Good Is In The Details

Gwendolyn Dolske and Rudy Salo interview Philosophy Professor Dr. Gregg Caruso (SUNY Corning), author of Rejecting Retributivism. Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice. We discuss the meaning of free will, what is a free will skeptic, determinism, and how understanding free will (or rejecting the idea of free will) impacts our sense of justice.

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"You start down a certain path — and you might lose control of where it takes you."

That single observation, drawn from two of the greatest works in American storytelling — The Godfather trilogy and Breaking Bad — contains one of philosophy's most ancient and most urgent warnings: that the danger of crossing a moral line isn't just that you might get caught. It's that you might become someone you never intended to be.

Michael Corleone doesn't set out to become the most powerful and most ruthless figure in organized crime. He sets out to protect his family. But each choice, each small moral compromise, each line crossed for ostensibly reasonable reasons, takes him further from who he was and closer to someone his earlier self would not recognize. That transformation is not just a great story. It is a philosophical case study in moral corruption, the nature of identity, and what it means to live a life you can look back on with something other than horror.

In this episode of Good Is In The Details, Gwendolyn Dolske and Rudy Salo welcome back their favorite returning guests, Professor Joshua Heter (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Jefferson College) and Professor Richard Greene(Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Richard Richards Institute for Ethics, Weber State University) — co-editors of The Godfather and Philosophy: An Argument You Can't Refuse (Open Universe, Carus Books) — twenty-eight chapters by philosophers reflecting upon the ethical and metaphysical issues raised in The Godfather novels and movies — for a conversation that makes one of the most beloved film trilogies in history feel like a graduate seminar in moral philosophy.

What we explore in this episode:

• Why The Godfather is not just a great film but a genuinely philosophical one — and what makes the Corleone saga uniquely suited to exploring questions that have occupied moral philosophers for millennia
• The philosophy of moral corruption: how do good people become bad ones — not through a single dramatic choice but through a series of small, seemingly justifiable compromises? And what does Michael Corleone's arc reveal about the fragility of moral character?
• The relation between ethics and the law — and what the Corleone family's private justice system reveals about what we actually believe justice requires versus what the formal legal system delivers Amazon
• The nature of loyalty, betrayal, and forgiveness — and whether the Corleone code of family honor represents a coherent moral philosophy or a sophisticated rationalization for violence
• Vigilantism and private justice: when the formal legal system fails — as it does for Amerigo Bonasera in the film's opening scene — what moral justification exists for taking justice into one's own hands? Amazon
• The American Dream and organized crime — what the Corleone family's story reveals about capitalism, immigration, power, and the gap between the promise of America and its delivery
• Why Breaking Bad and The Godfather tell essentially the same philosophical story — and what that convergence reveals about our cultural obsession with the moral fall
• The difficulties of breaking out of a dysfunctional way of life, and what philosophy says about whether redemption is possible once a certain threshold of moral compromise has been crossed
• What Aristotle's virtue ethics has to say about the Corleone family — and whether Don Vito's code constitutes a form of eudaimonia or its most seductive counterfeit

This is the episode for anyone who has ever watched Michael Corleone's eyes in the final scene of The Godfather and understood, without a single word being spoken, exactly what philosophy has been trying to tell us about the cost of who we choose to become.

Guests: Professor Joshua Heter — Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Jefferson College, Missouri. Co-editor of The Godfather and Philosophy and Punk Rock and Philosophy. Co-host of I Think, Therefore I Fan. Professor Richard Greene — Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Richard Richards Institute for Ethics, Weber State University, Utah. Past Director of the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl. Author of Spoiler Alert! It's a Book About the Philosophy of Spoilers. Co-editor of more than twenty books on pop culture and philosophy. Co-host of I Think, Therefore I Fan.

Good Is In The Details is hosted by Gwendolyn Dolske, Ph.D. and Rudy Salo — a philosophy, books, and ideas podcast exploring the examined life in the spirit of Socrates.

Check out The Godfather and Philosophy.

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Gwendoly Dolske and Rudy Salo welcome Psychologist and author, Dr. Seth Gillihan. How can we temper our thoughts? How can we become mindful? What are the techniques of CBT?

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Enjoy our holiday encore episode on Captain America with 3 time guest, Professor Mark D. White. (Originally aired July 4, 2020.)

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What is the mindset of a successful woman entrepreneur? Gwendolyn Dolske partners with TheModernDayWife.com to interview five women in business. How does one start? How does one handle obstacles? Rest? Balance? This episode has advice and inspiration for anyone pursuing business. Much thanks to Nev Tomic, Robin Ackerman, Jamie Jensen, Raana Kashani Gregg, and Cherie Monson.

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The definition of a good husband is changing. Here's what the data actually says, and what philosophy thinks about it.

A hundred years ago, a good husband provided financially and came home on time. Today the research tells a strikingly different story and it has enormous implications for what makes a marriage work, what makes both partners happy, and what we're actually looking for when we commit to building a life with someone.

In this episode of Good Is In The Details, Gwendolyn Dolske and Rudy Salo dig into one of the most searched and most debated questions in modern relationships: What makes a good husband in 2023 and beyond? Our guest, Brian Page of Modern Husbands, gives us all the details.

