How Do We Define What Is Good & Bad? | Cosmic Skeptic | Modern Wisdom Podcast 214

Alex O'Connor is a philosopher & YouTuber. Get ready for a mental workout today as Alex poses some of the most famous and most difficult questions in ethics. What does it mean to say that something is good? Why SHOULD you do one thing instead of another thing? Why should we care about wellbeing? What is the definition of suffering? On whose authority is anything good or bad? Sponsor: Check out everything I use from The Protein Works at https://www.theproteinworks.com/modernwisdom/ (35% off everything with the code MODERN35) Extra Stuff: Watch Alex on YouTube - https://youtu.be/gcVR2OVxPYw Subscribe to Alex on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/CosmicSkeptic Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #morality #ethics #cosmicskeptic - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex O'Connor?

  There's a difference between doing and allowing. There's a difference between allowing a bad thing to happen and being the cause of a bad thing to happen. But it gets even more complicated than that because like you've got to decide like, how are you defining the difference between doing and allowing? Like, what, what really is the difference there? For example, if I walk up to somebody who is attached to a life support machine and I unplug them, I killed them or I allowed them to die?

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  Alex bloody O'Connor, how are you?

• 0:29Alex O'Connor?

  Chris, I'm, I'm well, all the better for seeing you, as they say. It's been, it's been too, it's been too long. I haven't seen you in person since we went to that event in London. And I can't think how long ago that was now, where you made me do the yoga that you seem to be telling everyone and their dog about. That photo of me, that photo of me that you keep posting is like, you know, the one of Beyonce that she wanted to disappear from the internet? That's my version of that, is me trying to work out how to put my leg under the, yeah, it was a nightmare.

• 0:59Alex O'Connor?

  But yeah, it's a shame. It's good to be speaking to you again, even if it's a, a public conversation.

• 1:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I know, man, it is. That was one hell of a weekend. One, one, one hell of a weekend. I've, I've got the full length, one hour yoga form, recording both of us doing it side by side, and I'm considering offering it out to the highest bidder. I'm pretty certain there's some people on the internet, some fairly sort of prominent debaters of yours that would pay good money for that kind of ammunition.

• 1:28Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, yeah, I, I, I do worry about some of the ammunition that my friends have on me and the people they could sell it to. I think maybe I could release it as a Patreon exclusive or something. That might be a good, or you could release it as a Patreon exclusive.

• 1:39Chris Williamson?

  And then steal all your patrons.

• 1:40Alex O'Connor?

  There you go, yeah. Yeah, they'll, they'll jump over to you there. Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. But you know, I haven't even seen that video. So God knows what other weird shapes I try to morph my body into.

• 1:52Chris Williamson?

  It was graceful. It was, it was your first time, you know? No one's good at the first time.

• 1:56Alex O'Connor?

  No one's.

• 1:58Chris Williamson?

  No one's good at the first time.

• 1:59Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, no one's good at the first time, as they say.

• 2:03Chris Williamson?

  But no, yeah, that was, that was February, man. That was a while ago.

• 2:05Alex O'Connor?

  Was that February?

• 2:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:07Alex O'Connor?

  Man, it's crazy. It's crazy world out there.

• 2:11Alex O'Connor?

  I, I've been getting a bit of flack for it actually, because, you know, speaking, I, because I, I'm, we're going to be talking about ethics today.

• 2:20Alex O'Connor?

  Because when you reached out to me and I was on your podcast before and we talked about veganism, which was the first time we properly spoke and that was ages ago now. But of course, talking about veganism requires ethics more broadly as an underlying. But hopefully, I can sway you in an ethical direction that puts you off the idea of sharing those videos of me online, but we'll see where it goes.

• 2:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay, I see how you're circling this back around now. I am a bad friend if that video ever surfaces anywhere. So, okay, ethics, morality, where do we start?

• 2:52Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, well, look, I mean, it's a complicated business, right? Ethics, generally speaking, people have broad intuitions that certain things are right or wrong. And it's clear that some of these things seem to vary across cultures, across upbringings. But generally speaking, everybody seems to have some kind of intuition that there is such thing as right or wrong. When you break down ethics, there are a number of layers in which you can look at it. So, one of the most important distinctions is between what might be called practical ethics and what might be called meta ethics. The simplest way to define these two is to say that practical ethics answers the question of what is good, whereas meta ethics answers the question of what good is, right?

• 3:36Alex O'Connor?

  So, if you're talking about practical ethics, this is generally what people think of when they think of ethics, right? Like, is abortion moral? Is euthanasia permissible? These kinds of questions, questions of veganism, that kind of stuff, social justice, any of that. But underlying that, we need to have some understanding of the meaning of the words we're using. I mean, what does it actually mean to say something is good? What does it mean to say that you ought to do something? Like, what are the definitions of these terms? And this is what you'd call meta ethics. And this is the more difficult part, in my view. And it's the part that, like, kind of there, there seems to be the most kind of irresolvable disagreements. Because if you just have a different intuition about what good is, then you're kind of talking past each other.

• 4:18Alex O'Connor?

  Whereas if you can at least agree that, say, you think that good consists in what maximizes well-being for conscious creatures, then when you have an argument about veganism, it becomes essentially an objective discussion, because you can just objectively point to what affects well-being in various ways. But if you disagree about what it actually means...

• 4:38Alex O'Connor?

  Then you run into problems, right? The thing is, like, nobody, nobody seems to agree on this, right? This isn't like a scientific endeavor where you, you conduct a bunch of experiments and you do peer review and then you just figure out what the answer is. It's like, we're asking the same questions that Aristotle and Plato were asking, you know, like, not much has actually changed. Uh, and a lot of the time, it, it's useful to read those classics because a lot of people end up reinventing the wheel and doing it badly because they're kind of thinking about ethics and they have this bright idea or anything, this is amazing. Um, but it turns out, you know, a hundred other people have done it before them, but it's so buried in the literature that they don't know it exists. So it's really worth kind of familiarizing yourself with some of the, at least the basic kind of, uh, conceptions of ethics a- a- across the board before you can jump into talking about practical ethics.

• 5:23Alex O'Connor?

  Um, but I, I don't know, like, the, the kind of most, uh, interesting distinction that people tend to start with is what ethics is kind of, what ethics is kind of driving at, right? I mean, so for instance, if I asked you what you think it means to say something is good, what, what does that, I mean, what do you, according to your intuition, what do you think that really means?

• 5:45Chris Williamson?

  Leaving the situation with more well-being or less suffering than when you found it?

• 5:55Alex O'Connor?

  Sure. So the question trivially just becomes, why should you care about well-being? Why, why does that matter? Why shouldn't we try to maximize suffering?

• 6:04Chris Williamson?

  There is a preference in one way, and that tends towards something which is not painful.

• 6:14Alex O'Connor?

  Okay, but what if someone comes along and says, look, I, I prefer other people to suffer. I don't want myself to suffer, but I think, you know, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a sadist and I really enjoy other people's suffering, so I think the best thing to do is to cause as much suffering to them as possible whilst minimizing my own suffering.

• 6:29Chris Williamson?

  Presuming that we're all sovereign wills.

• 6:34Chris Williamson?

  The preference of one shouldn't influence the preference of another.

• 6:38Alex O'Connor?

  Right, so now the question becomes why, right? Because you can say something like, look, generally there's a preference towards this thing or the other, but just because the majority of people prefer something, that doesn't mean it's necessarily the right thing to do, okay? And the first question that this highlights is objectivity in ethics, right? One of the most important distinctions to make is between a conception of objective ethics and a conception of subjective ethics. To say that something is objectively right, or objectively moral, say that objective ethics exists, is to say that ethical propositions are true regardless of what people think about them, right? It doesn't matter what your opinion is, in other words, because you say something like, well, it could be to do with like a preference for well-being, but if everybody on planet Earth decided that, you know, the Holocaust was the right thing to do, right?

• 7:23Alex O'Connor?

  Let's say the Holocaust wiped out all of its opposition, and Germany win the war, and everybody, or at least the majority on planet Earth, are convinced that that was a good thing to do. Most people want to say that that doesn't matter, it was still bad, it was still wrong, even if everybody doesn't agree with that, right?

• 7:37Chris Williamson?

  There's something universal that sits outside of what an individual's sense of is.

• 7:43Alex O'Connor?

  Right. Now, of course, that leads us to the intuition that morality does have at least some objectivity, right? That there, that you can say that an ethical proposition is actually true or false, right? And it doesn't matter what you think about it. The problem then becomes grounding it, right? Like, on whose authority is it good or bad? Now, traditionally, this is where religion would step up to the mark, and still tries to today, and in fact, a popular argument for the existence of God is the moral argument. And the moral argument is really simple, and it says, if, if God does not exist, objective morality does not exist. Objective morality does exist, therefore God exists, right? The idea being that if there is such thing as objective morality, it needs to be grounded

• 8:26Alex O'Connor?

  in something, and it can only really be grounded in some kind of authority, right? It can't be grounded in some kind of preference of a human being, or some kind of naturalistic feature, it has to have some kind of authority behind it, and that can only really come from a kind of supernatural authority that supersedes everybody else, right? And so it's basically saying that because objective morality exists, God must exist. And there are- Multiple ways to respond to this. The first is to try to ground objective morality in something else. But the second thing you can do, before we get too far ahead of ourselves, is to just say that morality actually isn't objective, right? You could say that morality is subjective. That is, it is dependent on what the person feels. Now, of course, the biggest problem with this is that you run into the kind of situations where somebody might say,

• 9:09Alex O'Connor?

  "Well, in my subjective opinion, the Holocaust was a good thing. Therefore, it was the right thing to do," right? And this doesn't sit right with us. But there are kind of different levels that subjectivity can work, right? So let me give you one example of the utilitarian case. Utilitarianism is broadly an objective ethical theory, but I'll give you a kind of form of it that could demonstrate how the objective and the subjective can come together. So I might say something like, "I subjectively value my well-being, and so do you. You subjectively value your well-being, and everybody subjectively values their well-being." Now, it's trivially true that you have to value your own pleasure. You have to think it's a good thing, right?

• 9:54Alex O'Connor?

  Some people take pleasure in things that other people find painful, but that would just be a wrong definition of pain for them, because for them, that would be a pleasurable experience, or at least it would lead to a pleasurable experience. Now, I can say something like, "Look, the preference for pleasure is subjective, right? It's just due to your preference, right? But there are objective things we can know about how to maximize it." So if I was a utilitarian who thought that the basic justification for having pleasure and well-being and suffering as the basis on which we ground ethics, I could say that that's subjective, but I could then be objectivist in my ways of kind of analyzing situations and seeing what would actually maximize pleasure, right?

• 10:39Alex O'Connor?

