Making Sense - Sam Harris - #14 — The Virtues of Cold Blood

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

00:00:12.600 this you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part

00:00:17.000 of this conversation in order to access full episodes of the making sense podcast you'll

00:00:21.900 need to subscribe at samharris.org there you'll find our private rss feed to add to your favorite

00:00:27.120 podcatcher along with other subscriber only content we don't run ads on the podcast and

00:00:32.600 therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy

00:00:36.620 what we're doing here please consider becoming one

00:00:39.040 today i'm going to be speaking with paul bloom paul is the brooks and suzanne reagan professor of

00:00:52.140 psychology and cognitive science at yale university he's published more than 100 scientific articles

00:00:56.800 in journals such as science and nature he's the editor of bbs behavioral and brain sciences which

00:01:02.440 is a great journal and he often publishes in the popular press in the new york times the new yorker

00:01:07.040 the atlantic monthly etc he's won numerous awards and he has a book just babies the origins of good

00:01:13.480 and evil which i highly recommend i've always really enjoyed my conversations with paul and it was a

00:01:18.580 pleasure to get him on the podcast and if you enjoy our conversation please let us know about it twitter

00:01:23.400 is probably the best place for that and please copy paul on that communication he gives his twitter

00:01:28.920 address at the end of the podcast and if you think we're dangerous morons well then feel free to tell

00:01:33.180 us that we can take it but generally speaking it's very helpful if you spread the word about the podcast

00:01:37.380 on social media and it's especially helpful if you review it on itunes i know as a consumer of these

00:01:43.160 things it's not immediately obvious why that would be so but i can tell you as a producer of one

00:01:47.840 reviews are extremely helpful so if you can bear it please take a moment to write a sentence or two

00:01:53.080 about the podcast and post that on itunes that would be much appreciated and without any more

00:01:58.160 fine print i now give you paul bloom

00:02:00.380 well i now have paul bloom on the line notorious yale psychologist hey paul how you doing i'm doing well

00:02:12.160 how are you doing i'm good i'm good well thank you for coming on the podcast notorious huh yes

00:02:17.100 notorious for um attacking empathy of late which has been a surprise to to many people i want to get

00:02:23.320 into that but before we do i i want to just back up and introduce you to listeners who may not be

00:02:29.900 totally familiar with your work what have you focused on and what are you focusing on these days

00:02:33.780 before we get into your your recent controversial views on empathy so i've worked on a range of different

00:02:39.840 issues in my uh research career i sort of have a bit of an academic uh deficit disorder with regard

00:02:46.180 to my research focus so i worked on language learning um religious belief pleasure and most of all over

00:02:55.220 the last several years morality so i completed a book just babies on the origins of morality and

00:03:02.480 recently i've become interested in uh in uh norm more normative questions of how we could be moral

00:03:09.760 people we can make the best moral judgments and do the best moral actions so this brought me to look

00:03:14.500 at at debates over the the relative merits and our capacity for reason uh issues about compassion and care

00:03:21.820 and in particular issues about empathy so um my next book which is still being written is going to be a

00:03:28.680 a critique of empathy it's a tendency we call against empathy and i've written some articles

00:03:34.660 exploring that so that's sort of a natural offshoot of my broader interest in moral cognition well that's

00:03:40.020 a great title so i think we'll want to get into the larger question of a scientific understanding

00:03:45.860 morality as well because as you know that's an area of interest of mine and i think it's an area where

00:03:51.140 we don't totally agree if if i'm not mistaken so that that could be interesting but you've spent a lot

00:03:57.040 of time doing i guess what would be called developmental psychology i'm wondering you're a parent i'm

00:04:03.080 wondering if if your understanding of the human mind in those terms has affected your parenting is there

00:04:09.460 anything in science that has affected the way you operate in the world in that domain almost nothing

00:04:16.260 yeah i mean almost all my my kids now are teenagers um one's off to university and and reflecting

00:04:24.360 on it none of my interactions nothing i've done with them has been influenced by either my own

00:04:30.440 research or everything i've known about psychology the reason for the almost is i feel my psychological

00:04:36.160 training has given me uh i think healthy skepticism about what psychologists have to say about child

00:04:42.140 rearing right so so you know you you have you have kids and you know there's so many choice points

00:04:47.520 um you know separate sleeping in a separate bed sleeping with you what sort of punishment what sort

00:04:53.600 of discipline a range of problems and psychologists weigh in enthusiastically on all of them and and

00:05:01.820 uh being a psychologist myself i know for the most part we don't know what we're talking about

00:05:05.940 and and and for the most part kids are pretty resilient so you know if you love your kid if you

00:05:11.520 don't do anything grotesquely wrong your kid will turn out the way your kid turns out let's back up

