I write primarily about ethics, and how ethics applies to social and political questions. I thought it would be helpful, then, to set out, as clearly as I can, what I view as the core of the ethical project: the good life. In short, it is a life of happiness, flourishing, and contentment. It is the opposite of a life of suffering. Our ethics is about those perspectives, values, beliefs, and behaviors that best help us to achieve such a life.

My ethical perspective begins with a simple truth about the human experience: Our lives inevitably contain a degree of dissatisfaction, unease, or a subtle sense that something is always “off.” This isn't pessimism, but the recognition that even our moments of pleasure and joy hold the seeds of their own transience. Even when we aren’t suffering in the typical sense—we aren’t ill, or in acute pain, or feeling depressed—there’s some degree of suffering or dis-ease that comes from a disconnect between how we want the world to be and how it inevitably is.

That disconnect stems from a deeply ingrained habit of the mind: our craving for permanence in a world constantly in flux, our desire for absolute control over situations that are fundamentally contingent. We attach ourselves to experiences, people, and ideals expecting them to provide lasting fulfillment, and are inevitably met with disappointment when the impermanent nature of reality asserts itself.

It is possible to arrive at a state of being where this baseline dissatisfaction dissolves. This isn't the elimination of all challenges, let alone of pain, but a radical shift in how we relate to them.  It’s recognizing that dissatisfaction is born from our craving, clinging, and misguided expectations, and not an inherent quality of life itself.

Thus an ethical and content life is about the perspective and understanding you bring to your relationships and interactions with others, yourself, and the world. It’s a way of seeing and knowing that is quite distinct from our culture’s default. Further, it’s not just a set of principles you hold to be true, but an ongoing path of practice. You have to put in the work of cultivating this perspective, which involves developing a deeper awareness of the nature of your own mind and your internal mental states.

The core elements of this include:

• Clear Observation: Developing a non-judgmental clarity about the mechanisms of the mind, how it constructs stories and attachments that then cause us dissatisfaction.
• Ethical Intention: Cultivating a way of being guided by a selfless compassion toward oneself and others. This helps break cycles of harmful habits that arise from self-centered craving.
• Mindful Attentiveness: Consistent cultivation of an awareness that anchors us in the present moment. This lets us see experiences, thoughts, and feelings as they truly are: dynamic and without solid, lasting essences.

This perspective presents a fundamental claim: it's our relationship to the world and our own minds that shape our experience of profound contentment or unease. It proposes a practice-based methodology for shifting that relationship through understanding, mindful engagement, and an ethics rooted in compassion. The ethical life is the life spent walking that path towards harmlessness, non-craving, non-clinging, and contentment.

I write primarily about ethics, and how ethics applies to social and political questions. I thought it would be helpful, then, to set out, as clearly as I can, what I view as the core of the ethical project: the good life. In short, it is a life of happiness, flourishing, and contentment. It is the opposite of a life of suffering. Our ethics is about those perspectives, values, beliefs, and behaviors that best help us to achieve such a life.

My ethical perspective begins with a simple truth about the human experience: Our lives inevitably contain a degree of dissatisfaction, unease, or a subtle sense that something is always “off.” This isn't pessimism, but the recognition that even our moments of pleasure and joy hold the seeds of their own transience. Even when we aren’t suffering in the typical sense—we aren’t ill, or in acute pain, or feeling depressed—there’s some degree of suffering or dis-ease that comes from a disconnect between how we want the world to be and how it inevitably is.

That disconnect stems from a deeply ingrained habit of the mind: our craving for permanence in a world constantly in flux, our desire for absolute control over situations that are fundamentally contingent. We attach ourselves to experiences, people, and ideals expecting them to provide lasting fulfillment, and are inevitably met with disappointment when the impermanent nature of reality asserts itself.

It is possible to arrive at a state of being where this baseline dissatisfaction dissolves. This isn't the elimination of all challenges, let alone of pain, but a radical shift in how we relate to them.  It’s recognizing that dissatisfaction is born from our craving, clinging, and misguided expectations, and not an inherent quality of life itself.

