Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We all, in life,

struggle with the question of what is the right thing to do? How do you behave like a good person?

What is the moral thing to do, the ethical thing to do? Once you get into the professional

philosophy sphere, you start asking, what do you mean by the right thing to do? Is there something

called the right thing to do? Is that an objective truth about the universe? Do people just make it up?

And if it's out there, whether we make it up or not, how do we find it? How do we calculate? How do we

decide what is the right thing to do under various conditions?

Probably, although there are many different approaches, the most popular current approach is

utilitarianism, some version of saying that there is some quantity, the utility, the greatest

good, the total happiness or pleasure or well-being of conscious creatures,

human beings, however you want to slice it, that we should try to maximize. The more people

are happy, the more their well-being is fulfilled, et cetera, the better off, the more moral

we're going to be. And probably the most prominent proponent of utilitarianism

in modern philosophy is today's guest, Peter Singer. Peter Singer has been a very active voice

in both developing utilitarian philosophy, but also in implementing it. He has had an impact on

the real world, more than most philosophers have had.

He's both been very, very careful in thinking about what it means to increase the total happiness

of humanity, and he's famously willing to follow the implications of his reasoning wherever they may

lead. He believes that we all have

moral intuitions or feelings. Some of them are not right. And so sometimes if you're

careful about doing moral philosophy, you're going to be led to conclusions that are a little

bit surprising or counterintuitive at first. But if you trust your logic, you should nevertheless accept them.

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