00:05:16.560 that way what do you make of that fact that science has not informed your life in that respect because

00:05:22.940 i i share your incorrigibility or or disregard of science and and it's although it's not the result

00:05:29.840 of being especially close to those particular data is it really just that you feel like we don't know

00:05:36.140 anything of substance that's actionable for a parent or is it just that it's it's too hard to bring that

00:05:42.860 kind of understanding online when you're in the trenches being a parent how do you explain the

00:05:48.040 fact that you wind up parenting more or less exactly the way you would parent if you were a

00:05:53.060 non-scientist yeah i think it's it's uh parents are intensely interested in the data and very willing

00:05:58.960 to act upon it i think i think too willing to act upon it too willing to to take psychologists

00:06:04.020 seriously i think the problem is your option one which is we just don't know much about development

00:06:08.920 or what makes people happy or healthy i i don't want to exaggerate it uh certain things around the

00:06:14.860 edges we do know um there's some i think useful narrow techniques for helping your kid get to sleep

00:06:21.500 and and dealing with certain crises certainly you know uh issues about about food and allergies and and

00:06:28.800 we we have some interesting tidbits and local facts that are useful but the broader question

00:06:34.920 everybody wants to know which is how do i raise my kid to be a good happy successful healthy kid

00:06:41.060 we just don't know and it's not for lack of trying i i you know in general i'm i'm very enthusiastic

00:06:48.860 about my field and i've written popular books trying to extend the insights from my field to broader

00:06:54.200 questions that interest a lot of people like you know how does pleasure work or or why do people have

00:07:00.100 religious belief but i'll confess that for many of the most important domains of our lives

00:07:04.980 we've come up with very very little and is that just a a larger statement about how hard it is to

00:07:12.520 understand the human mind in truly scientific terms yeah i think i think psychology has turned

00:07:18.220 out to be a much more difficult field than physics or chemistry or the harder sciences i don't think

00:07:24.460 we're you know i don't think psychologists are stupider than physicists or chemists i just think the

00:07:28.520 problems have turned out to be more difficult i i think to some extent we're in a pre-copernican

00:07:34.340 phase in psychology um we're waiting to turn into a full-fledged science and you know the the problem

00:07:41.640 i think is most urgent for domains like health and happiness and success over more specific narrow

00:07:49.200 problems like um visual perception or motor control or short-term memory there the science gets done

00:07:58.100 yeah yeah but you know jerry fodder had something his first law of cognitive science this isn't quite

00:08:04.240 it but my memory of it was the more intuitively interesting something is the less we know about

00:08:10.040 it so so there's a form of sticker shock you know i i teach intro psych and people coming in want to

00:08:16.280 know questions like you know why are some people mentally ill what could i do to be happier why do

00:08:22.200 people change their minds about things and what i tell them is the best science we have which is on

00:08:28.640 problems like color vision right and you know and and and you know amnesia long-term memory and and

00:08:36.560 language processing we we know the most about what intuitively matters the least i'm not sure whether

00:08:42.980 this is some sort of you know savage law of the universe or just reflects the fact that the problems

00:08:47.980 that were most interesting are just the hardest to resolve well i think there is a savage law of

00:08:52.220 the universe in a related sense it actually may connect with fodder's law which is that we have

00:09:00.920 obviously not been designed by evolution to understand our circumstance in any deep sense our common sense

00:09:08.080 intuitions about how things work are applicable within the domain of hurling rocks in parabolic arcs at

00:09:16.240 one another and moving at the speed at which apes move so when you get down to the very small in

00:09:23.060 physics or the very large in cosmology our intuitions are obviously at odds with what we're discovering to

00:09:29.320 be true and i think that may be true with the brain i mean certainly true with the significance of

00:09:34.320 information processing or even the fact that information processing is a thing that can be studied

00:09:38.620 and so our intuitions about what is interesting also is part of that picture i was having a

00:09:44.340 conversation with the physicist max tegmark recently and who's done some very interesting work in

00:09:49.560 cosmology among other areas and we were talking about this and he made this point which is a kind

00:09:55.820 of a stronger version of a point that i just made which i thought was interesting because he he said that

00:10:01.140 it's it's not only not surprising that what we find to be true violates our intuitions it should be

00:10:08.820 expected if we take evolution seriously that our cognitive toolkit has evolved for a certain domain and has not

00:10:16.940 at all been constrained by the way reality is altogether we should expect the truth to be deeply

00:10:24.200 counterintuitive and we should be distrustful of explanations that mesh well with our common sense and i i think

00:10:31.520 that is probably true across the board it probably doesn't just apply to things like quantum mechanics and

00:10:37.880 cosmology but it may apply to areas much closer to your area of interest for instance normative