  So it can get a bit complicated, right? And it's like, this isn't even the beginning. But like, one of the best ways oftentimes to explore different ethical theories, and one of the ways in which people like to write about it in the academy, is essentially to rely on intuition, right? Because you come up with some kind of ethical theory and you need a way to test it. So you have your ethical theory, and then you run it against some kind of counter example. And you say, "Well, this ethical theory leads us to this conclusion, which seems so absurd." That we have to reject the ethical theory. And this is a lot of the time how ethics is done, right? In order to show why someone's ethical theory is wrong, you show what it leads to and show that it's that it's an absurdity or an immorality or something that's so obviously bad

• 11:24Alex O'Connor?

  that we have to throw out the theory. This is known as a reductio ad absurdum. And that's the best way to explore ethics. But like, jumping into the question of ethics, it's like, it depends on what you want to do. It depends on if you want to know what good is. It depends on if you want to sort of work out famous moral dilemmas. It depends on if you if you're just trying to look at a specific moral issue and trying to kind of break it down. Like, it depends what you want to do, right? Like, in a conversation like this, there are so many avenues you can go down.

• 11:55Chris Williamson?

  I understand. Is it possible to have a conversation about practical ethics with the conversation about meta ethics still being poorly defined? It seems a little bit like playing football, but some people think you're allowed to handle the ball and other people think you can only kick it.

• 12:08Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, well, that's exactly the problem. If you don't have the same meta ethical theory, it's like you could be playing chess with someone who's using the rules of rugby and it's just, it's not going to work, right? But generally speaking, people do have certain base level intuitions that are roughly the same, right? And you can talk about practical ethics without breaking it into meta ethics. And I think it's more interesting to do so. Because meta ethics can get, it can get complicated and tricky and you have to define the difference between doing and allowing and you have to, it gets, it gets complicated, right?

• 12:37Chris Williamson?

  I imagine it gets quite semantic as well, that you just, a lot of the time, it's what does this word mean? And then you get into sort of senses of etymology and sort of bizarre. It's just linguistic territory. This, I think, is one of the big challenges we have with communication sort of generally at the moment in the media, that no one's actually defining what words mean. Words can mean multiple things. There's a term called semantic overload, which I learned from Ben Shapiro. And that is what's being used an awful lot at the moment, semantic overload.

• 13:06Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 13:07Chris Williamson?

  So I imagine when you're having a very complex discussion, really trying to get into the weeds with something and work out the nuance of practical ethics. And then someone comes in and goes, well, I know that you said that you kicked the ball, but is it really a ball? And why is it called ball? And you're like, oh, fucking hell, mate, come on.

• 13:23Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly right. Kind of ruins the game. This is what you run into, especially if you talk to someone who's got an interest in philosophy or ethics. If you talk to them on a practical level and you say, "Well, look, I think that, you know, the mass confinement and torture of animals is immoral for the purpose of, you know, a fancy steak," right? And someone turns around, if you talk to the average person, they'll talk around, they'll turn around and say, "But what if they're treated this way? What if they're treated that way?" They bring up practical concerns. But an ethicist might say, "Well, why? Like, why should I care about animal suffering? Like, what does that matter?" And I could say, "Well, you care about animal suffering for the same reason you care about human suffering." And they say, "Why should I care about human suffering?" Yeah. And the question can go on and on and on and on and on. And you never kind of come to a useful stopping point unless you can agree on something. But you can talk

• 14:08Alex O'Connor?

  about practical ethics without breaking it down to metaethics if you do have certain, if you do have certain level agreements. So if I agree that we shouldn't cause harm to human beings unnecessarily, and so do you, then I can make an argument from consistency. I can say that, "Well, I think you're holding an inconsistent set of beliefs if you're okay with harming a human being, or you're okay with harming a non-human animal, but you're not okay with harming a human being." It's like, what are your reasons for one and the other? And I could show that maybe there's an inconsistency there, right? But like, you could be consistently wrong, right? Like, I could, we could make our ethical, practical ethical case completely consistent. I could say that, "Well, in order to be against animal exploitation, you also have to be, I don't know, you have to be pro-life in this instance

• 14:50Alex O'Connor?

  and that instance. And for some strange reason, you also have to hold this other belief and this other belief and this other belief." And you can kind of convince someone of all of those things. But like, they could just be, they could just have a consistent worldview that's wrong at its basis, right? So it depends what you're trying to do. If you're trying to convince someone of a moral cause, then it's better to talk on the practical level and try to point out inconsistencies. But if you're trying to get to the question of what is actually good, then you're better off talking a bit about metaethics. And one of the most important questions... Is what is the focus of ethics? Does the focus of ethics, uh, let's say, does ethics, should ethics focus on, say, the consequence of an action? Should it focus on the action itself?

• 15:33Alex O'Connor?

  Should it focus on the agent performing the action? Right, these three are broadly three ways in which people distinguish ethics. So if we consider a statement like murder is wrong, some people might analyze that to mean that murder is wrong because the consequences that it leads to, that is, you know, someone dying, people suffering, people mourning are bad. Right? And so generally speaking, in order to determine whether something's right or wrong, we look at the consequences of the action. Seems somewhat intuitive, but some people like to instead say that the focus of ethics should be, and this is consequentialism, sometimes called teleology from the Greek word telos for end or purpose. Some people prefer to look at the agent.

• 16:13Alex O'Connor?

  They prefer to say that, don't, the reason you shouldn't murder is because the virtuous person wouldn't murder. Right, like murder is not a virtuous thing to do. Aristotle's ethics was a virtue ethics theory, and it was kind of like the right thing to do is what the virtuous person would do. In other words, so it's not so much about the action or its consequences, it's about, it's about the person committing the action. Right? Some people prefer to just look at the action itself, not the consequence, but the action itself. They say murder is wrong in and of itself, regardless of the consequences, regardless of who's performing it. And this generally comes from, this is a kind of typical view of religious people a lot of the time with divine command theory, who think that ethics is just what's commanded by God.

• 16:57Alex O'Connor?

  So if God says, don't murder, then don't murder. That's, that's kind of it, full stop. Doesn't matter what consequences are, it's just wrong in and of itself. And all of these things have kind of weight to them. And the reason why, why people like kind of flip back and forth in them when they're studying them is because each of them seem to have kind of difficult ethical territory. Like if you, I think most people are, at the beginning tend to be more attracted to consequentialist ethics. And that's because I think that generally speaking, our society is, is a bit more based on consequentialist ethics than anything else. Like in, in the modern era, that seems to be the kind of the implicit way that people do ethics. But there are some really kind of Difficult problems with that. So for instance, let me take your proposition that

• 17:42Alex O'Connor?

  the right thing to do is what maximizes wellbeing. So this would be a consequentialist view and essentially a utilitarian one. Utilitarianism being the idea that we should maximize utility and utilitarians identify utility with pleasure. So essentially, the best thing to do is to maximize pleasure or minimize suffering. Now, there are various problems with this, but let me give you one example. This comes from a guy called Roger Crisp, who's a kind of leading John Stuart Mill scholar, and every undergraduate at Oxford has to read his commentary on utilitarianism. And he gives this example of the rash doctor. So let me ask you a question here. A doctor has

• 18:24Alex O'Connor?

  a patient, and they've got two potential medicines that they can give to the patient, like option A and option B. Option A, if successful, will restore the patient to 100% health, but it's got a 99% chance of failure and only a 1% chance of working. The 99% chance is that they'll die. So 99% chance that this is just going to kill the patient. Only 1% chance is going to succeed, but if it does, it's going to restore them fully to health. Option B, it will only restore them to, say, 85% health, but it's got a 99% chance of being successful and only a 1% chance of the patient dying. Say the doctor chooses option A, and it works. Did the doctor

• 19:09Alex O'Connor?

  do the right thing?

• 19:15Chris Williamson?

  To everyone who's listening, I've already warned you about this, but I want you to be playing along at home as well, because this difficulty, the mental gears that you're going to be able to hear in me that are whirring away, I want you to be suffering along with me. So

• 19:29Chris Williamson?

  from a consequentialist, just the outcome, does the end justify the means? I suppose, in that form, yes. You could do that a million times and keep on getting the one out of 100.

• 19:44Alex O'Connor?

  So the difficult thing to say is intuitively, when faced with the option before we know what's actually going to happen, and you've got the two medicines in front of you, you'd probably advise the doctor to take option B, right?

• 19:54Chris Williamson?

  Of course, yeah.

• 19:57Alex O'Connor?

  And that seems that seems justifiable, right? It seems like that should be the case. But the weird conclusion is that if he uses option B and it works and the patient's restored to 85% health, whether or not the doctor did the right thing completely depends on what would have happened if he'd administered drug A. Because if had he administered drug A, it failed, then what the doctor did actually did maximize well-being, right? Because it was 85% health versus death. Whereas if it were the case that had he gone for option A, it would have worked, then what he's done has actually not maximized pleasure, right? Because instead of well-being, let's say, because instead of 85% healthy, could have

• 20:38Alex O'Connor?

  got 100% health. Now, the kind of easy answer to this is to say, well, okay, so it's not actually about you. You shouldn't do what will actually maximize pleasure. You should do what will probably maximize pleasure, right? But you can see, we've already kind of adapted the theory, right? We've already gone from kind of saying, well, obviously, it's about kind of what maximizes the right thing to do is whatever's going to actually maximize someone's well-being. But like, that's not always the case.

• 21:03Chris Williamson?

  Now, there's a caveat in there.

• 21:05Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, even even if like, in this situation, yeah, had you done the other thing, it would have actually like, in in reality, in the actual world, would have caused more more pleasure. It's like, it probably wasn't justified to do that, right? So, yeah, now now we're kind of talking about probabilistic utilitarianism, right?

• 21:23Chris Williamson?

  Does this continue to roll down? So does probabilistic utilitarianism then split into some other subdivision, some other subdivision?

• 21:32Alex O'Connor?

  Well, it doesn't always divide kind of subdivide in that manner, but there are there are lots of different kinds of divisions. So

• 21:37Chris Williamson?

  I imagine there's just a tree branch that continues to go down. My point is like, for every situation that you encounter, do you then need to continue to create a sub-discipline within that that allows you to explore that particular type of solution?

• 21:51Alex O'Connor?

  Pretty much. And luckily, because these questions have been being asked for thousands of years, you can find hundreds of essays on any particular kind of individual instance of a moral dilemma that you have. But like, there's another, there's a further distinction that might be made between what you could call, what Roger Crisp at least calls, the criterion of good and the decision procedure, right? And these are two separate things. So The criterion of good is the criterion by which we determine whether or not something is good. Whereas the decision procedure is the way that we try to go bringing about that good. Right? So take this utilitarian analysis where we've shown that you know you should act in a way that probably maximizes pleasure.

