#448 — The Philosophy of Good and Evil

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 David Edmonds. David, thanks for joining me again. Thanks for having me back. So, David, you have a new book, which I I really enjoyed. It's titled Death in a Shallow Pond, a Philosopher, a Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need. And, you've written a kind of a short bio of, the philosopher Peter Singer, who's also been on the podcast several times and of the effective altruism movement that he has spawned along with, Will McCaskill and Toby Ord, who've also been on the podcast several times. And but it's also a great history of moral philosophy in the analytic tradition. So I I I just wanna track through the book really because it's I I think the, the virtues of effective altruism as well as its, the concerns surrounding it are are still worth talking about. And I think just the the core concerns of moral philosophy and how we think about doing good in the world are are really, of a, eternal interest because it's not at all clear that we think about these things rationally or effectively or normatively in any other way. So but before we jump in, remind people what you do. You you because I you you and I have spoken before, and you have your own podcast. But, you know, where can people find your work generally, and and what are you tending to focus on these days? Gosh. Well, I had a double life as a BBC journalist and a philosopher. I've given up the BBC bit, so it's all philosophy from now on. Nice. I've got a podcast called Philosophy Bites, which I make with a colleague, a friend called Nigel Warburton. And, yeah, now I write philosophy books. And I'm linked to a center in Oxford called the UHERO Institute, Institute, which is a center dedicated to the study of practical ethics, applied ethics. So, yeah, those are the various strings to my bow. So why did you write this book? How why and why did you take the the angle you took here? Oh, gosh. I mean, there's some prosaic explanations for why I wrote the book. I just written this biography of a guy called Derek Parfit, who, as it happens, Peter Singer says is the only genius he ever met. And so I was thinking, I had such fun writing that book, and he was such an extraordinary character. Mhmm. I thought maybe I'll have a …