Hello everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this.

So the goal of the episode today is to track the changes in the ethical views of the

philosopher Peter Singer throughout the different stages of his career.

Peter Singer being a man who's considered to be one of the most

influential philosophers talking about ethics today. He's written books that have

sold millions of copies on everything from animal rights to end-of-life care to

effective altruism, but one of the most interesting things about Peter Singer as a philosopher

is just how much his views have changed over the years. What I mean is, at the beginning of his career,

Peter Singer was somebody who didn't believe in moral facts. Morality was a kind of thing to him where it couldn't possibly be true or false, no matter how hard you tried.

Whereas these days, as a 78 year old man, after 50 years of thinking and writing about this kind of stuff.

He's gotten to a place today where he thinks that morality is actually something that is

objectively true.

How did that whole transformation take place?

Today's episode is the story of it,

and by the end of this story, hopefully along the way I'm going to do my best to do three things.

One, the story of his moral evolution

will be a great excuse for us to talk about several different important

modern ethical approaches that people are holding these days.

It'll allow you to see if any of these align with you.

Second thing is, I hope by talking about these different types of meta-ethics and normative ethics and how they combine together to make up an approach to morality.

My hope is that it'll allow you to have a frame of reference to understand your own ethical evolution better, whatever that's going to look like in your case.

And the last thing I hope this episode can do is to serve as an inspiration.

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