#305 — Moral Knowledge

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2022

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Erik Hoel about the nature of moral truth. They discuss the connection between consequentialism and Effective Altruism, the problems with implementing academic moral philosophy, bad arguments against consequentialism, the implications of AI for our morality, the dangers of moral certainty, whether all claims about good and evil are claims about consequences, the problem of moral fanaticism, difficulty in thinking about low-probability events, and other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
0:12.1	hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing
0:16.2	the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
0:20.7	Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed
0:26.1	to add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads
0:31.2	on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
0:35.8	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
0:46.4	Okay, well a reminder that we're releasing more episodes of the series, The Essential Sam Harris,
0:52.8	created by Jay Shapiro. Jay has mined my catalog and put together episodes on specific themes.
1:03.1	Adding his own commentary read by the wonderful Megan Phelps roper. And weaving that together with
1:10.5	excerpts from many podcasts on a similar topic. We released artificial intelligence
1:16.9	about a week ago. There will be episodes on consciousness and violence, free will, belief and
1:24.3	unbelief, existential threat and nuclear war, social media and the information landscape, death,
1:31.7	meditation and Eastern spirituality, and perhaps other topics beyond that.
1:38.2	Jay's also created workbooks for each episode and recommendations for further exploration.
1:43.6	And these full episodes and other materials are available to all podcast subscribers.
1:50.4	As always, if you can't afford a subscription, you need to only send an email to support at
1:54.8	samherst.org and request a free account. And I remain extremely grateful to have a community of
2:02.4	subscribers that support the podcast knowing that others who can't afford to are nevertheless
2:09.6	able to get everything for free. That really is the business model that makes sense for me in digital
2:14.8	media. And it's our policy over at waking up too. So don't let real concerns about money ever be
2:22.5	the reason why you don't get access to my digital work. Okay. Well, I've been off Twitter for about
	...

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