Rationally Speaking #181 - William MacAskill on "Moral Uncertainty"

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2017

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode introduces "moral uncertainty," the idea that you shouldn't be overly confident in your moral judgments -- like whether it's okay to eat meat, for example, or whether it's okay to abort a baby. The episode's guest is Will MacAskill, a founder of the effective altruism movement and Oxford professor of philosophy. Julia and Will discuss how to take multiple moral systems into account when making a decision, and how to deal with "absolutist" theories that insist some actions have infinite badness, like lying.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today's episode of Rationally Speaking is sponsored by Givewell, a nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding charities and publishing their full analysis to help donors decide where to give.
0:09.2	They do rigorous research to quantify how much good a given charity does, how many lives does it save, or how much does it reduce poverty per dollar donated.
0:17.4	You can read all about their research or just check out their short list of top recommended evidence-based charities to maximize the amount of good that your donations can do. It's free and available to everyone online. Check them out at give well.org. I also want to let you all know about this year's Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, being held in New City, June 29th through July 2nd.
0:38.3	I'll be there taping a live podcast, and there will be lots of other great guests, including
0:42.4	the skeptics guide to the universe, my former co-host, Massimo Piliucci, the amazing James
0:47.4	Randy, and keynote speaker Mike Massimino, former NASA astronaut.
0:51.9	Get your tickets at nexus.org, n-e-C-S-S-S-O-org.
0:56.7	...
0:57.0	... Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
1:22.5	I'm your host, Julia Galef, and with me today is my good friend and today's guest, Will McCaskill.
1:28.7	Will is probably most famous worldwide for creating and helping create and popularize the
1:35.1	effective altruism movement, which I've talked about in several past episodes of the podcast.
1:41.2	He co-founded and is the CEO of the Center for Effective Altruism and is the
1:46.8	author of the book Doing Good Better. But today we're not going to be talking about effective altruism,
1:52.3	at least not primarily. We're going to be talking about Will's work and philosophy. Oh, I didn't
1:56.9	mention in my list of Will's achievements that he's also, he was, when he became a
2:02.6	tenured professor of philosophy at Oxford, he was the youngest person in the world to be a
2:08.2	tenured professor at Oxford. And so we're going to be talking about Will's sort of main research
2:13.5	focus in philosophy, which is moral uncertainty. And this is a topic that's on my list,
2:20.6	at least, of philosophical questions that I think are meaningful and real and important to
2:27.9	actual real-life decision-making and that are unresolved, but that I feel like we might potentially be able to make progress on.
2:37.2	This is not a long list of topics, but moral uncertainty is on it.
	...

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