Thus an ethical and content life is about the perspective and understanding you bring to your relationships and interactions with others, yourself, and the world. It’s a way of seeing and knowing that is quite distinct from our culture’s default. Further, it’s not just a set of principles you hold to be true, but an ongoing path of practice. You have to put in the work of cultivating this perspective, which involves developing a deeper awareness of the nature of your own mind and your internal mental states.

The core elements of this include:

• Clear Observation: Developing a non-judgmental clarity about the mechanisms of the mind, how it constructs stories and attachments that then cause us dissatisfaction.
• Ethical Intention: Cultivating a way of being guided by a selfless compassion toward oneself and others. This helps break cycles of harmful habits that arise from self-centered craving.
• Mindful Attentiveness: Consistent cultivation of an awareness that anchors us in the present moment. This lets us see experiences, thoughts, and feelings as they truly are: dynamic and without solid, lasting essences.

This perspective presents a fundamental claim: it's our relationship to the world and our own minds that shape our experience of profound contentment or unease. It proposes a practice-based methodology for shifting that relationship through understanding, mindful engagement, and an ethics rooted in compassion. The ethical life is the life spent walking that path towards harmlessness, non-craving, non-clinging, and contentment.

There's a contingent of the right that imagines itself persecuted for speaking “truths they don’t want you to hear.” In these circles, the “truths” are often presented as scientific, just the simple application of reason to incontrovertible evidence, arriving at forbidden conclusions. But those conclusions always seem to just be the pretty standard racism and misogyny at common to the reactionary far-right worldview.

Take cartoonist Scott Adams’s tweeted attempt to explain why the world doesn't conform to his miasma of cultural preferences.

Here's a reframe for understanding basically everything wrong with the country right now.

We think we have a racial and political divide. We do not. We have a broken mating system (marriage).

When men and women have adequate mating strategies, they put their focus on mating, and in so doing they become biologically satisfied. Or at least it keeps them busy.

But when mating strategies fail -- for a variety of social reasons, like now -- men become dangerous and women become batshit crazy and start defending DEI and open borders and anything else that increases the odds of women being around additional sperm.

What we think we see is Democrats versus Republicans. That's the downstream effect. But it's really a mating failure that turned Democrats into the woman party and Republicans into the man party.

Democrat men are pleasers, so they play along with the single women to increase their mating options. Republican women are inclined to back their protectors, which is also a good mating strategy.

There you go.

This looks vaguely like evolutionary psychology, and that’s not surprising. Evo-psych frequently features in the reasoning of these types. While there are some interesting ideas in the field, it lends itself quite well to just-so stories: unfalsifiable narratives intended to render “natural” whatever contingent social preferences the arguer would prefer are natural and so fixed and unavoidable. Such as “traditional” gender roles, and fundamental, natural, and genetic differences in outlook, intelligence, and capabilities between men and women.

It’s also a pretty clear example of what the French philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes called “myth.” He didn't mean only stories of Zeus or Thor. Rather, he had in mind the very tendency found in the common (mis)use of evolutionary psychology to take political claims and beliefs and depoliticize and naturalize them as a way to anchor them in reality itself, and so buffer them from critique. It’s unreasonable, after all, to rail against the way nature just is, and so if right-wing views of gender are natural, then it is unreasonable to argue against, or deviate from, right-wing views of gender. Never mind that these notions of gender aren't universally held, nor are they historically uniform.

Evolutionary psychology—or speculative biology more generally—is particularly useful for the task of myth-making, because it constructs compelling narratives grounded in an ancient and inaccessible past. There's no way to check its truth, because it doesn’t offer real predictions, only explanations, and whether you find those explanations compelling, compared to others on offer, is ultimately about how appealing you find the historical narrative.

Our task, in the face these anti-liberal myths, is to expose them for what they are. As Catherine Belsey puts it in her short introduction to poststructuralism, “Myth, Barthes explains, converts history into nature. And the task of the mythographer is to rediscover the element of history that motivates the myth, to elicit what is specific in a given time and place, asking what interests are served by the naturalization of particular convictions and values.”

Scott Adams’s interests are pretty clear.

Georgetown history professor Thomas Zimmer makes the following point about how to engage with the arguments of bad faith culture warriors.

I don't want to get into the details of Chris Rufo's particular brand of culture warring here. I had a long conversation on my show about it with Sam Hoadley-Brill. Rather, Zimmer's remark calls to mind a distinction liberals need to be careful to keep in mind when entering into politically charged questions.

