Hey everyone, I'm generally just a casual lurker around here, but I hope you don't mind me piping up to share this one linkpost since it seems like a few people have expressed interest in the subject:

https://nwrains.net/morality-1/

It's basically... well, I guess I should feel a bit ridiculous saying it's basically an attempt to explain all of morality, but to be honest I feel like that's only barely an exaggeration. To give the abbreviated version, its aim is first and foremost to nail down (in non-technical language) the philosophical underpinnings of what morality even is and what justifies it -- i.e. why we should consider ourselves morally obligated to do what's good in a global sense rather than just what's good for ourselves, and what it even means to say that certain outcomes are "good" in the first place, and whether it's possible to say that some outcomes are better than others in any kind of objective sense (as opposed to accepting some version of moral relativism or nihilism). Its base argument is that even though what people consider "good" is totally subjective, it's nevertheless possible to make objective statements about those subjective valuations, and to use those objective statements as a basis for evaluating goodness and badness in universal terms. It discusses the idea of preference utilitarianism -- that people have certain preferences, and that satisfying those preferences is good. But then it takes that approach a bit further and goes into the idea of meta-preferences -- that people can have preferences about their preferences, and that because of this, they can sometimes prefer outcomes that go beyond their object-level preferences alone. It then goes into how this phenomenon can cause people to be implicitly precommitted to following a kind of social contract based on John Rawls' veil of ignorance, and from there it goes into all the classic ethical problems like the Is-Ought Problem, the obligatory/supererogatory distinction, the Procreation Asymmetry, and the Repugnant Conclusion, and discusses how these problems might be made resolvable under this framework. It also addresses some more on-the-ground issues along the way, like abortion, animal welfare, charitable giving, the moral status of future people, the moral status of dead people, and so on.

It's hard to give a perfect summary here, because each point sort of builds off the preceding ones in a way that makes it tough to boil down to just a few bullet points. But for what it's worth, you'll probably be able to know for yourself within the first few minutes whether it's making enough sense to you that you'd find it worthwhile to continue with the rest. It's admittedly very long, but I think a lot of the parts about animal welfare and population ethics and so on are extremely relevant to a lot of the EA discussions that keep coming up here and elsewhere, so I'm hoping that at least a few people might read it and get some value out of it. And of course any feedback would be hugely appreciated too. Thanks!