Rafael Ruiz

Karma: 243

PhD Student in Philosophy at the London School of Economics, researching Moral Progress, Moral Circle Expansion, and the causes that drive it. Previously, I did a MA in Philosophy at King’s College London and a MA in Political Philosophy at Pompeu Fabra University (Spain). More information about my research at my personal website: https://www.rafaelruizdelira.com/

When I have the time, I also run https://futurosophia.com/, a website and nonprofit aimed at promoting the ideas of Effective Altruism in Spanish.

You might also know me from EA Twitter. :)

Rafael Ruiz 1 Apr 2024 11:25 UTC
11 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Announcing Mandatory Draft Amnesty Day (April 2nd)
Even my grocery shopping list? 😳 That’s a bit embarrassing but I hope fellow EAs can help me optimize it for impact

Rafael Ruiz 1 Apr 2024 11:15 UTC
27 points
6 ∶ 0
on: Cause Area Tier List
Climate change is going pretty well, I’ve heard carbon emissions are up!

Also, humans are carbon-based creatures so having more carbon around seems plausibly good 😊

Rafael Ruiz 1 Apr 2024 11:02 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: EA Global: we’re improving 1-on-1s
Are we using the old 12 signs astrological chart, or the updated one with Ophiuchus 13th astrological sign?

Rafael Ruiz 15 Feb 2024 10:30 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: JoshuaBlake’s comment on: PhD on Moral Progress—Seven Philosophical Takes and Opinions
Fair! I agree to that, at least until this point of time.
But I think there could be a time where we could have picked most of the “social low-hanging fruit” (cases like the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, universal education), so there’s not a lot for easy social progress left to do. At least comparatively, then investing on the “moral philosophy low-hanging fruit” will look more worthwhile.
Some important cases of philosophical moral problems that might have great axiological moral importance, at least under consequentialism/utilitarianism could be population ethics (totalism vs averagism), our duties towards wild animals, and the moral status of digital beings.
I think figuring them out could have great importance. Of course, if we always just keep them as just an interesting philosophical thought experiment and we don’t do anything about promoting any outcomes, they might not matter that much. But I’m guessing people in the year 2100 might want to start implementing some of those ideas.

Rafael Ruiz 13 Feb 2024 11:29 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: JackM’s comment on: PhD on Moral Progress—Bibliography Review
Same! Seems like a fascinating, although complicated topic. You might enjoy Oded Galor’s “The Journey of Humanity”, if you haven’t read it. :)

Rafael Ruiz 13 Feb 2024 11:26 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: JoshuaBlake’s comment on: PhD on Moral Progress—Seven Philosophical Takes and Opinions
Sure! So I think most of our conceptual philosophical moral progress until now has been quite poor. If looked under the lens of moral consistency reasoning I outlined in point (3), cosmopolitanism, feminism, human rights, animal rights, and even longtermism all seem like slight variations on the same argument (“There are no morally relevant differences between Amy and Bob, so we should treat them equally”).
In contrast, I think the fact that we are starting to develop cases like population ethics, infinite ethics, complicated variations of thought experiments (there are infinite variations of the trolley problem we could conjure up), that really test our limits of our moral sense and moral intuitions, hints at the fact that we might need a more systematic, perhaps computerized approach to moral philosophy. I think the likely path is that most conceptual moral progress in the future (in the sense of figuring out new theories and thought experiments) will happen with the assistance of AI systems.
I can’t point to anything very concrete, since I can’t predict the future of moral philosophy in any concrete way, but I think philosophical ethics might become very conceptually advanced and depart heavily from common-sense morality. I think this has been an increasing gap since the enlightenment. Challenges to common-sense morality have been slowly increasing. We might be at the early beginning of that exponential takeoff.
Of course, many of the moral systems that AIs will develop we will consider to be ridiculous. And some might be! But in other cases, we might be too backwards or morally tied to our biologically and culturally shaped moral intuitions and taboos to realize that it is in fact an advancement. For example, the Repugnant Conclusion in population ethics might be true (or the optimal decision in some sense, if you’re a moral anti-realist), even if it goes against many of our moral intuitions.
The effort will take place in separating the wheat from the chaff. And I’m not sure if it will be AI or actual moral philosophers doing this effort of discriminating good from bad ethical systems and concepts.

