Scruple — Ethical Mail Agent
A cynical AI ethicist living in your inbox
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Matthieu Cherubini

Scruple — Ethical Mail Agent - A cynical AI ethicist living in your inbox

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Scruple replaces moral hesitation with computation. It runs four ethical frameworks on your emails and writes the replies — simulating compassion, automating principle, outsourcing guilt. It produces better answers than you would. It feels nothing about any of them. That’s the point.

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Matthieu Cherubini
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Hey everyone. Scruple is a Chrome extension that reads the email you're dreading and runs it through 4 ethical frameworks in parallel — Utilitarian, Duty Ethics, Self-Interest, and Virtue Ethics. Each scores the situation on shared dimensions (empathy, assertiveness, honesty, pragmatism) and produces a draft reply. The four answers contradict each other more often than they align. A line chart shows the frameworks pulling in different directions across the same axes. You pick the one that fits, or the least uncomfortable compromise, and press send. The reasoning is outsourced. The guilt is diffused across philosophies. What’s interesting is what comes out of using it: Does choosing the “ethical” reply make it ethical? Does it matter if the reasoning is genuine or simulated? And what does it say about us that outsourcing the moral work to a machine feels like relief? Full write-up: https://medium.com/@mchrbn/scrup...