10 Assertions on Morality
Start the new year by judging other people
I was very committed to not posting until the New Year. I’d really like to hit a weekly cadence in 2026, but due to a busy schedule and a propensity to procrastinate, I’m worried that won’t happen without some preparation. I’ve managed to get a reasonable pool of drafts started, so hopefully I’ll make it at least a few months before excusing myself for lapses.1
I’ve found myself returning to a few different topics as I prepared my drafts, chief amongst which is morality. I think about morality a lot, both in the narrow dimension of whether I am myself acting morally, and more broadly, considering how we define our moral principles and our values more generally. My favorite dinner party questions are to ask for your favorite color2 (which must reveal something deep about ourselves), and what is the meaning of life. The second question inevitably breaks down into clarifications and exceptions, and more often than not ends up reformatted as what it means to live a good life. This is a better question, and one that almost all of us ask ourselves at one point or another.
I don’t have a strong formal education in moral philosophy, particularly not in its modern incarnations, but I do have a lot of experience with the continental tradition coming out of Nietzsche and running through the French existentialists. If continental philosophy may be less rigorous than the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, I have nonetheless always found it to be more personally relevant.3 These thinkers were often dealing with questions of how to structure meaning in our lives following “the death of God,” which, if you would like to avoid theological interpretations, we can simply take to mean a world in which there is no a priori meaning or values, only those we as humans create ourselves.
The import of these questions is most easily discerned in moody Russian novels (Crime and Punishment) or slightly less moody French novels (The Stranger) or even occasionally in not-too-moody-at-all American films (Rope).
My own worldview is deeply shaped by these thinkers. I take many of their conclusions for granted. However, their societal adoption is inconsistent and at times contradictory. I expect to write several posts to articulate my own understanding of morality, and its relevance in today’s world.
I am very much not alone in this endeavor. The emergence of platforms like Substack shows, to me, a hunger for new critical thinking about our present. There is no way to navigate the large technological, geopolitical, and social changes of the present without a strong moral framework4 and assessment of one’s own values. We live in an incredibly analytical moment, and have become used to having our actions categorized according to statistics. As I will argue in a later piece, I believe this hyper-analysis of society has led to a form of fatalism, as though every outcome were preordained by an economist.56 Morality is the way out of this kind of thinking, as it is our means of asserting forces and preferences beyond popular narratives.
So, as a way of inaugurating this blog for 2026, I wanted to share 107 assertions on morality. These assertions serve as the starting point for my own moral philosophy. I’m specifically framing these as assertions because they are claims in need of backing; I may revise my statements as I refine my thinking. None of these assertions are moralistic; I am not asserting any kind of behavior as good or bad. I am describing how I think about morality, not prescribing my own moral framework and values. I do expect to address that as well in future posts.
Throughout these assertions I distinguish between morality, which concerns questions of good and bad (right and wrong), and values8, which concern questions of purpose and meaning. I treat the two as distinct but tightly coupled concepts. I also employ moral/morality as terms distinct from moralistic/moralism. The latter term has a pejorative connotation, and I employ it as a shorthand for any moral judgement made without a high degree of certainty. I retain moralism’s negative connotation even when recommending its employment, so that we do not forget its danger when abused.
10 Assertions
There is no a priori morality or values. Every life has to define them anew.
Our human nature, including our biology, does provide fundamental motivations for morality and values. An example would be that certain actions are likely to surface as taboos in any culture, like murder and theft. More broadly, humans are social creatures, so a lot of moral questions concern how we ought to act in a society.
We cannot equate “natural” with “good”. I recognize a lot of tension in this statement. Traditional Catholic norms around sex, for example, could be taken as an example of morality asserting itself over biology in a problematic fashion. On the other hand, if humans are naturally tribalistic, or prone to othering, that does not make tribalism good. So human nature is a factor in morals, and often a strong motivator, but it should not be determinative.
The first object of the human endeavor is to define our values and our moral principles, both in accordance with and in spite of social and physical (“natural”) expectations. I consider this point to be the “crux” of morality. All subsequent moral questions are downstream of one’s principles. If we do not work to shape our own values and principles, then by default we inherit the values and principles of our environment. In practice, forging a fully complete moral framework may be infeasible, so our beliefs tend to be a mix of chosen and inherited, in differing proportions. Note that for the purposes of this list, I am completely avoiding the critical question of how we determine what our values and morals ought to be.9
Morality is always assessed relative to a moral framework (this is an extension of point #1 in consideration of point #4).
