Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. I think

that many of us are interested in trying to do the right thing in various contexts,

but as we learn from Spike Lee's movie, as well as elsewhere, it can be hard to know

what it means to do the right thing. And that's true both in a narrow sense and in a meta

sense. In a literal sense, we don't know which thing to do is the right one. That's

what Spike Lee investigated, but the meta sense is what does it mean to say that something

is the right thing? So there literally is within philosophy, the study of ethics, a moral

philosophy, but then there's a study of meta ethics. What are the standards by which

we defend a certain conception of what is morally right? I myself subscribe to something

called moral constructivism, where I think that what exists out there in the world is

the natural world, stuff, behaving in certain ways, and accordance with the laws of physics.

Morality I think is something that we human beings, or presumably other conscious creatures,

out there in the cosmos, talk about and construct ourselves. And then it's very interesting

to talk about, well, what things should we construct? How should we decide to be moral

in different people disagree and so forth? But I think that my point of view there is

a minority one. I think it most people, both on the street and professional thinkers about

this, are what we call moral realists. They think that in addition to the physical stuff

of the universe, there is something else, some way of judging what is right and wrong.

It might come from God, if you're religious, or it might come from philosophizing, from

pure rationality, or it might just come from sort of introspecting about our intuitions

about what is right and what is wrong. So today's guest is Russ Schaeffer Landau. He's

one of the best people to talk about these issues. He's one of the leading defenders of

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