Part One · First Questions · Series 7

How to Be Good

We argue, both of us right, and never get one inch closer.

Forthcoming EthicsMetaphilosophy

The question

It's late, the dishes are done, and we're still going — me and someone I actually love — about whether her brother did the right thing. I've got reasons. She's got reasons. Good ones, both sides. And about an hour in I notice something that stops me cold: we're not getting closer. We are not one inch closer than when we started. We're just saying the same things harder. She says "you can't put a price on family," I say "he had a duty to the people depending on him," and those two sentences slide right past each other like they're made of glass.

And here's the part I can't shake. It's not that one of us is stupid. It's not even that we want different things. It's that there is apparently no move — none — that would count, for both of us, as settling it. So we don't settle it. We never settle anything. And I start to wonder if that's just what having values is. Or if something is broken, and it's not in her, and it's not in me.

The episodes

Each episode builds on the one before, and the finale hands the question back to you sharper, not settled.

8 of 8 transcripts are readable now — audio is coming.

1

We never settle anything

A late-night argument between two people who love each other, about whether her brother did the right thing — good reasons on both sides, and no step that would count for both as settling it. This first episode examines the moral argument that never ends, and asks whether that is simply what having values is like, or a sign that something has gone wrong underneath.
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2

The three things you're actually saying

Listened to closely, the reasons in any moral argument fall into three kinds — how the act turns out, a line that must not be crossed, and the kind of person it makes you. The episode makes the strongest case for each in turn — the traditions of Mill and Bentham, of Kant, and of Aristotle — and shows that the three do not convert into one another.
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3

Just saying it harder

When the reasons run out, people restate the same sentence with more force. C. L. Stevenson's emotivism holds that this is what moral argument always was — not two people reaching for a fact but two people pressing attitudes on each other. The episode builds the position until it half-convinces, then counts what accepting it would cost.
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4

The law with no lawgiver

Elizabeth Anscombe's 1958 paper Modern Moral Philosophy argued that the moral "ought" behaves like a law — binding and overriding — while the lawgiver that once stood behind it is gone. The episode states her case, then hears two replies — Christine Korsgaard's, that we give the law to ourselves, and Philippa Foot's, that the standard was never a law but the plain facts of what a human being needs.
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5

Is moral language broken?

Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981) argues that our moral words are fragments — surviving pieces of traditions that have collapsed, which is why the arguments never end. The episode builds the diagnosis at full strength, then sets beside it the philosophers, John Rawls and Thomas Scanlon among them, who hold that nothing has collapsed and the field is doing the ordinary hard work of disagreement.
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6

Open-mindedness

The calm refusal to take a side — "I can see both sides" — is put under the same scrutiny as everything else. On MacIntyre's diagnosis it is a symptom of the collapse rather than maturity; on the rival account it can be an evasion of work with a real answer at the end. The listener's own open-mindedness is the subject, and no verdict is returned.
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7

Nietzsche or Aristotle

MacIntyre's cure — recover a living tradition, or concede to Nietzsche that morality is power that has learned to sound like principle. The episode makes the case for that stark choice at full force, then bills it from both sides, including the philosophers who say he is reaching for a solid floor while denying that anyone has one.
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8

What would it take to repair the words?

No verdict, and no instruction to choose your ground — on the hardest diagnosis, the choosing was the disease. The final episode refuses the comfortable exits one by one and hands back a question sharper than the one the series began with — is the foundation really gone, or has the work of finding it simply not been done? Both readings are left open.
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Thinkers

The thinkers and traditions this series draws on:

G.E.M. Anscombe

The question

The episodes

Thinkers

Where it connects