Self-Interest, Morality & Free Will - General Philosophy (2018 Peter Millican)

In this lecture on General Philosophy, Professor Peter Millican discusses identity, self-interest, hedonism, morality and free will. The focus is mainly on self-interest, particularly in showing that psychological egoism is false and based on a fundamental confusion. This comes from a 2018 series on General Philosophy.
This series of 8 lectures on General Philosophy was delivered to first year Oxford University undergraduates in Michaelmas term 2018. The lectures cover six main topics: Knowledge and Scepticism, Induction, Mind and Body, Personal Identity, Free Will, God and Evil. But they set these topics within a much broader context, encompassing humanity’s history of discovery about the natural world (both in physics and biology), and our place within it (linked to issues of both evolution and morality). Main themes of the lectures are: (1) Introduction and views of the cosmos from Genesis to Descartes; (2) Humanity’s place in the scientific picture of the world; (3) Scepticism and the problem of induction; (4) More on induction and facing up to scepticism; (5) The mind and personal identity; (6) Identity, self-interest, morality, and free will; (7) Free will, causality, explanation, and moral responsibility; (8) God and morality.
More lectures on General Philosophy: • General Philosophy - P...
Source: podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/gene...
#philosophy #ethics #egoism

[@DJAKOMEENO]

Am I the only one finding this terrible? I was really hoping for something more than this. I am not a huge fan of lessons where the speaker totally leans on a side, but this aside all the arguments that he presents are elementary and carried out more with body language and emotional emphasis rather than logical steps. I may have misunderstood everything, if so give me a hand here please.

[@dibelobecny5427]

I don't agree with the point about lady crossing the street, you could just argue that you just like feeling like a good person. Ans what makes you feel like that is determined by what society deems praiseworthy/horrible. (after all, how did you know it's a good thing to help a lady cross the street? Probably your parents/teachers.) That being said, yeah, while 45 minutes of this is a thinly-veiled rant about how psychological hedonism is utterly wrong, if you're a college professor, you can be extremely tangential about one topic, as a treat. The other lectures are genuienly very good (even though they focus more on english speaking philosophers than they probably should be) and more objective. You should also consider he must shove all of this into a 55 minute introductory lecture, so it has to be kinda surface level and cannot painstaikingly go through all the logical steps. Also I just think it's funny he is utterly unable to go one lecture without mentioning David Hume. This is not supposed to be some great refutation of what you have said, I'm just inviting you to introduce more flimsy into your life