Making Sense - Sam Harris - August 26, 2015


#16 — The Dark Side


Episode Stats

Length

42 minutes

Words per Minute

173.8756

Word Count

7,335

Sentence Count

4

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

6


Summary

Today, I speak with Dr. Paul Bloom, a psychologist from Yale, about abortion, torture, and the dark side of the dark, dark side. We discuss rape, incest, and torture, as well as whether or not we should be vegetarian, vegan, and meat-eaten, and what it means to be a moral relativist, and how we should deal with rape and incest in the modern world, and why we should all be better off if we don't have abortion. In the case of rape, we can't even begin to begin to get into the details, but we can begin to sketch the outlines of the discussion, starting with the fact that abortion is illegal in most countries, and that it's a crime to abort a fetus if it's stillborn at the moment of conception, even if the mother is raped and becomes pregnant. We also discuss the case studies of a woman who was raped by her father, and who became pregnant by her mother, but whose pregnancy was terminated when she became pregnant and died at the time of delivery due to a single-ceremonial fertilization, rather than due to rape or incest. And, of course, we take a look at what would happen to a fetus who becomes pregnant and becomes a victim of rape and carries on to term, and is sentenced to life in prison for the death of her unborn child, even though the mother was raped and killed by her own father. What would you do with such a fetus? What do you think of the situation? And what would you would do if you were raped by your own mother, and pregnant by your father, but not able to bear a child? What are your thoughts on abortion, and could you do about it? All of which you would you be willing to do about abortion and rape, and if so, should you be given the death penalty for that fetus be put to term in prison, or sent to death? We ll find out in this episode of the Making Sense Podcast, featuring Dr. Bloom's answer to that question, and much more! Subscribe to the podcast by clicking the link below, and find out more about the making sense of it in the podcast, making sense, and other related topics, in the Making sense Podcast? Make sense? (Make sense, folks! "Making sense" by Sam Harris making sense by Sam Harris and the Making Sum?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
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00:00:39.040 today i'll be speaking with paul bloom again we spoke two podcasts back he's a psychologist from
00:00:52.220 yale and a wonderful thinker this time around we get into some controversial areas we go to the
00:00:57.480 dark side a little bit we talk about torture despite my better judgment we talk about cecil the lion
00:01:04.520 talk about politics you'll find at the end that i perform a kind of intervention on myself and paul
00:01:11.960 to some degree on the topic of eating meat many of you vegans and vegetarians have been after me for
00:01:18.480 quite some time for a few remarks i made about having been a lapsed vegetarian and now the the chickens
00:01:26.980 as it were have come home to roost so you'll hear that i call for the best resources out there for how
00:01:35.500 to be a vegetarian or a vegan healthily and that's a sincere request so if you have good information to
00:01:41.640 send me please do so through the email contact form on my website and please put vegetarianism or veganism
00:01:48.460 in the subject line and i will keep you apprised of my progress and without further preamble i give
00:01:54.620 you paul bloom
00:01:55.620 i'm back with paul bloom my friend the yale psychologist who was on the podcast last time
00:02:06.520 hey paul how you doing i'm doing great sam how are you i'm good i'm good well you are back largely
00:02:11.620 because i wanted to talk to you again but people loved our last podcast so i would encourage people
00:02:16.760 if they haven't heard you the first time around to go back and listen to what we said about empathy
00:02:21.700 but now i think it would be good for the two of us to strike out onto some novel territory here and i had the
00:02:30.140 idea that we could look at some essentially moral case studies where we talk about stories in the news that are
00:02:37.260 are particularly salient in moral terms and just essentially free associate on them
00:02:42.500 that sounds like a lot of fun i mean the the issues that we could talk about are interesting in and of themselves
00:02:47.700 but it could also serve as sort of test cases to explore certain views that you and i have
00:02:51.940 maybe flesh out some agreements and some differences
00:02:53.940 yeah well so you know you and i in preparation for this conversation
