A Young Philosopher Returns to the Arena
Alex O'Connor, better known as CosmicSkeptic, returned from an exam-induced hiatus to deliver a sprawling livestream Q&A that, beneath its casual surface, contained some of the sharpest philosophical reasoning his channel has produced. At nineteen years old and awaiting A-level results that would determine his university future, O'Connor used the informal format to wade into questions about objective morality, nihilism, free will, and Jordan Peterson's philosophical errors, each segment revealing a thinker whose positions have crystallized during months away from the camera.
The Impossibility of Objective Morality
The most substantive portion of the livestream concerns O'Connor's continued rejection of objective morality. His argument proceeds in layers, beginning with G.E. Moore's open question argument against naturalistic definitions of "good." Sam Harris's well-being framework, O'Connor contends, commits exactly this error by equating goodness with well-being, producing a tautology:
If you're gonna say good is what is conducive to well-being then that sentence can also be rendered as whatever is conducive to well-being is conducive to well-being. That's the same sentence, because good just means that.
This is a clean application of Moore's naturalistic fallacy, and O'Connor deploys it effectively. But the argument has a well-known vulnerability: Moore himself believed in objective moral properties (he was a moral realist), just non-natural ones. O'Connor's use of Moore to argue against all objectivity overshoots the original framework. A defender of Harris might also counter that "well-being" is not meant as a synonym for "good" but as its ground, much as "H2O" is not a synonym for "water" but its scientific reduction. The analogy is imperfect, but it shows the tautology objection may be less decisive than O'Connor suggests.
More compelling is his second move, which targets the very concept of objectivity:
Objectivity means independent of human emotion. If I say that something is objective fact, it means that it would be fact if every human mind instantly dissolved and disappeared. But if morality is a product of emotion and the human mind, then that can't be said to still exist independently of the human life.
This is the harder problem for moral realists, and O'Connor states it with admirable clarity. He then adds an underappreciated distinction: even if one could establish what is objectively good, a separate argument would be needed to show that one ought to pursue the good. Knowing what is right and being obligated to do it are logically independent claims. This is a genuine philosophical insight that many popular discussions of ethics elide entirely.
The Painted Wall and Practical Ethics
Rather than leaving his audience in a nihilistic void, O'Connor offers an elegant analogy. Two people who subjectively agree that orange is the best color to paint a wall can proceed as though their preference is objective, because their agreement renders the question moot in practice. Morality works the same way:
We both subjectively value well-being, and we can show that this objectively improves well-being. Therefore we can treat this action as though it is objectively good. But it's not.
This is essentially a pragmatist position, one that echoes thinkers from Hume to Blackburn. The strength of the analogy is its honesty: it refuses to inflate practical consensus into metaphysical truth. The weakness is that it depends on universal agreement about well-being, which fractures the moment one encounters genuine moral disagreement, precisely the cases where objective morality would be most useful.
Peterson, Nihilism, and the Subjectivity Escape Hatch
O'Connor's response to Jordan Peterson's claim that consistent atheists would behave like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov is more nuanced than most atheist rebuttals. He concedes Peterson's philosophical point rather than dismissing it outright:
Maybe Peterson's right on a philosophical level, but he's wrong on a kind of factual level. I mean clearly there are many people who don't believe in God and don't murder.
The critical move is his identification of Peterson's error: the assumption that human beings can or should operate purely on the basis of philosophical conclusions, ignoring the inescapable reality of subjective experience. Peterson, O'Connor argues, "is ignoring the subjective element" when he insists that without objective grounding, all meaning collapses. This is a strong objection. Philosophical nihilism and lived experience are not the same domain, and confusing them is a category error that Peterson commits repeatedly.
That said, O'Connor's own position carries a tension he only partially acknowledges. If subjective experience is sufficient to sustain meaning and morality in practice, one might ask why the philosophical question matters at all. O'Connor insists it does, that words like "meaning" and "purpose" carry a weight implying objectivity, but he never quite explains why the philosophical conclusion should trouble someone whose subjective life is rich with purpose. The pragmatist in him has already won the argument; the philosopher in him refuses to accept the victory.
Free Will as the Final Domino
Threading through the entire discussion is O'Connor's hard determinism, which he treats as the trump card against moral objectivity:
The idea of praise, the idea of shame, the idea of good and evil, the idea of guilt, all of these things just disappear when free will does not exist.
This is stated as self-evident, but it deserves more scrutiny than O'Connor gives it. Compatibilists from Frankfurt to Dennett have argued extensively that moral responsibility survives determinism, provided one defines freedom as the ability to act on one's own desires without external constraint. O'Connor's hard incompatibilism is a defensible position, but presenting it as though it conclusively dissolves morality overlooks decades of serious philosophical work that argues otherwise.
Bottom Line
This livestream captures a young philosopher at an interesting inflection point: sophisticated enough to identify real problems in popular moral frameworks, honest enough to concede when opponents have partial points, but perhaps too confident that his own synthesis, pragmatic subjectivism married to hard determinism, is free of the tensions he identifies in others. The strongest moments come when O'Connor distinguishes between knowing what is good and being obligated to pursue it, and when he pins Peterson's error on the conflation of philosophical and practical domains. At nineteen, the philosophical instincts are sharp. The question is whether university will complicate or confirm them.