It is possible to oppose many DEI programs because you believe state mandates in this area exceed constitutional limits, and that, even when done to achieve worthwhile ends, allowing the state to step outside those limits is unwise and dangerous. Or, you might reasonably oppose DEI programs because you believe the evidence shows that they don't achieve their goals, or have counterproductive results. In other words, you can hold to a vision of a world where minorities and women are no longer discriminated against because they are minorities or women, while also having reason to believe that many DEI programs don't achieve that vision.

But another motivation for opposing DEI programs could be that your vision of an ideal world is one where minorities and women—and, particularly, minority women—will not be in positions of power and prestige above whites and men—and, particularly, above white men.

In general, I think the best way to have a fruitful political debate is to assume that you and your interlocutor share a vision of the best, most just world (at least in broad brush strokes) and then treat the disagreement as one about which strategies, tactics, and policies are most likely to get us there, or are least likely to have unacceptable costs and unintended consequences.

But the fact is that, for many on the reactionary far-right, their illiberalism isn't grounded in believing liberalism won't achieve a just world, at least not as we should properly understand justice. Rather, they reject liberalism because they aim at a fundamentally unjust world. The ideal society this radical, and revolutionary, right invisions and seeks to achieve is corrupt. Their preferred world is a profoundly immoral and ugly place.

When all we talk about is tactics—whether a particular strategy violates liberal norms or fails to fit within the rules of liberal institutions—we fail to highlight that divergence of incompatible visions. The effect is to normalize the immoral preferences by making it appear that what's wrong with the illiberal vision is how it goes about achieving its ends, but not the vision itself. Liberals should insist that liberalism is better not just because it sticks to generally applicable rules, but because liberalism helps us achieve a society worth wanting. And it also undercuts one of our best critiques of the reactionary right: That their aim, no matter how they revise their tactics, is a world we shouldn't want—and that most of us, fortunately, don't.

republished a good number of transcripts of my ReImagining Liberty episodes, has released its first major survey of Americans' populist views. It's well worth your time to read, with a ton of interesting findings beyond the core takeaway of "full-blown populists comprising about 10.3% of Trump’s support and about 2.5% of Biden’s." (And if you subscribe to The UnPopulist newsletter—it's free!—or the Zooming In podcast, you'll get to hear my in-depth interview with the survey's author next week.)

But I wanted to highlight the one finding I found perhaps the most interesting. It's certainly the most stark.

When asked, “Do you think your wallet (or your valuables) would be returned to you if it were found by a stranger?,” just 16.5% of Trump populists said yes—less than half the percentage of all Americans who said the same (34.0%). The Trump populists’ level of trust was lower than that of other Trump supporters and of any major subgroup we reviewed, whether by gender, age, race, income or political party. It was also distinct from the trust level of Biden supporters and Biden populists, 40.5% and 47.8% of whom, respectively, said yes to the same question—significantly more than all Americans.

That's an enormous difference. And not just that Trumpist populists dramatically less likely to believe a stranger would return their wallet as the typical American, but that the most hardcore Biden supporters are dramatically more likely than the typical American to think a strange would come through for them.

Why might this be? I can see two obvious possibilities, which aren't necessarily exclusive.

The first take is that the most Trumpy of the Trumpists could live in towns that are, in fact, generally less honest than the rest of America. Maybe these areas are populated by people more likely to steal. Or maybe these Trumpists are themselves less honest, and assuming everyone else is, too. ("I know I wouldn't return a stranger's wallet...") In other words, maybe there are features of the kinds of places that are drawn to Trump that also manifest as a greater likelihood of dishonesty. This is the "Trumpists are members of a broken culture" interpretation.

The second take--and, again, both could simultaneously be true--is that a feature of the most Trumpy of the Trumpists is that they consume a ton of far-right media and a consistent feature of far-right media is the message that the world outside your door, and especially the world of people even marginally different from you, is a scary, dangerous, apocalyptic place. So, yes, if you dropped your wallet somewhere on your own block, your Trumpy neighbor would return it to you, but if you dropped it enough blocks over that it's where they live, then it's gone--and that's if you even manage to make it out of there unscathed.