00:02:58.260 just spatted a few topics around
00:03:01.380 i think we both still dimly recall the republican presidential debate the first one with
00:03:08.120 donald trump which happened i think about 10 days ago
00:03:11.300 and um one thing stood out for me there that
00:03:15.780 i just think is it's amazing that no one picks up on this i don't think i saw this talked about in any
00:03:22.660 in any journalistic context but it seemed that at least three of the candidates there
00:03:28.900 declared their opposition to abortion
00:03:32.060 not only in general and not only in the case of rape and incest but even
00:03:39.220 to save the life of the mother i mean i'd like to just spell out what that actually means because
00:03:45.180 it's it's a really a mind-boggling position for anyone to have especially someone who would
00:03:51.160 seek to run this country i would guess that'd be huckabee and santorum who would be the third
00:03:56.400 yeah i think it was it was walker cruz and rubio and rubio he didn't spell it out but he said
00:04:04.140 that his support for abortion in the case of rape incest and for the life of the mother had
00:04:09.700 been mischaracterized it's a kind of a hand-waving denial of his
00:04:12.960 of his liberal position there you have to respect it as a morally consistent view
00:04:17.280 if you do believe it's murder then that follows and you could
00:04:21.140 admire these people if anything for their their moral consistency and their willingness to
00:04:26.200 to see the implications of their views yeah no i mean it is it's a courage of a certain kind
00:04:32.240 no doubt so let's just look at the details here because what this means is in a perfect
00:04:39.200 world by their lights even if a teenage girl were raped by her father and became pregnant and there
00:04:50.200 was some reasonable concern that she would not survive the delivery of this child they would be
00:04:57.760 against abortion even if we could intervene immediately even the moment after conception
00:05:04.480 and just remove a single-celled fertilized ovum they would be against it that is in fact the moral
00:05:13.340 position this idea that life starts at the moment of conception and is equivalently sacred at that point
00:05:20.480 that's what they're committed to so and and presumably any doctor who could by magic or otherwise
00:05:27.380 extract a single cell from the uterus of a raped daughter who was likely to die if she carried this
00:05:37.080 fetus to term that they would want that doctor prosecuted as a murderer and presumably killed if
00:05:45.980 they're for the death penalty at the very least put in prison for the rest of his life that is the
00:05:49.620 totality of this moral position it is just mind-bogglingly unethical and yet no journalist
00:05:56.200 ever presses these people on it i think it's because the journalists don't take them particularly
00:06:00.700 seriously and and i don't know whether they should be taken seriously i think for at least some cases
00:06:06.820 like uh huckabee for instance this might express a sincere and considered viewpoint but for a lot of
00:06:13.400 these politicians for one thing they know that no such law would ever get passed um they're not going
00:06:18.460 to revamp uh roe v wade in this sort of dramatic way i think what it is is is a signal look how far
00:06:24.480 i'm willing to go even if you don't think i'm right you've got to admire me they're saying for my
00:06:30.180 consistency and my moral strength and and i i think the psychology what's going on is very interesting
00:06:35.740 but i don't think that these are meant to be purely evaluated as moral positions but they're only
00:06:42.120 appropriate signals which is to say effective ones useful ones from a political point of view
00:06:46.980 if some significant percentage of the electorate actually holds these views so these are they're
00:06:53.160 at best they're pandering to the convictions of a mob who actually would want the laws to change in this
00:07:00.800 way yes uh they're they're they're pandering to the most extreme uh members of the republican party
00:07:07.980 in the hopes that all the non-extreme members will at least respect or not be repelled by their extreme
00:07:14.260 views but how could they be confident of that given what this moral position entails again we're talking
00:07:19.860 about someone who's raped and who will die if she brings this baby to term and we can prevent this
00:07:29.500 catastrophe by removing a single cell or a collection of of 50 cells right a microscopic
00:07:36.780 organism without any nervous system without any capacity to suffer i mean this is this is in fact
00:07:44.140 what is being proposed and they are confident that this will not alienate better than 50 percent of
