Whereas goal-directed activities get their value from culminating in an achievement—crossing the finish line makes the painful marathon worth running—goalless activities have value apart from how they end.

Goalless activities are valuable just because you’re doing them, and they continue to...

Cultivating the right intentions leads moral improvement, moral improvement leads to human flourishing.

Sometimes we make horrible decisions that, luckily, don’t result in disaster. Sometimes we try to do heroic, loving, or generous deeds but don’t make any difference in the world. Moral im...

Think about walking from a very dark room into a brightly lit one. You don’t immediately see more—you probably see less. Your pupils have to contract. Your brain has to process very different information. This everyday visual experience is a guide to the more serious difficulty we face when we tr...

Sometimes we make horrible decisions that, luckily, don’t result in disaster. Sometimes we try to do heroic, loving, or generous deeds but don’t make any difference in the world. Moral improvement is a matter of improving your intentions, developing your character, and better understanding why yo...

The stories we tell ourselves shape our lives, the truth of these stories decide to what extent we live in reality.

Storytelling is a skill that requires careful attention to the details of life. It requires developing a “morally thick” vocabulary that brings out the nuance in our intention...

The surprising discovery is that subjects do have different reactions to these variations. The more “person-to-person” the trolley problem is, the more reluctant someone was to act. So people are more likely to pull a lever to change the tracks, much less likely to push another person to their de...

• The Stoic General gives himself advice on virtue and reflects on what he has discovered about the good life in his own adventures.
• He reflects on nature, change, death—not just for himself but for everything in the universe. When he has a question about reality, he writes that down a...

The “ultimate good” for human beings will involve satisfying our animal needs while also building up virtuous traits of character, over time and in a rational way.

Contemporary philosophers name this state as “flourishing”—the complete state of being a well-developed, accomplished, and happ...

Asking yourself the right questions, followed by deep contemplation is one way to nurture your virtues.

The key to weathering any hardship or difficulty is to continually remind ourselves that what matters is not what happens to us but how we respond to it. Can you respond with kindness to ...

Effective altruism is a philosophical movement dedicated to giving people extremely specific advice about how money should factor into living an ethical life.

The effective altruism movement is an ethical system guided by three connected assumptions about the role that money plays in the mo...

Virtue ethicists are sometimes accused of advocating a self-centred morality, one that overemphasizes how your spending and giving affect you, the giver, and your pursuit of eudaimonia. Shouldn’t morality be about other people—about selflessness?

But the effective altruists are selfless in...

• Many effective altruists think that our primary moral obligation is to reduce suffering and promote happiness and that we can measure the moral worth of our decisions based on how effective those decisions are at improving net happiness.
• Earn to give:  Earn as much as you can. Then d...