[Edited after publication for clarity.]
I used to get into a lot of really frustrating arguments about normative ethics where the person I was talking to and I were just talking past each other. When I found the Sorting Hat Chats system for classifying personality types, I originally just thought of it as being another elaborate fiction-based classification system, which is another one of my guilty pleasures. Sorting Hat Chats is divided into primary and secondary houses. While the secondary houses are just a new gloss on the standard Hogwarts houses, the primary houses are an inexplicably good system for classifying people’s opinions about normative ethics and scrupulosity. Now, instead of going “okay but that thing is wrong, why are you still arguing about it,” I go “ah, Ravenclaw primary” and move on. So I thought I would write up my understanding of the system somewhere more permanent than Tumblr.
(Note: Sorting Hat Chats house primaries only vaguely resemble the Hogwarts houses they are named after, and it is best to put aside your preconceptions about the houses when considering this system. Similarly, no knowledge of Harry Potter is required to understand the system. While this is my personal understanding of the system, I do not claim to know what the creators of the Sorting Hat Chats system intended and may very well be misunderstanding their original intent. I think it is fairly unlikely that this system covers literally all possible orientations towards normative ethics, but as-is it is useful enough that I think it’s worth sharing.)
Ravenclaw Primary. There is an infallible single-question test for identifying Ravenclaw primaries: “is normative ethics boring and/or completely disconnected from any actual moral reasoning you do in your everyday life?” If your answer is “yes”, you are not a Ravenclaw primary. If your answer is “no”, welcome to Team Ravenclaw.
Ravenclaw primaries believe that you should figure out what the right thing to do is through logic and reason. They often have a particular fondness for moral philosophy and ethical thought experiments. Ravenclaw primaries are particularly likely to identify as utilitarians, Kantians, and virtue ethicists. Other sorts of primaries only rarely identify as these categories unless they have to regularly talk to Ravenclaw primaries. For some reason, Ravenclaw primaries have a particular attraction to Catholicism and Judaism; I suspect I would know a lot of Ravenclaw primary Muslims if I knew more Muslims.
Please note that “Ravenclaw primary” is not the same thing as “moral realist.” Many Ravenclaw primaries are not moral realists, although they have a distinct tendency to fall into the “error theorist in metaethics class, utilitarian in normative ethics class” bucket. A Ravenclaw moral non-realist can be recognized by (a) the fact that they really really care about the difference between error theory and noncognitivism and (b) their insistence on trying to come up with some ethical system from first principles anyway.
It is commonly assumed that all effective altruists are Ravenclaw primaries. This is not actually true, although we do have a lot of them.
Gryffindor Primary. Like Ravenclaw primaries, Gryffindor primaries care about principles. Unlike Ravenclaw primaries, Gryffindor primaries tend to follow their hearts and their intuitive sense of what goodness is; they don’t view moral intuitions as raw material for a systematized moral system, but as justifications in themselves.
It is common for Gryffindor primaries to pursue certain values, such as justice or kindness or freedom or the flourishing of others or their family or their own happiness. It is also common for Gryffindor primaries to feel a strong intuitive sense that one should follow certain rules, such as letting everyone speak freely or avoiding blasphemy or being loyal to your friends.
Gryffindor primaries are perfectly capable of systematizing; a Gryffindor primary who intuitively values the greatest good for the greatest number will probably use a lot of numbers to figure out what the greatest good for the greatest number is. However, when it comes right down to it, when asked to justify their beliefs, a Gryffindor primary will go “because it’s WRONG”. When pressed, they will say “because it JUST IS. It’s OBVIOUS.” Occasionally they will engage in circular reasoning like “you should pursue beautiful things because they are beautiful!”
Not all Gryffindor primaries have an ethical system that involves caring about people. Oscar Wilde and Patti Smith are both excellent examples of Gryffindor primaries who are devoted to beauty and art.
I am a Gryffindor primary.
Hufflepuff Primary. Unlike Ravenclaws and Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs care about people. They believe in the inherent worth and dignity of individuals, and want to engage in moral behavior because they have empathy for others. (A Ravenclaw, on the other hand, would start wondering how you could measure worth and dignity, and a Gryffindor might decide they’re pursuing the principle of INHERENT WORTH AND DIGNITY FOR ALL HUMANKIND! without ever really caring about individual humans.)
Hufflepuffs are perhaps best modeled with the idea of circles of concern. Some Hufflepuffs have very small circles: perhaps they care about their family, or their friends, or themselves, or anyone who happens to be personally suffering in front of them at this moment. Some have larger circles: they care about a community, or people who have suffered the same thing they have suffered, or people who also practice their religion, or their country. Some Hufflepuff primaries’ circles embrace all of humankind, or all sentient beings, or ecosystems.
