Pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan,

Scicast.

If those conversations are indicators for how many people have got questions,

so it could be in trouble here.

It might have more hecklers on the way.

Let's hope not.

All right.

So we're going to take a question beginning here from this section.

My question is for Peter Singer.

As a moral realist myself, I'm really curious to know what convinced you of moral realism.

What is the main argument?

So one of the things that convinced me was Derek Parfitt's book On What Matters,

and in particular the argument that he puts there

about this strange person who is indifferent to whatever happens to him on a future Tuesday.

So this is an argument against David Hume's claim that reason in practice always starts from

a desire, what Yume called a passion. And Hume said, reason is slave to the passions.

And so Parthet asks us to imagine somebody who just doesn't have a desire about what

happens to him on any future Tuesday.

So if you ask him, in other respects he's like us, if you ask him, would you prefer to have

a mild headache or be tortured?

And let's say you're asking this question on a Wednesday and the torture, whatever is, you're going to have to have the headache today or be tortured tomorrow. He will say, of course, I'd much rather have the headache. But if you ask him the question on a Monday, he would say, well, I don't really want a headache and I don't care what happens to me on a future Tuesday. You know, I don't want to have the headache. And then he's tortured. It's a Tuesday, but it's no longer a future Tuesday and he hates what's happening to him. So Parford argues and I agree that this

is, this person is clearly irrational. There's something, you know, gone wrong with his reasoning

...