If you enjoyed my previous post The Difficulty of Choice – One Death or Five, this is a follow-up post which came about due to a most amazing coincidence. Here’s the whole story.

Just the other day, I was going through Mint Lounge. (Don’t ask what I was actually supposed to be doing then.) One article led to another, and it wasn’t long before I stumbled on an article related to podcasts. You can find that article here. Before you start wondering how many hyperlinks you will have to navigate in this blog post, let me tell you: one more.

The article in the Mint mentioned a podcast titled ‘Justice with Michael Sandel’ which is primarily based on a very popular class conducted by Prof. Sandel at Harvard University. Apparently, there is a lecture in which Prof. Sandel talks about the “five deaths versus one” problem through a variety of angles and scenarios. That was a pleasant surprise since I had written my previous blog post a couple of days ago! If you have anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes to spare, check out this video.

In this lecture, Prof. Sandel raises the ideas of consequentialist and categorical moral reasoning – the former leading to utilitarianism and the second to Kant’s philosophy, among others. Prof. Sandel very rightly points out that “philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already know… It works by taking what we know from familiar, unquestioned settings and making it strange… not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing… Once the familiar turns strange, it’s never quite the same again. Self-knowledge is like lost innocence. However unsettling you find it, it can never be un-thought or un-known.”

If you did read on till here, you will find the first 20 minutes of the video interesting. Later, Prof. Sandel quotes Kant: “scepticism is a resting place for reason… but it cannot be its permanent resting place.” The rest of the video is also interesting, but I’ll leave you to discover that for yourself.

In case you fear that this blog is starting to become mired in the incomprehensible realm of philosophy, let me assure you that I too hope, as fervently as you do, that the next post will be on something more tangible. So let’s wait and watch!

PS: Mint Lounge e-paper is admittedly convenient, in spite of my usual affinity for paper of the ecologically insensitive kind!