What we explore in this episode:

• What the data says about marriage and happiness; including the finding from the transcript that when both partners have an equal voice in financial decisions, couples are happier and far more likely to stay married
• How equal decision-making in marriage is consistently linked to higher marital happiness and how husbands who share household labor have greater odds of being in the high happiness trajectory.
• How public attitudes about marriage have shifted dramatically with 62% of Americans now saying marriages are better when both partners share jobs and household responsibility.
• What philosophy says about partnership, commitment, and the ethics of relationships
• Whether the "good provider" model of husbandhood is outdated and what replaces it.
• How gender norms shape what men believe a good husband looks like and how those norms can harm both partners.
• What emotional labor, cognitive labor, and equal partnership actually look like in practice.
• The Aristotelian case for a flourishing marriage: what does it mean for both people to genuinely thrive?

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Award Winning episode!

W3 Award: Silver Winner, Individual Episodes & Specials, Crime & Mystery (Podcast)

Gwendolyn and Rudy welcome True Crime podcaster, Sarah J McLaughlin (host and producer of the compelling and top of the charts pod, Appalachian Mysteria). What goes into producing a true crime podcast? What is the story behind the WVU 1970 murders of two young women? How does our fascination with true crime reflect our cultural values? Is there a link between transportation and season 1 of Appalachian Mysteria?

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Gwendolyn and Rudy welcome journalist and host of the podcast Now What?, Carole Zimmer. What is the meaning of journalism? How has it changed over the years? How can we distinguish between entertainment and news? What does podcasting add to the space of journalism and media?

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Gwendolyn Dolske and Rudy Salo welcome creator of Mac's List for employers and job seekers and host of Find Your Dream Job Podcast, Mac Prichard. How does one navigate job searching in 2023? How can we align our dreams and happiness through work? What kinds of questions should one be asking in the job search process? How do different generations approach work and goals?

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What if the pursuit of absolute good is itself the source of evil?

It is the carefully argued, rigorously developed central thesis of one of the most original philosophers working in continental philosophy today. And it is the question at the heart of this intellectually demanding (and personally meaningful) conversations.

The guest is Gwendolyn's dear friend from grad school, Drew Dalton.

Drew M. Dalton: professor of English at Indiana University, formerly professor of philosophy at Dominican University, PhD from the Institute of Philosophy at KU Leuven (where he and Gwendolyn were graduate school colleagues), author of Longing for the Other: Levinas and Metaphysical Desire (Duquesne University Press), The Ethics of Resistance: Tyranny of the Absolute (Bloomsbury), and The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism (Northwestern University Press). He is one of the few contemporary philosophers building a systematic, original philosophical framework from the ground up. And that framework begins, unflinchingly, with evil.

Dalton argues that the pursuit of an absolute good inevitably leads to evil, and that the only defensible ethical position is what he calls "ethical resistance": conceiving of the good negatively, as a mode of resisting the possibility of absolute evil, rather than as a positive ideal to be achieved. The historical evidence for this claim is not hard to find. Every atrocity in human history has been committed in the name of something absolutely good, a pure race, a classless society, a holy land, a perfect order. Dalton uses examples from social and political history to demonstrate how concepts of the absolute good have been used to justify oppressive systems globally.

But Drew's argument goes deeper than politics. In metaphysics, he argues for a "metaphysics of decay" based on the thermodynamic revolution in contemporary material sciences, specifically the second law of thermodynamics and entropic decay, from which he develops an account of being as something which is "unbecoming." The universe, on this account, is not neutral. It is not indifferent. It is, in a precise philosophical sense, oriented toward dissolution. And that orientation has profound consequences for how we think about meaning, morality, and the possibility of the good.

What we explore in this episode:

• The "tyranny of the absolute": Dalton's argument that any concept of absolute good, when pursued without resistance, becomes a source of oppression, violence, and evil.
• The moral status of the universe: whether reality itself can be evaluated in moral terms and what the answer means for how we live.
• The metaphysics of entropic decay: how the second law of thermodynamics, speculatively extended, produces a philosophical account of being as "unbecoming" and what that means for ethics.
• The "aesthetics of escape": Dalton's argument that art's primary function is not to help us see truth but to "carry us away" from what he calls the "moral horror" and "torment" of existence, and why guilty pleasures and escapism are "existentially necessary palliatives."
• What it feels like to have this conversation with a friend, someone whose intellectual history you share, whose books you have watched develop from ideas into arguments into published philosophy, and what that connection makes possible in a recorded conversation
• Why Rudy's jaw dropped more than once, and what that tells you about the depth this episode reaches
• What the examined life looks like when it takes evil seriously as a philosophical starting point rather than a problem to be solved.

Note: Drew Dalton has since published The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism (Northwestern University Press, 2023) — the most complete statement of the philosophical framework discussed in this episode. His essay "Reality is evil" was published in Aeon in August 2025. This episode is the conversation that preceded both.

Good Is In The Details is hosted by Gwendolyn Dolske, Ph.D. and Rudy Salo — a philosophy, books, and ideas podcast exploring the examined life in the spirit of Socrates.

Learn more about Professor Dalton: Bio and Books

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