• 22:33Alex O'Connor?

  Like, that would be our decision procedure. Like, we kind of decide intuitively that the way to determine how we decide what to do should be based on probabilistic utilitarianism. Right? But has it changed the actual criterion of good? If we offer a kind of abstract analysis of what good is, well, we don't think that good is what would prob- We don't think that good is the result of what you should probably do or something like that. We still think that the good thing is what maximizes pleasure and minimizes suffering. Even if we've decided that the way we decide which actual action we're going to take is more probabilistic. So the criterion of good, the utilitarianism, is still what is actually most pleasurable. But the decision procedure leads us to probabilistic utilitarianism.

• 23:18Chris Williamson?

  The route to get there now has some form of discounting that's been through.

• 23:21Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. And it seems a bit strange. Like, why is it that we've got an ethical theory where we've decided that this is what's good? But that's not what we should actually do in order to try and achieve that good, right? It seems like an inconsistency. It seems a little strange, right? Further distinctions like the classic kind of argument against utilitarianism is something like an instance of a gang rape or something. It's like, well, don't the pleasure of the many outweigh the suffering of the single individual? And some people would say, well, no, because the suffering is so great that even five people, you know, getting immense pleasure, it's not going to outweigh it. But if you think that, then just make it six people, or seven people, or 100 people, until the scales get balanced out. And some people would say something like, well, clearly, it would still be wrong in all circumstances.

• 24:06Alex O'Connor?

  Right? So can we really say that the maximization of pleasure is? The criterion of good is how we should determine what we're doing. If we've got a situation where it seems it doesn't matter how much kind of the scale of the wellbeing tips one way or the other, like, we still wouldn't be in favor of this, right? And it's like, yeah, you've now got to rethink things, right? And this is why people prefer sometimes a kind of action-based view of morality, known as deontology, right? Like, the idea that the thing is wrong in of itself, right? It's not about the consequence, it's that gang rape is wrong. It's not wrong because of the suffering that it will bring about this person or something like that, it's just wrong, right? And so, when faced with an ethical dilemma like that, you've kind of got two choices.

• 24:51Alex O'Connor?

  You either have to further adapt or explain or analyze your utilitarianism, or maybe you have to adopt deontology, or maybe you have to accept the conclusion that gang rape is actually moral. And that's the least popular line to go down, funnily enough. But so, you know, the utilitarian might say, okay, well, look, I mean, it's not about what will maximize pleasure in any given instance, but let's say, you know, the best thing to do is to act according with a general rule, which, if followed broadly, would maximize pleasure, right? So even if in that individual instance, you know, it would maximize pleasure to allow people to commit horrible crimes, like, if we allowed everybody to live by that rule, suffering would rise over all because of people being scared of being accosted on the

• 25:36Alex O'Connor?

  street and people being scared of being robbed or raped, whatever it may be. So, okay, so it now becomes, look, the thing that we should do is act in accordance with rules which, if generally abided by, would maximize pleasure. Okay, so now our decision procedure is kind of morphed into, you shouldn't do what always maximizes pleasure, you shouldn't even do what always probably maximizes pleasure, you should do what would probably maximize pleasure if we made it a rule that everyone followed. It's like, we're getting a lot more kind of further detached.

• 26:09Chris Williamson?

  We're down the tree, we're down this little tree.

• 26:10Alex O'Connor?

  And you notice the way that we've done that is simply by taking the ethical theory that we started with, that you kind of just kind of hypothesized at the beginning, and just said, but that leads to this. Okay, so we should adapt it in this way, but then that leads to this, and that leads to this, and that leads to this, right? And like, yeah, these things kind of come out of nowhere, like, a lot of the time, someone will come up with an idea that just says like... Like, what about this counter example? And it just, it just kind of blows everyone away and everything has to be rethought. That, that happened in the, in the philosophy of knowledge. Because one of the, one of the most interesting things about philosophy to me is that nobody has a sufficient analysis really of what knowledge is. No one can really decide on what constitutes knowledge.

• 26:55Alex O'Connor?

  And the reason for that is because, well, let's, let's think about what, I mean, okay, let me, let me just ask you, just out of interest, like, what do you think, if, if you had to give like a definition of knowledge, what would it be? Like, how can you say that you know something is true?

• 27:08Chris Williamson?

  That sounds like two questions. Knowing that something is true versus knowing things.

• 27:13Alex O'Connor?

  Well, I mean to say, like, what's the definition of knowledge in, in either case? What does it mean to know something?

• 27:22Chris Williamson?

  An accumulation of understanding about the world?

• 27:27Alex O'Connor?

  Okay, so, so basically, you now holding a belief about the world.

• 27:32Chris Williamson?

  Which is represented accurately in reality.

• 27:35Alex O'Connor?

  Okay, so which is actually true, right? So you holding a belief about the world which is true?

• 27:38Chris Williamson?

  Was that far off? Has someone else said that? Someone famous?

• 27:42Alex O'Connor?

  Well, you can, you can test it, right? Because you could say something like, if somebody was in a room with no windows, and irrationally, they just believed it was raining.

• 27:55Alex O'Connor?

  But it was raining.

• 27:57Alex O'Connor?

  Did they know that it was raining? Because they believe that it's raining and it's true that it's raining, but do they know that it's raining?

• 28:03Alex O'Connor?

  Well, clearly not. Okay, so, so it can't just be kind of having a belief that's true. That can't be knowledge, because you can accidentally hold a true belief. So then the definition, the popular definition became justified true belief. And you'll hear this phrase thrown around all the time. It's like, well, you have to, you have to believe something is true. It has to be true, and you have to be justified in believing that it's true.

• 28:21Chris Williamson?

  What do they mean by justified?

• 28:23Alex O'Connor?

  As in, you have to, you have to believe that it's true for good reasons. And people will offer different analyses of what is a good reason and what's not. But like, so they'll say, for instance, just, just kind of imagining that it's raining outside isn't a good reason. But if you look out of the window and you see that it's raining, that's good reason to believe that it's, that it's raining. And so if you look out the window, you see that it's raining, then you believe that it's raining, it is actually raining, and you're justified in that belief. So you know that it's raining. Voila, problem solved, right?

• 28:50Alex O'Connor?

  Enter Edmund Gettier, who just kind of blew the lid off everything. And as far as I, as far as I recall, being, being told this, he kind of...

• 29:00Alex O'Connor?

  He wrote this somewhat flippantly, like he was going through like different problems that seemed to just be kind of put to bed and just for the hell of it was just seeing if he could come up with counter examples. And he wrote this really, really short paper. It's like two pages long and it just blew up the philosophy of knowledge, right? Got rid of this idea of justified true belief. And I'll tell it to you now, right? This is kind of crazy.

• 29:20Chris Williamson?

  This sounds a little bit like, you know, round about springtime, when you finally got rid of all of the shit old clothes that you don't need anymore. And you've like put them all, they're all in the charity shop, your mum's taken them to Oxfam in those big sort of see-through bags. And you're like, right, all my socks are back in, these are only the socks that I wear, all the drawers are organized, color-coded, size, everything else. And someone's just come in and gone, just grabbed all of your stuff and then just thrown it around the room.

• 29:49Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, it's also sometimes a bit like someone's kind of, as your mum is driving away with all of the clothes in the bag, someone looks and goes, you know that she's taken this with her? And you have to go, oh crap, run after her. Because you realise that what you've said, yeah, what you've said has actually taken away this really important belief of yours, right? Because you're like, I think this is, this is the right theory, this is the right way to go. And someone says, yeah, but you know that if you, if you do that, then this other belief you hold has to fly out the window. And you're like, oh crap. And you're running after it as fast as you can, right?

• 30:17Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so Edmund Gettier.

• 30:19Alex O'Connor?

  And this kind of, this kind of happened with knowledge, right?

• 30:20Chris Williamson?

  Gettier.

• 30:21Alex O'Connor?

  Gettier, yeah. And such, such cases as he presented in this paper are known now as Gettier cases, which essentially, a Gettier case is an instance of justified true belief that is not knowledge. Because again, we're working with counter examples here. So if the theory is that, well, knowledge is justified true belief, then if you can offer an example of someone having justified true belief that isn't knowledge, then we have to throw out that theory and we have to come up with something better. So Gettier says, imagine, and I need to make sure, it's been a while since I've, since, I want to make sure I get this right. Imagine somebody is waiting for, they're in a job interview, there are two guys in a job interview. And while they're waiting to hear back from the interviewer,

• 31:05Alex O'Connor?

  the person who he's across from is getting bored and he decides to take the coins that he's got in his pocket out and starts counting them on the table because he's bored. And he sees him counting 10 coins. Right, so he knows that this guy's got 10 coins in his pocket. Then what happens is the interviewer comes out and basically says, "Listen, you know, I haven't spoken to the board yet, but it seems like you're going to get the job, right? Like, we're pretty sure you're going to get the job." Which, or sorry, we're pretty sure the other guy's going to get the job. The guy who was counting the coins. They say, "We're pretty sure this guy's going to get the job." And this kind of gives you a justified belief that this man's going to get the job.

• 31:48Alex O'Connor?

  But one thing that you know, although you could say that, you know, maybe you have a justified belief that this man's going to get the job. Another thing that you have a justified belief in by derivative is you have a justified belief that the person who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket. Because you've seen this guy counting out 10 coins and you've got a justified reason to think that he's going to, that he's going to get the job. And so you have a justified belief that this person, that the person who gets the job is going to have 10 coins in his pocket. Now, something goes wrong, something like really unexpected, something unlikely, right? So this, it's not fair to say that you could have predicted this, but something, something happens. And as it turns out, you end up getting the job. It's you, not the other guy. You get the job. And you think, "Oh, this is great, I've got the job."

• 32:31Alex O'Connor?

  But just as it happens, you happen to have 10 coins in your pocket. Just by chance, you've also got 10 coins in your pocket. So your belief, you had a justified, true belief that the person who gets the job would have 10 coins in his pocket. But it seems, it seems like you can't say that you knew that. Because as it turns out, like, yeah, I guess it was true that the person who got the job had 10 coins in his pocket. And I guess you were justified in believing that. But like surely that's not knowledge because clearly you kind of meant something else, right? Like that can't be knowledge, but this is an instance of justified true belief. And this actually happened to me once in person because there are all kinds of Gethsean cases that you can construct. And that's kind of a clumsier one to understand perhaps, but

• 33:14Alex O'Connor?

  this happened to me once. I was in a car and I was driving around a big corner, right? And so I saw this, this child kind of above the hedge, like around the corner, kind of bobbing up and down. And I looked over there and I thought she was riding a horse. So as we're going around the corner, I think, oh, man, like there's a horse over there. That's quite exciting. I was quite excited to see this horse, right? So we turn around the corner and turns out she's not on a horse. She's walking, she's on like her dad's back, right? But just by chance, there also happens to be a horse in the field. Now, I kid you not, this actually happened to me. I sat there and I thought to myself, this is a Gethsean case because like, although, you know, maybe I wasn't entirely justified in believing that the girl was on a horse. I like seeing a horse that high up bobbing

• 33:58Alex O'Connor?

  along, I think, you know, I could form a justified belief that she was riding a horse. And the belief was that there's a horse there. So I believed that a horse was there. It was true that a horse was there and I was justified in believing that a horse was there. But did I know that the horse was there? Like, can you really say that I knew it before? Do you see what I'm saying? Like, this doesn't seem to count as knowledge, right? And so Gethsean kind of is talking about these cases and people are like, oh, damn. So now we have to, now we have to change it up.

