#446 — How to Do the Most Good

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

🗓️ 1 December 2025

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Michael Plant about the philosophy of happiness and effective altruism. They discuss the nature of well-being, Nozick's "Experience Machine" thought experiment, the validity of self-reported happiness data, the conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self, Derek Parfit's "Repugnant Conclusion," the disconnect between moral intentions and consequences, why treating depression is more impactful than cash, the massive disparities in charitable impact, the potential effects of AI on human flourishing, the meaning crisis in a post-work future, 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 hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to
0:21.5	subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made
0:26.5	possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here,
0:31.2	please consider becoming one. I am here with Michael Plant.
0:38.4	Michael, thanks for joining me.
0:40.0	Thanks for having me on.
0:41.1	So we were introduced by Peter Singer, and I think you, was he your dissertation advisor?
0:46.5	He was.
0:47.3	All right.
0:47.5	So maybe you can give your background before we jump into the topics of mutual interest.
0:52.6	Well, so I'm a philosopher and global happiness researcher and I kind of got started
0:57.7	on this interest age about 16.
0:59.7	I first came across philosophy.
1:01.6	My first lesson on philosophy, I came across the idea of utilitarianism that we should maximize
1:06.0	happiness.
1:07.0	And I thought, oh, wow, that's, I don't know if that's the whole story of ethics, but that's
1:10.0	a massive story of ethics. You might say it was a waking up moment. And then over the next 20 years, I've kind of pursued two topics as this philosophical question or should we maximize happiness? I mean, I thought that was quite plausible, but lots of people thought it was nuts. So what's going on there? And then this empirical question of, well, how do we do that? You know, what in fact, how can we apply happiness research to
1:31.9	finding out what really we ought to do? And I've been kind of pursuing those tracks and those
1:35.7	have taken me to what I'm doing now. So maybe we should define a few terms before we proceed.
1:40.9	A couple will be very easy and then I think happiness will be very hard. But you just
1:47.4	mentioned utilitarianism. How do you define that and do you differentiate it from consequentialism
1:54.1	and what is the rival meta-ethical position or positions that if they exist, I'm uncertain as
	...

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