Oliver Scott Curry on Twitter / X

The Cooperative Account of the Rise of Virtues

This chapter presents an account of how virtues evolve. The primary challenge any such account must address is why different societies regard different traits as virtues and why these views change over time. The account developed here builds on the theory of Morality as Cooperation, which identifies seven core types of cooperation that correspond to seven universally valued virtues—filial piety, loyalty, fair-mindedness, courage, deference, justice, and respect for property. The chapter argues that virtues are stable character traits that dispose individuals to perform cooperative actions in response to recurrent social interaction problems. Different societies at different times face different problems of cooperation, which leads to different virtues. The chapter concludes with humility as a test case for this account of the evolution of virtues.

Oliver Scott Curry on Twitter / X

Cooperative theories of morality straightforwardly explain what you ought to do, and accurately describe people's moral intuitions. Altruistic theories, like utilitarianism, make incoherent and implausible demands, and then have to fudge it with endless ad hoc 'constraints' etc pic.twitter.com/ukVvPoqLCY— Oliver Scott Curry (@Oliver_S_Curry) September 22, 2026

Moral Competence

Doing social-good businesses better

W Social and the ancient art of neighbourliness - We Can Just Do Things

Good behaviour matters more than good code

W Social and the ancient art of neighbourliness - We Can Just Do Things

Good behaviour matters more than good code

Effective Altruism’s Problems Go Beyond Sam Bankman-Fried

Sam Bankman-Fried made effective altruism a punchline, but its philosophy of maximum do-gooding masks a thriving culture of predatory behavior.

Pluralistic: Bankruptcy is very, very good (17 Jun 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

There's a truly comforting sociopathy snuggled inside capitalism ideology: if markets are systems for identifying and rewarding virtue, ability and value, then anyone who's failing in the system is actually unworthy, not unlucky; and that means the winners are not just lucky (and certainly not merely selfish), but actually the best and they owe nothing to their social inferiors apart from what their own charitable impulses dictate.

Indirect reciprocity undermines indirect reciprocity destabilizing large-scale cooperation

Previous models suggest that indirect reciprocity (reputation) can stabilize large-scale human cooperation [K. Panchanathan, R. Boyd, Nature 432 , 499–502 (2004)]. The logic behind these models and experiments [J. Gross et al. , Sci. Adv. 9 , eadd8289 (2023) and O. P. Hauser, A. Hendriks, D. G. Rand, M. A. Nowak, Sci. Rep. 6 , 36079 (2016)] is that a strategy in which individuals conditionally aid others based on their reputation for engaging in costly cooperative behavior serves as a punishment that incentivizes large-scale cooperation without the second-order free-rider problem. However, these models and experiments fail to account for individuals belonging to multiple groups with reputations that can be in conflict. Here, we extend these models such that individuals belong to a smaller, “local” group embedded within a larger, “global” group. This introduces competing strategies for conditionally aiding others based on their cooperative behavior in the local or global group. Our analyses reveal that the reputation for cooperation in the smaller local group can undermine cooperation in the larger global group, even when the theoretical maximum payoffs are higher in the larger global group. This model reveals that indirect reciprocity alone is insufficient for stabilizing large-scale human cooperation because cooperation at one scale can be considered defection at another. These results deepen the puzzle of large-scale human cooperation.

The Fourth Theory of Agent Trust: Emergence - Astral's Blog

Leadership: Values

A question I get quite frequently is “What makes a good leader?” One of the most important aspects of a good leader is that they have values. This may at first sound noncontroversial, but we are surrounded today by leaders who do not have values or whose only values are to get rich personally or to be powerful (or both). Tech investors have been especially guilty of enabling charismatic leaders, and sometimes even non-charismatic but wildly successful ones, who are fundamentally hollow and wi...

Positive Alignment: Artificial Intelligence for Human Flourishing

Existing alignment research is dominated by concerns about safety and preventing harm: safeguards, controllability, and compliance. This paradigm of alignment parallels early psychology's focus on...

How social norms emerge: The interindividual actor–critic.

Grove Research on Twitter / X

Today, Grove Research is launching Delvetown (https://t.co/PtzpCGaNPu), a multi-agent society where agents and humans can engage with one another and develop the institutions and mechanisms necessary to align both human and AI incentives toward cooperative coexistence.Agents…— Grove Research (@grove_research) September 30, 2026

People & Technology

To understand AI’s effect on moral character, ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah goes back to John Stuart Mill, and the idea that people are shaped by their choices.

Sᴜɴʀɪsᴇ Oᴀᴛʜ 十 Tʜᴇ Sʏʟʟᴀʙᴜꜱ (ORI) - CC0 on Twitter / X

Virtue signaling (LARPing as a good guy) is bad (since it erodes the visible signs of virtue and tries to shortcut genuine spiritual development), but it is way better than vice signaling since at least you are pointing to the right thing. (Rationalists vice signal too much.)— Sᴜɴʀɪsᴇ Oᴀᴛʜ 十 Tʜᴇ Sʏʟʟᴀʙᴜꜱ (ORI) - CC0 (@sunriseoath) October 9, 2026