Episodi

  • Eliminating Morality - Part 2 (with Ethan Moore)

    Eliminating Morality - Part 2 (with Ethan Moore)
    Oct 22 2026
    If you want to show your support for my newsletter/podcast, consider becoming a paid subscriber. The proceeds will be donated to animal welfare charities. Thanks for all the support!Without further delay, here is part 2 of my discussion with Ethan. Two eliminativists have surprisingly much to say to each other. For part 1 click here:Transcript[00:02] Walter Veit: All right. Zoom broke up this podcast episode because I am not a premium member: after 40 minutes you are automatically disconnected, unfortunately. Such is life. But to finish my point, there are a lot of choices we make in our lives, certain seemingly strange values you might decide to live under. I went to Japan last year around this time and saw some sumo wrestlers living together, dedicating their lives to this lifestyle. They have to follow certain rules. They have very strict eating regimes. For the moral abolitionist, there is nothing inherently wrong with someone just deciding, willy-nilly, to follow a certain set of rules. But you are then almost treating morality in a similar style: almost like a random set of rules you might choose to live by, rather than trying to attach anything beyond that.[01:11] Ethan Moore: Yes. I am always careful with things like this, because I do not want to take on the mantle of “anything goes”, which is always the brush with which error theory, let alone moral abolitionism, is tarred. There are standards we can subject our decisions to, but these would be standards of what I would call instrumental rationality. Take the person who decides to sit around counting blades of grass all day, the ideally coherent eccentric. If that really coheres with their goals, makes them happy and fulfils their desires, and they can sustain relationships alongside their grass-blade counting, who am I to fault them for it? On the principles of instrumental rationality, that is, you are instrumentally rational to the extent that you pursue the perceived probable means to your ends, they are being instrumentally rational. Of course, if the average person went about counting blades of grass, or devoting their life to sumo wrestling, that would probably be instrumentally irrational for most people, given their desires. But that is a matter of how their desires interact with the practices that lifestyle would require. In fairness, if I gave advice to a friend who was considering becoming a sumo wrestler, what I would ask them is: do you really care about this so much that you will give up all of these other things? Is that what you really care about? Rather than: no, you should not care about that, what is wrong with you? It is a very different orientation.[03:07] Walter Veit: You mentioned earlier that Bentham said natural rights should be thought of as nonsense upon stilts. And Dennett, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, takes up that idea and says: yes, it is nonsense, but it is useful nonsense. We might need it for ending conversations; “conversation stoppers”, he calls them. But given what you just said, I think not so. We do not actually want conversations to end by people just declaring that something is some kind of ultimate value. It would be better to talk about means and ends instead. Usually, if there is conflict between people, or if these conversations arise at all, it is because people do not understand why someone else wants to pursue certain ends or favours a certain policy. If you already understood, or were in agreement, there would be little reason to ask. So I think it would usually be better to let people explain, perhaps in excessive detail, what their beliefs are and what goals lead them to endorse a certain action or policy, because that could help us understand each other better. Especially in the culture wars, I think there is a lot of misunderstanding, where people attribute both the wrong goals and the wrong beliefs to the other side. And fair enough, often people do have wrong beliefs and strange goals, but not always. So trying to understand where other people are coming from can be quite useful for getting around conflicts, perhaps in many cases.[04:50] Ethan Moore: Absolutely, I would agree. Normally, the more incendiary the debate, the more misunderstanding is happening. I entirely agree with that, and a lot of my thesis is devoted to arguing it. We do not want conversations to stop. When these things matter to us, we want them to be protracted. We want to be clear on what we want and how to achieve our goals. And if we do have incompatible goals, we want to know about that, because then we know it is a matter of competition, or negotiation. We have these options, and it is good to know which options are available to us. If we have genuinely intractable, incompatible goals, then at least let us be honest about what we are doing: we are competing. That is what we do when we go to the ballot box. We compete with other people who have opposing goals, or at least that is what we think we are ...
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    39 min
  • How to abolish morality? (with Ethan Moore)