It is common for Hufflepuff primaries to have multiple circles and to care more about people in the inner circles than people in the outer circles. A Hufflepuff primary of my acquaintance occasionally comments that they care equally about their spouse and the entire continent of Africa.
In my experience, effective altruist Hufflepuff primaries often have a formative experience that causes them to have empathy with animals or people in the developing world: for example, they may have visited a developing country, gone to a museum exhibit that included an exhibit of rice equivalent to how much a person in the developing world eats in a day, or viewed a Mercy for Animals factory farm video.
Slytherin primary. Of the house primaries, Slytherins are the most likely to be parsed as amoral. The Slytherin primary cares about individuals: they almost always care about themselves; they may also care about their friends, partners, coworkers, or family. (Interestingly, some Slytherin primaries generalize this and agree that everyone else should care about their families too, sometimes promoting this principle at some cost to themselves; my father, a Slytherin primary, threatened to quit his job if one of his employees was fired for missing work because his child was in the hospital.)
A rough guideline for distinguishing Slytherin primaries from Hufflepuff primaries is that Hufflepuff primaries naturally care about groups (“my family”) while Slytherin primaries naturally care about individuals (“my dad, my mom, my sister, my husband, my child”). Hufflepuff primaries also tend to be more other-centered (“I care about you because you’re suffering”), while Slytherin primaries tend to be more self-centered (“I care about you because you are one of the six people I have chosen to care about”).
Most Slytherin primaries are not particularly altruistic. They sometimes engage in activism or charity donation if it’s in their own interest or the interest of the individuals they care about: for example, a trans Slytherin primary may advocate for trans rights; a Slytherin primary whose partner died of cancer may raise money to fight cancer. A small number of Slytherin primaries may take up altruism for reasons expressed eloquently in the following quote from Terry Pratchett’s Wee Free Men:
All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!
It can sometimes be hard to determine someone’s primary. A Ravenclaw primary may behave similarly to a Hufflepuff primary if they’ve been reasoned into it; a Gryffindor primary who believes in the principle of helping people close to you may be difficult to tell apart from a Slytherin. But in my experience, if you question why someone believes what they believe thoroughly, you can almost always classify them into a house primary.
Why is this useful? First, you will avoid frustrating arguments because you are aware that other primaries differ from you. Slytherin primaries can recognize that altruism is psychologically important to other people and, while they don’t have to understand it, they do have to accept it. Ravenclaw primaries can avoid patiently repeating thought-experiment-based arguments to people who respond with “huh, that’s confusing” and then keep doing what they were going to do anyway. Gryffindor primaries can stop having arguments that end in “YOU SHOULDN’T DO WRONG THINGS BECAUSE THEY ARE WRONG, WHY IS THIS SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND.” Hufflepuff primaries will stop explaining that, you see, these people are people and they suffer and you should have empathy for them.
It can also help you strategize about how to convince someone to adopt your values. In my experience, philosophical arguments tend to only move Ravenclaw primaries. Gryffindor primaries respond best to Secular-Solstice-style attempts to make doing the right thing seem grand and beautiful. Hufflepuff primaries respond best to things that trigger empathy, such as Give Directly Live. Slytherin primaries… look, if you can appeal to their self-interest, do, but most of the time you’d be better off locating a Ravenclaw and leaving the Slytherin to do their own thing.
I also think the primaries have very different kinds of scrupulosity, and tactics that work to address one primary’s scrupulosity issues are incoherent or useless with another primary. Sorting Hat Chats calls scrupulosity issues a “burned primary.” I’ve noticed miscommunication particularly with Gryffindor and Ravenclaw primaries, perhaps because they’re the only ones I’ve seen burning around me.
Burned Ravenclaws lose faith in their ability to find the truth at all. They may be troubled by moral nihilism, the inability to understand everything that’s going on in the world, or the fact that any action has many unknowable consequences and you’ll never be able to know for sure if you did the consequentially right thing. I’d add that Ravenclaws often have guilt issues if they adopt a moral system they can’t live up to; that’s relatively treatable through persuading the Ravenclaw to adopt a more livable system.
