Moral Minority
Moral Minority is a podcast on moral philosophy and the problem of moral foundations. Why does morality matter? What grounds the moral principles to which we appeal when making judgments about right and wrong, justice and injustice? Do we have good grounds for making the judgments we do make–in our everyday lives, our relationships, our work, or in politics? And if not, where does that leave us?
Moral Minority
Latest Episodes
Moral of the Story: Hannah Smart on Meat Puppets
Hannah Smart, the noted David Foster Wallace scholar, returns to the show to discuss her debut novel, Meat Puppets. Smart writes metafictions anchored in the anxieties of the human heart. Meat Puppets is an ambitious first novel that, like the ...
Content of the Form: Hannah Smart on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
In honor of the 30th anniversary of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, novelist Hannah Smart once again joins us for a discussion of the ethical limits and critical revaluation of this maximally ambitious and chronically misunderstood novel....
Contemporary Conversations: Jonathan B. Fine on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and the German Enlightenment
On September 7, 1945, only a few months after the Allies accepted the Nazis’ unconditional surrender, the Deutches Theater in Berlin reopened its doors with a very deliberate choice of performance. Like many theaters across the country reopenin...
Nota Bene: The Moral Passion of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King with Hannah Smart
David Foster Wallace, the loquacious novelist behind Infinite Jest, seemingly predicted much of our culture moment from AI avatars to the hypnotic and addictive temptation of the infinite scroll. In his fiction and essays, he agonized over the ...
Contemporary Conversations: Eleanor Russell on Simone Weil's Gravity & Grace
Eleanor Russell joins us to discuss the mystical writings of French philosopher, Simone Weil. Published posthumously and edited by Gustave Thibon, Gravity and Grace is a collection of fragments from Weil's notebooks that sketch the cor...