00:10:44.920 solutions to moral problems we have not evolved to function well in a group of seven billion people

00:10:52.780 trying to run a global economy and solve civilizational problems we have evolved in small bands of hunter

00:11:01.100 gatherers and are tuned to the the social challenges we encounter in those circumstances so this may be a

00:11:08.180 bridge from where we just were to talk about things like empathy and morality but i just want to get your

00:11:13.260 reaction to that right i i think the point is exactly right and the highlights both the similarities and the

00:11:18.360 differences uh between psychology and a field like physics so so in both cases we have these bedrock

00:11:24.520 foundational intuitions that have evolved through natural selection we for physics it's middle-sized

00:11:29.300 objects that you know move in certain ways for uh for psychology it's people beliefs and desires

00:11:35.300 and so so the question is how come we made so much success in physics where we have quantum theory we

00:11:42.480 have cosmology we we understand a very big and a very small and not the equivalent success in psychology

00:11:49.160 and one answer could be what we're talking about before the problems in psychology are simply in

00:11:53.660 some way harder another issue though is something which has been raised by the evolutionary psychologist

00:11:59.220 leader cosmetes which is that our our intuitions might blind us in certain ways that make psychology

00:12:05.360 hard to do so we have what she calls instinct blindness which is the sense which is that if something

00:12:11.800 is psychologically natural it seems to sort of not need explanation and doesn't benefit from from

00:12:18.520 explanation you know if if you take take something very simple which we can explain which is why

00:12:24.220 people love their children and you know that's evolution 101 uh people have evolved to love their

00:12:30.160 children for a sort of standard functional reason and we could talk about where in the brain this

00:12:35.000 capacity is we talk about what triggers it and what doesn't trigger it but my experience is if you say

00:12:40.560 these things which i think is a rather trivial and fairly obvious example people find it almost repellent

00:12:47.160 and so i you know a lot of a lot of psychology i think runs against the problem that people don't

00:12:52.820 want to hear it it doesn't seem right it seems to sort of violate certain sacred intuitions that we

00:12:58.040 might have let's linger on that point for a second because that that is a difference obviously between

00:13:03.280 psychology and physics so what what's going on there do you think it's just when you say that

00:13:08.240 uh when you give any kind of quote reductive explanation for something like love do you think

00:13:15.760 the the message that people draw is that they they don't really love their children or that love isn't

00:13:21.200 really important or what's happening there i think there's two things that might be independent or

00:13:25.940 might be connected one is they don't think this needs an explanation um i i i see this in many realms

00:13:33.920 people you know you you you tell i tell people well i study why a certain thing why people think

00:13:39.460 killing is wrong and they look at me and say well duh of course killing is wrong there's a waste of

00:13:45.160 taxpayer dollars exactly and you say you say you're a professor and you know and and i used to say i you

00:13:52.600 know i study you know why do people enjoy orgasm and chocolate and people laugh um because it's obvious

00:14:00.080 of course we do and it needs tremendous um you need to be i i think william james talked about it said

00:14:07.640 you need to be an almost depraved person to want to explain these things to go beyond the common sense

00:14:13.680 intuition so so problem one is that people it takes a lot of work to get people to understand

00:14:19.080 that these are contingent facts if we were wired up differently if if evolution were differently we would

00:14:25.480 want to eat our children uh not love them we you know we would have sex with trees and not people

00:14:31.240 and and so you have to explain how things worked out so that's one problem and i think the second

00:14:35.620 problem really is i think people find it almost morally repellent to dig in to these questions

00:14:41.800 particularly for moral questions and actually particularly for a question i think which has

00:14:45.920 occupied you a lot more than has occupied me and you contribute a lot to this which is when it

00:14:50.660 comes to spiritual or religious matters um if you tell people you're interested in why people

00:14:56.740 uh believe in god or believe in an afterlife they immediately run to the inference that you're

00:15:02.740 attacking these beliefs and that there's something wrong with the enterprise yeah yeah so so i i

00:15:08.960 interrupted you there with the inhomogeneity or the the lack of analogy between psychology and physics

00:15:15.860 so apart from the the bad vibe that people get when you start explaining prominent features of the

00:15:22.540 human mind there's this sense that not only is it wrong or or somehow unsavory to reduce these

00:15:30.760 cherished mental states to something biological there's a sense that it's just it's superfluous you

00:15:36.720 don't these things don't have to be explained i guess some people do have this attitude toward

00:15:40.980 things like gravity but it's in terms of our living we don't feel like we need to explain it but

00:15:45.840 right there's no real resistance to the enterprise of physics when you think about an open-ended

00:15:51.920 search for explanation that's right so so for whatever reason um obvious physical facts don't

