Gahey, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. One of the most uncomfortable

conversations that we tend to have when we're adolescents, when we're just forming our view of

the world, but which we often then shunt aside later on in life, is the basic, dangerous idea of what does it really mean to do the right

thing versus doing the wrong thing and how do we figure out the edge cases when is it okay to lie

for example to spare a greater harm is it okay to lavish your children with everything they need at the same time as you know

that some of the money that you spend on them could be saving the lives of needier children

overseas? There are big ethical flare-ups in modern culture like is it okay to kill an itsy-bits

teeny-weeny little pre-baby in a mummy's tummy.

Should she have the right to do so?

This abortion debate has, of course, roiled the United States for decades, whether or not

gay people should be allowed to marry each other.

But often, we just sort of take as a given our underlying ethical assumptions about the rest of our lives.

And most of what we believe in Western secular liberal culture is some form of utilitarianism

or consequentialism whose most significant advocate in this generation and arguably of the 20th century would have to be Peter Singer.

A former guest on this show, in fact, I moderated Peter Singer's live events when he was in

Australia and I hope to have him on the show again soon. He literally coined the term animal liberation

in his book of the same name in the 1970s, and he's had

more of an impact than perhaps any other living moral philosopher on the way that both philosophers

think and therefore the way that we all think about doing right and doing wrong. And his basic

position is a utilitarian one, is that the greatest good for the greatest number

of people should be our moral yardstick rather than some sort of more theological or

absolutist moral position that says that there are things that are intrinsically right or

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