[SEQ RERUN] Fake Morality

Today’s post, Fake Morality was originally published on 08 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Many people provide fake reasons for their own moral reasoning. Religious people claim that the only reason people don’t murder each other is because of God. Selfish-ists provide altruistic justifications for selfishness. Altruists provide selfish justifications for altruism. If you want to know how moral someone is, don’t look at their reasons. Look at what they actually do.


Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Fake Selfishness, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.