00:15:59.820 don't meet with the same objection you know i i think maybe throughout history at some point when

00:16:04.500 somebody says i'm interested in why things fall to the ground rather than fly into the air other people

00:16:09.880 laughed and said it's obvious you know why would you question such a thing but we don't do that now we

00:16:13.960 understand these are good questions and more to the point that there aren't typically the moral

00:16:19.000 implications for it nobody feels threatened if you say you're studying gravity or uh you know or energy

00:16:25.740 or mass well if you say you're studying love or religion or morality it it you know it gets people

00:16:33.140 scarred up i mean maybe there's a case to be made that it should get people scarred up maybe a lot of

00:16:38.580 what society runs on certain things not being questioned and not being challenged and uh and the

00:16:43.780 influence of people like you and me it's not necessarily a positive one well it does i guess it gets

00:16:48.420 people's guard up because it at least implicitly carries the message that things are not as they seem

00:16:57.380 and that that's true across all of science but when you're told that things are not as they seem

00:17:03.380 with respect to gravity or the way diseases spread or anything else that science might tackle outside

00:17:11.020 the human mind you're not delivering the same kind of insult whereas if you say things are not as they

00:17:16.100 seem with things like interpersonal love or parental love or spiritual experience you are often explicitly

00:17:24.600 but at least implicitly saying that the reasons why you think you're doing something the reason why

00:17:30.920 you think this is so important to you you love your kids you love your wife is not at all what is

00:17:37.840 really pulling the levers of your mind there's another explanation entirely that doesn't even treat

00:17:44.080 these nouns necessarily at all now we're talking about genes or we're talking about neurotransmitters

00:17:50.360 or we're talking about something that you that's not even available to your own inspection

00:17:55.060 subjectively if you continue the conversation long enough i don't think that becomes

00:18:00.240 deflationary in the way that people fear but if you don't continue it long enough you're left giving

00:18:05.740 people the impression that love is nothing but a certain balance of neurotransmitters and therefore

00:18:10.540 that's right it's you're you know you're just a bag of chemicals get over yourself yeah i think that's

00:18:16.080 right i like the word insult because that's often how it's taken i mean i've i've been as i'm writing

00:18:21.080 a part of my book that's looking at political psychology uh as part of a sort of a separate question

00:18:26.760 about whether liberals and uh conservatives differ in their empathy and one thing i've noticed in

00:18:32.080 political psychology is no political psychologists lean to a tremendous extent liberal this is the

00:18:37.860 point that john heighten's colleagues wrote up in an article and you know it's true of academics in

00:18:43.160 general uh but certainly it's true for political psychology and one effect that this has is that there's

00:18:50.040 endless detailed explanations of why conservatives believe what they do you know so what's going on

00:18:57.500 when they reject affirmative action or they don't like the president's health care plan but there's

00:19:02.700 extremely little reflection on why liberals believe what they do now even if you think the liberal

00:19:08.840 cause is the right one you know for just about every question still it's an empirical question how we

00:19:14.220 come how liberals come to the beliefs that they do but it's considered as either a superfluous question

00:19:21.040 or a taboo one you know liberals if you're liberal you think liberals believe what they do because um

00:19:28.220 they they um they it's the right answer and and you don't want to reduce it down to experience or

00:19:34.600 you know god forbid random arbitrary social experience and of course the same thing comes up with uh

00:19:41.000 religion which is that you know religious people often get very offended by um studies of why uh

00:19:49.620 people are religious while they find studies of why people are atheists fascinating and often they

00:19:54.700 raise it as a challenge why don't you go study atheists and in fact i think you know we should study

00:19:59.780 atheists and there's some work on atheists and my experience is when you talk about atheists under

00:20:04.360 research on why they're atheists often they get their you know hackles up nobody wants their

00:20:10.240 cherished beliefs to be put under the microscope by somebody like me not even me what you've done

00:20:15.740 with empathy is is even more seditious than that i think because it's not just that you are proposing

00:20:22.240 that we study a necessary and and cherished emotion you're actually challenging the common sense view of

00:20:30.760 it as being socially and psychologically beneficial and vital to our moral lives you've come down very

00:20:38.280 much on the really a side of a controversy that most people didn't even know existed which is that

00:20:44.040 empathy in many cases is harmful and is not a good piece of software if you want to be a reliable

00:20:51.860 moral actor in normative terms so tell me about what you've said about empathy and let's let's get

00:20:57.200 into the details so i always have to begin with the most boring way ever to begin anything which is

00:21:02.460 we're talking about terminology because people use the term empathy in all sorts of ways and i think

00:21:07.960 my position is easily misunderstood if you think some people think empathy just as a word referring to

