How Do We Define What Is Good & Bad? - Cosmic Skeptic - #214

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Alex O'Connor, otherwise known as Cosmic Skeptic. And today we are posing some of the most difficult and famous questions in ethics. Some of my favorite episodes that we do on Modern Wisdom are ones that pose questions that force you to actively participate in the discussion. I really enjoy bringing you along for the ride and making sure that you're engaged in what is being said. So today, Alex gives us some mind-bending questions that force us to question our intuitions around what is good and what is bad. So today, expect to learn what does it mean to say that a thing is good? Why should you do one thing instead of another? Why should we care about well-being? What is the definition of suffering? And on whose authority is anything good or bad? Really sort of, it's a episode that you should be focused on while you're listening to it, let's put it that way. But for now, it's time for a mental workout with the wise and wonderful Alex O'Connor.
Alex bloody O'Connor, how are you?

**Alex O'Connor** (1:25)
Chris, I'm well. All the better for seeing you, as they say. It's been too long. I haven't seen you in person since we went to that event in London. And I can't think how long ago that was now, where you made me do the yoga that you seem to be telling everyone and their dog about. And that photo of me, that photo of me that you keep posting is like, you know the one of Beyonce that she wanted to disappear from the internet? That's my version of that. Me trying to work out how to put my leg under the, yeah, it was a nightmare. But yeah, it's a shame. It's good to be speaking to you again, even if it's a public conversation.

**Chris Williamson** (1:59)
Yeah, I know man. It is, that was one hell of a weekend.
One hell of a weekend. I've got the full length, one hour yoga form recording both of us doing it side by side. And I'm considering offering it out to the highest bidder. I'm pretty certain there's some people on the internet, some fairly sort of prominent debaters of yours that would pay good money for that kind of ammunition.

**Alex O'Connor** (2:24)
Yeah, yeah, I do worry about some of the ammunition that my friends have on me and the people they could sell it to. I think maybe I could release it as a Patreon exclusive or something. That might be a good... Or you could release it as a Patreon exclusive.

**Chris Williamson** (2:35)
And then steal all your Patreons.

**Alex O'Connor** (2:36)
There you go, yeah. Yeah, they'll jump over to you there. Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. But you know, I haven't even seen that video. So God knows what other weird shapes I try to morph my body into.

**Chris Williamson** (2:48)
It was graceful. It was your first time, you know? No one's good at the first time.

**Alex O'Connor** (2:53)
No one's good at the first time, as they say.

**Chris Williamson** (2:59)
But no, yeah, that was February, man. That was a while ago.

**Alex O'Connor** (3:01)
Was that February?

**Chris Williamson** (3:02)
Yeah.

**Alex O'Connor** (3:03)
Man, it's crazy. It's a crazy world out there. I've been getting a bit of flak for it, actually, because we're going to be talking about ethics today.
Because when you reached out to me, and I was on your podcast before, and we talked about veganism, which was the first time we properly spoke, and that was ages ago now. But of course, talking about veganism requires ethics more broadly as an underlying. But hopefully, I can sway you in an ethical direction that puts you off the idea of sharing those videos of me online, but we'll see where it goes.

**Chris Williamson** (3:38)
Okay, I see how you're circling this background now. I'm a bad friend if that video ever surfaces anywhere. So okay, ethics, morality, where do we start?

**Alex O'Connor** (3:48)
Yeah. Well, look, I mean, it's a complicated business, right? Ethics, generally speaking, people have broad intuitions that certain things are right or wrong. And it's clear that some of these things seem to vary across cultures, across upbringings.
But generally speaking, everybody seems to have some kind of intuition that there is such thing as right or wrong. When you break down ethics, there are a number of layers in which you can look at it. So one of the most important distinctions is between what might be called practical ethics and what might be called meta-ethics.
The simplest way to define these two is to say that practical ethics answers the question of what is good, whereas meta-ethics answers the question of what good is, right? So if you're talking about practical ethics, this is generally what people think of when they think of ethics, right? Like, is abortion moral? Is euthanasia permissible? These kinds of questions, questions of veganism, that kind of stuff, social justice, any of that. But underlying that, we need to have some understanding of the meaning of the words we're using. I mean, what does it actually mean to say something is good? What does it mean to say that you ought to do something? Like, what are the definitions of these terms? And this is what you'd call meta-ethics. And this is the more difficult part, in my view. And it's the part that, like, kind of there, there seems to be the most kind of irresolvable disagreements. Because if you just have a different intuition about what good is, then you're kind of talking past each other. Whereas if you can at least agree that, say, you think that good is, good consists in what maximizes well-being for conscious creatures, then when you have an argument about veganism, it becomes essentially an objective discussion. Because you can just objectively point to what affects well-being in various ways, but if you disagree about what it actually means, then you run into problems. The thing is, nobody seems to agree on this. This isn't like a scientific endeavor where you conduct a bunch of experiments and you do peer review, and then you just figure out what the answer is. It's like, we're asking the same questions that Aristotle and Plato were asking. Not much has actually changed. A lot of the time, it's useful to read those classics because a lot of people end up reinventing the wheel and doing it badly, because they're thinking about ethics and they have this bright idea. I think this is amazing. But it turns out a hundred other people have done it before them, but it's so buried in the literature that they don't know it exists. So it's really worth familiarizing yourself with some of the basic conceptions of ethics across the board before you can jump into talking about practical ethics.