• 34:23Chris Williamson?

  Mum's gone off with the socks, yeah.

• 34:25Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, it just, it just kind of completely upends everything that we think about the analysis of knowledge. And this is what happens in ethics all the time.

• 34:33Chris Williamson?

  Some bastard comes in with a cricket bat and breaks everything.

• 34:38Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly. But sometimes it can also work in people's favor, right? So an example would be with an analysis of free will. I'm someone who doesn't believe that free will exists. Or rather, I say, I have an active belief that free will does not exist.

• 34:48Chris Williamson?

  Why do you have that distinction?

• 34:50Alex O'Connor?

  Because it's one thing to be just unconvinced of something. It's another thing to believe that it's false, right? So like, let me put it this way.

• 34:59Chris Williamson?

  Agnostic versus atheist.

• 35:01Alex O'Connor?

  Pretty much, yeah. But it's, I would say that agnosticism is a claim to knowledge, whereas theism is a claim to belief. So I'd characterize it like this. This comes from my friend Matt Dillahunty. If I had a random jar of coins, I don't have anything I can use right now, and you didn't know how many coins were in the jar, and neither did I. And I said, look, I think there's an even number of coins in this jar. Would you believe me?

• 35:29Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 35:30Alex O'Connor?

  But that doesn't mean you believe it's false, right?

• 35:33Chris Williamson?

  No, I just don't agree.

• 35:35Alex O'Connor?

  Exactly. There's a distinction between not believing a proposition and believing that the proposition is false. So if you believe that I was, if you believe that it was false, that means you believe there's an odd number. If you just don't believe that it's true, that means that you're kind of reserving judgment. So some people might say, I don't believe in free will, that is, I'm reserving judgment. I don't know, I'm not convinced that free will exists. I'm saying I'm convinced that free will does not exist. But, and that's a whole other podcast, but this has interesting implications for ethics because there's this common intuition that in order to be held responsible for something, you need to have freely chosen to do it.

• 36:09Alex O'Connor?

  Whereas like, you can't be held responsible for something you didn't freely choose to do. Right, this is a general intuition that people, that people held for the longest time, which seems to make a lot of sense. It's like, how can you hold someone responsible if they, if they can't have acted otherwise? Can you hold them morally responsible? And so if there's no free will, basically, nobody's ever responsible for anything they do.

• 36:30Chris Williamson?

  Is there any morality left?

• 36:32Alex O'Connor?

  Well, exactly, this is, this is the big problem. It's like, where does morality go?

• 36:38Alex O'Connor?

  But then, again, people were coming up with counter examples. So generally speaking, the idea is that the principle could be kind of summed up as, you can't be held morally responsible if it's the case that you couldn't have acted otherwise.

• 36:54Chris Williamson?

  So if you were a passenger on a train and a train kills a person,

• 37:00Chris Williamson?

  it's not your fault that the train killed the person, you didn't get to control the train.

• 37:04Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, but also it might be something like if you trip over by mistake and you knock someone in front of a train and they get hit by a train, that's not really your fault because it was an accident, you fell over. And that's different from pushing them potentially. But if you, if you tripped through no fault of your own, or if someone else pushed you and you, you ended up pushing into them, it's like, you're not morally responsible because you couldn't have acted otherwise.

• 37:24Chris Williamson?

  And it's based on intent. It seems like that appears to be the distinction.

• 37:29Alex O'Connor?

  Yes, I suppose so.

• 37:32Chris Williamson?

  Actually, no, it might not be because there's some constraints. You're saying couldn't have acted otherwise. So you might not have intended to do something, but you could have acted otherwise.

• 37:41Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, this is

• 37:42Chris Williamson?

  The manslaughter versus murder versus accidental death.

• 37:46Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, pretty much. But then it also gets more complicated.

• 37:50Chris Williamson?

  Of course it does. Is there anything that doesn't?

• 37:53Alex O'Connor?

  Uh, man, veganism is quite a simple.

• 37:56Chris Williamson?

  Vegan for everyone that's playing vegan bingo at home, that's three times today.

• 38:04Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, how do you know if someone's vegan? You know, that's the, that's the, like, that kind of gets on my nerves. It's like, um, how do you know if someone's got a nut allergy? Don't worry, they'll tell you. It's like, yeah, of course I'm gonna bloody tell you. So I'm going for a meal with you.

• 38:16Chris Williamson?

  Gonna die. Yeah. Okay, so intent. What's this thought experiment?

• 38:21Alex O'Connor?

  So Harry Frankfurt comes along and, and basically the job is to disprove this intuition is you've got to come up with a situation in which someone couldn't have acted otherwise. And yet is still morally responsible for their action, right? Which seems like a hard task. One example that Peter van Inwagenen has given is of somebody who witnesses a crime and decides not to call the police, immorally so, right? Should call the police, but decides not to, right? Feeling a bit evil or something, you know, doesn't, doesn't want the person to see justice. But this person doesn't know that the phone lines were down anyway. So even if he tried to phone the police, he couldn't have phoned the police. So this person did not call the police, but he couldn't have acted otherwise because he couldn't have phoned the police.

• 39:03Alex O'Connor?

  But we still hold him morally responsible, even though he couldn't have acted otherwise.

• 39:07Chris Williamson?

  That's a good example.

• 39:08Alex O'Connor?

  Now, somebody might say something like, yeah, but look, I mean, clearly what matters here is like the intention. Right? It's, it's the, it's the intent. It's kind of the person's, because he still could have tried to call the police and then the phone lines would have been down. But like, Harry Frankfurt discusses loads and loads of very particular cases, but one of the, one of the examples you could potentially give is that you've got somebody who is like a neuroscientist and is able to like, it kind of is hooked up to your brain in such a way that he can kind of prod your brain and make you do certain things and change your mental state. And he basically says, you know, let's say you're, you're voting in a, in an election or something. And one of the candidates is some kind of genuine tyrant. And it's like, it would be immoral to vote for this person and.

• 39:51Alex O'Connor?

  The neuroscientist essentially kind of scans your brain and sees that if you're gonna vote for the person of your own accord, he just lets you do it. But if he realizes from your brain activity that you're about to go and vote for the other person, he will kind of fiddle about with your brain in such a way that you become motivated to go and vote for the other person. So, you know, let's say that you go to vote for the good party and this person kind of hooks up to your brain and changes your motivations and makes you want to go and do this thing. You'd say that person's not responsible for voting for the bad person because it's not their fault that the person was in their brain. But like, what if the person goes and votes for the bad person of their own accord?

• 40:33Alex O'Connor?

  Because like, clearly they're morally responsible because they've freely chosen of their own accord to go and vote for this bad tyrant, right? But they couldn't have acted otherwise. Because had they tried to vote for the other one, they would have been motivated to vote for him anyway. So it's like, can we really say they're morally responsible? Well intuitively, we want to say, yeah, they're still morally responsible. But if you're morally responsible despite the fact that you couldn't have acted differently, you couldn't have even wanted differently, then we seem to have a counter example to the case or to the proposition that, you know, you can only be held responsible if you couldn't, if you could have acted otherwise, right? And again, like, this leads to a wealth of discussion and there are lots of different responses to this.

• 41:15Alex O'Connor?

  Like, I've got my responses to it, other people have their responses to it, and I think there's like satisfactory responses to this, but at the very least, you can see that it's not as simple as people originally thought, right? Because you, the great thing about ethics is you can come up with incredibly contrived thought experiments. You can come up with the most ridiculous scenarios in the world and someone can say that's the most unrealistic thing I've ever heard, but it doesn't matter because if it contradicts your theory, then it means the theory's wrong. It doesn't matter how crazy the thought experiment has to be. It's kind of like when people are talking about utilitarianism and they say, okay, but what if we painlessly kill somebody, right? And they suffer no pain. And someone says, well, that's still bad because people around them would suffer. And I say, okay, well, what if, you know, what if we kill somebody who's like homeless and has no family and no one cares about them?

• 42:00Alex O'Connor?

  We say, okay, yeah, but that's still wrong because someone has to do the killing and that kind of that that might kind of affect them. And they say, okay, okay. So what if we like, what if we like are in a cabin in the woods and we painlessly kill someone and the person who does the killing like immediately forgets and the person who makes them forget doesn't know why they're making big. And it's like, it's getting a bit, it's getting a bit contrived, it's getting a bit crazy. But the thing is like, if in that situation, you've still got a counter example, if, if, if the, if the counter example is like logically coherent, as far fetched as it may be, it can still expose the flaw in the ethical thinking, right?

• 42:36Chris Williamson?

  The battleground, the battleground of ethics is really fast moving, I'm guessing based on that. Like you think about science, you have to construct an experiment, perhaps even get some funding, put some pants on, leave the house, do the actual thing, analyze the data. Whereas all that you really need to do here is like have an armchair and a brain.

• 42:57Alex O'Connor?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:57Chris Williamson?

  And, and you can-

• 42:58Alex O'Connor?

  One of the great things about ethics is you can do it all by yourself and you don't need any funding for it. But at the same time, it's also very slow moving because the basic questions have been the same questions for thousands of years. It's just like somebody will come up with an interesting, particular thought experiment that requires various different responses or a thought experiment that ends up having quite impactful, or quite an impact on the rest of philosophy or something like that. But like the fundamental question at the basis hasn't, hasn't really changed. Like, modern developments can inform our ethical discussions, but they don't really change the nature of them. You know, for example, when you develop technology, you can start talking about living in a simulation and this kind of stuff, but like, the question is still the same. So the thought experiment might be like the experience machine of hooking someone up to the matrix where they experience more pleasure, but it's not real.

• 43:44Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, sure, that's kind of, that's a new thought, but the idea of kind of- Somehow replicating reality is not new. You know, like we've just moved from Descartes' evil demon that makes you think you're living in a particular world to it being done by The Matrix, right? So like, particular thought experiments and the way that they're expressed can change quickly, but the fundamental questions are still the same.

• 44:08Chris Williamson?