00:07:51.800 the electorate i just don't understand their confidence is derived from either some assumption
00:07:58.420 that just no one is following the plot here and no one actually understands the position they're
00:08:03.700 articulating or they just think that most people most of the time are close enough to this position
00:08:09.880 that it's a safe position to stake out i think some combination of the two i think um i mean another
00:08:16.660 issue would be trump's immigration policies which if you spell them out they're off they're sort of
00:08:22.240 unimaginably cruel you know expelling children and their parents uh including parents who are maybe legal
00:08:28.060 immigrants um in in order to sort of establish some sort of anti-immigrant position and i think like
00:08:36.360 the abortion thing if you spell it out to them what people what the implications are uh they would find
00:08:41.800 it repellent but at the same time i don't think people are responding or meant to respond to the moral
00:08:50.560 content of these views as opposed to their status as signals i mean remember the whole thing about
00:08:56.940 obama's birth certificate i actually think that that most people who claimed obama was not an american
00:09:03.140 citizen didn't really believe this they were just saying boo obama they were saying i don't like
00:09:08.240 obama here's a bad thing we could say about him and i think that a lot of these moral statements
00:09:13.180 are not meant to be thought of as factual moral claims in some way you're giving in some way i think
00:09:19.440 you're giving the republican candidates too much credit i think you're sort of envisioning them as
00:09:24.260 making these thoughtful ethical claims that are meant to be evaluated as opposed to making dramatic
00:09:29.500 flourishes for the audience it almost doesn't matter which side of that you take because the
00:09:34.240 dramatic flourish is only effective or at least not ruinous to your candidacy if no one is objecting
00:09:42.960 to what is suggested there so it's like either either you have to be confident that that everyone is
00:09:49.000 speaking and reasoning in bad faith or enough of everyone for you're doing so not to matter
00:09:55.360 or you have to think that millions of people actually agree with the letter of the position
00:10:01.640 you're staking out i haven't studied this but i think the poll data suggests that it would have to
00:10:05.920 be option one i don't think this extreme pro-life view is held by a large proportion of americans
00:10:11.860 i think most americans fall sort of uneasily in the middle and obviously there's a political
00:10:17.220 party difference but i think the view you're sketching out with its implications if you put
00:10:21.280 that to people uh republicans uh as well as democrats they say no we don't want that to sort of put this
00:10:27.540 in a nice light it's analogous to a politician who says that such and so is their top priority
00:10:32.960 and nothing is more important than saving american lives nothing is more important than this nothing
00:10:37.240 more important than that which is taken literally is absurd nobody would would assume that a single
00:10:42.600 policy should override all other policies but these are statements meant more as sort of speech acts
00:10:48.780 that that you know highlight one's commitment and one's loyalty to the party
00:10:54.600 so in some way he may be the only american who's taking
00:10:59.180 the one person watching this debate who is actually doing the math here morally speaking
00:11:05.700 saying but that's but that's morally absurd so actually there's something that in trump's
00:11:10.500 candidacy and and his whole style of self-presentation which i think supports your interpretation here which
00:11:16.560 is that the fact that he is as popular as he is given that it's it is almost impossible to take what
00:11:25.240 he says seriously there's a kind of histrionic bad faith to his his style of self-presentation where
00:11:32.000 even he doesn't believe what he's saying nor does he believe that you believe it and yet he's winning
00:11:38.780 points for saying it as loudly as he can say it people are just simply relieved to have someone
00:11:45.820 speak in a uncensored way even if it's actually a kind of bad faith performance where he's actually not
00:11:53.980 voicing an honest position i think that's right i think people have pointed out that many of trump's
00:11:59.120 views lean very left uh he's notably sympathetic to single-payer health care systems which you know
00:12:05.980 if somebody named somebody like bush or rubio suggested they'd be laughed off the stage but
00:12:10.820 there's a huge tolerance for trump's views because they're not taken seriously as as views i mean i