00:21:14.980 anything good compassion care love morality making the world a better place and so on under that

00:21:20.920 construal of empathy i have nothing against it i'm not a monster i mean i want to make the world a better place

00:21:25.340 um they're you know bullies are

00:21:55.020 one way reason why bullies are very good at being bullies is that they exquisitely understand

00:21:59.740 what's going on in the heads of their victims yeah yeah that's often misunderstood by the way we

00:22:04.240 should just footnote that that this form of cognitive empathy that you've just distinguished from

00:22:10.200 the other form that you're about to describe is something that psychopaths have in spades when we talk

00:22:15.860 about psychopaths being devoid of empathy it's not the empathy that allows us to understand another

00:22:22.260 person's experience that is not something that prototypically evil people lack in fact they as

00:22:28.360 you just said they use this understanding to be as successfully evil as they can be that's exactly

00:22:34.520 right so so um you know another term for cognitive empathy is social intelligence and i like that way of

00:22:40.900 talking because it captures the point that intelligence is an extraordinary tool without it you know we

00:22:46.820 couldn't do any great things but in the hands of somebody with malevolent ends intelligence could be

00:22:51.500 used to make them a lot worse and i think that that's that social intelligence is exactly like that

00:22:57.080 um mind reading another term for it is is a tool that could be used any way you want it and the very best

00:23:04.120 people in the world have have tons of it and so do the very worst people in the world so so the sense

00:23:10.320 of empathy i'm i'm i'm using and that this actually matches what most psychologists and most philosophers

00:23:15.880 uh how how they use the term is empathy is in the sense of what adam smith and david hume and other

00:23:23.280 philosophers called sympathy and what it refers to is feeling what other people feel so if you're in pain

00:23:31.340 and i feel empathy for you i will feel to some degree your pain if you're humiliated i will feel your

00:23:38.780 humiliation if you are happy i will feel your happiness and you could see why people are such

00:23:44.500 fans of this it it brings me closer to you it dissolves the boundaries between me and you and

00:23:50.580 there's a lot of psychological research showing that if i feel empathy towards you i'm more likely

00:23:55.680 to help you dan badson has done some wonderful studies on them and i don't contest that at all

00:24:00.160 but the problem with empathy and one of the problems of empathy that are many but the main problem

00:24:06.220 is it serves as a spotlight it zooms me in on a person in the here and now and as a result it's

00:24:13.800 biased it's parochial it's um short-sighted and it's innumerate uh it's one way i put it is it's

00:24:22.580 because of empathy that governments and societies care so much more about a little girl stuck in a well

00:24:29.120 than about millions or more people suffering and dying through climate change it's because of

00:24:35.800 empathy at least in part that we we freak out and panic over um mass shootings which however horrible

00:24:45.000 are a tiny proportion of gun homicides in america 0.01 percent roughly yeah i mean if so if you ask

00:24:53.660 people they would say mass shootings are the most terrible things there are now you know i live in

00:24:57.620 connecticut newtown's not that far away after the sandy hook killing people were including me were

00:25:02.640 deeply upset but intellectually if you could snap your fingers and make all the mass shootings go

00:25:08.880 away forever and then you did that nobody would know based on the homicide numbers yeah that it's so

00:25:16.380 tiny so it misdirects us it causes us to focus on the wrong thing it causes us to freak out at the

00:25:22.880 suffering of one and ignore the suffering of a hundred and um in in one of your books i forget

00:25:29.480 which one you uh you you talk about the study where uh we care more about one and about eight

00:25:35.560 yeah and you say something to the effect of if there's ever a non that's paul slovik's work that's

00:25:40.760 right that's right um some wonderful studies and also uh some named retoff and other investigators have

00:25:46.900 done this since and you know and and you described us that if there's ever a non-normative finding in

00:25:54.620 psychology that's it and so i i think we could i think there's many more examples like this that we

00:25:59.960 could say we could look and say and say as rational people well you know a black life matters as much as

00:26:07.140 a white life the life of an ugly person who doesn't inspire my empathy matters just as much as a beautiful

00:26:13.860 person who does and the lives of a hundred matter more than a life of one especially and this this

00:26:20.720 is the the amazingly non-normative finding from slovik's work is especially if those hundred include

00:26:28.320 the one you were caring about so you can set up this paradigm where you show a reliable loss of concern

00:26:37.260 when you add people to the group so you start with one little girl whose story is very emotionally

00:26:43.960 salient and people care about her to a maximal degree and then you add her brother to the story

00:26:50.560 and people care a little less and then you add eight more people to the story keeping the same girl

00:26:55.400 and people's care just drops off a cliff that's truly amazing it's not one attractive girl versus a

00:27:02.340 hundred faceless people it can be the one attractive girl along with the hundred and you care less it's