  Has it been, has it been quite a while since anything revolutionary in terms of a question to be asked as opposed to a criticism of an existing question has come up?

• 44:17Alex O'Connor?

  I mean, you'll tend to kind of, you'll tend to know when that happened because this is, this is what can make people famous, when they come up with a way of kind of putting things together. A lot of people consider like the kind of most recent really important person to have been someone like Immanuel Kant. Like, the thing is like,

• 44:38Alex O'Connor?

  it's difficult because it's, it's so kind of, it's so abstract, right? Like, it's difficult to determine whether what someone's saying is actually new or if it's just a synthesis of previous ideas or something like that. But generally speaking, the progress is slow, right? Like, the, the big steps that are taken in ethics will be like on a very, very particular question, on a very, very particular point of ethics. Like, if somebody manages to prove somehow philosophically that we're not living in a simulated reality, that would be a really important and kind of philosophical discovery of how we'd manage to argue that, that would have wide-reaching implications, right? For instance, if someone kind of discovered, "It just so happens that I've got a philosophical argument that says that we can't replicate consciousness."

• 45:21Alex O'Connor?

  Because you know the simulation argument of Nick Bostrom says that, you know, humanity will get to the point where it can simulate human consciousness, and that consciousness will be able to simulate consciousness and so on and so on and so on, and the likelihood that you happen to be in base reality is minimal, is tiny.

• 45:35Chris Williamson?

  To interject there, did you watch the episode of Joe Rogan where Nick tries to explain that to him?

• 45:41Alex O'Connor?

  I didn't, but we've talked about that.

• 45:43Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I brought it up. Anyone that's listening, so you'll have heard me talk about superintelligence a number of times, one of my favourite books. Recently read The Precipice by Toby Yord, who I texted you about and said, is he one of your lecturers at uni? The Precipice about existential risk is from the same Future of Humanity Institute. Nick Bostrom, guy that I've read for tons and tons of time, sits down with my favourite podcaster, Joe Rogan. I think, fucking hell, this is great. This is going to be brilliant. Joe simply does not get the simulation hypothesis, which is like Nick's, or at least one of Nick's crowning works. And it's fairly straightforward to understand. And then for 45 minutes, continues to force the audience down the same groundhog

• 46:26Chris Williamson?

  sort of exchange. So yeah, if you want to find out about Nick Bostrom, do not watch his episode with Joe Rogan unless you want to tear your eardrums out. So yes.

• 46:37Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, you can just read the paper that he put out.

• 46:40Chris Williamson?

  Precisely. There's one interesting thing I was thinking there, that the discovery of knowledge in philosophy or ethics, where does that come from? Or what is that discovery? Because it's not like we have discovered a new star. This is a particular new type of element. This is a new proton. It's somehow universal and existent, and yet is also manifest by someone's thoughts and also quite sort of transient and ephemeral.

• 47:13Alex O'Connor?

  I think you can think of it in the same way. This is probably the most helpful way to think of it potentially is to think about it in terms of like mathematical discoveries. Because maths is kind of a language that we invent to describe things that we believe are analytically true. And it's essentially tautologies. To say that one plus one equals two is kind of the same as just saying two is two. You can make mathematical discoveries because people kind of have, they put together equations and I'm not a mathematician, but you know, like you can kind of make discoveries by putting different propositions together and seeing how they work, right? And it's weird to think that you can kind of discover things in this manner, in this kind of weird, abstract kind of sense. But like, I think the same thing is roughly going on, like.

• 47:55Alex O'Connor?

  Ethical movements are made when people kind of realize implications of beliefs we already hold, or realize a new way of justifying them or something like that, or realize an inconsistency that we that we hold. Most of the kind of, most of the kind of ethic, when you say something like ethical progression, people tend to think of, like in practice, they tend to think of things like slavery being abolished, or the vegan movement, that's number four.

• 48:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 48:19Alex O'Connor?

  And like, yeah, sure, but that, there are two different things we could be talking about, because there's that kind of ethical progression, which is where we like to think, oh, well, we're practically changing to live up to like the objective ethical standard that we've constructed, or that exists, or however you want to frame it. But another question is like, what about the frame itself? Like, can we kind of have a development in that frame? And sometimes the development in the frame leads to developments in practice. But this is, this is one of the questions that will help you determine whether you think objective morality exists. It's like, do we discover ethical truths, or do we invent them? Do we, do we kind of come across objective truths about the way we should behave, or do we just kind of decide on a new way of living to be consistent with our preferences

• 49:02Alex O'Connor?

  or something like that? Like, that's, that's one of the most fundamental questions, to figure out whether, whether ethics actually objectively exists.

• 49:09Chris Williamson?

  Is that the question that Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris got a little bogged down with during their live debate?

• 49:18Alex O'Connor?

  I think potentially, because they would both, I'm not as familiar with Jordan Peterson's as I am Sam Harris's morality, but I think both believe in objective morality, but they have different justifications for it. And Sam Harris's is just, is trash. I mean, it's awful. It's just, it doesn't make any sense. And I think Jordan Peterson was kind of trying to poke holes in it, because Sam Harris kind of says, well, well-being should be the basis of morality, because we all care about well-being. And someone says, yeah, but like, why is well-being good? Why is suffering bad? And Sam Harris says, well, if you don't believe me, go and put your hand on a hot stove. And it's like, dude, you're missing, you're really missing the point here. It's not like, I don't doubt that I wouldn't like putting my hand on a hot stove, but why does that make it objectively

• 50:01Alex O'Connor?

  wrong? Like, because for it to be objectively wrong, it would be kind of wrong regardless of what I think about it. It doesn't matter if I prefer it or not. It's like, it's wrong of its own accord. Somehow, if no human beings existed, it would still be wrong to inflict suffering, even if there's no one to inflict the suffering upon, something like that. Like, and Sam Harris kind of doesn't, doesn't address that. And I think Jordan Peterson kind of pokes, tries to poke holes in that.

• 50:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:22Alex O'Connor?

  But he's poking holes in the justification, not, not the idea that ethics is objective.

• 50:26Chris Williamson?

  Did you see, I'm gonna guess that you probably won't have done, because you're not on social media as much as me, but Sam is releasing a Making Sense book, which is a synthesis of things he's spoken about on the podcast. He's doing it, Tim Ferriss. Did you see?

• 50:41Alex O'Connor?

  I didn't see that, no.

• 50:42Chris Williamson?

  It's come out today. So it got announced.

• 50:44Alex O'Connor?

  Oh, really?

• 50:44Chris Williamson?

  Pre-order available today. So yeah, it's just the Tim Ferriss model man. Have a conversation, write a book about the conversations, then have a conversation about the book that you wrote about the conversations, and then you just continue to keep on going.

• 50:59Alex O'Connor?

  Just keep going on, yeah.

• 51:00Chris Williamson?

  You monetize. So, okay, man, let's, let's, let's have some of your favorite thought experiments that we might have not, might have not covered yet. Anything that sort of you think is, is gonna bend people's minds a little bit as they try and answer it?

• 51:13Alex O'Connor?

  Well, ethically speaking, I mean, okay, so I remember when we, when you asked me to come on, I wasn't sure if you wanted to talk more about method ethics, or if you wanted to, because you said you wanted to just go through some, like, ethical dilemmas. So like, there are a few that you can, that you can think of, and, and there are different ways in which they're difficult. So for instance, consider the fact that this would be, this would be a demonstration that sometimes the consequences of a certain thing that we think is good are actually, that they have unexpected consequences. So broadly speaking, we think that it's good to educate people. The more educated people are, the better.

• 51:50Alex O'Connor?

  But education rate is directly correlated to suicide rate, right? The more educated a society becomes, the higher the suicide rate. So is it actually immoral to educate a society more if it's going to lead to more suicidality? Like, are we placing a value on knowledge itself? Do we not value knowledge because of what it does for humanity? Like, and do we have the right to essentially kind of risk a rise in suicide in order to educate other people? Like, I don't know, it's like, you don't necessarily think of that consequence. Another example of like an unintended consequence might be something like, I remember I went to a talk once about the ethics of markets, right? What can be sold and what can't?

• 52:33Alex O'Connor?

  So things like organ selling and prostitution and sex work, right? And I think broadly speaking, in liberal society, people are in favor of sex work. They say, look, you are, it's your body, you can sell it as you please, like, you should be able to do that. And, you know, I was roughly in agreement, but I'm listening to this talk and I'm thinking, okay, so let's say we legalize prostitution. There's a consequence that people don't necessarily think about, right? If you, if you become like a merchant of sex.

• 53:04Chris Williamson?

  That sounds like a really good name for a band.

• 53:06Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, or a, or a street name, maybe. We have, we have laws that exist that say that if you're a merchant, if you're selling a product, you don't get to discriminate who you sell your product to. Right now, it's, it's slightly different with things like baking a cake that has a certain message on it. That was a big controversy, but that's because you're kind of, you're producing a specific, you know, a specific kind of designed to order thing, right? It's not just a general product that you're offering. So the person who baked that cake basically said, I'm not going to bake a cake that says like, happy marriage to a gay couple, because that goes against my beliefs, but I can't deny them service to like a product that anybody else could buy because they're gay. So if they came in and bought one of my pre-made cakes, I can't deny service to them and I wouldn't do, right? Now.

• 53:47Chris Williamson?

  Did they make that distinction?

• 53:49Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, the cake seller definitely did.

• 53:50Chris Williamson?

  So he actually had a fairly good sort of consistent grounding philosophy.

• 53:54Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, he said, look, like it's not, it's not about like, I'm not going to sell to a gay person. That's not what it is. It's I'm not going to produce like essentially like a piece of art.

• 54:02Chris Williamson?

  Celebration of that.

• 54:04Alex O'Connor?

  In the same way that like, although, you know, I wouldn't want to draw an equivalency between these two. It works by analogy. If someone came in and said, you know, can you bake a cake that says the N word on it or something? You'd be like, I don't, I don't want to make that because it goes against my, my beliefs. And someone could be like, but you're, you're discriminating against me because, you know, because I'm black and I'm ordering a cake. It's like, no, it's like, it's because of what you're, you're making me do. Now, obviously, I'm not trying to say that, you know, that you should be as uncomfortable writing the N word as saying happy, happy wedding to a gay couple. But I'm saying like, the, the kind of basic principle is that there's a difference between refusing someone's service because of who they are and refusing them service because of what they're asking you to do. But if you're selling sex just as a general product, like we have laws that say that you can't discriminate.

• 54:46Alex O'Connor?

