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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
without killing people or also you know have some kind of pleasure and then it fits out other outcomes and you sort of got this back and forth and the machine in the middle like you know mixes it all up and gives you the output and rules kind of says that the way this works is you come at it from like both sides you've got intuitive like outcomes and you've got like intuitive theoretical suggestions and you sort of do this back and forth this tug of war between them until they kind of balance out a bit and you get this reflective equilibrium
And that that's what we're doing when we're coming up with theories.
It is never as simple as somebody writing a book and saying, right, I'm going to prove to you from first principles that abortion is wrong specifically from the eighth week.
That's never going to happen, ever.
They're going to rely on intuitions that you already have about people and the worth of humans and bodily autonomy, and they're going to convince you that way.
So...
If you become really learned in the traditions of philosophy, that can be really interesting.
But you'll notice that a lot of philosophers can talk about these big ideas with absolutely no personal investment in them.
They'd be like, oh, you know, like, so Nietzsche thought that God was dead and that this was a great tragedy.
And they're sort of talking as this historical aspect.
They've got zero personal sort of input in there.
And so they're obviously not going to use that to like guide their life in any way.
And if they did, it would just lead to confusion.
There's like a skit I saw once, I think, like someone's on an airplane and they've
They're dying and, you know, they're like, is there a doctor on board?
And someone shows up and says, I'm a doctor.
I'm a doctor of philosophy.
And they're like, well, what should we do?
We need to save this man.
And it's like, well, you know, the utilitarian would say that we should take resources from other people.
Showing 861–880 of 2,073 · page 44 of 104
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