Alex O'Connor
speaker
2,073 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 25 May
Alex O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The right thing to do is to bring about the least suffering for the least number or the most pleasure for the most people, the fewest number, I should say.
And someone says, okay, that sounds good.
And then how would you test that theory?
Well, you think of a scenario.
Okay, but hold on.
What if there was a healthy person who walked into a hospital and there were five people who needed organ transplants?
And you could kill that innocent person, steal their organs, and most people go, no, no, no, that would be wrong.
Okay, then we need to go back and revise our theory.
Hold on.
Why?
I thought the whole point of having an ethical theory was to tell us what right and wrong are.
But now you're saying if you don't like the conclusion, you just go back and edit the theory?
What's going on there?
It's because we already have intuitions about the outcome and we have certain intuitions about the input.
It's not as simple as like we're going to rationally work out what the standard of ethics is and then that will tell us what to do.
It's like we're going to come up with a kind of theory that captures how we already behave.
And if it doesn't capture how we already behave, then we're going to edit it slightly.
And so the process of meta-ethics or practical ethics coming up with these theories is in many cases actually just working out what we already believe, but doing it precisely.
It's like, you know, most people care about animals.
They love animals, but then they pay for factory farming.
Showing 821–840 of 2,073 · page 42 of 104
← Previous
Next →