Philosophy Video Explainers

A three-part series introducing key utilitarian ideas

To help promote An Introduction to Utilitarianism: From Theory to Practice, the publisher asked me to create three short videos—just a few minutes each—introducing some key ideas. Here’s what I came up with (with thanks to the good folks at Hackett for the video editing):

#1: Introduces utilitarianism as a moral theory, clarifies how it values rights instrumentally rather than (as commonly misunderstood) doing away with them altogether, and explains why we should take systematic moral theories seriously even if they sometimes have surprising or counterintuitive implications.

#2 explains impartial beneficence, and how the demandingness objection reads too much into claims about what would be morally ideal:

Finally, video #3 emphasizes the importance of effectiveness, with particular reference to goal-directedness and sensitivity to scale.

I don’t have much of a video content network by which to reach new audiences with these, but if anyone reading this uses TikTok, perhaps you could try sharing the first one.

I had briefly wondered whether it would be worth recording more video explainers — e.g. on Puzzles for Everyone, or how effective altruism is not exclusively utilitarian. But it’s probably not worth the bother unless there’s good reason to expect that I’d actually be able to reach new or broader audiences with the videos. (Otherwise, I prefer writing.)

Still, if anyone happens to be interested, I’ve assembled various of my interviews and recorded talks into a YouTube playlist. (I especially enjoyed my interview with Walter Veit on Why Not Effective Altruism?, but it was also fun to revisit my old 2016 talk at Oxford on Overriding Virtue, for example.)