Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Biography & Memoir
Episode: Peter Brian Barry, "George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Description: George Orwell is sometimes read as disinterested in (if not outright hostile) to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell's work reveals an author whose work was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell's written works are of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive ethical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice, and political morality. In George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality (Oxford UP, 2023), philosopher Peter Brian Barry avoids a narrow reading of Orwell that considers only a few of...