Commonsense Good, Creative Good

The idea is, normally just do straightforwardly good things. Be cooperative, friendly, and considerate. Embrace the standard virtues. Don't stress about the global impacts or second-order altruistic effects of minor decisions. But also identify the very small fraction of your decisions which are likely to have the largest effects and put a lot of creative energy into doing the best you can.

I agree with this, but would add that IMO, after you work out the consequentialist analysis of the small set of decisions that are worth intensive thought/effort/research, it is quite worthwhile to additionally work out something like a folk ethical account of why your result is correct, or of how the action you're endorsing coheres with deep virtues/deontology/tropes/etc.  

There are two big upsides to this process:

1. As you work this out, you get some extra checks on your reasoning -- maybe folk ethics sees something you're missing here; and
    
2. At least as importantly: a good folk ethical account will let individuals and groups cohere around the proposed action, in a simple, conscious, wanting-the-good-thing-together way, without needing to dissociate from what they're doing (whereas accounts like "it's worth dishonesty in this one particular case" will be harder to act on wholeheartedly, even when basically correct).  And this will work a lot better.

IMO, this is similar to: in math, we use heuristics and intuitions and informal reasoning a lot, to guess how to do things -- and we use detailed, not-condensed-by-heuristics algebra or mathematical proof steps sometimes also, to work out how a thing goes that we don't yet find intuitive or obvious.  But after writing a math proof the sloggy way, it's good to go back over it, look for "why it worked," "what was the true essence of the proof, that made it tick," and see if there is now a way to "see it at a glance," to locate ways of seeing that will make future such situations more obvious, and that can live in one's system 1 and aesthetics as well as in one's sloggy explicit reasoning.

Or, again, in coding: usually we can use standard data structures and patterns.  Sometimes we have to hand-invent something new.  But after coming up with the something new: it's good, often, to condense it into readily parsable/remember-able/re-useable stuff, instead of hand spaghetti code.

Or, in physics and many other domains: new results are sometimes counterintuitive, but it is advisable to then work out intuitions [LW · GW] whereby reality may be more intuitive in the future.

I don't have my concepts well worked out here yet, which is why I'm being so long-winded and full of analogies.  But I'm pretty sure that folk ethics, where we have it worked out, has a bunch of advantages over consequentialist reasoning that're kind of like those above. 

• As the OP notes, folk ethics can be applied to hundreds of decisions per day, without much thought per each;
• As the OP notes, folk ethics have been tested across huge numbers of past actions by huge numbers of people.  New attempts at folk ethical reasoning can't have this advantage fully.  But: I think when things are formulated simply enough, or enough in the language of folk ethics, we can back-apply them a lot more on a lot of known history and personally experienced anecdotes ad so on (since they are quick to apply, as in the above bullet point), and can get at least some of the "we still like this heuristic after considering it in a lot of different contexts with known outcomes" advantage.
• As OP implies, folk ethics is more robust to a lot of the normal human bias temptations ("x must be right, because I'd find it more convenient right this minute") compared to case-by-case reasoning;
• It is easier for us humans to work hard on something, in a stable fashion, when we can see in our hearts that it is good, and can see how it relates to everything else we care about.  Folk ethics helps with this.  Maybe folk ethics, and notions of virtue and so on, kind of are takes on how a given thing can fit together with all the little decisions and all the competing pulls as to what's good?  E.g. the OP lists as examples of commonsense goods "patience, respect, humility, moderation, kindness, honesty" -- and all of these are pretty usable guides to how to be while I care about something, and to how to relate that caring to l my other cares and goals.
• I suspect there's something particularly good here with groups.  We humans often want to be part of groups that can work toward a good goal across a long period of time, while maintaining integrity, and this is often hard because groups tend to degenerate with time into serving individuals' local power, becoming moral fads, or other things that aren't as good as the intended purpose.  Ethics, held in common by the group's common sense, is a lot of how this is ever avoided, I think; and this is more feasible if the group is trying to serve a thing whose folk ethics (or "commonsense good") has been worked out, vs something that hasn't.

For a concrete example: 

AI safety obviously matters.  The folk ethics of "don't let everyone get killed if you can help it" are solid, so that part's fine.  But in terms of tactics: I really think we need to work out a "commonsense good" or "folk ethics" type account of things like:

1. Is it okay to try to get lots of power, by being first to AI and trying to make use of that power to prevent worse AI outcomes?  (My take: maybe somehow, but I haven't seen the folk ethics worked out, and a good working out would give a lot of checks here, I think.)  
2. Is it okay to try to suppress risky research, e.g. via frowning at people and telling them that only bad people do AI research, so as to try to delay tech that might kill everyone?  (My take: probably, on my guess -- but a good folk ethics would bring structure and intuitions somehow, like, it would work out how this is different from other kinds of "discourage people from talking and figuring things out," it would have perceivable virtues or something for noticing the differences, which would help people then track the differences on the group commonsense level in ways that help the group's commonsense not erode its general belief in the goodness of people sharing information and doing things).