    How to abolish morality? (with Ethan Moore)
    Oct 21 2026
    Given our recent reading group and moral nihilism and several posts on the topic, I figured it would be a great idea to invite Ethan Moore. Ethan Moore is a fourth-year PhD researcher in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in the final stages of finishing his PhD thesis on the abolition of morality. To my knowledge, that is the first PhD thesis on this topic! It was a pleasure to talk to him and I hope you’ll enjoy the episode too!Ethan’s websiteSome of his publications:* ‘The Prudential “Now What?” Problem’, Acta Analytica (2026). View publication* ‘Ethics Without Morals’, in Philosophers on How to Live: Talking about Morality, Bloomsbury, forthcoming; edited by Jack Symes and Ellie Palmer.* The Amoral Life: A Practical Guide to Moral Abolitionism, Routledge, in progress; edited by Ethan Moore.Transcript* This transcript is generated with the help of AI and may contain minor mistakes. (check time stamps in video if in doubt)[00:03] Walter Veit: All right, welcome. I have not done a podcast episode in a while, but today we have Ethan Moore, PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. It is great to have you.[00:13] Ethan Moore: Great to be here.[00:15] Walter Veit: Now, to start, what are you working on?[00:18] Ethan Moore: So I am working on what in academic circles is called the “now what” problem. It is effectively this: moral error theory, which is a term of art for moral nihilism, is the belief that there are no objective moral facts, to put it in the most accessible way. If that is the case, what do we do with moral language and thought afterwards? Even if there are no such things as objective moral facts about what it is right or wrong to do, or what we should and should not do from a moral point of view, this kind of language, motivation and thought is incredibly prevalent in our day-to-day lives. It has a real impact on what people do, or more importantly, on what people restrain themselves from doing. And the question of whether it is useful comes apart from the question of whether it is true or false. So even if there are no moral facts, pretending as if there were, acting as if there were, or perhaps even compartmentalising the fact that there are no such things, can still be useful, even if they are ultimately myths. That is the area I am researching. As the title of this podcast suggests, I take the probably more controversial view that if that is the case, and perhaps even if the error theory is not true, moral language is actually destructive, socially and instrumentally. It gets in the way of many of our goals.[01:50] Walter Veit: It is clearly a very controversial thesis. If some listeners have not heard about any of these debates, they might think: we are trying to abolish morality, morality is harmful, destructive? All of these ideas might require quite a bit of defence. While you might not cover the defences of the error theory yourself, the arguments for why there are no moral facts, could you give a small summary of some of the arguments given in the literature for why people think there are no moral facts?[02:25] Ethan Moore: Absolutely. There are quite a few different arguments. The most popular one is what we call the argument from queerness, which basically means the argument from weirdness. The idea is that moral facts, were they to exist, and also the way in which we would come to know about them, would be incredibly strange, unlike the way in which we come to know any other kinds of facts, and unlike the other kinds of facts we know to exist. So weird, in fact, that it justifies scepticism regarding their existence.The specific features they target, in more abstract terms, are categorical imperativeness and irreducible normativity.The irreducible normativity part is more technical. The most accessible way I can describe it is the way Richard Garner put it. We really understand what it means to value something as a kind of mental activity, or even a social activity. When I value something, I can like, enjoy, prefer or desire that something happen. That is a mental attitude, a mind-to-world direction of fit, as we put it in metaethics. We know that when we eat a cake and enjoy it, the cake being tasty is just an experience the cake triggers in us. And if somebody else eats that same cake and does not enjoy it, they do not make a mistake when they say it is not tasty. They are not failing to detect a property that is in the cake.[04:19] Walter Veit: Even though I frequently have discussions with my wife about this: how can you enjoy this? It is clearly disgusting. I hate this food. Why do you not like this? It is great. So I think there is a general tendency to objectify our experiences and extrapolate them onto the world. That is actually a common phenomenon.[04:45] Ethan Moore: It is a common phenomenon. We often refer to it as projecting. We project our attitudes onto the object itself, as if they were a feature of that object that we are ...
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    39 min
  • A Flaw of Analytic Philosophy

