Capitalized Abstract Nouns

On Facebook, Marcello Herreshoff posted a list of Capitalized Abstract Nouns that people believe in. Marcello provided it as a resource for an exercise to help individuals explicate their own preferences, but that exercise is not my main interest here. My aim to form a taxonomy of things that people believe in, working off of Marcello's list.

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Conditions: People believe in preferred conditions of individual existence such as {innocence, dignity, strength, health, and freedom} and conditions of collective existence, such as {equity, order, accountability, and justice}. Also, people believe in beauty, which might be a preferred condition of reality, independent of the existence of people. Asserting a belief in these is perhaps asserting that the audience should also value the conditions.

Standards: People believe in behavioral standards or procedures (both individual & collective) such as {decency, fairness, honesty, efficiency, cleanliness, discipline, faith, and patience}. Statements of belief in these are partly assertions of their terminal value, and partly assertions of their instrumental efficacy in obtaining good conditions.

Agents: People believe in particular agents (individual & collective) such as {god, nature, human society, America, the American military, the global market, Whatever Inc, Senator Whomever, and themselves}. Belief in these is mostly about the ability of the agent to obtain good conditions, and partly about the ethical behavior of the agent, and a little bit about the terminal value of the agent's existence.

People believe in non-particular agents also, such as {family, friends, volunteers, patrons, citizens, stewards, and leaders}. Saying "I believe in family" means something very close to "I believe in the value of the relational behavioral standard of kinship," but I've decided to make this a separate category from believing in the other behavioral standards like decency, fairness, and honesty.

Projects: People believe in projects, movements, and social systems, such as {the reformation, open source software, democracy, feudalism, the war on drugs, and miscegenation} Belief in these is a lot like belief in particular agents.

People believe in bodies of knowledge and procedure, such as {education, medicine, tradition, law, and functional programming}. These are more like the behavioral standards.

Dunno: The last one I really care about categorizing is "The Future". Is that like believing in a particular narrative, as in "I believe in the virgin birth of Christ"? Or is the future conceived of as an agent bringing about desirable conditions? Or is the future thought of as desirable condition itself, like beauty? Or is the future a non-particular collective project, like believing in revolution? Maybe it's the normal kind of belief, and people are just saying that the future exists. Probably not that one, but I don't know.

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SO THEN: People believe in good things, good lives, good conduct, good people and institutions and social roles, good projects, and maybe things in whatever category The Future belongs to. Riveting.

Pragmatic evidential semantic speech attitudes or something

There are more possible relationships between the content of your speech and your meaning than "serious" and "sarcastic".

1. I believe what I'm saying.
2. I kind of believe what I'm saying.
3. I said a thing that I believe in an unusual way so that you would understand how sincerely I believe it.
4. I would be surprised if what I was saying was mostly right, but we have to start with something if we are to compose a productive theory.
5. Some part of me believes what I'm saying, but I don't endorse that.
6. Some part of me doesn't believe what I'm saying, but I don't endorse that.
7. I believed what I was saying as I was saying it, but then I totally remembered or figured out that it was all wrong.
8. I don't really mean any of what I'm saying, but I'm saying it because of some impulse.
9. I don't strongly believe what I'm saying, but I'm still saying it because it's (funny | hurtful | interesting | a prank, mate | shit-posting | so random hahaha | expected of me | habitual | what someone else said | useful | phatic | ... ).
10. What I'm saying is literally true, but I don't mean all of the connotations that you're reading from it.
11. What I'm saying is literally false, but I meant the connotations that you're reading from it.
12. I don't know how to say a thing that I would mean, but what I'm saying gets close to the issue.
13. I know what I would like to say, but I'm saying something slightly wrong for sake of brevity.
14. I know what I would like to say, but I'm saying it with lots of indirection because you wouldn't respond well.
15. I'm not resolved yet as to whether I believe what I'm saying, but I will believe if someone finds a laudable reading of it or if lots of people seem to like it.
16. The state of affairs became true because I declared it.
17. What I'm saying is unrelated to my beliefs.
18. I thought I didn't believe the thing as I was saying it, but I have now been convinced by hearing my articulate argument aloud.
19. I believe what I'm saying, but not quite so much that I want to defend it while some asshole on twitter picks it apart.
20. I meant multiple readings of what I said, to different degrees toward different audiences, but I wouldn't normally try to simultaneously independently steer the beliefs of multiple audiences unless I were showing off to yet another audience.
21. I said the thing precisely because I thought you wouldn't know what it meant or if it meant something.
22. What I'm saying doesn't mean anything.
23. I meant the opposite of what I said, you butt.

