Episode 227: A Terrible Master (David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water").
Very Bad Wizards21 Joulu 2021

Episode 227: A Terrible Master (David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water").

David and Tamler dive into David Foster Wallace's celebrated and surprisingly earnest Kenyon College commencement speech "This is Water". How can we escape the prison and prism of our (literally) self-centered perspective? Can we choose to adjust our natural default settings, take a break from our running inner monologue, and pay attention to what's in front of us right now? Is DFW appealing to Buddhist ideas or something more general that you can be found across all spiritual traditions?

Plus we ask the AI ethics program "Ask Delphi" some tough moral questions (spoiler alert: "just the tip" is "rude"), and almost get into a big fight about the potential of AI ethical robots (but we're saving that argument for a future episode).

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Episode 39: How Many Moralities Are There? (Pt.1)

Episode 39: How Many Moralities Are There? (Pt.1)

Dave and Tamler bounce back this week after having to trash the last episode. Does morality ultimately boil down to a single principle (such as harm or justice), or is there more to ethical life than ...

20 Tammi 201459min

Episode 38: The Greatest Movies Ever Made about Personal Identity

Episode 38: The Greatest Movies Ever Made about Personal Identity

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31 Joulu 20131h 21min

Episode 37: Porn, Poop, and  Personal Identity (with Nina Strohminger)

Episode 37: Porn, Poop, and Personal Identity (with Nina Strohminger)

The guest we've been waiting for--Nina Strohminger--joins us to talk about the connection between disgust and humor, cheap laughs, moral character and personal identity, and the British opt-in plan fo...

17 Joulu 201345min

Episode 36: An Irresponsible Meta-Book Review of Joshua Greene's "Moral Tribes"

Episode 36: An Irresponsible Meta-Book Review of Joshua Greene's "Moral Tribes"

Our most irresponsible episode ever!  Dave and Tamler talk about two reviews of a book they haven't read--Joshua Greene's Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them--and feel only ...

25 Marras 201355min

Episode 35: Douchebags and Desert

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Dave and Tamler talk about the influence of character judgments on attributions of blame. What is the function of the blame--to assign responsibility or to judge a person's character? Is it fair that ...

11 Marras 20131h 1min

Episode 34: Does Reading Harry Potter Make You Moral? (with Will Wilkinson)

Episode 34: Does Reading Harry Potter Make You Moral? (with Will Wilkinson)

Special guest Will Wilkinson joins the podcast to talk about whether fiction makes us better people, and to discuss his recent Daily Beast article that trashed Dave's profession and livelihood. Also, ...

28 Loka 20131h 14min

Episode 33: Monkeys, Smurfs, and Human Conformity (With Laurie Santos)

Episode 33: Monkeys, Smurfs, and Human Conformity (With Laurie Santos)

Special guest Laurie Santos (Psychology, Yale) joins us to talk about what animal cognition can tell us about human nature. Why are other primates better at resisting the misleading influence of other...

14 Loka 201357min

Episode 32: Disagreeing About Disagreement

Episode 32: Disagreeing About Disagreement

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