Bonus episode: Arden & Rob on demandingness, work-life balance and injustice

By , and · Published February 25th, 2020

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Today’s bonus episode of the podcast is a quick conversation between me and my fellow 80,000 Hours researcher Arden Koehler about a few topics, including the demandingness of morality, work-life balance, and emotional reactions to injustice.

You can get it by subscribing to the 80,000 Hours Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more about the show.

Arden is about to graduate with a philosophy PhD from New York University, so naturally we dive right into some challenging implications of utilitarian philosophy and how it might be applied to real life. Issues we talk about include:

  • If you’re not going to be completely moral, should you try being a bit more moral or give up?
  • Should you feel angry if you see an injustice, and if so, why?
  • How much should we ask people to live frugally?

So far the feedback on the post-episode chats that we’ve done have been positive, so we thought we’d go ahead and try out this freestanding one. But fair warning: it’s among the more difficult episodes to follow, and probably not the best one to listen to first as you’ll benefit from having more context!

If you’d like to listen to more of Arden, you can find her in episode 67 — David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness, or episode 66 – Peter Singer on being provocative, effective altruism & how his moral views have changed.

Here’s more information on some of the issues we touch on:

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I mention the call for papers of the Academic Workshop on Global Priorities in the introduction — you can learn more here.

And finally, Toby Ord — one of our founding Trustees and a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford University — has his new book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity coming out next week. I’ve read it and very much enjoyed it. Find out where you can pre-order it here. We’ll have an interview with him coming up soon.

About the show

The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. We invite guests pursuing a wide range of career paths — from academics and activists to entrepreneurs and policymakers — to analyse the case for and against working on different issues and which approaches are best for solving them.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing [email protected].

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We've carefully selected 10 episodes we think it could make sense to listen to first, on a separate podcast feed:

Check out 'Effective Altruism: An Introduction'

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