Rafael Ruiz 9 Feb 2024 15:12 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Arturo Macias’s comment on: PhD on Moral Progress—Seven Philosophical Takes and Opinions
Outside of Marxism and continental philosophy (particularly the Frankfurt School and some Foucault), I think this idea has lost a lot of grip! So it has actually become a minority view or even awareness among current academic philosophers, particularly in the anglosphere.
However, I think it’s a very useful idea that should make us look at our social arrangements (institutions, beliefs, morality...) with some level of initial suspicion. Luckily, some similar arguments (often called “debunking arguments” or “genealogical arguments”) are starting to gain traction within philosophy again.

Rafael Ruiz 9 Feb 2024 12:27 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: JackM’s comment on: PhD on Moral Progress—Bibliography Review
I hadn’t! Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I will take a look in the coming months.

Rafael Ruiz 9 Feb 2024 12:25 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Arturo Macias’s comment on: PhD on Moral Progress—Seven Philosophical Takes and Opinions
Good! I think I mostly agree with this and I should probably flag it somewhere in the main post.
I do agree with you, and I think it also shows what is a central point of the later parts of my thesis, when I will talk about the empirical ideas rather than philosophical ideas: that technologies (from shipbuilding, to the industrial revolution, to factory farming, to future AI) are more of a factor in moral progress or regress than ideologies. So many moral philosophers might have the wrong focus.
(Although many of those things I would call “social” progress rather than “moral” strictly speaking, because it was triggered by external factors (economic and technological change) rather than moral reflection. It’s not that we became more cruel to animals in terms of our intentions, it’s that we gained more power over them.)

PhD on Moral Progress—Seven Philosophical Takes and Opinions

Rafael Ruiz8 Feb 2024 15:17 UTC

44 points

9 comments20 min readEA link

Rafael Ruiz 31 Dec 2023 18:05 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Daniel_Friedrich’s comment on: PhD on Moral Progress—Bibliography Review
I agree with you this is very important, and I’d like to see more work on it. Sadly I don’t have much concrete to say on this topic. The following is my opinion as a layman on AI:
I’ve found Toby Ord’s framework here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb7BoXYTWYI to be useful for thinking about these issues. I guess I’m an advocate for differential progress, like Ord. That is, prioritizing safety advancements relative to technical advancements. Not stopping work on AI capabilities, but right now shifting the current balance from capabilities work to safety work. And then in some years/decades once we have figured out alignment, shift the focus on capabilities again.
My very rough take on things is that as long as we manage to develop advanced LLMs (e.g. GPT5, 6, 7… and Copilots) slowly and carefully before dangerous AGI, we should use those LLMs to help us with technical alignment work. I think technical alignment work is the current bottleneck of the whole situation. There are either not enough people or we’re not smart enough to figure it out on our own (but maybe computers could help!).
So, to your points, I think right now (1) Runaway AI Risk is higher than (2) Malicious actors catching up. I don’t know by how much, since I don’t know how well Chinese labs are doing regarding AI, and if they could come to big breakthroughs on their own. (And I don’t know how to compare those points (1) and (2) to (3) and (4).)
Perhaps somebody could do a BOTEC calculation or a rough model with some very rough numbers to see what’s a good tradeoff, and put it up for discussion. I’d like to see some work on this.