Burned Gryffindors are no longer able to trust their own internal compass to point them to what’s right. The burned Gryffindor sometimes develops a coping mechanism, such as relying on a person or a system to tell them what’s right; this can allow them to function, but often makes them feel depressed and soulless, and does not fail gracefully if the person or system abuses their power. Some worry that every moral claim anyone makes is actually correct and spend hours worrying that perhaps they’re doing great evil by watching a movie that at least one person on the Internet disapproves of. In my experience as a recovering burned Gryffindor, the solution is not to try to come up with less demanding rules or force yourself to stop listening to random people’s moral claims by force of will; instead, it is to get in touch with your own felt sense of morality, whatever that is, and fiercely defend your ability to make moral decisions for no other reason except that it is right.
I have not personally encountered a burned Hufflepuff or Slytherin. (The Slytherins do need to cut it out with the “have you considered becoming a Slytherin?” approach to scrupulosity issues though.) According to Sorting Hat Chats, a burned Slytherin feels it is too dangerous to have loved ones or value anyone but themselves, while a burned Hufflepuff aches to be allowed to have a community and care about more people but for whatever reason feels this is not possible. I’m interested in burned and formerly burned Slytherin/Hufflepuff opinions on how correct that is, as well as burned and formerly burned Ravenclaws and Gryffindors who want to add new experiences to my analysis.
Eskay said:
This seems potentially useful. I would be happier about it if it had names for its categories other than these names which are already the names of completely different categories, just with the word “primary” attached.
In the spirit of making suggestions and not just complaints, the best idea I thought of in one shower was to label these as “silver, gold, black, and bronze”. They don’t have an obvious connection to their meanings other than through Hogwarts houses, but they at least let you talk about “bronze Gryffindors”.
(You can combine them with blue-red-yellow-green to represent the secondaries, if you like. To my fellow heraldic pedants: yeah, I know, it violates the rule of tincture to group black with the metals and yellow with the colors. My only defense is that it saves us from having to distinguish gold and yellow as separate items.)
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blacktrance said:
The single-question Ravenclaw test isn’t that infallible, because it misclassifies me as Ravenclaw. (Which is why modeling is part of the system.)
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argleblarglebarglebah said:
Same.
I pass the Ravenclaw test despite my preferred metaethical system being Moral Sense Theory and my preferred ethical system being “*shrug*”.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
I really can’t tell what I am in this system, except very strongly not Slytherin. (Please feel free to attempt to sort me.)
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isabel said:
I guess I’m a gryffindor primary too. I do think about ethics more than most people for sure, which made me think I was ravenclaw initially, but my thinking is really mostly about making sure to prioritize my deepest and strongest moral intuitions (most notably ‘suffering is bad’) over ones that are more superficial. Also I decided I was a utilitarian and a moral anti-realist pretty much immediately upon hearing what those things mean and have not since been swayed by any thought experiments. On the other hand, I think that my morality does stem at its heart from empathy, so I could be a hufflepuff? Like the reason I think suffering is bad is that I have suffered and so when I imagine others suffering I project that memory it makes me feel bad, not so much because reducing suffering seems grand and important in a gryffindor-y way. But it’s not like my position on whether insects matter is dependent on seeing videos of insects being eaten, it’s dependent on arguments over whether insect brains are capable of suffering, because I’ve sort of automated the creation of empathy to a simple ‘decide whether something can suffer/feel happiness —> have empathy if yes, have no empathy if no’. I don’t feel any connection to the ideas of ‘dignity’ or ‘worth’.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
This describes me pretty well too I think?
But like, how would one reason out “suffering is bad” in any further detail? I think at a certain point there pretty much have to be moral axioms and I don’t think you can really get any more fundamental than that, so I don’t think that having such an axiom really prevents one from being Ravenclaw primary.
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Sophia Kovaleva said:
Slytherin/Hufflepuff distinction gets rather tricky when you consider circles of concern of size 1. “Spouse-like romantic partners” can theoretically be a group, but all mono people and even, apparently, most poly people it tends to allow for at most one person. Similarly, “family members I am or was close to, who haven’t disowned or abused me” can be of any size, but also can be 1, especially for people raised by single parents. “My kids” tends to be 1 for many people, and even when it’s not, it’s apparently fairly common to have favorite children.
Ravenclaw and Gryffindor seem to more or less be activist (or at least “wants to fix the world in theory”) systems, while the behavior of most people seems to be a mix of Hufflepuff with various amounts of Slytherin for extra important people in their lives.
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Adelene said:
Nah. The question to ask to distinguish them is, do they care about the people they care about because of their role, or because of their personality?
I’m a Hufflepuff mostly by dint of definitely not being anything else, but I can get along with very nearly anybody; personality just isn’t going to do it for me as something to differentiate people I do want to spend effort on from ones I’m not.
