The Nonlinear Library EA - PhD on Moral Progress - Bibliography Review by Rafael Ruiz
Dec 10, 2023
01:10:38
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: PhD on Moral Progress - Bibliography Review, published by Rafael Ruiz on December 10, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Epistemic Status: I've researched this broad topic for a couple of years. I've read about 30+ books and 100+ articles on the topic so far (I'm not really keeping count). I've also read many other works in the related areas of normative moral philosophy, moral psychology, moral epistemology, moral methodology, and metaethics, since it's basically my area of specialization within philosophy. This project will be my PhD thesis. However, I still have 3 years of the PhD to go, so a substantial amount of my opinions on the matter are subject to changes.
Disclaimer: I have received some funding as a Forethought Foundation Fellow in support of my PhD research. But all the opinions expressed here are my own.
Index.
Part I - Bibliography Review
Part II - Preliminary Takes and Opinions (I'm writing it, coming very soon!)
More parts to be published later on.
Introduction.
Hi everyone, this is my first proper research-related post on the EA Forum, on a topic that I've been working on for several years, since even before my PhD, and now as part of my PhD in Philosophy at the London School of Economics.
This post is the start of a series on my work on the topic of Moral Progress, which includes and intersects with Moral Circle Expansion (also called Inclusivism or Moral Inclusion), Moral Progress, Social Progress, Social Movements, the mechanisms that drive progress and regress, the possibilities of measuring these phenomena, and policy or practical implications.
This first post is a bibliography review, which I hope will serve to orient future researchers that might want to tackle the same or similar topics. Hopefully it will help them to save time by separating the wheat from the chaff, the good research articles and books from the minor contributions. Initially, I had my reservations about doing a Bibliography Review, since now we have GPT4 which is quite good at purely neutral descriptive summarizing, so I felt maybe perhaps this work wasn't needed.
However, given that now we have it as a good research assistant for pure facts, that also allows me more freedom to be more opinionated in my bibliography review. I'll try to tell you what I think is super worth reading, and what is "meh, skim it if you have free time", so you can sift through the literature in a more time-efficient way.
The eventual goal outcome of the whole project would be to distil the main insights into book on the topic of Moral Progress with serious contributions to the current literature within interdisciplinary moral philosophy, but that probably won't happen until I finish my PhD thesis manuscript around 2026. Then after that, I'll have to rewrite that manuscript to turn it into a more accessible book, so it probably wouldn't be published until a later date. I'm also not sure just yet whether it would be an academic book on a University Press or something closer to What We Owe The Future, which aims to be accessible for a broader audience.
So the finished work is quite a long way. On the brighter side, I will publish some of the key findings and takeaways on the EA Forum, probably in summarized form rather than the excruciatingly slow pace of writing in philosophy, which often takes 20 pages to make some minor points. Instead of that, I guess I'll post something closer to digestible bullet points with my views, attempting to foster online discussion, and then defend them in more detail over time and in the eventual book.
Your feedback will of course be appreciated, particularly if I change my mind on substantial issues, connect me with other researchers, etc. So let's put our collective brains together (this is a pun having to do with cultural evolution that you might not understand y...
Epistemic Status: I've researched this broad topic for a couple of years. I've read about 30+ books and 100+ articles on the topic so far (I'm not really keeping count). I've also read many other works in the related areas of normative moral philosophy, moral psychology, moral epistemology, moral methodology, and metaethics, since it's basically my area of specialization within philosophy. This project will be my PhD thesis. However, I still have 3 years of the PhD to go, so a substantial amount of my opinions on the matter are subject to changes.
Disclaimer: I have received some funding as a Forethought Foundation Fellow in support of my PhD research. But all the opinions expressed here are my own.
Index.
Part I - Bibliography Review
Part II - Preliminary Takes and Opinions (I'm writing it, coming very soon!)
More parts to be published later on.
Introduction.
Hi everyone, this is my first proper research-related post on the EA Forum, on a topic that I've been working on for several years, since even before my PhD, and now as part of my PhD in Philosophy at the London School of Economics.
This post is the start of a series on my work on the topic of Moral Progress, which includes and intersects with Moral Circle Expansion (also called Inclusivism or Moral Inclusion), Moral Progress, Social Progress, Social Movements, the mechanisms that drive progress and regress, the possibilities of measuring these phenomena, and policy or practical implications.
This first post is a bibliography review, which I hope will serve to orient future researchers that might want to tackle the same or similar topics. Hopefully it will help them to save time by separating the wheat from the chaff, the good research articles and books from the minor contributions. Initially, I had my reservations about doing a Bibliography Review, since now we have GPT4 which is quite good at purely neutral descriptive summarizing, so I felt maybe perhaps this work wasn't needed.
However, given that now we have it as a good research assistant for pure facts, that also allows me more freedom to be more opinionated in my bibliography review. I'll try to tell you what I think is super worth reading, and what is "meh, skim it if you have free time", so you can sift through the literature in a more time-efficient way.
The eventual goal outcome of the whole project would be to distil the main insights into book on the topic of Moral Progress with serious contributions to the current literature within interdisciplinary moral philosophy, but that probably won't happen until I finish my PhD thesis manuscript around 2026. Then after that, I'll have to rewrite that manuscript to turn it into a more accessible book, so it probably wouldn't be published until a later date. I'm also not sure just yet whether it would be an academic book on a University Press or something closer to What We Owe The Future, which aims to be accessible for a broader audience.
So the finished work is quite a long way. On the brighter side, I will publish some of the key findings and takeaways on the EA Forum, probably in summarized form rather than the excruciatingly slow pace of writing in philosophy, which often takes 20 pages to make some minor points. Instead of that, I guess I'll post something closer to digestible bullet points with my views, attempting to foster online discussion, and then defend them in more detail over time and in the eventual book.
Your feedback will of course be appreciated, particularly if I change my mind on substantial issues, connect me with other researchers, etc. So let's put our collective brains together (this is a pun having to do with cultural evolution that you might not understand y...