(Listen to other episodes of Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot here.)

Today I interview moral philosopher Ruth Chang. Our discussion may serve as a kind of “Contemporary Meta-Ethics 101” course, and will bring you up to speed on the kinds of debates moral philosophers are having today. Among other things, we discuss:

• practical rationality: what should we do?
• what makes something a reason for action?
• are there more than 3 ways (better than, worse than, equal to) of comparing two things evaluatively?

Download CPBD episode 021 with Ruth Chang. Total time is 1:41:35.

Ruth Chang links:

• Ruth Chang at Rutgers University
• reading materials (in PDF) for her course with Derek Parfit, ‘Advanced Topics in Ethics’
• Making Comparisons Count
• Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason

Links for things we discussed:

• Practical reason
• Chang, “Can Desires Provide Reasons for Action?“
• Buridan’s ass
• sui generis
• reasons for action: internal vs. external
• papers on internalism vs. externalism
• “Mackie’s two questions” appear in the famous first chapter of his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong
• moral psychology
• Joyce, The Evolution of Morality
• divine command theory
• Chang, “Parity,  Interval Value, and Choice“

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