00:27:09.220 a magnificent and horrible finding and and you know i i've i've long championed the forces of reason

00:27:15.840 and rationality and moral judgment i think far more than many social psychologists that were capable of

00:27:21.060 that and so there's an interesting duality here on the one hand our gut feelings push us towards the one

00:27:28.020 girl and not the hundred even if the hundred includes the girl on the other hand we're smart

00:27:32.760 enough to recognize when we put it in this abstract way that that's a moral mistake in some way you

00:27:39.180 could view the moral mistakes caused by empathy as analogous to the mistakes and rationality that

00:27:44.520 people like danny kahneman have chronicled where where you see people just you know you get these

00:27:50.120 puzzles and you ignore the base rates you get things all messed up and that's when when you step back

00:27:55.740 and look at it and do the math you realize wow that was a mistake my gut led me in the wrong way

00:28:00.860 visual illusions are another case it looks this way but it isn't you take out the ruler and you

00:28:06.420 measure it and although the lines look like they're different lengths they're the same so we have this

00:28:10.860 additional capacity to do this both for things that connect to the external world like vision but also

00:28:16.580 for morality where we have standards of reason and consistency and we could use this to say wow our

00:28:21.760 empathy is pushing us in the wrong direction yeah so now do you see us correcting for this in a way

00:28:27.860 that is adequate to the the magnitude of the moral error or is is our way of correcting for it more

00:28:34.960 haphazard than that uh our way of correcting this is always haphazard but the analogy i make is with

00:28:40.700 racism so so we know we have racist biases many of us have explicit racist biases but there's a lot

00:28:47.300 of evidence for implicit racial biases biases that we don't know we have even

00:28:51.760 but that influence us in all sorts of ways so what do you do so suppose if you think racism is okay

00:28:57.460 then there's not a problem but suppose you know as you and i do we think racism is wrong

00:29:01.740 so what do you do about it well the answer is not you try harder you know we know trying hard doesn't

00:29:08.960 work for these sort of biases but there are different sorts of fixes so in fact for for for biases

00:29:15.680 often there's technological fixes one story this may be apocryphal but it's a good story is that

00:29:22.160 symphony orchestras were heavily biased in favor of men because they they claim that you know the

00:29:27.780 people making judgments who were both men and women said men just sound better they have stronger more

00:29:31.960 powerful styles so what they did was they started auditioning people behind a screen

00:29:36.980 and this is and then then by then the sex ratio became more normal so this is an example of you

00:29:43.880 you got a bias you don't like it and so you try to fix the world so it doesn't apply and i could

00:29:49.920 imagine similar things had happening with with empathy where you change laws and policies so that

00:29:55.200 empathy plays less of a role i'll give you one small example just because of the trial of the

00:30:00.500 boston marathon killer has come to an end was recently in the news but i think victim statements are a

00:30:05.680 horrible idea where people where people come into court and describe in great detail their anguish

00:30:11.080 and their pain and then this plays some role in sentencing and that seems you know hugely immoral

00:30:18.440 because the extent to which you're going to be affected by the witness statements depends on how

00:30:23.340 much they cry and whether they have the same color skin as you and whether they're attractive and

00:30:28.740 whether they they are stoic or weepy or whatever and then this will then influence how many years in

00:30:34.300 prison somebody has yeah and you know and it seems it seems it seems bizarrely intentionally structurally

00:30:41.340 irrationally immoral yeah i've actually never thought about that before i think you're absolutely right

00:30:46.720 there i i'm wondering if the argument in favor of witness statements relates to the debt owed to the

00:30:54.440 the victims and their families and that there's there's some sense that we owe this to them the

00:31:00.440 opportunity to to vent and express their grievance this way and that a judge and and a court would

00:31:06.760 be reluctant to deny that to them is that what makes this such a common feature of these kinds of

00:31:11.720 trials yeah i think that's what the argument for it is and you know if if it would make the victims

00:31:17.520 happier feel that they they're getting what they deserve to make their statements it's an excellent case

00:31:22.520 for it but it seems to go too far to have these statements influencing the influence the sentencing

00:31:28.180 i mean this isn't necessarily a bleeding heart argument it it could be it could go both ways i

00:31:34.500 mean if the victim statements seem are done by people who don't inspire your empathy yeah if a white

00:31:39.860 jury is listening to victim statements by black people they might say this isn't capturing my empathy

00:31:44.400 this isn't upsetting me let's give the guy a light sentence so i you know i i don't have any sort of

00:31:49.800 view as to whether the sentences in these sort of cases are are too harsh are too alien it's just that

00:31:56.040 the victim statements put put noise and issues of incredible bias including racial bias and and makes