The second object of the human endeavor is to live according to one’s moral framework (acting well or “good”) for the purpose of one’s values (acting meaningfully). Without morals, our values would have no justice. Without values, our morals would be meaningless.10
Within a moral framework, only individual actions11 are good or bad, not beings. When we assert an individual is a good or bad person, we are always making a moralistic (see nuance above) judgement of their being, that relies on a lossy and possibly biased summary of their actions over a period of time. We are susceptible to narratives about ourselves and others that allow us to obscure the morality of individuals actions, excusing behavior as exceptions from the script. Few of us would claim that we are “bad people,” but this is a moralistic assessment based on our own internal narratives, in which we are inevitably the heroes.
In practice, assessing the morality of a given action is complex and multidimensional. We can make a good assessment of the first- and even second-order effects of our actions (“Was I nice to that person?”), but the complexity of the assessment grows exponentially as we consider n-th order effects (“Is my company a net-negative on humanity? Does my participation in the company meaningfully impact that outcome?”). Morality alone allows for only a superficial assessment of our actions. The challenge is even greater if we fully account for inaction or the opportunity cost of our actions.
Despite the complexity, we must be willing to make moralistic claims about the n-th order effects of our actions, else we risk sliding into relativism or even nihilism. Note this is a particular requirement in today’s globalized, capitalist society, where market forces can dictate actions across the planet. Earlier moral philosophies may underemphasize the importance and difficulties of this point, as the world of the past was less integrated (less complex), and may have taken for granted the presence of moralistic norms (as in an outwardly religious society). Over-moralizing is pernicious, so we should still be judicious in when we choose to make a moralistic claim about our actions (by default, save it for “big” decisions, like our jobs).
The third object of the human endeavor is to promote one’s moral principles and values12, adapting each into a socio-political13 practice. In a very narrow sense, this means moralizing against others’ actions on the basis of our moral principles. However, this must occur in contention and discourse with the moral principles of our peers. The natural outcome of this discourse should be the continual refinement of social norms and the establishment and adaption of laws. As always, I emphasize the active nature of this process, as it is only from this grounds-up approach and with continual engagement that we are able to strive for a moral society, while avoiding the worst outcomes of moralism14.
Implicit in several of these assertions is my further claim that the “human endeavor” (i.e. our life as humans), is only fully realized by developing, following and promoting our morals and our values.
Alternatively, I could share lyrical odes to my cats whenever I fail to prepare a blog post.
I have an Apple note with a running tally of responses to this question. As expected, the current winner is blue.
Though I have become increasingly disillusioned with the direction continental philosophy took from the 60s onwards, hence my bookend with the existentialists. At this point I basically agree with the critique that a lot of it is obscure at best, pseudo-intellectual at worst (With important exceptions! Foucault, for example, is very much alive in the modern discourse).
Throughout, I will use “moral framework” to refer to any cohesive set of moral principles.
I am at no point arguing that statistical or economic analysis is invalid. I am arguing instead that we have begun to substitute such analysis for discussion of what we want or what ought to occur. This has real consequences for the outcomes we observe!
I love footnotes.
I know that numerical lists have developed a bad name thanks to the Internet, but they worked fine for Moses and Wittgenstein.
I understand that “values” is a broad term, and may be philosophically imprecise in this context (e.g. aren’t morals normally a kind of value?). I may revise my phrasing in later pieces; I have not found an alternative term that doesn’t bring unwanted baggage to my argument.
I’m really focused on the mechanics of morality in these assertions. I couldn’t neatly add a series of normative assertions on moral principles on top of it, and I am not ready to neatly defer to precepts like the categorical imperative to accomplish the same.
The effective altruism movement sometimes conflates morals and values, so that morals are our values. It is teleologically problematic if we derive the meaning in our life exclusively from the amount of good we can accomplish; our values should be compatible with paradise (if our lives would feel meaningless in a world of perfect good and abundance, then our values probably need tweaking).
Or inaction.
I had originally refrained from including values in this point, but they are essential for shaping the kind of society we have. We cannot answer questions such as how to prioritize the arts vs. the sciences without values. However, I am cognizant that much of today’s tribalism could be framed as an overemphasis of narrow values vs morals (or even virtues).
The ultimate tribal signaling in continental philosophy is to ensure that your thesis culminates in a connection to the political, because Marx and stuff. Bonus points for each prefix added onto “political.” Thank you for reading my anarcho-socio-episto-alohomora-political footnote.
A moralistic society can still instigate atrocities. Consider the colonial actions of the Victorians. A moral society should not.
Correlation between favorite color and individual moral framework, lets go.