We’re in Leesburg, Virginia at Stone Tower Winery today. It’s beautiful:

I’m sharing an excerpt from Tyler Cowen’s book Stubborn Attachments:

Rights rarely conflict with consequences in the simple ways set out by philosophical thought experiments. We can therefore shift the way we think about radical uncertainty and consequences. Rather than let it paralyze us, we can think of radical uncertainty as giving us the freedom to act morally, without the fear that we are engaging in consequentialist destruction. We can also see this radical uncertainty as supporting a new enchantment with human life and choice.

We can accept that most or all of our actions will have consequences we cannot possibly predict. On average, these consequences will be positive, just as average economic growth is positive. But we will always wonder about the future consequences we have set in motion. We will wonder about our strange and almost magical powers in this regard. For all the confusion we might feel about the marginal product of an individual act, this is also an empowering notion, and it relates to the idea that all fruitful societies are based on some notion of faith.

In this case, we can hold on to our faith in doing the right thing, and indeed in doing the right thing for its own sake, without being brutally beaten back by the fear that we are bringing about some sort of consequentialist disaster.