00:32:03.020 that part of the sentencing process so that's an easy fix to to get rid of things like that i've often

00:32:09.420 said that i think our laws and social institutions need to engineer our better judgment and our understanding

00:32:16.940 of moral normativity and inoculate us against our failures of intuition even when our we can summon

00:32:25.500 the appropriate intuitions we can't always summon them reliably or it takes work to summon them and

00:32:31.960 what we want are laws that are wiser than we are we want to be able to rely on a system that corrects for

00:32:41.000 what at the end of the day we recognize to be a kind of you know it's a suite of moral illusions or

00:32:46.380 moral biases that are leading us to to misallocate both emotional and very real resources i think

00:32:53.260 that's exactly right um you know there's a phrase by by lincoln that uh steve thinker made as the title

00:32:58.400 of his wonderful book the better angels of our nature and i think that that you know those better angels

00:33:04.240 first and foremost is deliberative careful analytic cost benefit reasoning on how to make the world a

00:33:11.940 better place and laws and policies should work to instill them you know just under some analyses that's

00:33:18.920 what something like a constitution is which is uh you know a constitution is at a very higher level

00:33:24.240 saying look you might get really excited and want to have a law that says you could re-elect

00:33:30.060 a popular third president or reinstill slavery or ban some ugly political doctrine you don't like

00:33:37.140 but you can't we're going to block this and you could undo the block but it's going to be very

00:33:42.540 difficult and take a very long period of time constitutions under this view are the sort of

00:33:48.400 equivalent of waiting periods to buy a gun or get married just they slow you down they make it harder

00:33:54.780 and by making it harder it's you know danny kahneman talks about thinking fast and slow

00:33:59.840 and thinking slow i think is a lot better and i i think good social institutions reflect as you put

00:34:06.920 it the the workings of thinking slow and often encourage us to think slow but it's interesting

00:34:12.400 because you can often think slow in areas that are taboo and i think it's it's no less important to

00:34:20.500 to venture into those areas given that so much human suffering often hinges on what one thinks but

00:34:26.740 it seems to me that in questioning the value of the moral value of empathy in its kind of emotional

00:34:34.800 contagion form you have trespassed on a on a taboo there and tell me a little bit about how the

00:34:41.100 conversation has gone in public i noticed there was a little bit of pushback recently in a new york

00:34:46.160 times op-ed and you had that target article in in the boston review that i sent in a piece for what

00:34:51.680 what has it been like to make the noises you've made recently about empathy it has not been a

00:34:57.460 popular popular argument um some of the objections turn on a misunderstanding so some people say i'm

00:35:05.180 outraged at what you're saying i have a lot of evidence that empathy is good and doesn't suffer

00:35:09.580 from the problems that you say it suffers from and then they go on to defend compassion for instance

00:35:14.920 and and i'm very careful in my book and in my work to distinguish empathy from compassion and you

00:35:20.240 know we should bookmark this because it connects to meditative practices actually in an interesting

00:35:25.220 way the the good arguments i've heard against empathy the ones that have made me scratch my head

00:35:30.580 is that um empathy might be useful or central for intimate relationships so when it comes to

00:35:39.100 relationships between say us and our children and our friends you are supposed to be biased

00:35:44.580 and parochial and not you know not impartial and so a defender of empathy might say that somebody

00:35:51.340 who has zero empathy might be a fine policymaker uh a fine moral judge but a lousy husband or wife or

00:36:02.180 father or mother i don't think that's true i i think if you look at it closely it's not even here it's

00:36:09.340 not empathy that we're looking for but understanding and caring but those are the arguments that that

00:36:14.500 most give me pause and in fact i'm i'm um i'm i'm kind of on i'm certainly a consequentialist

00:36:22.360 and i'm on most days a utilitarian but i'm struggled with and we've talked about this before

00:36:27.900 i've struggled with the question of the obligation we have towards those we're close to like our

00:36:33.960 children and to strangers and and i'm not you know i haven't been persuaded by people like

00:36:39.560 peter singer who says in the long run there should be no difference right right well that's a very rich

00:36:45.340 area to talk about i'd like to go there but i don't want to miss this point but let's deal first

00:36:50.800 with this distinction between empathy and compassion how do you separate those so i actually got thinking

00:36:55.880 about this through a chance meeting with matthew ricard yeah i know matthew i i would think that

00:37:01.280 you would um you guys have a lot of affinity um so i met him at a conference and you know he was

00:37:06.480 wearing his saffron robes and had a putific smile and radiated peace and i was me and i came up to him

00:37:13.880 and started talking and we ended up getting a cup of coffee and he asked me what i was up to

00:37:17.240 and and i was quite nervous because i i'm not a confrontational guy and i figured this is not a

