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Zak Stein - The Eros of Ethics

Emerge: Making Sense of What's Next

The Utilitarian Calculus

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Utilitarianism focuses on the outcome of actions and efficiently executing the right action, emphasizing the development of ethics associated with modern ideologies. Utilitarian approaches are seen as scientific and rigorous, contrasting with emotional and intuitive ethical realms. The utilitarian calculus requires concrete thinking about the intended results of actions to do good. The classic debate between utilitarians and deontologists like Kant revolves around efficiency versus moral law, where utilitarians prioritize maximizing good outcomes even if it involves sacrificing a few, while deontologists argue that individuals should never be made a means to an end but are ends in themselves.

In this first conversation after a year sabbatical from the Emerge project I'm speaking with Zak Stein. This is a far ranging conversation about ethics, education, trauma, the erotics of moral understanding, and more.

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Show Notes

0:00 Opening
0:03 How to create the kinds of humans who can respond to the meta-crisis?
0:08 “We’re not sure what it means to be good anymore” / what’s worth loving
0:09 Eros and Ethics / Ensoulment
0:17 Moral development
0:23 “How do you get someone interested in what is truly good?”
0:25 Linking / meta-psychology
0:29 Community ethics feedback loops
0:33 Objective ethics
0:37 Embodied ethical sensing
0:38 Intersection between Trauma & Ethics, desensitization, somatic de-armoring
0:43 Trust, return of the Sacred
0:47 The Moral Exemplar
0:52 Exposure to the full ethical range
0:54 “Trauma” in culture
0:62 Evil
0:68 Practices for Wellbeing
0:72 “Enlightenment is your greatest disappointment”
0:74 Eros & Ethics
0:77 Human as ethical actor, intimacy and obligation
0:81 Circling, following “aliveness”, co-discovering moral landscape
0:85 Path = compromising moral integrity increasingly intolerable
0:88 Ethics in Community, MAPLE’s advantage
0:90 Closing

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