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The Unimagined Good<br>Where Do New Ideas About What is Good Come From?

Michael Nielsen<br>Jul 31, 2026

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This essay is about moral imagination as a design practice, including my own unresolved confrontation with one of its results. Posted to both my Substack and my notebook – comments are open at both, and I’d love to hear your thoughts!

And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good – Need we ask anyone to tell us these things? – Robert Pirsig, inspired by Plato

One of my favourite places is the St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, in the Potrero Hill neighbourhood of San Francisco. It’s unassuming from the outside. You enter to see a dome ringed with shining life-size saints, all dancing. If you look closely, you realize these are not the usual Christian saints. You see Rumi, Mohandas Gandhi, Anne Frank, Charles Darwin, Paul Erdős, and more, a generous, expansive notion of sainthood:

The Church is named for a bishop of the long-vanished town of Nyssa, in what is now Turkey. In his own time, Gregory was a small-town bishop, peripheral to affairs of the Church. He wrote several books, but they became well known only long after his death. In 379 CE he delivered a homily on Ecclesiastes that contains the first known unequivocal condemnation of slavery. Gregory argued that since human beings are made in God’s image, to enslave another person is to set oneself above God. In Gregory’s words:<br>If [humanity] is in the likeness of God, … who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or rather, not even to God himself. […] God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since [God] himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God’s?

Today, such a condemnation is unsurprising. We know slavery is bad. But in Gregory’s time it was an almost unthinkable idea. As far back as we have records, slavery is present in every large civilization, from China to Mesopotamia to Rome. There is no problem with slavery in the Indian Vedas, in the Chinese Analects, or in the Greek Philosophers. Nor in the Christian Bible, where slaves appear often, and slaveholding is sometimes depicted positively. A person could own another person. St. Paul comes close to showing discomfort: in his letter to Philemon he returns a runaway slave, but asks that the man be received “no longer as a slave but as a brother.” But even Paul does not take the step of condemning slavery itself.<br>Then Gregory, in 379 CE, steps outside the ideas and institutions of his society, and condemns slavery entire. Countless people have been slaves, their lives owned by another. Gregory had the moral imagination to realize this was unequivocally wrong.<br>Unfortunately, he was almost entirely ignored. The idea was perhaps too strange, too upsetting to the order of things. It didn’t launch a movement or change church teaching. St. Augustine, a generation later and far more influential, continued to treat slavery as a consequence of sin, part of the divine order, not something to fight against. The world had to wait 1,200 or so more years for the idea to be rediscovered and then slowly enacted1.<br>“that the strong not oppress the weak”

Moral imagination shapes and reshapes humanity. More than 2,000 years before Gregory, Hammurabi ruled Babylon, near the Euphrates River in modern Iraq. Today, Hammurabi is best known for his law code, one of the progenitors of modern justice systems. The code may be seen in the Louvre Museum in Paris, carved into a stone pillar over two meters tall and weighing four tonnes. At the top of the pillar Hammurabi is shown receiving a rod and ring – signifying the authority to measure and judge others – from Shamash, the sun god of Babylon. Below, the pillar contains the text of the law code – 282 provisions, ranging from how to treat a murderer to what to do if someone floods a neighbour’s granary. The provisions are too small to see in this image, but up close they blanket the pillar.

In the prologue to the law code we are told the gods have called Hammurabi forth “to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, that the strong might not oppress the weak.” The epilogue repeats this last phrase, and expands on it: “that the strong might not oppress the weak, and that even the orphan and the widow might be treated with justice… let the oppressed person stand before my monument and have the words read aloud, so that person’s mind can rest easy that justice will be done.”<br>This is a striking argument. Hammurabi is not justifying his rule by birth to the previous king. Nor by being himself a god. Nor even by military conquests or by good governance. No: Hammurabi’s power is justified by the service he does for the weak, protecting them from the strong. The idea was...