Inner Goodness — LessWrong
A recent conversation with Michael Vassar touched on - or to be more accurate, he patiently explained to me - the psychology of at least three (3) different types of people known to him, who are evil and think of themselves as "evil". In ascending order of frequency: The first type was someone who, having concluded that God does not exist, concludes that one should do all the things that God is said to dislike. (Apparently such folk actually exist.) The third type was someone who thinks of "morality" only as a burden - all the things your parents say you can't do - and who rebels by deliberately doing those things. The second type was a whole 'nother story, so I'm skipping it for now. This reminded me of a topic I needed to post on: Beware of placing goodness outside. This specializes to e.g. my belief that ethicists should be inside rather than outside a profession: that it is futile to have "bioethicists" not working in biotech, or futile to think you can study Friendly AI without