Making Sense with Sam Harris · 2025-12-01 · 22 min · 4,608 words

#446 — How to Do the Most Good

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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 advisor?

He was. All right, so we uh 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 age about 16. I first came across philosophy, my first lesson on philosophy, I came across the idea of utilitarianism that we should maximize 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.

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