Just want to plug Josh Greene's great book Moral Tribes here (disclosure: he's my former boss). Moral Tribes basically makes the same argument in different/more words: we evolved moral instincts that usually serve us pretty well, and the tricky part is realizing when we're in a situation that requires us to pull out the heavy-duty philosophical machinery.

Yeah, in general, we are pretty compute limited and should stick to good heuristics for most kinds of problems. I do think that most people rely too much on heuristics, so for the average person the useful lesson is "actually stop and think about things once in a while", but I can see how the opposite problem may sometimes arise in this community.

[Forum Repost] Didn't catch this until just now, but happy to see the idea expanded a bit more! I'll have to sit down and think on it longer, but I did have some immediate thoughts. 

I guess at its core I'm unsure what exactly a proper balance of thinking about folk ethics^[1] (or commonsense good) and reasoned ethics^[2] (or creative good) is, when exactly you should engage in each. You highlight the content, that reasoned ethics should be brought in for the big decisions, those with longevity generally. And Ana [LW(p) · GW(p)] starts to map this out a bit further, saying reasoned ethics involves an analysis of "the small set of decisions that are worth intensive thought/effort/research" But even if the decision set is small, if it's just these really big topics, the time spent implementing major decisions like these is likely long and full of many day to day tradeoffs and choices. Sure, eating vegan is now a system one task for me, but part of what solidified veganism for me was bringing in my discomfort from reasoned ethics into my day to day for awhile, for months even. The folk ethics there (for me) was entirely in the opposite direction, and I honestly don't think I would have made the switch if I didn't bring reasoned ethics into my everyday decisions. 

I guess for that reason I'm kind of on guard, looking for other ways my commonsense intuitions about what I should do might be flawed. And sure, when you set it up like "folk ethics is just sticking to basic principles of benevolence, of patience, honesty and kindness" few will argue adherence to this is flawed. But it's rarely these principles and instead the application of them where the disagreement comes in. My family and I don't disagree that kindness is an important value, we disagree on what practicing kindness in the world looks like. 

In light of this, I think I'd propose the converse of Anna's comments: stick to folk ethics for most of the day to day stuff, but with some frequency^[3] bring the reasoned ethics into your life, into the day to day, to see if how you are living is in accord with your philosophical commitments. This could look like literally going through a day wearing the reasoned ethics hat, or it could even look like taking stock of what what has happened over a period of time and reflecting on whether those daily decisions are in accord. Maybe this community is different, but I agree with Eccentricity [LW(p) · GW(p)] that I generally see way to little of this in the world, and really wish people engaged in it more. 

1. ^{^}

   I'll use folk ethics in place of commonsense good hereafter because I find the term compelling

2. ^{^}

   I'll use reasoned ethics in place of creative good because I think this set (folk ethics and reasoned ethics) feels more intuitive. Sorry for changing the language, it just made it easier for me to articulate myself here.

3. ^{^}

   Really unsure what's best here so I'm leaving it intentionally vague. If I had to suggest something, at least an annual review and time of reflection is warranted (I like to do this at the end of the calendar year but I think you could do it w/e) and at most I think checking in each week (running through a day at the end of the week really thinking if the decisions and actions you are taking make sense) might be good.

Luckily, humans have lived for centuries under these constraints, and we've developed ideas of what is "good" that turn out to be a solid guide to typical situations. Moral systems around the world don't agree on everything, but on questions of how to live your daily life they're surprisingly close: patience, respect, humility, moderation, kindness, honesty. I'm thankful we have all this learning on makes for harmonious societies distilled into our cultures to support us in our interactions.

In a sense, deontology is nothing if not well-tested consequentialism. Just rules selected for (sometimes even by quite literal evolutionary processes) because they work in terms of making societies thrive, turned into broad heuristics. That still doesn't mean they're always right, especially in such an out-of-distribution world as the modern one we've created, but yeah, for trivial stuff they work.

One thing to note though is that the review question you pose actually can be seen as a conflict between two very basic common sense principles. One is to be helpful and friendly to someone you've directly interacted with and that maybe was helpful and friendly to you, even though perhaps not a great cook. The other is to be truthful to perfect strangers, even if it means hurting slightly that person. Different moralities and cultures actually tend to produce different answers to these questions. There's an expression that was coined to describe a certain flaw widespread in some parts of Italian culture, "amoral familism" - the tendency to prefer simply helping your own, your tribe (family, friends, acquaintances) over any other value. That's overly skewed towards one end and often actively harmful for a healthy social fabric. At the other end though, even being always strictly rule-bound and never moved by sympathy can make for a fundamentally cruel demeanor. So in many ways there's still some balancing to do, probably based on weighing a sense of immediate consequences at least. Though of course trying to go too deep down the rabbit hole of multiple orders of effects leads to infinite recursion and paralysis.

This makes me think that a useful meta-principle for application of moral principles in the absence omniscience is "robustness to auxillary information." Phrased another way, if the variance of the outcomes of your choices is high according to a moral principle, in all but the most extreme cases, either find more information or pick a different moral principle.