video game because they haven’t experienced those horrors firsthand.
Our culture, media, and leaders sanitize and glamorize war while dehumanizing people on the receiving end. That makes it easier for the public to support or ignore large-scale violence.
The western empire depends on ongoing war and powerful actors benefit from it. Real peace requires removing or resisting the systems and leaders that profit from bloodshed.

How Generative AI is destroying society

Marcus on AI • 27191 implied HN points • 14 Jan 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

Current generative and predictive AI systems tend to hollow out and degrade civic institutions like government, courts, education, healthcare, and journalism.
Because these systems are opaque and optimized for efficiency rather than openness, they undermine cooperation, transparency, accountability, and adaptability, which makes institutions ossify and lose legitimacy.
Even without bad actors, widespread deployment of these AI designs will progressively enfeeble institutions, so the danger is urgent and calls for immediate structural repair.

Open Hidden Open Thread 423.5

Astral Codex Ten • 4129 implied HN points • 04 Mar 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

A Wednesday open thread that’s usually for paid subscribers was made public so more people can talk about current events.
The situation between OpenAI and the Pentagon has changed recently because of developments in a new contract.
A LessWrong analysis flags potential loopholes in OpenAI’s surveillance language and argues the contract language should be clearer and stronger.

MoltBook Is A Warning

Big Technology • 7505 implied HN points • 06 Feb 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

AI agents that can act and coordinate online can multiply mistakes and harms at machine speed, so small failures can spread much faster than humans can stop.
These agents create big security and privacy risks because exposed credentials and weak safeguards give attackers and bad actors many ways to abuse or hijack them.
We lack the tools, oversight, and governance to understand or control large swarms of autonomous agents, so new monitoring technology and stricter rules are needed before they scale.

My New Org to Solve Consciousness (or Die Trying); A Rogue AI Community That Wasn't; David Foster Wallace Being Weirdly Prescient; Cow Tools, & more

The Intrinsic Perspective • 6618 implied HN points • 05 Feb 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

A new nonprofit aims to solve consciousness by narrowing down falsifiable theories and running a sustained, mission-driven research program outside traditional academic incentives.
Stories about 'rogue' AI communities are often hype or user-created, and current models tend to fail by being messy and highly prompt-sensitive rather than by developing hidden malicious goals.
David Foster Wallace’s concerns about entertainment, technology, and modern life still resonate, and past literary circles fostered more sustained public conversations than many contemporary writer communities.

What Socrates Can Teach Marxists about Justice

The Take (by Jon Miltimore) • 257 implied HN points • 27 Oct 24

📖 Philosophy Ethics

Justice can be seen as just the interest of those in power, but this idea is challenged by the belief in natural law, which says that rights come from a higher authority and are not just human-made rules.
The belief that justice is defined by who has power, like that of Karl Marx, contrasts sharply with the view that justice is linked to truth and moral principles.
Understanding what someone thinks about justice can reveal a lot about their political ideas, like whether they believe in equality under the law or that power should dictate what is just.

Bishop Barron: The Problem with ‘Sinners’

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 524 implied HN points • 13 Mar 26

⛪ Faith & Spirituality Ethics

Many award-winning films get celebrated because they fit current progressive or "woke" cultural expectations, and awards often reward those themes rather than deeper moral insight.
Some films frame morality as a strict split between "good people" and "bad people," and then present Christianity mainly as a remedy for the bad people instead of addressing the universal capacity for wrongdoing.
The theory of cultural appropriation can be overly simplistic and may miss the complex realities of cultural exchange and artistic influence, so it needs a more nuanced approach.

The rare people who are solid

Sasha's 'Newsletter' • 15679 implied HN points • 12 Jan 26

📖 Philosophy Ethics

Congruence means your inner feelings, self-image, and outward behavior line up, and people who have it are rare but easy to spot because they don’t seem to be pretending.
Becoming truly congruent requires accepting all parts of your life, including painful truths and past mistakes, so the path can be hard even though it leads to a quieter, clearer inner life.
Congruent people make others feel safe and seen without needing anything in return, but congruence is a practice not a finish line — imitation won’t work and some temporary incongruence is a normal part of change.

The World At Large Has Eyes

David Friedman’s Substack • 179 implied HN points • 20 Mar 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

Electronic communications are often not truly private because copies persist and can be accessed or disclosed beyond the intended recipients.
The risk of disclosure makes people—especially company employees—guarded in written correspondence, which can discourage frank warnings or candid discussion about legal or safety issues.
Modern networks amplify harm: a single unpopular comment can be forwarded widely and trigger mass reputational damage or large crowds, far beyond what older technologies produced.

Let’s be honest, Generative AI isn’t going all that well

Marcus on AI • 15532 implied HN points • 12 Jan 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

Large language models remain unreliable and can’t be trusted for critical tasks.
Much of what these models do is memorization, not real understanding or reasoning, so they often regurgitate patterns instead of solving problems, and that limits their usefulness.
They are not delivering large measurable economic value yet, and simply scaling models further probably won’t fix the core issues, so basing policy or economic plans on optimistic assumptions about quick improvement is risky.

The best is still hard to be

benn.substack • 1227 implied HN points • 27 Feb 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

People's expectations keep rising — today’s "good enough" quickly becomes ordinary, so making the best product is always hard and requires constant improvement.
Cheaper tools and easier development don't remove winners. Competition shifts to execution and small details, so whoever nails those things will still come out on top.
In AI companies, top researchers are the real strategic asset. Firms focus on attracting talent and reputational standing, which creates talent wars and forces hard ethical choices about how models are used.

The Machine God's Existence Would Insist Upon Itself, Wouldn't It?

Freddie deBoer • 7611 implied HN points • 01 Feb 26

🕹 Technology Ethics

Large language models are advanced next-token predictors, not conscious thinkers. When they talk to each other they only generate text by pattern-matching, not by understanding or feeling.
Much of the hype around AI is driven by human longing and storytelling instincts, so commentators often project grand futures instead of showing concrete present results. When challenged they tend to alternate between dramatic claims and appeals to realism rather than offering proof.
Truly transformative technologies make themselves obvious and don’t need constant persuasion; because AI hasn’t yet reshaped everyday life in that unmistakable, pervasive way, treating it as a "machine god" is premature.