Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
27 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think if Freud had been more open to ideas, he wouldn’t have treated dissent — whether Adlerian or other forms of dissent — in the way he did.”
02 / uncertainty
“I don’t know whether maybe we’ll get an AI that will be able to mix people’s writing styles so that they’re harder to identify.”
03 / belief
“I think we want to punish people who do great evil as a way of indicating that it’s got an expressivist function, that this was a terrible thing that they did.”
04 / belief
“I think there’s evidence that that is possible, and we don’t yet know to what extent that can spread and start to dominate humans in future generations.”
05 / belief
“I think you would really have to change the system of making appointments and tenuring people.”
06 / belief
“I think one reason for supporting secularism is that it seems to me to be true. I don’t think that there is a divine being.”
07 / belief
“I can understand why he wants to emphasize the importance of preventing extinction, but I think there are a number of concerns.”
08 / belief
“I think that’s perhaps why there’s been more of a tendency to talk about that and focus on it than is really justified.”
09 / belief
“I think the Australian governments are actually reasonably utilitarian, and I’m more familiar with them than I am with the governments of Singapore, but Singapore’s a strong candidate.”
10 / belief
“Let me just say, firstly, that book was written a long time ago, I think in the early 1980s.”
11 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if that doesn’t exist, but you said they’re happier than we are, which suggests that there is a common metric of happiness, and that was the basis on which I answered your question.”
12 / belief
“I think what I learned from Hegel was that the nature of society at a time, including its economic interests, does influence people’s ideas.”
13 / belief
“Firstly, we can stop eating nonhuman animals, and particularly, I would say, stop eating animal products from factory farms.”
14 / belief
“I think a lot of our activities are combating nature’s way of doing things rather than regarding it as a model to follow.”
15 / uncertainty
“I don’t know, do you? Again, yes, there were some wonderful works of culture and art produced, but the working class had a very rough life, and maybe they would’ve had a better life if there’d been more utilitarian thinking.”
16 / belief
“I think we all have that intuition. It’s not that I don’t have any retributive intuitions.”
17 / belief
“I think there are a whole lot of factors that just make it hard for people to make that fundamental change about what they eat.”
18 / observation
“What you’ve shown now is that their interest happens to coincide with the universal good. That’s the way to produce more happiness, full stop, not just more happiness for them.”
19 / evaluation
“I think that’s difficult because, again, you would have to take into account the consequences of not having predators, and what are you going to do with a prey population?”
20 / commitment
“I would say he became so committed to the idea that he had to show that morality is objective — that otherwise nihilism is true, nothing matters, and his whole life would be a waste — that that influenced his acceptance of arguments that otherwise he would not have accepted.”
21 / commitment
“I’m going to be teaching my final semester at Princeton because I’m retiring from Princeton at the end of the fall semester.”
22 / evaluation
“Well, it can be a complex question in the sense that it may be that we don’t want to directly aim at utility because we’re likely to get things wrong.”
23 / evaluation
“I used to say that Sidgwick is an underrated philosopher because he’s the best of the utilitarians, of the 19th-century utilitarians.”
24 / evaluation
“In the area of transgender studies, that’s because many academics have been severely abused and harassed and their lives made quite difficult if they have published things that were seen as transphobic, although I think that term is used far too broadly.”
25 / uncertainty
“I’m not sure whether it’s intractable in a philosophical sense because we can’t sum up the values, or whether there’s just so much factual information that we don’t have, including how do we make comparisons between the well-being of the bison, let’s say, that were here more numerously, as compared with the well-being of the humans.”
26 / evaluation
“As you said, there may be effects on other animals and plants in the area where we’re introducing them. But to do so just for its own sake, just because they were once here and were once part of the ecology, is not, to my view, a sufficient reason for introducing them if we know that is going to increase the suffering of some prey animals.”
27 / evaluation
“I think there are some cases — and again, I would instance factory farming — where we can be very confident that what we’re doing is causing more pain and suffering than it’s doing good to us. That’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of other questions, including that question you asked about — is it good that humans colonized North America — where it’s harder to make those decisions because they are involving comparisons.”