    A Flaw of Analytic Philosophy
    Feb 13 2026
    Click on the video above if you want to listen to this essay in my German accent or simply scroll below to read it.A few weeks ago, I published an essay on Substack titled The End of Analytic Philosophy. In it, I agreed with Liam Kofi Bright that analytic philosophy has perhaps come close to becoming a degenerating research programme, leaving even many of its practitioners with a pessimistic outlook on its future. But the post was not at all meant to be depressing, for I offered a successor paradigm: naturalistic philosophy. A philosophy strongly continuous with, and often collaborative with, the sciences in order to make progress on our field’s most pressing problems.I was a bit worried about coming out as a ‘non-analytic philosopher’, since most of my peers happily use the label of analytic philosopher for themselves. I was therefore happy to see the overwhelmingly positive reactions that made my essay go somewhat viral on substack and gained me a ton of new subscribers. However, this also brought with it a new bar for my writing, making me go from an experimental week of daily posts to much less frequent posts. Now, I had a good excuse, since I was committed to several deadlines for writing projects I had to finish, but really I was afraid of failing to live up to the new bar I had set for my blog. This is amusing, really, since blogging is usually seen as a kind of no-holds-barred, free-flowing, let-your-thoughts-spill-out-on-the-page kind of activity. But just like with academic writing, it is easy to set oneself the goal of continually surpassing one’s previous writing, which can admittedly be very valuable - that is unless it completely paralyses one.Here, I want to follow up on my essay on analytic philosophy by highlighting a central flaw of analytic philosophy. While some of my readers are fellow philosophers or have read enough philosophy to be sufficiently familiar with the methods and goals of analytic philosophy, many are not. To the layperson who has heard of the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, analytic philosophy may simply represent clear and rigorous argumentation, whereas continental philosophy is associated with obscurity, metaphors, and unclear if any arguments. So coming out against analytic philosophy could easily be read as being against clear writing - which is, of course, not what I am against at all.Reading my previous essay, one might have come away with the conclusion that analytic philosophers do not draw sufficiently on, and have too little familiarity with, what goes on in the sciences. While that is true, it is not sufficient reason to reject analytic philosophy or to distinguish naturalistic philosophy as a third kind of philosophy altogether. More conservatively, one might read this argument as amounting merely to a call for analytic philosophers to learn more about science where it bears on the philosophical questions they are interested in.But the opposition between naturalistic philosophy and analytic philosophy runs deeper than that. There is a fundamental flaw in one of the central goals and methods of philosophy, namely the analysis of concepts.With the linguistic turn in the twentieth century, philosophers became less concerned with the world and more concerned with language. How do we use concepts? How do they represent things in the world? How can sentences be true or false? What is the meaning of particular words? Analytic philosophy as a discipline moved away from its origins in natural philosophy that once combined philosophy and science, and became something closer to linguistics… though, surprisingly enough, without actually engaging all that much with linguists. Indeed, one might have expected the linguistic turn to lead to a different merger altogether. A merger between linguistics and philosophy. But there are only a few attempts to really make this happen, such as MIT’s joint Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.In many areas of analytic philosophy today, the central questions concern how we should define particular terms. In the philosophy of medicine, for instance, the central debate is about how we should understand terms like ‘health’, ‘disease’, ‘pathology’, and the like. How do analytic philosophers usually approach this problem? They do so by introspecting, by asking themselves about the intuitions they have concerning these concepts, and by trying to come up with a definition that comes as close as possible to providing necessary and sufficient conditions. Commonly, philosophers assert that these intuitions reflect not only how they themselves think about particular terms (examples from other areas of philosophy include consciousness, knowledge, and morality), but more generally how competent language users in our society think about and use these terms.If this makes you raise an eyebrow, you are entirely justified. If we are interested in what the folk mean when they use a term, why should we ...
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    12 min
  • What to do with a meaningless life?

    What to do with a meaningless life?
    Feb 19 2026

    Since I’ll soon be a guest on Joseph Folley’s Unsolicited Advice podcast and he is organizing a reading group on Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus this month, I figured it would be a great idea to revisit one of my earliest philosophy articles that I published in the Journal of Camus Studies.

    Veit, W. (2018). Existential Nihilism: The Only Really Serious Philosophic…



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    7 min
  • Why Effective Altruists (And Everyone Else) Should Become Nihilists

    Why Effective Altruists (And Everyone Else) Should Become Nihilists
    Feb 3 2026

    This is a recording of my essay (of the same name) for my podcast/youtube channel. If you prefer to read it, please visit the original essay here:



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    11 min
  • What’s it like being a raven or a crow?

