Beliefs as a ranking of value

In order to make your beliefs into a description of behavior, you have to realize that they are a tool for measuring value. An honest person actively asks themselves what is best at all times and in all things.¹ They use their beliefs to assess cost and benefit of everything.

One reason that so many struggle to live their beliefs is that they use them as a rigid list of what is good and what is bad. This artificial representation pits desire against belief, when they are designed to work in concert with each other. Real morality is to live according to what is best, and what is best will never be some rigid set of rules externally given. Instead, what is best is determined by your understanding of the value of all potential choices. When you aim for what is best, your desire accomplishes your morality, rather than fighting against it.

As your understanding of reality increases, you will come to see the set of choices available and the cost and benefit of each more clearly. Your model will grow to include detail about things that must co-occur and things that can’t co-occur, as well as things that require prerequisites. All of these details will factor into the value you appraise in certain options, and this will, in turn, change what you desire and how much you desire it. Always be willing to override your prior understanding of what is best.²

As you come to adopt a more robust understanding of right and wrong as a gradient instead of two discrete lists, you will more easily reconcile your beliefs and desires, because you will be freed of the need to do what is right through the exercise of brute force willpower. Instead, your desire for what you see has the greatest value will automatically increase as a result of explicitly thinking about what is valuable, why it is valuable, and what other options exist.