Christopher Brown

speaker

1,098 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 20 Jan

Christopher Brown’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable · 20 Jan 2026 podcast

And I think even posing the question, posing the questions points out, absurdity may be too strong, but rise of Christianity, good or bad?

You know, Columbus's crossing of the Atlantic, good or bad?

Well, it kind of depends on who you ask and what you're interested in.

I don't think these things are resolvable in very simple moralistic terms.

I mean, heck, you could have the same conversation with the Reformation, good or bad.

My suspicion is that there are different answers to that in Canterbury than there are in Rome.

The world is too complex and people are too diverse and their experiences are far too complicated and varied to...

at least from a historian's point of view, to simplify things in the ways that those kinds of analyses require.

Yeah, I'm not sure what to say about that.

I mean, one thing I think you should know and your audience should know is that, you know, the conclusions I've reached on this subject come from many years of writing and thinking.

Sometimes there are arguments where you know what you want to say and then you find your ways to support it.

This is a view that emerged out of many years of thinking about the subject and the problem.

So,

Could be hard to boil it down.

You know, there's a, you know, in the crudest possible sense, every aspect of human affairs is contingent, right?

I mean, what does the world look like if Napoleon's parents never met?

I mean, you can play this kind of game forever.

On the other hand, you can do the thing of, well...

But look, the forces, in the end, the evolution of human society was going to bring us to a particular point.

And really, in some ways, it's a matter of where you look.

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