I don't know which it is, and I suspect it's a good bit of both. But the upshot is that, if liberalism depends upon the view that we are capable of living together in peace and some degree of mutual support, then Trump's populist base are skeptical of the very possibility of such a positively interdependent world. That's not good.

Choose any time in the past distant enough that it feels culturally distinct from our own. We needn't go back far to find such an alien world. Now, ask yourself if that society lived up to the standards of justice we demand today. Was Mississippi in the 1950s just? Eighteenth-century France? Florence under the Medici? Caesar's Rome? (This last you can certainly find odd corners of the internet that will say "Yes," but those corners tend to have little understanding of the culture of Rome, and even less of justice.)

The answer, in all these cases, is rather obviously "No." And not just in a "things could've been better" sense, but those cultures were so fundamentally unjust by our current standards that radical changes were called for. And yet, if you'd asked whatever the equivalent at the time was of mainstream, centrist, perhaps even generally liberal minded commentators, intelligentsia, "influencers," or politically engaged thought leaders whether the status quo was largely just, most of them would've said "Yes." Most would've looked at calls for significant disruption in the name of justice as maybe a bit shrill, or not taking civility and decorum seriously enough, or just unrealistic and irrational. Yes, things could be better, of course, but disruption is, well, disruptive, and things work well enough that wisdom says to leave them mostly alone, no?

From our perspective today, that sort of historical tut-tutting of justice talk, and of calls for making society not just a little better, but radically better, comes off as naive at best. There's no point in the past we can point to and say, "They should've stopped there. They should've decided that was good enough, and so dismissed the calls to make it better." Obviously, the world is more just now than if we'd stuck by those reasonable centrist standards, and that good enough status quo, of 1300s Europe, or 100 AD Rome, or 1950 Mississippi.

The point is--and it's one we all-too-often refuse to acknowledge or directly confront--our time, today, is just another point in history. To believe that we really have, somehow, reached the "good enough" status quo, the very moment future generations will look back on and say, "Okay, yeah, that's where they should've stopped," is to substitute status quo bias (and the appeal of being personally comfortable within that status quo) for clear-eyed understanding of history, and reasonable, rational, and genuinely humane cultural critique.

This is especially true for those of us committed to the cause of liberty, and those of us who believe people shouldn't just be relatively freer, but radically freer. I've written about how easy it is, while talking in the rhetoric of liberty, to slip into defense of the status quo. One way to avoid that is to critically examine our feelings that now, today, the present we lucked into living in, is somehow unique among all other points in history--points that where, themselves, at one time a now, a today, a present people lived in--and resist the pull of presentism. Our world is better than it used to be, sure, but as far as "achieving the best possible," we're only getting started. And future generations will judge us harshly for deciding we'd done enough.

History's heroes are never the ones standing atop it and yelling stop. They're never the ones demanding that calls for greater justice and freedom be quiet and non-disruptive. We should strive to be the kind of people future generations will sing the praises of, not the kinds of people future generations will view, rightly, as thinking their world was good enough.

I am, on the whole, rather optimistic about 2024. Yes, we've got a pretty important election that, if it goes the wrong way, could--and I think this is the only clear-eyed and reasonable take on the matter--mean the effective end of American democracy, our basic system of liberalism replaced by what is pretty obviously a fascist movement. There's really no other serious way to characterize what Trump and Trumpism represent, and it's critical, between now and November, that we don't shy away from recognizing that fascism, even if it means uncomfortable conversations with people who, through either ignorance or corrupt values, support it.

That said, this is a bullet we are quite likely to dodge. While it's always possible for Trump to win the next election, he'd need something of a miracle. He's unpopular, the thick of his campaign (and the conspiratorial and culture war rhetoric that will inevitably be the center of it) will remind people why those don't like him, the economy is booming, and, anyway, he'll probably have a felony conviction or two. (And that's if he's even on the ballot. My money is on the Supreme Court finding a way to avoid kicking him off, but you never know.) Think of it this way: Trump lost in 2020 because a bunch of suburban white women voters turned against him. Has anything changed between then and now, or is anything likely to change over the next year, to bring them around to him again? (The prospect of a national abortion ban if the GOP gains control of the government sure isn't going to help his chances.)

