Why Today’s Ethics Offers No Real Guidance

In this episode, Ben Bayer reads aloud his article “Why Today’s Ethics Offers No Real Guidance.” In that essay, he examines the strange set of cases today’s academic ethicists choose to analyze. All too often, he observes, they see morality as concerned with settling interpersonal conflicts or even resolving dilemmas in rare emergency situations such as the “trolley problem.” Bayer argues that these ethicists are unable to provide meaningful advice for everyday life because they think that the special province of morality is to give us advice about who is to be sacrificed to whom when there are conflicts of interest. Bayer’s article was originally published in New Ideal, the Ayn Rand Institute’s journal, on November 18, 2020.