Doing right and feeling good

My panel at Hay-on-Wye (me, Elaine Glaser, Peter Dews and Simon Baron-Cohen) talked about compassion, the sentiment model of morality, effective altruism and how to really help the world. Now available as video!

My view is largely that moral action is strongly driven and motivated by emotions rather than reason, but outside the world of the blindingly obvious or everyday human activity our intuitions and feelings are not great guides. We do not function well morally when the numbers get too big or the cognitive biases become maladaptive. Morality may be about the heart, but ethics is in the brain.