00:12:17.320 find i find trump fascinating i find the ascendance of trump just extraordinarily interesting and i mean
00:12:23.680 one thing i'll ask your opinion on this because i'm genuinely dumbfounded is what explains the
00:12:29.840 variation how people respond to trump so for me and for most of my friends which are which tend to
00:12:37.420 lean very liberal uh we find trump repellent we find his endless boasting his bragging about his money
00:12:44.720 his derision towards his enemies his personal insults just as awful awful person but so many other people
00:12:52.240 seem to be attracted to him they seem to think this is terrific this is this great guy who we admire
00:12:57.740 who you know who deserves our respect and we you know give him help they say that they say about trump
00:13:03.420 what do you think underlies that difference well yeah it's hard to even locate myself on that
00:13:08.960 continuum too because i there is so yes where do you uh lie in that continuum like how do you personally
00:13:14.320 respond to trump's style you know i think i'm in two places on it because it was in some ways a
00:13:20.200 relief to have him on that stage because he was just he's so ungovernable he destabilizes what is
00:13:26.260 otherwise a a machine perfectly designed to produce non-information and to give you absolutely no insight
00:13:35.300 into how people would actually govern and because he's destabilizing the republican party it's i think
00:13:43.700 it's if nothing else interesting yeah and i think as it sounds like you do that he's probably not
00:13:50.040 committed not truly committed to anything all that scary so he's actually less scary than some of the
00:13:56.840 other republican candidates in terms of how they would likely govern also i don't think he stands a
00:14:01.820 chance of becoming president so i'm not worried about him in any deep sense but he is a a genuinely
00:14:08.700 comic figure and i it's hard to imagine people who truly like him not seeing that the fact that
00:14:17.980 anyone's taking him as a truly successful and brilliant billionaire who has gravitas because of
00:14:26.460 how much he's accomplished that's very hard for me to to believe but i i'm sure most of the people
00:14:32.920 who support him do more or less take him in that sense i mean for the last many years i've been
00:14:38.260 writing on a defense of human rationality arguing contrary to people like my friend john height
00:14:44.340 that we're actually far more rational and reflective than people give us credit for even people even
00:14:50.700 in our political domain uh we we are capable of rational thought and rational liberation i have to say
00:14:56.880 you know this the republican uh debate and trump in general is proving to be an embarrassment for my
00:15:02.880 theory yeah i i'm i'm feel like getting refuted more and more each day by watching the reactions
00:15:08.560 to trump and and i feel you know and it's kind of sad that that at some level i get well let me back
00:15:15.720 up uh you know chomsky uh has has famously argued that we really that the rational thing to do is not
00:15:22.940 to care about these uh the debates between the political parties because to all intents and purposes
00:15:27.960 they're the same or all the parties of big business and imperialism and so on and i don't believe that
00:15:33.680 but maybe uh people aren't taking this seriously they're enjoying a spectacle of trump they're rooting
00:15:39.680 them on and maybe if you if you if you press them on it they would say we don't really care that much
00:15:45.000 about difference to republicans and democrats we're just there for the show i have your same angle on
00:15:50.820 reason and the same gripe with height but i must say my own experiences of late not just as a spectator
00:16:00.140 on our political process but just my collisions with my own critics have caused me to worry that
00:16:06.140 as i recently just said on twitter that i fear that reason is actually an acquired taste and not that many
00:16:12.280 people seem to acquire it that there's a style of argumentation that i'm running into again and again
00:16:18.120 and again and it's it's it's on twitter but it's at much greater length was it was with chomsky when
00:16:22.740 i attempted to have a conversation with him where there is such a an unwillingness to engage with the
00:16:30.280 details of an argument that you don't want to be true you know your opponent's position that you're not
00:16:38.060 even willing to take the time to understand it the style is you just want to demonize the person
00:16:44.860 for merely broaching a certain topic and yet this strategy of vilifying someone distorting their
00:16:52.260 position yelling louder and louder and louder until you silence them that is viewed by many people
