The Moral Equivalent of War

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We live in a time where most Americans don't experience war, so they don't have this chance to be great. So you're returning to more luck in a sense. But we can engineer circumstances in which people are pushed to the same kind of self-sacrifice and heroism that they might be pushed to in war. We can artificially engender it and we can do it in a way that does not result in the horrible bloodshed and loss and waste of war but results in something positive.

As a writer of profiles, Larissa MacFarquhar is granted the privilege of listening to, learning from, and sharing the stories of extraordinary thinkers like Derik Parfit, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Mantel, and Paul Krugman. And she’s often drawn to write about the individual thinking behind extreme altruism, dementia care, and whether to stay in a small town. Motivating her is a desire to place readers inside someone’s head: to see what they see and to think how they think.

In their dialogue, Larissa and Tyler discuss the thinking and thinkers behind her profiles, essays, and books, including notions of moral luck, exit vs voice, the prose of Kenneth Tynan, why altruistic heroes are mainly found in genre fiction, why she avoids describing physical appearances in her writing, the circumstances that push humans to live more extraordinary lives, what today has in common with the 1890s, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded December 17th, 2018 Other ways to connect

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