Candidate Moral Imperatives

1. Do good. Achieve good. Maximize good.
2. Improve things, especially conditions for people and moral patients. Don't worsen things. Optimize everything. Depessimize everything.
3. Do wondrous deeds.
4. Be good effectively. Waste no motions. With every move, become closer to achieving the goal.
5. Make progress. Invest effort where gains will accrue.
6. Do the things you think you should be doing.
7. Do the least total harm. Prevent large harms.
8. Prevent bad and insufficient good. Prioritize preventing frequent and severe bad things.
9. Keep bad things small and infrequent.
10. Enable the least harm to triumph over greater harms.
11. Signal your moral character more effectively.
12. Summon good.
13. Avoid paths leading into hells.
14. Party on responsibly.
15. Create good. Create more and better good.
16. Cause the change you wish to see in the world.
17. Reduce the expected magnitude of potential harms.
18. Abstain from vice.
19. Be cautious in ever doing things that you consider sinful or which others widely consider sinful.
20. Don't just not do the thing, but leave a safe margin around doing the thing.
21. Preserve good. Destroy bad.
22. Act so as to best serve universal well-being.
23. Hack at the sources of bad.
26. Be good. Be good better. Be good ambitiously. Be virtuous. Be great. Become better.
27. Be so fucking rad.
28. Build good character.
29. Become an ideal. Do god's job. Become a savior.
30. Don't become a grotesque parody of yourself.
31. Become a superlative example of righteousness.
32. Don't be a dick.
33. Attach the self to meaning.
34. Continually strike envy in the hearts of men with the weight of your philosophical authority on righteousness.
35. Be reasonable, rational, prudent, wise.
36. Become the person.
37. Become the forerunner.
38. Find ways to become better.
39. Be less than the regular amount of terrible for a human.
40. Become proof that greater unimagined goods are possible.
41. Be just. Alter the distribution of benefits and burdens across people to be closer in accordance with the merits of those people? Be reputable. Keep promises? Be responsible. Make amends if you previously worsened things? Be scrupulous.
42. Be nice. Be excellent to each other. Be charitable.
43. Learn to want to follow whatever the correct standards are.
44. Learn skills.
45. Preserve parts of yourself which may be good.
46. Hold yourself to a higher standard.
47. Become good enough to justify the continued existence of the places you inhabit.
48. Don't continue becoming not good, if that's what you're doing.
49. Become terrifyingly formidable.
50. Become a person who seems to hail from a culture with greater moral and philosophical authority.
51. Become better, even knowing that better might not be good enough.
52. If you're an ok person, and you want to improve in some ways, and other people would want you to improve in those ways, become that person.
53. Become a person whose words show that you bear a great wealth of careful reasoning and relevant practice.
55. Cultivate a hunger to improve.
56. Commit to doing good. Pledge yourself to good. Comply with your past declarations of intent to do good.
57. Regain the ability to respond to the meaning of things.
58. Try to try.
59. Live in your name.
60. Adopt important responsibilities.
61. Cultivate an intrusive conscience.
62. Set your heart on a pilgrimage.
63. Maintain a desire to improve.
64. Do good relentlessly.
65. Don't look for reasons to do bad.
66. Act as though you care strongly about things that affect lots of people, even when you don't.
67. Occasionally cultivate a motivated disposition insensitive to goal feasibility.
69. Reinforce good. 
70. Help people to be good. Show gratitude when another person improves conditions for you or yours.
71. Coordinate with good. Affiliate with causes that are trying to do good.
72. Promote participation on solving important problems. Prioritize important topics that are hard to have opinions on.
73. Become a rallying point for good.
74. Create places for people to do good. Build reputable organizations for achieving good.
75. Seek and amplify the good processes that created the good parts of you.
76. Find and amplify the process that generates entities that heed meta-level advice such as this.
77. Evaluate goodness anew.
78. 
    
80. Go meta first.
81. Seek whence.
82. Act in a way that greater commands your own endorsement.
83. Don’t do things that prevent people from offering you good opportunities.
84. Don’t do things that spoil people's ability to reach the Pareto frontier.
85. If you should simply do well what you were meant to do, only figure this out by being meant to figure well.
86. Do correctly whatever you have been (self-)created to do.
87. Do things for which you and members of your outgroup would both want to be remembered.
88. Do the things which a better version of you wishes you would do.
89. Act by universalizable principles.
90. Act by principles which everyone can rationally will that you act by.
91. Act by principles which no one can not reasonably reject that everyone act by.
93. First take the plank out of your own eye.
94. Keep your identity small.
95. Make no graven image capable of suffering.
96. Reduce suffering generally.
97. Reduce existential risk for anything which should exist.
98. Find new ways to quantitatively estimate how good some possible courses of action are.
99. Prevent the heat death of the universe. Avoid the loss of resources generally.
100. Enter situations where you can act decisively.
101. Do not boil a young goat in its mother's milk.
102. Write fresh scripture. 
103. Stay out of your own way.
104. Don't shoot yourself in the foot. 
105. Eat mostly plants.
106. Don't believe everything you hallucinate.
107. Help people to analyze the failures of their self-analysis.
108. Try to identify what things might pave a slippery, sloping road to hell.
109. Harvest baboon organs.
110. Analyze incentives producing coordination problems.
111. Over-chlorinate not thy neighbor's pool.
112. Cast no aspersions on ants.
113. Love and serve one another.
114. Be the aliens you wish would contact the world.
115. Become the friend you want to talk to.
116. Become someone who lives on their own terms. Become the creator of products you love. Become the mentor you never had. Become the child you wish you had. Become the parent you wanted to grow up with. Become the spouse you want to be with.
117. Have fun. Do not hurt people. Do not accept defeat. Strive to be happy.
118. Attain knowledge of Causes and secret motions of things. Enlarge the bounds of Human Empire to the effecting of all things possible.
119. Be a simple kind of man. Be something you love and understand.