00:37:22.020 it's like telling you know a rabbi you're writing a book in favor of pork you know to tell this guy

00:37:27.000 that i was against empathy but to my surprise he i said yeah that's kind of that's standard buddhist

00:37:33.460 teaching and he pointed out that buddhists make a distinction between what's called sometimes called

00:37:38.920 sentimental compassion which is what i've been calling empathy which is feeling other people's

00:37:43.360 pain getting into their head and great compassion which is more distance and he's done this wonderful

00:37:49.860 research program with this neuroscientist tanya tanya singer where they carefully work explicitly

00:37:55.920 to distinguish empathy from compassion they get people in in fmri machines to to do meditative

00:38:03.700 practices that are either empathic or compassion they look at what how expert meditators do what what

00:38:09.800 more normal people do and the moral of all of this which connects to other psychological research

00:38:15.600 including the work of richie davidson actually who's done some wonderful work on this

00:38:19.080 is that empathy burns you out it burns you out it saddens you it makes you less effective

00:38:25.080 what you should do instead is you should feel compassion what the buddhists call loving kindness

00:38:31.160 um you should feel positive and cheerful if you're dealing with somebody who is miserable

00:38:36.800 and ashamed and in pain you don't feel miserable ashamed and you feel cheerful positive full of love and

00:38:43.480 energy so you so you care extraordinarily deeply about them but you don't feel their pain

00:38:50.840 and i think once you once you make this i don't care what you call it i mean i don't in the end

00:38:56.440 you know the issue isn't over what you call empathy or whether you should keep empathy under any

00:39:01.480 definition it's about what kind of intellectual and sentimental attitudes we should have towards people

00:39:08.760 and i think the attitude that they call compassion is far better than the attitude that they call empathy

00:39:14.680 as you say it's a clear recognition of the suffering there's nothing about your attention

00:39:21.480 that is distracting you from the reality of the other person's suffering but it's not diminishing your own

00:39:28.680 well-being in the presence of that suffering what you're feeling is a real commitment to alleviating it

00:39:34.120 that's different than simply being also miserable in the presence of human misery that's exactly right

00:39:41.320 and you don't have to be a you know a monk to appreciate this i think people often have a failure

00:39:46.520 of moral imagination where they'll say well you're not going to do anything nice if you don't have

00:39:51.000 empathy but think about all the things we do think about giving to charity and helping out a friend

00:39:56.360 and you know giving advice and and and you know volunteering saving to take a standard philosophical

00:40:03.880 example saving a girl's life who's drowning in none of these cases do you have to put yourself in

00:40:09.960 their shoes what you have to do is care about them right so so you know if presumably if i pass a girl

00:40:16.920 drowning in shallow water as i walked by i would rush in and pull her out i'm not a monster head high

00:40:22.600 water i think you'd go in there well singer's example uh peter singer's example sets the bar

00:40:26.840 very low yes it's extremely it's extremely shallow water the shallow pond is really nice as a shallow

00:40:33.400 pond but i'm really wearing nice shoes yeah and you know and then when i think it costs like 50 bucks

00:40:39.640 for me that's nice shoes i go if i go and i'll ruin my shoes but i'll go in nonetheless and singer's

00:40:45.720 point goes on to say that uh you recognize that that a life is worth far more than 50 dollars

00:40:51.800 and then singer goes on to make the point well then when you spend 50 buying you know a meal or

00:40:58.200 or a night out at a bar you're doing a moral equivalent to murdering a child so put that aside

00:41:03.800 but i would i would drift into the pond shallow or deep rescue the girl but plainly i don't have

00:41:09.720 to put myself in her shoes i don't have to feel what it's like to be drowning i don't have to imagine

00:41:15.320 the sorrows of her parents learning that their beloved daughter had died that's ridiculous

00:41:19.800 i rather i notice she's drowning i say god it's really would be horrible for this person to die

00:41:25.640 i get to save her and i save her and and i'm not special here most of the kind things we do have

00:41:30.760 nothing to do with empathy just as a lot of the very bad things we do are motivated by empathy let's

00:41:36.200 get to that that's very interesting so the dark side of empathy but before we get there we should also

00:41:40.920 point out that if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to subscribe at

00:41:48.120 sam harris.org once you do you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the making sense podcast

00:41:53.720 along with other subscriber-only content including bonus episodes and amas and the conversations i've

00:41:59.720 been having on the waking up app the making sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on

00:42:05.000 listener support and you can subscribe now at sam harris.org

Making Sense - Sam Harris - July 29, 2015

#14 — The Virtues of Cold Blood

Episode Stats

Length

Words per Minute

Word Count

Sentence Count

Misogynist Sentences

Hate Speech Sentences

Summary

Transcript