Across the world, to fight for a moral cause is seen as heroic, while the morally corrupt and dissolute are villains to be shunned. Yet, the outcome of claimed moral actions is often problematic. Should we stop calling actions moral or immoral, and instead focus on their consequences? Is morality a rhetorical device to authorise our behaviour without further investigation? Or is morality essential to, not just society, but what it means to be human?

Join Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Hanno Sauer and more as they debate these questions.

Every culture has its own taboos, duties and ideas of the good—so can any moral law claim to bind us all? Sociologist Steven Lukes, author of The Diversity of Morals, a New Yorker book of the year, insists that taking moral plurality seriously does not oblige us to give up the capacity to judge good and bad actions. Philosopher Alex Rosenberg, the self-styled "nice-nihilist," argues that there are no moral facts at all, only a shared core of evolved dispositions across cultures. Taking the anthropological record as their starting point, Lukes and Rosenberg will ask whether the idea of morality can survive the discovery that different cultures have very different ideas of good and evil.