Welcome to our show!

Hello, everybody.

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of this brand-new podcast. The idea behind the show is to get careful thinking about political problems out into the world in a new way. Many of our discussions will be with people who call themselves philosophers, but we hope to be both intellectually rigorous and engaging for nonphilosophers at the same time. It’s a tough balancing act, and we hope you’ll let us know when it works and when it doesn’t.

And with all that said, we should introduce ourselves. The man writing these posts (and most of the future ones) is Matt Peterson, and the show’s host is Christian Barry. We both work at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics—Christian in Canberra at the Australian National University, and me at the University of Melbourne. If you do a little digging, you’ll see that our backgrounds are in print editing (we used to edit a journal together called Ethics & International Affairs). Audio is new for us, but we love it already.

We’ve had some great assistance in putting the show together, both from CAPPE, whose staff has enthusiastically supported this project, and from our sponsors, who we’ve linked to in the right-hand column. The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs has agreed to add Public Ethics Radio to its own podcast stream. And the superb German record label Kompakt has generously agreed to let us use their music in our show. The producer Steve Rennicks has also composed some original music that appears in the show, and we thank him as well.

We’ve got a lot of great material to give you. We’re delighted to have as our inaugural guest a philosopher we know well and respect deeply, Thomas Pogge. We’ll tell you a little bit more about him in the next post. We’ve got plenty more more in the pipeline: Leif Wenar on the resource curse, Jessica Wolfendale on Torture, and Larry Temkin on extending human lifespans.

We hope you enjoy the show. If you do (or don’t!), we’d love to hear what you think: send us an email at contact@publicethicsradio.org.