00:16:58.580 who support your side of the argument as a truly clever thing to do that it's really it's it's effective
00:17:06.880 it's morally appropriate just call the other person an asshole or a monster loudly enough
00:17:13.980 until the conversation is over and then you've you've won and that's just more and more i'm finding
00:17:20.300 that that that is where people who imagine that they are highly scrupulous and honest and and
00:17:26.660 intellectually serious agents of progress that's how they're behaving it's very depressing i mean just
00:17:32.640 it now makes me want to pick my battles far more conservatively because it's just it's such a waste of
00:17:38.120 time and energy to even attempt some of these conversations i could understand that i've kind of watched as a
00:17:42.700 horrified spectator to some of the things you're talking about and uh you have my sympathies there
00:17:47.380 there's in some way i i won't defend that style but i'll make an observation about it which is that
00:17:53.540 um if if what you're going after is trying to find out the truth then you don't want that style at all
00:17:59.920 you want to listen to an open mind you want to let both sides air their disputes you want to explore
00:18:04.400 counterfactuals and so on and so forth on the other hand if there's something if there's some policy
00:18:10.040 you want and you have a goal in mind and you've already settled the issue to your own mind
00:18:15.280 in some cases that may be what that may be the most rational strategy to demonize your opponent
00:18:22.440 um regardless of its sort of moral qualities the example i'm thinking about is debates over torture
00:18:29.300 yeah where when people uh ray you know i'm thinking uh alan gershowitz for instance has made
00:18:35.240 some provocative claims about the occasional necessity of torture and under certain circumstances
00:18:40.100 i followed him down that rabbit hole and you know i get i get his hate mail still and i get my own
00:18:46.160 hate mail and it's it's a totally thankless job as i've said in various places i actually regret having
00:18:52.640 even talked about the and written about the topic because it's just i mean i think it's i think
00:18:57.720 it's hugely interesting ethically and philosophically it's something you absolutely want to be able to
00:19:02.560 talk about and it has great consequences as a matter of public policy but you are so perfectly
00:19:09.160 demonized even for talking about it that it's just not worth it and that's a that's a feature not a
00:19:15.060 bug i mean that's that's the point the point is that if you have a certain view that says that
00:19:20.500 torture is repellent one should never do it it's monstrous um and that's an absolute principle one
00:19:27.320 then you may choose to demonize people who argue in favor of torture and rather than engage with them
00:19:35.380 because you want them you want to make their views and to make those those people repellent you want to
00:19:41.700 disincentivize holding that view but but the problem is as i hope to show in my arguments on this topic is
00:19:48.180 that the consequences of that position are even more repellent if you actually follow it to the letter
00:19:54.900 it is somewhat analogous to this abortion example right just raised it's just if you actually look
00:20:00.520 at the details of what it would mean to never under any circumstance have recourse to making another
00:20:08.040 person so uncomfortable that they talk to you right what it called torture by another name right you can
00:20:15.640 easily concoct not not just thought experiments but very realistic situations in fact situations we know
00:20:22.800 have occurred where the person before you you absolutely know is guilty and has information
00:20:30.160 that would save lives and yet you're just you're delivering them coffee and cigarettes and and giving
00:20:35.740 them cable television to watch if you look at the details you can easily find a situation where you
00:20:41.180 would be a moral monster to not have recourse to that and yet you can't even push the conversation
00:20:48.140 far enough as to reveal that no it's it's true and i've seen i've seen this style of uh demonization
00:20:55.600 applied to people on the right people on the left it's something that that individuals with tremendous
00:21:01.620 confidence both in the correctness of their views and you know that the monstrosity of other views
00:21:08.620 will kind of cheerfully engage and believe they're on the side of the angels and it's not such an alien
00:21:14.100 feeling i mean if somebody if i had if i bumped into a holocaust denier i wouldn't give them the
00:21:19.760 respect of having a lengthy discourse with them yeah i would i would ridicule them but that's because