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vamair said:
Like “would they care about that person if the person’s role changes”?
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Walter said:
Very cool system. Way to go, blue hellsite.
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Act said:
I am very confused about what I am supposed to be under this system. I seem to oscillate randomly between reading these things and saying “ok I’m a Gryffindor who performs Ravenclaw because moral systems should be buildable from first principles because otherwise how would you Convince Everyone Else”, “I’m a burned Gryffindor whose instinctive morality is authoritarian and whose new morality is still authoritarian but with more constant freakouts about whether my authorities are making the right choices”, “clearly a Hufflepuff, what else could a contractarian be”, “obviously a Slytherin but just way more enlightened than other slytherins and able to see that cooperating helps you achieve your goals better”, “a Hufflepuff but modeling ravenclaw because my tribe is ravenclaw people”, “Gryffindor but ashamed of it because nobody else likes my moral principles so I keep trying to be the other houses and it keeps not working”, and about fifty other different things.
Is there a house for “morality is about figuring out what everyone ELSE wants morality to be, and doing that thing, because it would be *awful* to have values misaligned from the rest of humanity”? Like, a house for “screw this, who gave ME the right to pick what’s moral, I’mma go consult an opinion poll”?
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SquirrelInHell said:
My intuition feels that the above has classified me very very aptly, and I got extremely clear-cut responses like so:
“is normative ethics boring and/or completely disconnected from any actual moral reasoning you do in your everyday life?” -> NO! [reflexive, immediate inner scream at 110dB volume]
“they don’t view moral intuitions as raw material for a systematized moral system, but as justifications in themselves” -> huh? oh yeah, I can imagine it’s possible to think that… but then sometimes you’re WRONG and you don’t understand why so you can’t FIX IT aaargh
“They believe in the inherent worth and dignity of individuals, and want to engage in moral behavior because they have empathy for others.” -> nice! I learned to do that too, after I figured out from abstract principles that it tends to produce results which I value. I guess it’s neat to have it switched on right from the beginning!
“The Slytherin primary cares about individuals: they almost always care about themselves; they may also care about their friends, partners, coworkers, or family. ” -> sure, good for you, and of course you OBVIOUSLY would still want to maximize your utility across all possible causally structured worlds with a Kolmogorov complexity prior, which seems to imply adopting some abstract moral principles that generalize to other people, no? is this view confused or am I just so hopeless at imagining this
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Cerastes said:
While I’m always skeptical of these sort of “N types of people” categories, I must admit that Slytherin primary fits me perfectly. Which is also weird because I detest the HP universe’s narrow-minded association of snakes, the uncontested pinnacle of all evolution, with “evil”.
Even more oddly, I feel as if this has *always* described me, long before I began thinking seriously about morality/ethics/primatology. Perhaps these are only secondarily about morality and the ultimate cause is something deeper in the individual’s personality or social tendencies? Perhaps our supposedly “conscious” or “deliberate” “choice” of moral/ethical system and meta-ethical principles is not actually logical at all, but merely based on our deeper personality/tendencies, and we “find arguments convincing” simply because they appeal to our natures?
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Armada said:
>pinnacle of evolution
Technically, snakes are still evolving, along with everything else. There could potentially be a more snake-y snake in the future that doesn’t exist yet.
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PDV said:
Speaking as a Slytherin who will probably take the GWWC pledge soon: The way to convince Slytherins is to make your preferred morality high-status and/or normative in your community. Make signaling only realistically achievable by doing the real thing. Alternately, convince the ones who are already modeling Ravenclaw as a tool that they should stick to it to use it better.
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PDV said:
Also, remember that Slytherins care more intensely about what their friends and valued people think. I absolutely place significant value on being moral according to the values of people I care about. So if my precious people are EAs, I actually care about being good in EA terms.
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Armada said:
You seem a bit uncharitable to Slytherins here, though perhaps I only think so because I’m a Slytherin. I basically only care about a handful of people and fuck the rest of the world, yeah, but I also care about what those people care about, even if I think it’s dumb (e.g. religion, social interaction with strangers). It’s just that the reasoning is “an Important Person likes this, there should continue to be enough of it for them” and not “this is itself an important thing, there should continue to be enough of it for everyone.”
You also miss what I think is an important point, that Slytherin primaries are intensely loyal to their Important People. You ever heard that phrase, “A good friend helps you move; a best friend helps you move a body”? That. If I had to choose between one of my people and the entire city of Hong Kong, the only thing that would keep Hong Kong on the map is if a) it was possible for that person to learn about the trade and b) they would feel guilty about a choice they didn’t make, such that it would ruin whatever life I had traded Hong Kong for.
