Ethics Discussion with Daniel Muñoz

At the prompting of

Bentham's Bulldog

, I had my first “Substack Live” discussion today. It was billed as a “debate” about consequentialism and deontology, where the brilliant

Daniel Muñoz

and I could finally hash out our disagreements. But anyone hoping to see our bloody gored remains will be disappointed: I’d say it was really more of a “friendly discussion” where we uncovered significant areas of overlap and agreement, in addition to clarifying the points where we disagree.

Besides all the detail on how to understand the consequentialism-deontology debate and the biggest challenges for either side, we also covered (with even more agreement) some larger topics like progress in philosophy, the value of normative ethics, the problem with bioethics, and the challenge of balancing explicit rationality against the implicit wisdom or “adaptiveness” of received norms. (We also got some questions from the live audience, which was fun.)

I had a blast, and thought it was a great discussion—huge thanks to Daniel and Matthew for making it happen! Hopefully we’ll see a bunch more live conversations between philosophers on Substack in future. (Substack makes the tech/logistics very simple and straightforward.) If you have a strong view on how valuable this sort of exchange is, relative to ordinary posts, let me know in the comments.