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Moral Minority is a podcast on moral philosophy and the problem of moral foundations. Why does morality matter? What grounds the moral principles to which we appeal when making judgments about right and wrong, justice and injustice? Do we have good grounds for making the judgments we do make–in our everyday lives, our relationships, our work, or in politics? And if not, where does that leave us?
18 Episodes
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The poet, Alina Stefanescu, joins us for a freewheeling discussion of Jacques Derrida's classic work of politico-ethical deconstruction, The Politics of Friendship, and her new poetry collection, My Heresies. In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida ruminates on the interrelationship between our inherited concepts of friendship, fraternity, and democracy, and the distance we have yet to travel in order to work through the inadequacies of our conceptual vocabularies and the living content they e...
In Part 2, we wrap up our consideration of Jean-Paul Sartre's midcentury magnum opus by exploring how we move from the inaccessible interiority of consciousness to our concrete relations with others. The latter half of Being & Nothingness takes up the question of what aspects of our being are revealed to us in confrontation with the Other. Sartre famously argues here that it is the Other's look, the omnipresent possibility of being seen, judged, and evaluated by another consciousness that...
Note Bene is a series of off the cuff episodes that delve more into our personal experiences with broader topics with relevance to normativity and the ethical life. In this episode, Charles is joined by the writer and critic, Jon Repetti, to reflect on the art and philosophy of the late American avant-garde filmmaker, David Lynch. While touching upon his entire filmography, the discussion focuses on the LA triptych of films, Lost Highway(1997), Mulholland Drive(1999), and Inland Empire(2006) ...
Matt McManus joins us to help excavate the common origins of liberalism and socialism within the revolutionary republican tradition and illuminate shared political and normative principles rooted in a commitment to egalitarianism and expressive individualism. His new work, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. functions as an survey of key figures within the tradition of political liberalism and how their ideas of freedom, equality, and solidarity run parallel to the development of socia...
In a far-reaching conversation with the critic Ryan Ruby, we unpack the legacy and impact of Fredric Jameson's landmark work of Marxist literary criticism, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Jameson's text argues for the explanatory richness and coherency of a Marxist hermeutical approach to interpreting the social function of the literary text. The guiding principle of Jameson's methodology is that any commentary that fails to historicize the narrative strategie...
In Part 1, we explicate Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to build a total existential system hinges on an unusual account of the evanescent character of consciousness at the heart of the meaning of existence. In this episode, we cover the first half of Sartre's monumental work, Being and Nothingness, explaining core concepts derived from his philosophical progenitors found in Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerian Existenz philosophy. After discussing Sartre's creative appropriations of these th...
Repetititon(1843) is a difficult and, for many, a baffling work by Søren Kierkegaard. It is equal parts psychological study, literary riddle, and philosophical problematic. In this discussion, we attempt to shed light on its central concept of repetition, how its interior dialectic differs from the Hegelian concept of mediation, and what the possibility of repetition means for the peculiarly modern problems of personal identity, historicity, and contingency. We interrogate the unusual literar...
In this lively interview with philosopher Vanessa Wills, we discuss her recently published book, Marx's Ethical Vision, which argues that Marx's historical materialism contains a coherent and consistent moral picture of social transformation grounded in a view of human nature and the conditions of human flourishing. Contra the amoralist reading of Marx, Wills critically reconstructs, drawing from the entire range of Marx's corpus, an unflinching concern for normative ends that emerge as the d...
This episode inaugurates a series of episodes exploring the existentialist approach to modern philosophy by considering the most well-known work of the melancholic, Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric is a genre-bending blend of aesthetic criticism, biblical exegesis, and critical ethics. It is perhaps the most profound deliberation on the concept of faith in the history of philosophy. Firmly rooted in post-Kantian ethical universalism, Fear and Trem...
To complete our series on Dialectic of Enlightenment, we take an extended look at the famous chapter on the culture industry. The function of the culture industry, or the sphere of production concerned with creating entertainment and art is to inure and train consumers to acquiesce to the dominant ideology expressed through its culture products. The tendency of this process, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is to reproduce sameness, conformity, and eliminate the thought of rebellion a...
In this multi-part series, we examine the legacy of critical theory and the prospects of a recuperation of Marxist theory in the face of rising fascism by delving into the dense and fragmentary landmark text of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment. In Part 2, we focus on the final completed fragment, "Elements of Anti-Semitism: The Limits of Enlightenment,' which analyzes the concept and instrumentalization of antisemitism in fascist political currents. Adorno and Horkheimer, over...
In this multi-part series, we examine the legacy of critical theory and the prospects of a recuperation of Marxist theory in the face of rising fascism by delving into the dense and fragmentary landmark text of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment. In Part 1, we discuss the meaning of Enlightenment as the advancement of thought and ask how we square the traditional narratives of historical progress and emancipatory potential with the pernicious effects of rationalised management, ...
This episode discusses the German sociologist Max Weber's Vocation Lectures. In these lectures, Weber outlines a secular conception of the meaning of a vocation, the role of passion in politics and scholarship, and the kind of ethically responsibility that confronts us given the unavoidably violent nature of modern politics. Weber characterises modernity as the instrumentalization of reason and scientific knowledge towards the end of a kind mastery or control over the natural world. In ...
In Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams interrogates what we can still glean about the universal character of human action and the notion of responsibility from a study of the Ancient Greeks. William provides a philosophical interpretation of the historical circumstances of the Greek understanding, expressed in the tragedies, of agency, responsibility, and the role of luck in human affairs. His claim is that our modern concept of moral responsibility does not deserve its presume...
This episode turns to Christine Korsgaard's Tanner lectures, "The Sources of Normativity," to explore how morality might be rationally vindicated from within the nature of practical rationality. Korsgaard's project is an iteration of the Enlightenment's attempt to ground morality in human nature. Korsgaard suggests that the correct moral theory will not merely provide an explanation of our moral natures, but also be justified in the light of our status as reflective animals. Her constructivis...
This episode examines Alasdair MacIntyre's attempt to explain the existence of interminable moral and political disagreement as a symptom of the disarray of our inherited moral concepts. MacIntyre contends that the best way to unify our disparate and competing concepts of right, obligation, and virtue is to understand them as emerging from determinate social conditions. What modernity lacks or has forgotten in its instrumental use of moral concepts is that normative questions like "what...
In this episode, Devin and Charles climb down from the heights of Nietzsche's critique of conventional morality in order to take a brief detour into the domain of twentieth-century analytic metaethics. Together they explore the historical context, motivating forces and access the viability of moral realism—the view that our moral claims have objective validity. The discussion focuses on the social conditions driving analytic philosophy's turn to logical and semantic analysis and h...
In the inaugural episode of Moral Minority, Devin and Charles make the case for Nietzsche's continual relevance to contemporary politics by examining the problem of moral foundations and how we make sense of our normative commitments in the absence of transcendental warrant. This episode centers around a discussion of Nietzsche's under-discussed 1881 work, Dawn. What does it mean to undermine traditional morality? How do we avoid the temptation of nihilistic despair? What positive resou...
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