And if he loses, or if he can't run, that'll not just end the risk of him becoming America's autocrat. It'll also take a lot of the wind out of the sails of right-wing populism and the cultural far-right. People who run as mini-Trumps don't tend to perform well electorally, because a lot of his appeal, to the Americans who find him and his ideas appealing, is about Trump. It turns out, thankfully, that fascist politics themselves are rather repulsive to most Americans, as are reactionary social and cultural preferences. Ours is, imperfectly, a liberal society. Trump's charisma, as some mischaracterize it, carried the day in 2016, but the potential inheritors of his movement don't just fail to achieve his "engaging" personality, but for the most part have a remarkable degree of anti-charisma. As I've argued elsewhere, being a far-right reactionary isn't so much a philosophy as it is a set of preferences and attitudes, and those preferences and attitudes tend to be concentrated among rather unlikable people.

So as not to turn this newsletter isn't an essay, I'll touch on just one more reason to think the world is getting better: It turns out that the right's culture war isn't popular. What looked like an electoral wave of wretched people with wretched ideas getting on school boards and then banning books offensive to their nonsense ideology--while going out of their way to inflict cruelty on LGBT kids--wasn't so much about Americans actually liking the right's obsession with genitals as it was parents upset about school closures. Now that school are open, and the threat of pandemic related closings behind us, Americans are reasserting their social liberalism. It hasn't been perfect, and not as fast or thorough as I'd like, but the trend is in an encouraging direction. In the end, social liberalism wins out because it is more humane, ethical, inspiring, and conducive to the sort of society most of us want to live in.

It seems rather obvious that a divinely all-knowing and perfectly moral being would not think it’s wrong to be gay or transgender. In fact, such a belief counts a pretty clear evidence that such a being is not, in fact, morally perfect. And yet many disagree, and that disagreement raises I call the “Religious Prejudice Trilemma,” three alternative explanations for religious claims against the morality of LGBT identifies and lifestyles—alternatives that are considerably more likely to be true than a morally perfect divine being taking an anti-LGBT stance.

Quite a lot of people believe that scripture tells them it’s wrong for a man to have a sexual relationship with another man. They believe that their god has dictated that there are only two, immutable genders. Or they believe that gender roles are part of the divine order, and so a virtuous life entails men living “traditionally male” roles and women living “traditionally female” roles.

This prejudice needn’t manifest as hatred for those leading sinful lives or making sinful choices—though of course it frequently does. Instead, it can manifest in a “hate the sin, love the sinner” way, in a motivation to convince LGBT people to give up their ways for something more godly, and for a desire to keep those lifestyles away from children and from being normalized.

Of course, even if the believer doesn’t descend into outright hate, holding and expressing these moral beliefs, and particular trying to manifest them in society at large, makes the lives of LGBT—who see nothing wrong with their identities, feelings, and behaviors—worse. It does them harm and, unless you share the believers’ religious priors, it’s an unjustifiable, and thus unjust, harm.

If we step away from religious motivations for anti-LGBT views, it’s difficult to find a cogent argument for the immorality of gay relationships or the wrongness of transgender identities. And it’s difficult because basically moral principles, or a basic understanding of the virtues, tells us there in fact is nothing wrong with being LGBT.

So what are we to make of claims that the creator of the universe says otherwise?

Given both the paucity of non-religious arguments against LGBT lifestyles, and the obvious harm that flow from anti-LBGT beliefs, religious faithful should thoroughly consider three alternatives, any of which is considerably more likely to be true than that an all-knowing and morally perfect being opposes gay and transgender lifestyles.

First, it might be that the particular deity the religious believer has in mind doesn’t actually exist. After all, the majority of people are convinced any particular divine being isn’t real, although they disagree on which ones aren’t real. Thus, while atheism is a way to approach this prong of the trilemma, it needn’t be the only way to interpret it. Perhaps the deity you currently believe exists and opposes LGBT lifestyles in fact doesn’t exist—but another one with different moral values does.

Second, it might be that the deity you have in mind does exist, but that its beliefs and commands, as presented in your scriptures, have been misinterpreted in such as away as to characterize LGBT lifestyles as wrong. Again, the fact of disagreement pushes in this direction. Many Christians think homosexuality is wrong, or that transgenderism is sinful, but many don’t. And both sides claim to find support for their position within scripture.