That, and I’m not five and therefore can assume that other people have their Important People and so on down the line and there’s nothing actually special about my Important People just because they’re mine.
(warning: disordered thinking, discussion of suicide)
I’m also a formerly burned Slytherin. For me it happened in high school. Short version: one of my only and closest friends cut off contact with me for no apparent reason, and this coincided with my depression getting worse than it ever had before. Said friend was pretty much the only tie I had to the rest of the people I hung out with, so I essentially lost 7-10 goodish friends once she started pretending I didn’t exist.
(And I, like an idiot, or in other words a sixteen-year-old, didn’t contest this beyond trying to figure out what the fuck had happened, because in addition to all that I’m hella submissive and naturally put the wants and needs of my Important People before my own and on top of that I’m chronically suicidal and the patch I use to keep it in check is alternatively “other people need me and their needs are more important than my own,” which is weakening, and “I am not responsible for my life, I don’t get to make that decision,” which works better.)
Luckily I met people who weren’t shitbags and now they are my Important People and utterly deserve to be.
P.S.: Let’s hope that formatting up there worked and didn’t print as plaintext because that would be awkward.
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ozymandias said:
I was trying really hard to check my prejudice against Ravenclaws and thus wound up being prejudiced against Slytherins. 🙂
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Armada said:
Yeah, that’s fair. I’m probably not very, let’s call it generous, to Gryffindors if I’m not thinking about it. 🙂
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loki said:
I am a Slytherin Primary’s Most Important Person and it is important to note that that’s an awe-inspiring feeling that I don’t think I with my different intuitive priorities can match.
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
I think those are all valid styles of moral reasoning and and I don’t feel comfortable any one of them as being “my” style, or being somehow essential to my personality.
I also don’t think anyone else should feel comfortable doing that either. For any one of them there is a context in which it is the correct style. As a human you should be able to mediate between them and deploy them as required by the situation.
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Mickie Dreysen said:
My view from the burned Ravenclaw perspective you asked for, Ozy, is that there are two sides of a divide that I struggle to come to grips with.
There’s the first part, the part that I know is dangerous to me, personally. That’s the part of me that wonders why I bother anymore to try and explain myself to anyone. Why? No one pays attention to my logic, or my advice, anyway, no matter if I’m right or not.
Then there’s the redeeming side that I try and remember. The people around me, the ones I’ve chosen as friends and family, and that I try and reach out to, are thinking living breathing adults (kids have a different level of autonomy, of course, and slightly different rules, but the overall thrust I’m trying for is the same, just tuned to differing levels) with their own reasons for doing something.
If they need my advice, they’ll ask for it. They don’t need me harping on their failure to think it through (from my limited view of their reasoning).
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Rune “Diana” Anonymous said:
I guess I’m a formerly burned Slytherin, but I also have some Gryffindor stuff going on underneath? The Slytherin is the part of me that actually cares about people, with the Gryffindor part being most horrific disgust and loathing for almost everything and everyone in its current state, with my principles and goals in that area being almost completely unrelated to ethics, with occasional bursts of undying scrupulosity and horror at how everyone is suffering and the state of the world, and self-loathing for not helping others, or for eating pork, or for cow farming being a thing, or that cars exist, or that people don’t use edged weapons that much, or that we’re chordates, or that everything is messy, or that faces exist, or that games or music or any other thing unrelated to actual suffering is horrifically, intolerably wrong. I end up modeling Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff a lot, because most of my important people are Ravenclaw, and the only one I interact with IRL is Hufflepuff.
I would say that I was a burned Gryffindor, but your model of a burned Gryffindor is counter to my experience of “everything is horrible, everyone is terrible, nothing will ever change, nothing will change, might as well destroy the whole planet”, and it’s clear how that might be a Slytherin burnstate either. I’m experiencing something similar to the Ravenclaw burnstate, but I generally attribute it to having been gaslit for a few years near constantly by my former tutors, as well as prior gas- and marshlighting in ABA and other IEP stuff in the public elementary and middleschools I attended in the years prior to those tutors. I don’t have a very good memory, I don’t think, and often doubt my judgement and memories, and it’s horrifying, because I can’t trust anything I think I know, and I know that I definitely can’t trust anything from anyone else, either, because even if they mean well, they’ll still fuck up and I’ve had those trust issues since I was a third grader, and almost all my experiences continue to enforce that message.
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