  But you can't refuse someone's service because they're gay or because they're black or because they're female or something. But you should be able to refuse sex at any time for any reason, right? Like if you're having sex, like in the porn industry or something, like you should be able to, you should be allowed to determine whether you have sex with men or not. Right? You should be able to decide whether you have sex with someone who's black or white, or someone who you find attractive or don't find attractive, someone who's disabled. Like it is your, is your basic right to determine who you have sex with and who you don't. But if you're kind of selling a, a general product of sex, does that mean that you kind of are forced to offer your services to men as well as women? Like if you became a prostitute, Chris, could I try and hire you and you say, look, I don't, I don't serve men. I could take you to the Supreme Court and say, well, look, you're discriminating against me on the basis of sex.

• 55:31Alex O'Connor?

  It's like, that's an interesting implication that people don't generally think about. And I raised it with a guy giving the talk and he kind of didn't really have an answer for it because I don't think it's a particularly common objection to bring up. I know that, I, I discovered actually after the fact that one of my tutors for practical ethics had written a paper to this effect, discussing this exact question of like. Like, here's a kind of interesting reason that maybe we shouldn't be in favor of the legalization of prostitution. And it's not what you think. It's not like, oh, it's lewd, it's bad. It's like, it's like, you're gonna either have to create something of like, an entire new moral legal category about denying people a service on the basis of sex, or disability, or attractiveness. I mean, imagine refusing someone a service because you don't think they're attractive.

• 56:12Alex O'Connor?

  Like, this is, this is brand new territory. But if you don't do that, then you're essentially saying, this person must be compelled to have sex with anybody who wants it, if they, if they pay the right price. And that, that seems equally uncomfortable. So, it's like, maybe not as simple as you first thought.

• 56:26Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting where we have

• 56:31Chris Williamson?

  things that we're incredibly familiar with, that are

• 56:36Chris Williamson?

  artifacts of our heritage as human beings, like modes of thinking, the

• 56:43Chris Williamson?

  implicit assumption that you should only have sex with people that you want to have sex with. And yet, at the same time, when that comes crashing into something that we also know really, really well, which is a more modern invention, like free markets and

• 56:55Alex O'Connor?

  and equality and equal treatment, right?

• 56:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. When, when those two things sort of come crashing together, you're like, ah, hang on, I'm, I feel like I'm supporting both teams here. Like, how the fuck is this working?

• 57:06Alex O'Connor?

  And people try to kind of, people might try to wriggle out of it, or synthesize, and they might say something like, well, if you agree to be a prostitute, then, then you agree to offer your services to anybody. So it's like, you know, we're not just saying, anybody has to have sex with whoever asks it. It's like, if you enter into a contractual agreement that says you are a prostitute, you now have to have sex with whoever wants. But it's like, are you saying that someone can like, sign off their consent? Are you saying that someone can like, sign a contract which says, I am no longer able to consent in any of my sexual encounters, so long as the person is paying? It's like, I don't think that's what you want either. Right? It's like, and maybe we might think that, although every instinct says something like, well, your body is your private property, and you should be able to, you should be able to sell it, or you like, you should be able to do what you like, and make money with it

• 57:51Alex O'Connor?

  as you like, we might think that we value our principles of equality under, under like, the free market so, so highly, that it's worth sacrificing this, this other kind of principle that people should be able to sell their bodies. And we say, actually, no, like, we're not going to allow people to sign away their consent, and so we're not going to legalize prostitution. But it's like, every argument that you hear in the popular discourse against prostitution is like, it, it, it's wrong, man. It's like, you shouldn't, man, that's like, that's, that could be your daughter, man. It's like,

• 58:20Alex O'Connor?

  It hasn't got the right focus, right? There are better arguments that you could be making against the legalization of prostitution that's for the benefit of the person who'd be, or the rights of the person who's selling it. Like, it's a difficult question. It's worth, you know, your listeners kind of just mulling it over, just thinking like, what are the implications of those kinds of beliefs? Like, there are so many kind of hidden around the corner that you might not be, you might not be entirely aware of. No, I agree, man. What else you got? Anything else that you've got in the tank that you've been thinking about? Here's one of my favorite ethical dilemmas. This is one of my favorite ethical dilemmas that was given to me before I came to university. I was like, I was like sixteen, seventeen, I was in a pub, and I met somebody who was studying physics and philosophy at Oxford. And it was the first time I met him, and he just kind of, he's a bit of a strange man.

• 59:04Alex O'Connor?

  He just turns to me and says, here's one for you. Okay. It's always a good way to start, isn't it? This question remained with me to this day, right? And I want you to answer this honestly. And, you know, you might, you might be kind of exposing some immorality by answering this honestly, but I want you to try your best. Would you rather kill an innocent person and then immediately forget about it, or not kill the innocent person but live the rest of your life thinking that you had? The second one. You'd rather not kill the person but live the rest of your life thinking that you had? Yeah, probably because I haven't fully thought through just how painful it would be to believe that I would have killed someone. Right.

• 59:45Alex O'Connor?

  Now, so this is the, this is the answer that I think people often give this answer at first because it kind of sounds like the right one to do. And maybe you actually, maybe it would actually be better for you. After thinking about it for the longest possible time, the majority of people tend to kind of say, well, actually, I think I'd have to say that I'd rather kill the person than immediately forget. Because like, if you're talking about like, if, as you say, like, it's like, you don't know what it's like to live that life believing that you've actually killed that person. But there are two different questions on the table here. The first is what you would do, and the second is what you should do, right? So like, I think most people, when they think about it deeply enough, realize that

• 1:00:28Alex O'Connor?

  because of the amount of sacrifice that they're making, they should, they would probably kill the person and then forget because they just can't deal with the, with the... With a kind of backlash of that. But that's a separate question from what they should do and maybe they shouldn't kill the innocent person. But you could also say, like, you know, should we expect somebody to essentially sacrifice her life of well being for the life of another person? Like, do we have the right to expect that of a person? Or do they have a right to say that, you know, if I don't commit this action, it's going to have this horrible impingement on the rest of my life and I actually have a right to kind of look after my own interests first, even if my own interests are kind of lesser than another person's? In the same way that if you decide not to give to charity, that's your right to do so.

• 1:01:10Alex O'Connor?

  But like, the £25 that you're going to save is worth so much less to you than it would be worth to people for whom you could buy mosquito nets or something and save them from getting malaria. But we say that even though like, the benefit that it gives you is much less than the benefit it would give the other person, like, you have a right to look after yourself first and look to your interests first. And maybe you could say the same thing in this instance, I'm not entirely sure. But it's a difficult question to think, if you were really in that situation, what do you think you would do?

• 1:01:45Chris Williamson?

  It's hard, man. I mean, the question here, and it seems like this happens with a lot of it, is whether or not you're able to take a third party perspective and the would versus the should, i.e. the armchair philosophy versus the actual brass roots action. Those two things often, I'm going to guess, come into conflict with each other because there isn't a third party perspective. If we are talking about you doing the thing, there is no third party perspective for you to take. There is only in the should, not the would.

• 1:02:25Alex O'Connor?

  Right. But if morality is objective, then we should say, like, it doesn't matter what you would do. There is a right answer to the question regardless of what you find yourself actually doing. Like in the famous trolley problem, when you ask somebody whether they would pull the lever and whether they'd push the fat man off the bridge, you know, the famous trolley experiment?

• 1:02:43Chris Williamson?

  Take us through it.

• 1:02:44Alex O'Connor?

  So, you know, the trolley is going down the track. And it's about to run into five workers who are working on the track and you can pull a lever and it will divert the track, the train onto a track that's got a single person working. So it will kill one person instead of the five. And the question is, you know, should you pull the lever or would you pull the lever? Most people say, yeah, of course I pull the lever. I'm gonna, I'd rather, you know, the train goes into one person than five people. The principle being, yeah, okay, so I'll sacrifice one person's life to save five innocent people's lives. Fine. But then you ask the question, what if you're walking along and there's no lever and the train's going towards five people on the track, but there's this really fat man walking across the bridge. And if you push him off the bridge, he's gonna land on the train, it's gonna kill him, but it's gonna stop the train. Would

• 1:03:26Alex O'Connor?

  you push the fat man? And people are like, well, I don't, no, I don't think so. I don't think I have the rights to that. But it's like, hold on, why not? Like, why is it that you're willing to kind of pull a lever that kills one person to save five people, but you're not willing to push the man to kill the man, save the five people? And Michael Sandel, who's a philosopher at Harvard, one of the most famous philosophers living, he's got a great book, by the way, called Justice, which is a fantastic introduction to ethics. Like, I don't feel like I've done a very good job here of like actually going through the various ethical theories. We've just kind of been mulling here and there. But That's the fun stuff. If you want like a really good introduction to just what ethics is, the different ways of thinking about it, Justice by Michael Sandel is a fantastic book. And in a lecture, you can watch on YouTube, he gives the trolley problem, which is a great starting point

• 1:04:10Alex O'Connor?

  for practical ethics. It's one of the first things that people will, will talk about. And he's talking to his students and he's asking this question and the student kind of says, but you know, I don't wanna, it's different because there's a difference between me like, if you're like driving the train. So Michael Sandel says, you're driving the train and you can, you can turn the, you can turn the wheel and it goes into one person instead of five people. And that's instead of the lever, right? So most people say, yeah, they would turn, they would turn the wheel, they'd go into the one person instead of the five, but they wouldn't push the fat man. And one of the students says, but look, I mean, the difference is like, there's a difference between like turning the wheel and like actually like getting your hands on a man and pushing him off the thing. And so Michael Sandel says, well, what if the fat man is kind of on a trap door? And the way to open the trap door is to grab a big wheel and you just turn the wheels. And it's

• 1:04:53Alex O'Connor?

  like, okay, yeah, I still probably wouldn't do that, right? And But again, the reason I bring this up is to say like, I think it's fair to say that maybe like, most people would pull the lever but wouldn't push the fat man, but surely if the principle is the same, then you should do the same thing in either situation. Or is there a difference? Like, you know, what's going on there? And interestingly, like, there have been studies done where people have undergone an MRI scan whilst being asked the trolley problem. And when they think about like the lever, so okay, so the people who say that they would both pull the lever and push the fat man, when they're thinking about the question, the parts of their brain associated with rationality are lighting up.

• 1:05:36Alex O'Connor?

  For the people who say that they would pull the lever but wouldn't push the fat man, when they're thinking about the questions, the emotional parts of the brain are lighting up, right? Implying that actually, yeah, no, no, the reason you wouldn't push the fat man is actually because of like, you know, your emotional tendency to what you would and wouldn't do, rather than your rational thinking about what you should and shouldn't do. But okay, there are some situations in which I can give you two situations which are like almost exactly the same, and yet you would say that one is right and one is wrong. Let's say, for example, you're an ambulance driver

• 1:06:08Alex O'Connor?

  and you've got two people in the back and they need to get to hospital immediately, right? And if you don't get there immediately, they're gonna die. As you're driving along, you look out the window and you see a boulder just rolling, rolling towards an innocent man, right? Now, what you could do is you could stop the ambulance, you could get out of the ambulance, you could push the boulder out of the way and you'd save the innocent man. But you shouldn't do that, right? You should stay driving because then the two people in the back of the ambulance are gonna die. So you stay, you stay in the ambulance, you think, I wish I could save that man, but I can't. I'm willing to like allow him to die so that I can make sure that these two guys get to hospital, right? Fair? Would you say that that's a fair analysis?

