351 | Peter Singer on Maximizing Good for All Sentient Creatures

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We all in life struggle with the question of what is the right thing to do? How do you behave like a good person? What is the moral thing to do, the ethical thing to do?

Once you get into the professional philosophy sphere, you start asking, what do you mean by the right thing to do? Is there something called right thing to do? Is that an objective truth about the universe? Do people just make it up?

And if it's out there, whether we make it up or not, how do we find it? How do we calculate? How do we decide what is the right thing to do under various conditions? Probably, although there are many different approaches, the most popular current approach is utilitarianism, some version of saying that There is some quantity, the utility, the greatest good, the total happiness or pleasure or well-being of conscious creatures, human beings, however you want to slice it, that we should try to maximize.

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