Episode 12: Andrew DeGood and Liz Short on What Reasoning Is For

If reasoning does not change the verdict, what was the reasoning for? Andrew DeGood and Liz Short take Episode 12 without a guest and start with two studies. One found that people rated GPT-4o's ethical advice slightly higher than advice from *The New York Times* column *The Ethicist*. Another found that turning on thinking mode did not materially change aggregate moral agreement across five frontier models, even though it changed some individual verdicts and often changed the framework used to justify them. That sends the hosts into the human version of the same question. Does moral judgment begin with reason, or do we reach for reasons after intuition, culture, family, politics, and peer pressure have already set the answer? The Turn comes when Andrew suggests GPT-4o won the advice comparison because it acts like an echo chamber. Liz pushes the argument further: AI may be showing us the group morality we already built.