Third, if your deity does exist and you’re not mistaken about how to interpret its will via scripture, then you must finally consider that your assessment of that being as morally perfect is what’s mistaken. Anyone who’s read stories from mythology is familiar with all manner of morally imperfect gods and goddesses, beings who might be powerful, and had their share of worshipers, but were not moral paragons worthy of emulation. Perhaps your deity falls into that same camp, given that if it is telling you to see LGBT lifestyles as wrong, it’s made at least one moral error. If that’s the case, then your obligation is not to follow it down a morally incorrect path, but instead to strive to be better.

The simple fact is that there’s nothing wrong with being gay, and there’s nothing wrong with being transgender. If a religion says otherwise, then that religion is based on a god that doesn’t exist, has been misinterpreted, or isn’t morally perfect. No matter which of those is true, our obligation is to reject the misguided moral claims and accept gay and transgender people, and their lifestyles, as worthy parts of a pluralistic and humane society.

Most of the arguments against the use of AI like ChatGPT and Midjourney to create prose and images, especially for commercial use, don’t make a lot of sense. And this is understandable, because once you clear away the inconsistent claims and unexamined assertions, you’re left with two main reasons for opposition: AI will economically undercut artists and writers, and AI is creepy.

We can’t dismiss either of these out of hand. It’s perfectly reasonable for artists and writers to worry that generative AI means it’ll be harder for them to earn a living. And feelings of unease about computer programs that drift ever closer to producing human-style output inevitably arouse feelings of, if nothing else, the uncanny.

But that doesn’t mean we should let bad arguments off the hook. That opponents of the commercial use of ChatGPT and, especially, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, etc., avoid stating their real concerns is a problem. It’s one thing to say, “I don’t think you should use Midjourney to make art for your commercial project because I think you should pay me instead.” It’s quite another to concoct transparently bad arguments as cover for that simple economic interest.

One of the least convincing is that generative AI amounts to IP theft–or, in the words of the Author’s Guild, “plagiarism.”

Text and image generators work by first getting trained on a corpus of content, which in practice means going through the internet and looking at stuff. This could be the whole of Wikipedia or the depths of DeviantArt. The information then gets processed into a neural network, with assigned tags (for subject, style, and so on), and then becomes the basis of what the software generates when you ask it for an image of Donald Trump getting arrested or the answers to the bar exam.

In other words, AI image generators have looked at a lot of images, have a sense of the appearance of different things (objects, styles, tones, and so on), and then use that knowledge to make new images based on user prompts. Occasionally, this will result in perfect or near perfect copies of other art, but you have to put some effort into getting them to do that, and doing that isn’t what they’re predominantly used for. Instead, they’re used to generate new art in the style of old, or mash together styles, or create scenes that don’t exist elsewhere.

In other words, they do exactly what human artists do. Every artist has influences, and no artist is free of them. Every artist gets a sense of what different objects look like by either seeing them in the real world or seeing them in the art of others. Every artist makes images that are “original” in the sense that they aren’t perfect copies (unless it’s tracing, or a forgery), but aren’t “original” in the sense that they aren’t in large part based on what’s come before. The images and books artists and authors learn and draw inspiration from don’t get processed into a computer’s large language model, but they do become information in the artist’s brain. (Or they get saved to cloud storage for future browsing, or copied into personal mediums for practice.)

Thus the only real difference between the way human artists go about using what’s come before and the way computers do it is that, in the case of computers, it’s a computer doing it. And maybe that matters, somehow, but it’s not clear how it could be relevant to distinguishing why human artists are “inspired” by others, but computers doing the same thing are “stealing.”

One common approach to making the case that they in fact are distinct is to claim that Midjourney isn’t coming up with anything new, while human artists inject a non-synthesizable creativity into their creations. Thus the computer, because it isn’t creating anything new, is merely copying, if even in a loose sense. And copying, in the world of intellectual property, is stealing.

AI and Theft: A Thought Experiment

What’s in the box?