Rafael Ruiz 26 Dec 2023 12:49 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Jonas Hallgren’s comment on: PhD on Moral Progress—Bibliography Review
Hi Jonas! Henrich’s 2020 book is very ambitious, but I thought it was really interesting. It has lots of insights from various disciplines, attempting to explain why Europe became the dominant superpower from the middle ages (starting to take off around the 13th century) to modernity.
Regarding AI, I think it’s currently beyond the scope of this project. Although I mention AI at some points regarding the future of progress, I don’t develop anything in-depth. So sadly I don’t have any new insights regarding AI alignment.
I do think theories of cultural evolution and processes of mutations and selection of ideas could play a key role in predicting and shaping the long-term future, whether it’s for humans or AI. So I’m excited for some social scientists or computer modellers to try to take this kind of work in a direction applied to making AI values dynamic and evolving (rather than static). But again, it’s currently outside of the scope of my work and area of expertise.

Rafael Ruiz 21 Dec 2023 20:18 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Ulrik Horn’s comment on: PhD on Moral Progress—Bibliography Review
Hi Ulrik! I’m definitely aware of this issue, and it’s a very ugly side of this debate, which is why some people might have moved away from the topic in the past.
The dangers of using moral progress to justify colonialism and imperialism will be one key point in my next post, and it’s also a brief section in the first chapter of my thesis. It’s definitely worth cautioning against imposing progress to other cultures. And political intervention is much more complicated than “my culture is more progressed, so we should enforce it upon the rest”. It deals with difficult issues of epistemic biases, lack of political legitimacy, and political paternalism. Aside from being a convenient excuse for the powerful to come to other countries and exploit others. It’s probably not enough, but at least the explicit warning and section is there.
I try not to adhere or rely on particularly “western” values in my view of progress. But there’s controversy as whether values such as moral impartiality and individual human rights are western. Amartya Sen for example wants to claim that they aren’t, and he finds examples of such values in nonwestern contexts (in Development as Freedom Chapter 10). But I am not fully convinced either way. It’s probably a tricky issue that deserves its own book-length treatment by itself.
If you know any other authors, academics or philosophers that bring in the non-western perspective with regards to values and progress, I’d love to take a look!

Rafael Ruiz 21 Dec 2023 20:03 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Scott Smith’s comment on: PhD on Moral Progress—Bibliography Review
Hi Scott, glad I could motivate you to get Buchanan and Powell. It’s a great book! It might feel a bit long if you’re not a philosopher, but it’s definitely a standout solid reading with many insights on this topic.
On The Blank Slate and Moral Uncertainty, sure, let me add the following to my reviews in order to add to that:
Those two books I think are really good with regards to their subject matter. They’re both general overviews of their respective fields. Moral Uncertainty is much more technical, but basically the required reading if you’re getting into that topic for the first time. So it’s ⁵⁄₅ stars if you’re interested in the topic, probably the best starting point.
The Blank Slate is more replaceable with any other introduction to cognitive science. It presents stuff like the view of the mind as a computer, with debates like the Language of Thought, connectionism, and human nature. Pinker is more accessible than “textbooks” like Tim Crane’s “The Mechanical Mind”, which are more rigorous but technical and harder to read.
Pinker also presents his opinionated side of things, siding with the evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides on analyzing humans as biological animals which inherit a lot of instincts. So he wants to argue that we are instinctually hard-wired towards certain behavior, which explains stuff like our capacity for language.
At some points he rambles against “leftists” in academia which want to deny instinctual human nature. He wants to detach ethics and human rights from any particular conception of human nature.
I take a bit of a middle position between Pinker and the “leftist that wants to deny human nature”. I think the evolutionary psychology standpoint is definitely worth taking into consideration, but it might be more straightforward to apply with regards to stuff like language learning, which happens in an individual mind, than to politics and societies, which is less straightforward since there are new phenomena that happens when you’re dealing with interactions of large groups of people. (I think more recently Pinker would even agree with that, since in his later books like Better Angels and Enlightenment Now, Pinker is a defender of enlightenment values to overcome our “pre-wired” tribalism.) I’d say it’s like a ⁴⁄₅ stars reading.
I’ll also edit the post to reflect this.

