BBC
A History of Ideas: The Life You Can Save
Harry Shearer on the Life You can Save
In this action packed animation, lives are saved and expensive shoes ruined to answer the question: Is there an important difference between someone drowning in front of you and someone dying in a far off land? Drawing on the thinking of the Philosopher Peter Singer, we get an insight into whether proximity has any bearing on ethical problems.
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Here’s the whole episode from A History of Ideas – Lawyer Harry Potter on Morality and the Law.
In this action packed animation, lives are saved and expensive shoes ruined to answer the question: Is there an important difference between someone drowning in front of you and someone dying in a far off land?
Is it right to tell a lie in order to save your friend from an axe wielding, homicidal maniac? Emmanuel Kant said ‘No’.
Is it right to intervene and sacrifice one person to save five? In this animation of a classic thought problem, we find that the answer is fraught with difficulty.
Are you ready for a brush with Hume’s Guillotine? This animation looks at the problem of trying to reason from facts about the way the world is to judgements about values based on those facts.