ReImagining LibertyAaron Ross Powell

But this argument doesn’t work, either. Occasionally an artist comes along who creates something we declare genuinely new, but even that has influences, even that draws upon what’s come before–and, besides, this level of novelty is exceedingly rare. For most artists, what they’re doing, let’s be honest, looks an awful lot like what plenty of other artists are doing, as well. How much actual, novel creativity is there in the countless Tolkien pastiches filling shelves in the bookstore fantasy section? How much is that new police procedural a freestanding work of uniquely human creativity, and how much is it just the same thing we’ve seen countless times before? When an artist gets hired to do yet another anime inspired cover for a tabletop roleplaying game, or when he draws another picture in the house style, it’s difficult to say it’s meaningfully distinct from Midjourney doing the same. Except, again, that one is a human and one is a computer.

And maybe there actually is an important difference between the two. Maybe humans have a metaphysical essence that imbues their output with soul in a way a computer can never match. But if so, that means the real concern is about that essential nature, and not with a papered on claim to IP theft.

Ethics isn’t just something we know and understand, it’s something we do. As I wrote last week, the ethical life is a practice, aimed at changing our perspective about the world and ourselves so that we can be more accepting of their impermanence and inevitable change, and so more contented and likely to cause harm to ourselves and others.

But this practice is challenging, both because it requires putting in time and effort and because it means giving up habits and values we’re likely quite attached to. Our minds, while capable of extraordinary things, possesse ingrained tendencies that can create a constant undercurrent of unease and obscure our potential for clarity and contentment. Let's examine five of the most persistent and disruptive that interfere with the practices and changed perspectives necessary for achieving an ethical life.

Sensual Craving: This isn't merely pursuing enjoyment, but a grasping for intense pleasurable experiences through sight, sound, taste, smell, and physical sensation. Our attention becomes fixated on external sources of stimulation. The fleeting nature of these experiences breeds a craving for more, leading to perpetual dissatisfaction.

Aversion: An immediate resistance to any experience labeled as unwanted, painful, irritating, or unfamiliar. This internal opposition manifests as anger, frustration, or a subtle mental withdrawal. It narrows our field of perception and makes us reactive.

Lethargy: A heaviness of both body and mind. It clouds our thinking, dampens motivation, and creates an aversion to effort. It feels as if we must push through a haze, making it difficult to remain engaged and alert.

Restlessness: A constant feeling of unease, preventing us from being truly present. The mind flits from thought to thought, seeking distractions or becoming preoccupied with worries and anxieties. We have the urge to be occupied or entertained, unable to find satisfaction with the present moment.

Doubt: This pervasive uncertainty can take many forms: fear of making wrong choices, a gnawing lack of self-trust, or an overly critical questioning that undermines our potential and sense of direction. The constant second-guessing drains our mental energy.

These hindrances don’t operate in isolation, but instead feed into and reinforce each other, combining to pull us away from ethical practice. When under the influence of a hindrance, our viewpoint becomes distorted. We might misinterpret passing emotions as fundamental truths, overreact due to dislike, or miss opportunities because of mental sluggishness. Additionally, our mental and emotional resources are continuously sapped by either indulging in hindrances or fighting against them. This leaves us weary and depletes our reserves for living with intention.

Together, these construct a barrier to cultivating the insight necessary for an ethical perspective. Deeper self-understanding arises from the capacity for sustained, non-judgmental observation of our experiences. The hindrances prevent this necessary inner clarity and limit the possibility of transformative wisdom.

The good news is that these hindrances are learned habits of mind, and so they can be unlearned. This isn’t easy, of course, and requires effort, but there are readily available methods for achieving it.

Mindful Observation: Cultivating the ability to recognize these tendencies when they arise, without condemnation, observing how they color our thoughts and behavior.

Cultivating Discernment: Gaining insight into the transient and conditioned nature of hindrances. We learn to view them not as fixed aspects of ourselves, but as reactive mental and emotional patterns.

Developing Wholesome Counterparts: Actively strengthening qualities that directly oppose the hindrances. Qualities like contentment, non-reactivity, focus, inner tranquility, and well-founded confidence support our efforts to work with these difficult mental states.

The ethical path isn’t valuable merely because it’s important to treat others morally. It’s valuable, as well, because it’s how we can lead happy lives, free—if not entirely, then at least significantly more than most of us are day to day—of the stress, dis-ease, and dissatisfaction that is a background feature of much of the human condition. Thus putting in the work to overcome these hindrances is more than worth the effort.