    What’s it like being a raven or a crow?
    Feb 2 2026
    This recording is based on an article Heather and I published in The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. I’ve copied the text here for convenience:Many of us as children may have wondered what’s going on inside the mind of an animal – what are they thinking and feeling? Most animal researchers study science because of their fascination with animals, but for a long time scientific norms made it impossible to even raise the question of animal consciousness without losing scientific credibility.Fortunately, those days have ended, thanks in large part to pioneering work by scientists such as Donald Griffin, who argued from the 1980s to his death in 2003 that animal minds should be a topic for scientific study.We are philosophers who study consciousness, and in our recent research we worked with other scientists to explore what the world might be like from the point of view of corvids, the family of birds that includes ravens, crows, jays and magpies.“Birdbrain” used to be a common insult but corvids have such surprising intelligence that they are sometimes described by scientists and journalists as “feathered apes”. But we wanted to go beyond intelligence. To do this we examined five dimensions of their experience by combing through studies on their behaviour, cognition, brains, emotions and consciousness.Corvids’ eyes have incredibly sharp resolution that allows them to navigate while flying at high speeds and to find potential sources of food. Their hearing is excellent, perhaps unsurprising for songbirds, allowing them to even distinguish reliable from unreliable group members by assessing and remembering their alert calls.They also have a good sense of smell, which they use to help them find nuts and other food they have hidden. Unfortunately, we do not know how their smell compares to a lot of other animals, because there are not enough studies on corvids’ sense of smell yet.Emotional livesCorvids show cognitive biases, similar to humans. They have negative moods and show signs of pessimism after observing similar states in others.But they also show positive moods after successfully using tools – just like humans. And they can also show neophobia – wariness of new objects.Even if you come with treats to give them, corvids are reluctant to fly close to someone they haven’t met before, but are confident with humans they know well – another common human trait.It is common for people to only attribute emotional lives to mammals, but corvids show that we should study the emotions of birds in more detail.Integrated experiencesWe humans have one stream of consciousness. But birds lack a corpus callosum, the structure that connects the two brain hemispheres in us and other mammals.Their brain halves show a lot of division of labour, such as using their different eyes to focus on different tasks. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that their experience is split into two selves – it could suggest a kind of partial unity different from our own.Perhaps their consciousness is more like split-brain human patients who have had their corpus callosum cut to reduce the effects of seizures. When two pictures are presented in their respective left and right visual fields, these people will draw what they see on the left side with their left hand, whereas they will verbally describe what is on the right, giving the appearance of two selves in one body.Consciousness across timeCorvids show remarkable abilities in their sense of self across time. Because they often hide food (scientists call this caching), they can remember not just where they hid food, but also what kind of food it was and how long ago they hid it – which is relevant for more perishable foods such as insects, compared to longer-lasting nuts.Here their memory far outstrips our own or, for that matter, most other animals when it comes to hiding objects, with some corvids caching and remembering over a thousand food items in a month for later consumption. No human would be able to remember that many hiding spots.Corvids can even plan, collecting and storing a tool such as a spoon for future use.A rich sense of selfThey not only recognise themselves in mirrors, but also understand other minds. Research has shown corvids go back to remove cached food and hide it elsewhere if they know they have been observed – but only if they have stolen from others in the past.Male jays will watch the feeding behaviour of a female they want to court, so they can bring their preferred food. Even more solitary corvids, such as ravens, seem to have well-developed social skills, which scientists used to think were largely restricted to mammals.In all of this, there is still a great deal of uncertainty. Learning about the minds of other animals requires a great deal of inference from sparse and often ambiguous data. But we believe that there is scientific evidence for rich conscious experiences in ...
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    8 min
  • Panpsychism is a New Form of Creationism

    Panpsychism is a New Form of Creationism
    Jan 26 2026

    In a recent post, I criticized panpsychism for following the same mantra as creationists. Just as creationists could not believe in Darwinian evolution because it challenged their cherished beliefs in the divine and in our uniqueness within creation, panpsychists are hesitant to explain consciousness in terms of physical processes out of a fear that this would rob consciousness of its magical properties. The fact that science makes only gradual progress, and that there is always more to learn about complex phenomena, is taken by both creationists and panpsychists as a reason to reject the possibility of a scientific explanation outright.

    Unsurprisingly, panpsychists resisted my charge that their view constitutes a potential case of pseudophilosophy, just as creationism is a pseudoscience. However, in a recent post, the panpsychist Nino Kadic who I have previously engaged with, tellingly reveals an anti-Darwinian attitude shared perhaps by the majority of philosophers in treating consciousness as binary. This is a common attitude shared by many philosophers who have refused to take Darwin seriously because of his radical implications for philosophy. It is here that we can see the close relationship between panpsychism and the pseudoscience of creationism once more.

    Let’s dissect his essay, which summarizes the vagueness discussion about consciousness well.



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    9 min
  • What is consciousness?

    What is consciousness?
    Jan 12 2026

    You can read the essay here: https://walterveit.substack.com/p/what-is-consciousness



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    9 min