00:21:24.660 you know that that's such a heavy lift i mean there's just exactly there's so much evidence against
00:21:29.920 their view that even their their very interest in pursuing that line of inquiry says something
00:21:35.980 negative about them intellectually speaking leaving leaving the ethics aside it's like belonging to the
00:21:41.820 flat earth society it's like the fact that your your attention is captured by that project
00:21:46.420 says something derogatory about you i think some people would say the same thing about people
00:21:52.000 arguing for genetic genetic basis of ethnic differences people arguing about torture people
00:21:59.920 arguing about um unfettered capitalism and you know and and so so my claim i i'm not defending this but
00:22:08.280 i'm sort of making a descriptive claim that that those who do the demonization see themselves
00:22:13.360 as in the same position that you and i would see ourselves when confronted with a holocaust denier
00:22:18.840 right you're confronted with somebody who is motive must be motivated by sheer animus
00:22:23.620 and sheer irrationality they're not worth the time of day and actually they don't belong in the sort of
00:22:29.140 free marketplace of ideas just to show you how browbeaten i've been by this i feel the need to insert
00:22:35.540 just a defensive caveat here because having merely raised this issue you know echoes of my former
00:22:41.120 self on the topic of torture i'm going to get slammed so i just have to point out that my
00:22:46.100 investigation of the ethics of torture drew a parallel between torture and collateral damage
00:22:52.360 and the core of my point is that collateral damage is worse than torture across the board it is
00:22:59.100 worse to blow people up innocent or guilty than it is to waterboard them it's certainly worse to blow
00:23:04.820 them up along with their children than it is to waterboard them and if we ever found ourselves in
00:23:10.080 a situation where torturing one person seemed likely to minimize the prospect of collateral damage
00:23:17.000 torture would have to be preferable waterboarding would have to be preferable waterboarding someone
00:23:22.600 who is osama bin laden or he merely looks like osama bin laden it would have to be preferable
00:23:27.700 to dropping a 500 pound bomb on him and his family in moral terms and yet we accept collateral damage
00:23:35.600 more or less without argument there's no one whose reputation has been destroyed by his willingness
00:23:42.440 or her willingness to accept collateral damage in time of war and yet merely raising the prospect of
00:23:48.340 torturing a certain class of known terrorist just would destroy you and and as dershowitz and i have
00:23:55.580 experienced to some degree on the margins uh so anyway i have to point that out i i think torture
00:24:00.380 should be illegal but not everything that should remain illegal is in every instance unethical
00:24:06.560 trespassing should be illegal and theft should be illegal but there are situations where you would
00:24:11.180 have to be a monster not to trespass or not to steal if the stakes were high enough and and finally in
00:24:16.500 my defense and i just this now torture to realize how boring this is uh the position i have on torture
00:24:23.120 it's precisely the position you get if you read the stanford encyclopedia philosophy in their article
00:24:28.680 on torture they have an example of a carjacking where a guy stole a woman's car at a gas station
00:24:35.920 and she had her infant you know baby seat in the back seat and he abandoned the car on an incredibly
00:24:40.760 hot day i think it was in new zealand or australia and the police promptly caught the guy and wanted to
00:24:45.840 know where the car was and he just denied against all evidence that he had stolen the car and they knew
00:24:51.120 that a baby was dying in the back of it somewhere on you know on the side of the road and they you
00:24:56.260 know smacked him around a little bit and then he immediately told them where the car was and they
00:24:59.640 saved the baby in the nick of time that's the example that the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy
00:25:04.120 gives in support of at the very least a nuanced ethical consideration of the validity of torture
00:25:10.400 for for me i think that should stop you in your tracks i mean the idea that cops could not make
00:25:16.280 this guy at all uncomfortable physically when they knew he had taken this car they knew it because
00:25:22.760 they had video footage of him he was like a 300 pound samoan guy with a blonde afro or something he
00:25:27.860 was like the most recognizable person on earth who they had on video and yet if you try to have a