• 1:06:46Chris Williamson?

  Fairly busy day.

• 1:06:47Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, hope that guy gets a pay rise. But now imagine, same situation, except this time you're driving the ambulance, two people in the back, and there's a boulder in the way.

• 1:06:58Alex O'Connor?

  It's in the road, and the only way to to keep moving forward is to is to kind of push the boulder so that it rolls and kills an innocent man.

• 1:07:08Alex O'Connor?

  Are you allowed to do that?

• 1:07:11Alex O'Connor?

  Seems like maybe not, like hmm, I don't know if an ambulance driver was riding along, like that would be a good thing to do, you should kind of bump into the thing and make it hit the other, but you'd probably say no, but like, what's the difference? Like, what is the difference between, between allowing a boulder to kill an innocent man, save the people in the back, and pushing the boulder into the innocent man, save the people in the back? In both situations, you decide whether the innocent man lives or dies, and the basis in which you make that decision is, you know, with reference to the people in the back of the ambulance. So what is the difference?

• 1:07:45Chris Williamson?

  Is it not the continuation, the point at which you enter into the story and the effect that you have moving forward?

• 1:07:51Alex O'Connor?

  Sure. So this is the distinction of doing and allowing, and this is where this.

• 1:07:57Chris Williamson?

  Hey, I've stumbled upon some ethics.

• 1:07:59Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, well, this, I mean, this is, this is kind of the, the analysis that's given. It's like, well, there's a difference between doing and allowing. There's a difference between allowing a bad thing to happen and being the cause of a bad thing to happen, but my God, like, it gets, it gets worse, it gets, it gets even more complicated than that, because like, you've got to decide, like, how are you defining the difference between doing and allowing? Like, what, what really is the difference there? For example, you know, if I walk up to somebody who is attached to a life support machine and I unplug them, have I killed them or have I allowed them to die? Because like, you know, the machine was, was, okay, so maybe you could think something like, if you're the doctor, yeah, and you're the one who plugs in the machine, then by

• 1:08:43Alex O'Connor?

  taking out the machine, you're allowing them to die, because they were going to die anyway. You're stopping them from dying by plugging it in, when you unplug it, you allow them to die. But if the doctor plugs it in and then walks away, and then another person comes in and unplugs it, they're probably killing the person, right? That would be, but what, why, surely it can't be, the difference between doing and allowing can't be like, who's, who's doing the action, right? That can't be it, but like, that seems to, that seems to be a, a difficult intuition to, to, um, to, to think about, but also like, I mean, um, I wrote a paper about this once for, for one of my tutors and, and basically said like, the distinction is a bunk one, it doesn't make any sense. Like, if I take it to its extreme, I could say something like.

• 1:09:24Alex O'Connor?

  If I come up and slit your throat, I'm not killing you, I'm allowing you to die because like, I'm just removing the barrier of your blood that's kind of keeping it from like spurting everywhere, right? Like, it's a similar, it's a similar kind of thing. Like, for instance, you could say, take the life support machine. If instead of like a mechanical exterior electronic thing that plugs into the wall, let's say that we manage to kind of grow a cellular life support machine, right? So someone's on life support and we design a kind of technology that says we can, we can take like a pill that they take that causes them to like grow a certain kind of organ or something which acts in the same way as the life support machine does. If that person's just walking down the street minding their own business and I come up to them with a knife and I cut it out of them, surely I've killed them. But like, it's the

• 1:10:07Alex O'Connor?

  same, it's the same thing. All I've actually done is removed the barrier that was keeping them alive, so I've just allowed them to die. Right now, earlier from the thought experiment with the ambulance driver, it seems to be that there is a moral distinction, not just like a, like a physical, because right now we're talking about the non-moral distinction. We're just talking about what is the descriptive difference between doing and allowing. But once you've done that, you then have to determine whether it's morally relevant or not. So we've already seen that like, there seems to be a morally relevant difference between doing and allowing. It seems to be that allowing is less bad than doing. But then like, what does that mean for like, kind of cutting out someone's organ or something like, is that, is that not as bad as somehow killing them in another way or something like that?

• 1:10:51Alex O'Connor?

  Like, it's, it's like, it's not as simple as people think it is, right? Because this is, this is the exploration we go through, because I give you the thought experiment with the boulder and your answer is, well, I mean, surely the difference is that in one case, you're kind of putting yourself into the situation, you're doing rather than allowing. But it's like, yeah, but I could, I could say the same thing about slitting someone's, slitting someone's throat or something like that, right? Like, I'm not entirely sure that's the case. But also, sometimes we would think that allowing someone to die is just as bad as killing them. So for instance, Peter Singer gives the example of the child drowning in the, in the shallow pond. Imagine, for example, this is his, it's a famous example from him. If you're walking down the street and there's like a really shallow pond next

• 1:11:33Alex O'Connor?

  to you, and there's a child drowning in the shallow pond. And you could go and save that child really easily. But you decide not to, because you don't want to ruin your shoes. You just bought them and they cost you 30 quid. You're an immoral monster, right? That's a horrible thing to do.

• 1:11:49Alex O'Connor?

  So it's really, really bad because you've allowed this child to die because you've refused to intervene at the cost of thirty pounds. But that's what you do every single time you refuse to give thirty pounds to charity. The child isn't drowning in front of you, the child is starving on the other side of the world, and you're saying, no, I'm not going to intervene because I want to keep my thirty pounds. What's the difference between that and walking past a child in the shallow pond and saying, I'm not going to intervene because I don't want to ruin my shoes, which cost me thirty pounds?

• 1:12:18Chris Williamson?

  It's distance, it's a lack of directness or feeling like you are direct. This is how it manifests, at least in people.

• 1:12:26Alex O'Connor?

  So let's take that one by one, I mean, take the distance case. Okay, so a child drowning in Ethiopia is on the other side of the globe, okay? What if they're drowning in Morocco?

• 1:12:37Alex O'Connor?

  What about Spain? What about France? What about Wales? What if it was like, what if it was just, what if it was like in the next village along? What if it was like next door and you had to kind of go outside and knock on a door and get the dynamo? Like, how close? How close does that have to be? Like, surely distance doesn't make a difference if, like, the money that you can give will get to its destination easily. It's not like you have to go over to Ethiopia or something. It's like, you can just donate the money online, you can do it from your laptop. It would be less effort for you to donate thirty pounds to Oxfam than to go and, like, save a child from drowning in a puddle, right? But we seem to think that you have to save the child from the puddle, but you don't have to give money to charity.

• 1:13:20Alex O'Connor?

  And Peter Singer uses this to say that essentially, you taking thirty pounds, that you could have, you refusing to send lifesaving treatment to a child for no good reason is just the same as you posting them cyanide, as you're just putting some cyanide in the mail and shooting it over there and killing them.

• 1:13:37Chris Williamson?

  Bloody hell, Peter.

• 1:13:39Alex O'Connor?

  It's like, what is the moral difference? Why is it that just because in one case you're allowing them to die because you don't want to intervene, and in the other case you're causing them to die because you're actually doing the intervention? Like, what's the moral difference here? Why is one okay and one not? Why do you have the right to allow a child to die of malaria, but you don't have the right to allow a child to die from suffocation, from drowning?

• 1:14:02Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting when you come across people who...

• 1:14:08Chris Williamson?

  Have thought about this stuff thoroughly and then have the conviction of their efforts to go after it. So two examples, first one being yourself, you became convinced of Bing Bing fifth time lucky veganism through like a just an armchair philosophy sort of thought framework, desperately asked YouTube to see if someone out there could find a rebuttal that would mean that you didn't have to go vegan, then didn't stuck to your guns and went vegan. The other equivalent is Toby Ord, this guy that wrote The Precipice. And in his episode with Sam Harris, he said Toby Ord, and I quote his publishers Bloomsbury, who owe me an absolute shit tongue because I keep putting their authors on the show, he's not doing press the week he went on. I'm not, no, no, no, no, he's not not doing

• 1:14:53Chris Williamson?

  press, he's just not doing press that isn't Sam Harris. Anyway, not, not that I'm bitter, Toby, if you're listening. He is one of the key figures in the effective altruism movement.

• 1:15:06Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:06Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen this where people commit like 20, like significant portions of their earnings for the rest of their life? And then they find the, the most effective charity that they could give it to, they maximize the value out of every pound and people are giving like real significant portions of their wealth forever. And they're like tied into like the sort of lifetime contract thing. He's another person, similar to himself, presumably has gone through thought experiments like this, surrounded by people like fucking Nick Bostrom, who's just bending his mind. And yeah, the, the end result is, you know, 10%, 20% of his salary for the rest of time to.

• 1:15:46Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Chris Williamson?

  Effective altruism.

• 1:15:47Alex O'Connor?

  Well, this is, this is the thing, like the, the reason we do ethics, we should remember is to figure out the right way to live, right? There's, this is essentially why we do ethics, to figure out what the right things do. If you're just doing ethics in such a way and you think of it as kind of a philosophical play thing, then like, fine, but.

• 1:16:03Alex O'Connor?

  I think it's far more beneficial to use ethics to determine how you actually live your life. So if you come to a conclusion, and it seems really abstract, right? It seems like, what do you mean, driving an ambulance and you've got people and then there's like a rock just materializes and you go, but you realize that by answering that question, that can lead you to the conclusion, ah, so I should give up 10% of my income to charity.

• 1:16:26Chris Williamson?

  Dangerous, some of the things that you said today.

• 1:16:28Alex O'Connor?

  It's like, actually, yeah, no, that that makes sense, you know, and maybe you should then do that. But then if you become convinced that that's the case, then it's like, then act, act in accordance with it. If somebody, if you become ethically convinced that it's wrong to kill animals, then stop killing animals. If you become ethically convinced that there's no difference between refusing to give 30 quid to Oxfam and, you know, refusing to to save the child in the puddle, then give 30 quid to Oxfam. You know, like, it should be actually determining our actions. Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus says that for the man who does not cheat, what he determines to be true must determine his actions. And that sentence, almost single-handedly, made me go vegan.

• 1:17:03Chris Williamson?

