(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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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I find it oddly pleasing that your casual atheism blog has sort of accidentally spawned one of the better philosophy podcasts out there. If you can do more two hour-long interviews with professional philosophers in which they expound on philosophical issues this intensively, it’d definitely become the best.
Mark(Quote)
Mark,
Thanks. I am rather proud of what me and my $15 production budget have achieved. Interviews like this one aren’t available almost anywhere else.
lukeprog(Quote)
My God, Luke, you’re on a roll with these interviews. I can’t even keep up! But keep ‘em coming :)
Jeff H(Quote)
These definitely are good interviews. I listen to them when I go to the gym. Keep it up.
Landon Hedrick(Quote)
Great interview. Thank you for longer interviews like this one. You do a good job of leading with questions and allowing your guests ample time to explain their distinctions.
Nerf Herder(Quote)
Another great interview. I presume you will address her “masochist” argument against desirism at some point in the other podcast (if you’re still doing those).
The scenario with the chocolates was interesting. I kept thinking that she was going to bring up our evidenced right sided bias and include that into the equation. How does that affect it? This is why psychology (or XPhi philosophy) is important: the nature of intention has philosophical ramifications. If desire is a normative tiebreaker in value based reasoning, how do cognitive biases fit in?
Gatogreensleeves(Quote)
Oh, well, I guess I should have completely finished the interview before commenting- got a little too excited :-) For some reason, I thought it was almost over, but it had just started…
Gatogreensleeves(Quote)