#446 — How to Do the Most Good

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, so if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Michael Plant. Michael, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me on. So we were introduced by Peter Singer, and I think you was he your dissertation adviser? He was. Alright. So maybe you can give your background before we jump into the topics of mutual interest. Well, so I'm a philosopher and global happiness researcher, and I I kind of got started on on this interest stage. About 16, I first came across philosophy. My first lesson on philosophy, I came across the idea of utilitarianism, that we should maximise happiness, and I thought, oh, wow. That's I don't know if that's the whole story of ethics, but that's a massive story of ethics. You might say it was a, a waking up moment. Mhmm. And, then over the next twenty years, I've kind of pursued two topics. There's this philosophical question of should we maximise happiness? I mean, I thought that was quite plausible, but lots of people thought it was nuts. So what's going on there? And then this empirical question of, well, how do we do that? You know, what in fact you know, how can we apply happiness research to finding out what really we ought to do? And I've been kind of pursuing those tracks, and those have taken me to to what I'm doing now. So maybe we should define a few terms before we, proceed. I mean, a couple will be very easy, and then I think happiness will be very hard. But, you just mentioned utilitarianism. How do you define that, and and do you differentiate it from consequentialism? And what is the rival metaethical position or positions that if they exist. I'm I'm uncertain as to whether they actually exist, but we can talk about that. Well, so utilitarianism is or classical utilitarianism is the view that what one ought to do is to maximize the sum total of happiness. And then then that differs from consequentialism, where consequentialism was is what ought to to do the most good. So you don't necessarily have to define good in terms of happiness. You can think of that as desires or or other sorts of things. And then these kind of consequentialist theories contrast with what are called sort of down to logical or kind of common sense ethical theories where those theories will say, sometimes you should maximise the good, but also there are constraints, there are things you shouldn't do, …