Rafael Ruiz 15 Dec 2023 22:13 UTC
0 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Niki Kotsenko’s comment on: PhD on Moral Progress—Bibliography Review
Thanks a lot for the further reading recommendations, I will take a look!

Rafael Ruiz 15 Dec 2023 22:12 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Niki Kotsenko’s comment on: PhD on Moral Progress—Bibliography Review
Thanks for your comments!
Regarding (1), I’ll get in touch with you if I have a specific question.
(2) I’ll rewrite my characterization of Robert Wright’s work. I think his main line of argument is that cultural evolutionary processes lead to bigger networks of cooperation, which foster positive sum games, which in turn foster further cooperation in a positive feedback loop. (Though certainly not everything fosters further growth or cooperation, conspicuous consumption being one exception)
(3) Could you say more? Do you mean differences between people’s personalities (as in the OCEAN Big 5 Personalities)? Or more like character traits such as obedience to authority? Whatever the case, I definitely haven’t seen much of this work. Might be my personal ignorance or lack of search in psychology journals, but I think there’s general lack of work. Perhaps something that partly explains it are the controversies that surrounded the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s Experiment, which set back psychological research on morality quite a bit for several decades. Hopefully some moral psychologists pick up the topic of moral progress.

Rafael Ruiz 10 Dec 2023 12:37 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben Stevenson’s comment on: PhD on Moral Progress—Bibliography Review
I hope you find it Kitcher’s book worthwhile read! I always learn something from him.
(Typo fixed!)

Rafael Ruiz 10 Dec 2023 11:42 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: finm’s comment on: PhD on Moral Progress—Bibliography Review
Thanks for the support, Fin! I definitely agree with you, and I hope this way people can get most of the bang for their buck and save their research time. This topic is greatly time-inefficient, just because it’s very broad and interdisciplinary, and there was no clear initial indication of what’s good and what’s not. So I think reading from either the “TL;DR / Recommended Reading Order”, or some of the “Five Star” or “Four Star” books, or the “Worthwhile Articles” should be more than enough for the interest of EAs. The rest are more for completeness’ sake.
Hopefully I was able to highlight some hidden gems. For example, Hanno Sauer’s “Moral Teleology”, Victor Kumar’s “A Better Ape” and Philip Kitcher “Moral Progress” have flown under people’s radar, but they’re really good recent contributions. It’s a literature that has grown a bit in the past five years.
Sorry for the headers thing. That was never my intention, I just didn’t know putting something in Bold made it a header. I’ve fixed it now.

PhD on Moral Progress—Bibliography Review

Rafael Ruiz10 Dec 2023 10:06 UTC

122 points

25 comments40 min readEA link

Rafael Ruiz 24 Aug 2022 11:06 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Announcing a new introduction to effective altruism
Interesting introduction! I have a couple of first impressions that I’d like to share:
1. The beginning of the article seems strange to me. This is the first time I have seen “Effective Altruism” defined as “a project”. To me, “a project” seems to have the connotation of something happening within a specific organization, rather than an idea, question, ideology, philosophy, or social movement. I think Effective Altruism is not a project. Rather, it contains hundreds or thousands of projects. I think there might be a better concept to encompass the idea.
2. I find it weird to put “What are some examples of effective altruism in practice?” before outlining the ideas in “What values unite effective altruism?”. Although it might be more boring, I think our cause areas are better understood once we outline our core philosophy. Also, we try to be cause neutral, so our projects might change radically in the future.
3. On a more positive note, I like the bar charts! They’re very illuminating regarding the magnitude of the issues. :)

Rafael Ruiz

PhD on Mo­ral Progress—Seven Philo­soph­i­cal Takes and Opinions

PhD on Mo­ral Progress—Bibliog­ra­phy Review

PhD on Moral Progress—Seven Philosophical Takes and Opinions

PhD on Moral Progress—Bibliography Review