  What a bastard. I am, I'm gonna tell you a story, because I didn't ever get around to it. I texted you while I was in Ibiza about this. But I was away with Ricky, my buddy. We were having a great day. We'd had a day sort of exploring the island. We went out for dinner with the photographer and his missus that we were there on the night time. She's vegan, he's keto, and Ricky is a ex RAF soldier and like classic sort of CrossFit guy. And I found myself promulgating your position, putting forward your moral philosophy position on veganism, as I had two non vegans and one vegan sat around.

• 1:17:48Chris Williamson?

  And I was saying all of the stuff that there's, what is the characteristic that an animal lacks, that if a human lacked, blah, blah, and everything that we went through. If you haven't, if you don't know what I'm talking about, check out Alex's channel or check out his last episode on my show, which will be linked in the show notes below. And I found myself, and then his missus piped up and was like, so what, like, why do you still eat meat? And it it came back to the the practical implication. Which I think we keep coming back to and I keep trying to impress on you because I think that it is, at least for me, the kryptonite that has meant something I'm convinced of hasn't been something that I've taken as a lifestyle change, which is the amount of

• 1:18:30Chris Williamson?

  effort that is required to do it is simply practically highly inconvenient and because the path of least resistance and there's a lot of inertia to overcome with that, that I tend to not do it. But I said, I held my hands up and it's weird when you say something that's kind of in homage to someone that's a friend, but they're not there to hear it. But it's kind of an interesting sort of situation to be a part of. But I was like, look, man, like, I know that I'm living out of alignment with things that I know to be true. Like, I believe, I believe that I'm increasingly now convinced that, as you say, people in the future will look back on what we do with animals in terms of factory farming

• 1:19:11Chris Williamson?

  now as an absolute travesty. And yet, the food that I ordered was a chicken bacon pizza and this and the other. So yeah, it was, it was interesting. It's interesting to, to see people like yourself and like Toby Ode, who don't just sort of talk the talk, but they, they put their, they put their money and their vegetables where their mouth is.

• 1:19:41Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. Well, it's, it's why, why bother? Like, why bother doing any of this investigation? If you're not going to allow it to inform your action? Like, it would be like kind of spending years and years and years trying to figure out the best way to develop nuclear technology. And then you finally work it out and you go, ah, can't really be bothered to do it. I mean, it's a lot of effort, you know, it's like, then, then why bother do the investigations in the first place? I would say, look, remember, difficulty is a relative term. If I offered you five pounds to run a marathon.

• 1:20:11Alex O'Connor?

  That's a difficult thing to do, £5. But if I offered you a million pounds to run a marathon, it's probably the easiest million dollars you ever made, right? It's like, the term "difficult" is relative to the consequences of the action, right? Like, and relative to the suffering that you'll save by going vegan, the difficulty level is like nothing. And we don't allow that, that kind of, those kind of reasoning and that kind of excuse-making to be taken seriously on any other ethical issue. I mean, like, any other ethical issue that you choose, if you're talking about theft, you could be talking about domestic abuse or something. If someone was just like, "Look, I agree that it's wrong, it's just a lot of effort to change it." It's like, "Well, tough. Ethics isn't supposed to be easy. If something's wrong, then stop doing it." It's not like it's impossible for you, right? It's like, it's inconvenient. Yeah, well, you know what else is inconvenient?

• 1:20:57Alex O'Connor?

  Being put in a gas chamber. Like, "I think I have a bit more sympathy for the pig there than I do for you," I'm afraid to say. And it's worth, it's worth just remembering that, like, okay, the worst part is that, like, it's not really fair that I lumped that on you, because I was talking to a friend of mine the other day at the pub, and he's not a vegan, and the rest of us there were vegan, and we were talking about it, and we ended up having a big discussion about it. And by the end of the night, we're outside just going, "Well, just, you know, just do it, you know, you know that it's wrong, you know that." And then I saw someone who we didn't know, like a stranger, kind of go past on his motorbike or something. You know, when you see someone drive past, and you've never met them, but you just look at them and think, "I just, I don't like that person." It was like, it was one of those situations, and I thought to myself, "That guy eats meat."

• 1:21:37Alex O'Connor?

  And, no, but I thought, "Here I am, I thought, 'Here I am, like, I'm here with my friend, who's one of the nicest people I know, one of the nicest people I know, and here I am, like, lambasting him for his dietary choices. That guy is gonna go and eat meat, and he's not gonna suffer for it at all." It's like, "Why am I punishing you for being my friend?" You know, like, this doesn't seem fair, it doesn't seem fair that I should lay this on you, and I'm not gonna go and lay it on the stranger. Why should he get away for the rest of his life, never even having to consider that eating meat is wrong? But you don't get to get away with that because you had the misfortune to meet me, and now, like, this is on your mind every time you go and buy some milk. And it annoyed me, it frustrated me, because I thought, "This isn't fair on people. This isn't fair on people that just by chance, they happen to have met the wrong person who now is putting this in their head." But then I also thought, "Well, no, because like..."

• 1:22:21Alex O'Connor?

  By telling you about this and by saying it bluntly, it's like, it's an indication of how much I respect you as someone who wants to better themselves, who wants to get rid of false beliefs, who wants to adopt more true beliefs and live in line with a virtuous ethic. And it's like, everything that I see you do, you know, like when you're tweeting about things and you're posting Instagram posts and sometimes they're motivational, sometimes they're like you said earlier, something like, always avoid stupidity. Right? And it's like, yeah, it's pretty stupid to think that you're justified in torturing an animal so that you can have a bit of bacon. If you want to avoid stupidity, then, you know, avoid it. If you want to avoid stupidity, then avoid McDonald's, you know, like, it's like, and I realize that I'm justified in talking to you in this manner because it's not an attack.

• 1:23:06Alex O'Connor?

  It's a, it's a like, look, man, I see what you're trying to do and I reckon, like, I respect you enough to know that you can do better and this is how I think you could do it. And that's just, that's just one man's opinion, like, you know, who am I to tell you how to live your life? Well, I'm not, but I'm telling you how, I'm here to tell you how I live my life, why I live my life in that way and how it's benefited me and how I think it could benefit you too. And then it's up to you as to whether you want to make that decision or not. And when history looks back, as Peter Singer says, you'll be counted among the oppressors of the liberators and you've got to make that choice.

• 1:23:32Chris Williamson?

  And I love it. Alex, today's been awesome, man. Thank you so much for coming on. Where should people go? They want to, they want to watch something, why don't you, if people were to watch one video of yours, what would you recommend? They go onto your channel, so they search Cosmic Skeptic, which will be linked in the show notes below. What video should I put in there if they were to watch one?

• 1:23:51Alex O'Connor?

  I would, I would recommend, the one that I have as the channel trailer is a speech I gave in Tel Aviv called Why It's Time To Go Vegan. And it's one of my proudest videos, just because I think it landed quite well. People seem to like the speech. Other than that, there's a video I made called A Meat Eater's Case Of Veganism, which a lot of people, I think that's how you found me in there, because that's the video we originally discussed.

• 1:24:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:13Alex O'Connor?

  That's one of my favorite videos to talk about like ethics and stuff, you know, I used to be more about philosophy of religion, atheism, that kind of stuff, but I could care less at this point if you believe in God, if you're still like paying for animals to be tortured. So like, those are the most important things, but you know, the second link under that would definitely be patreon.com/cosmicskeptic. That's the, you know, make sure that that's, that's also in the, in the description. And you have a Patreon too now, which I'm, which I'm so glad to hear about.

• 1:24:38Chris Williamson?

  I know, indeed. I know, indeed, man. All, all because of you. All because of you. So yeah, everything will be linked in the show notes below. Oh, final thing, actually. So you mentioned about the gentleman from America, whose book was a good read as a basis for ethics.

• 1:24:57Alex O'Connor?

  Michael Sandel.

• 1:24:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Anything else that you think easy intro or just an interesting myth of Sisyphus, I guess?

• 1:25:04Alex O'Connor?

  I'm not sure if that's the easiest intro. It's about the, I mean, it's about the philosophy of suicide, which can be a bit much. I would recommend if you're just looking to get into ethics, Michael Sandel's Justice is a good place to start. You can also read Peter Singer's Practical Ethics, where he goes over and kind of discusses what does equality mean? When is it okay to kill? You know, like all of these kind of, these kind of questions, it's a really good introduction. Practical Ethics by Peter Singer. If you're interested in the discussions on utilitarianism that we've been having, then Roger Crisp's book, Mill on Utilitarianism, is the analysis that's worth reading. And I think if you want to read Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill, it's worth reading it alongside Crisp's analysis

• 1:25:49Alex O'Connor?

  or reading Crisp's analysis first, just to make sure you kind of understand everything that Mill is getting at and understand the different interpretations.

• 1:25:55Chris Williamson?

  This is like Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, where you need to have like someone along for the ride who can actually explain what's going on.

• 1:26:02Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, you probably want to make sure that you actually know what you're reading. It's like a lot of times if you're reading like old philosophy, you probably want to read it with some kind of, some kind of analysis, not because it's necessarily because it's difficult philosophy, but because the language has changed. Like people meant different things by different words. You need to make sure you understand what people, what people are saying. Yeah, ethics wise, I think, I'm just looking at the ethics section of my, oh, Ethics in the Real World is also a good collection of essays by Peter Singer as well. You can probably tell, I mean, Peter Singer is one of the most influential thinkers on my thinking in my life. Ethics in the real world are a series of very short essays on very particular ethical questions. Like, you know, should you refer to, in news stories, should you

• 1:26:45Alex O'Connor?

  refer to animals as who or that? So like, you know, should you say the cow that or the cow who? Like very specific questions across a broad range of different philosophical issues. And it's quite an interesting read. So those are some recommendations that I'd give to get people going.

• 1:26:59Chris Williamson?

  Cool, awesome. Alex, man, thank you so much. We're gonna have to find somewhere else. I'm gonna have to get something else to pull you back on about yoga or whatever the next adventure is that we take.

• 1:27:10Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I was here about that. Yeah, anytime, man. It's always good to speak to you. If you ever need me to come on and talk about veganism or something, or something.

• 1:27:18Chris Williamson?

  Or anything, or veganism.

• 1:27:19Alex O'Connor?

  That's fine. I don't mind. All veganism. Anything, all veganism. All veganism as everything. Because veganism is my everything, my one, my love, yeah. The apple of my eye.

• 1:27:30Chris Williamson?

  Well, I hope it's non-GMO apple because...

• 1:27:36Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, it's organic, whatever the latest buzz, free range. Yeah, grass-fed. Apple of my eye.

• 1:27:45Chris Williamson?

  Man, thank you for your time. Cheers, dude.

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  And then very slowly start being with the hands to prayer and join that left knee all the way back and keep head close to the hands if you can get it. And then take the left leg over the top of the right. Maybe tuck the toes behind the palms. Arms come out to the side and then this right arm on top of the left. And then he's squeezed into that midline and he starts sinking back.