00:25:33.960 conversation on this topic it's over before it even starts yeah i i think i my intuition is the same
00:25:39.800 as you're certainly in that case i mean this is consequentialism 101 and in fact you know the
00:25:45.400 utilitarians like like bentham uh were actually you know they they use torture as an example and they
00:25:52.140 said there should be you know that the logic is causing one person suffering to to save a thousand
00:25:57.540 lives is is a rational thing to do uh and it's sort of same moral philosophy that gives you you know
00:26:03.900 gay marriage and uh and and gives you personal freedoms of all sorts that that liberals uh like
00:26:10.320 me like also gives you you know the justification for torture i i i would say as you're aware there is
00:26:16.880 a counter argument which i'm sometimes persuaded by which is that that in that instance you're
00:26:21.480 certainly right that torture is a good thing but nonetheless as a matter of policy one should block
00:26:26.140 it absolutely well that that's my that is my argument in fact it's actually not original with me i
00:26:31.060 got it from um mark bowden the the atlantic writer who wrote a long article on torture which
00:26:37.760 is linked somewhere on my website he argued basically that he thought it should be illegal across the
00:26:42.460 board but our interrogators should know that there are certain cases perhaps never actually reached
00:26:48.820 but certain cases which if reached will be ethically and psychologically obvious to them where
00:26:54.580 it would be ethical to make somebody uncomfortable by whatever means because you absolutely know that
00:27:02.480 you are in one of these ticking bomb scenarios which uh potentially can occur and in that case you would
00:27:09.740 still be breaking the law but there's no judge or jury who would want to prosecute you for what you did
00:27:15.420 so you will be ethically and in fact off the hook even though you will have broken the law and that's
00:27:21.080 i think that's the right policy i think it should be illegal across the board because of all the other
00:27:25.140 consequences of having some legal mechanism by which to torture people so i like the analogy you gave
00:27:30.060 before of collateral damage which makes a nice point i i taught a freshman seminar a couple years ago on
00:27:35.860 seven deadly sins and i started at one point a famous trolley problem which i think we spoke about last
00:27:40.940 time we talked uh you know and basically the question is would you kill one person to save five
00:27:45.900 and one innocent person to save five innocent people and my students by and large says yeah
00:27:51.580 it would they would and then a bit later in the conversation i asked would you torture somebody
00:27:57.700 to save five people and they said no right they said they said and then and then i said but which is
00:28:04.300 worse killing somebody or torturing them and yeah but so so that that's that's the thing now here's what
00:28:09.700 i'll say which which might shock you i have the same intuition i actually think that that that in
00:28:15.580 some way although for you know at least for certain tortures i'd rather be tortured than killed i guess
00:28:21.360 there's some torture so horrific i'd rather die but but getting i'd rather be smacked around uh than
00:28:27.520 killed nonetheless i think in some way smacking around or certainly that waterboarding that the more
00:28:34.880 serious tortures are worse than killing somebody and and and i need to i need to sort of nail down
00:28:41.080 the intuition it has an intuition to human dignity and respect you know somebody who kills another
00:28:46.580 person in some way to act is less degrading than torturing another person though in a in another
00:28:54.140 respect of course it's far worse to kill than to torture yeah well i think it does have certain
00:28:59.340 connections to the trolley problem it does invoke that difference between flipping the
00:29:04.840 switch and pushing the fat man that's right there's something the up close and personal
00:29:08.860 hands-on aspect of it but all of those are aspects that are separable from the actual ethical case which
00:29:17.000 is to say that you you could have modes of torture that didn't entail any of that i mean the example i
00:29:21.820 gave which to everyone's horror in the end of faith was you could have a torture pill which delivered
00:29:27.180 the instruments of torture along with the instruments of their perfect concealment
00:29:31.120 and your experience as a torturer would be you gave the terrorist or the evil genius this pill
00:29:38.980 and he laid down for a nap of an hour and got up and then confessed everything because he never
00:29:45.560 wanted to go through that again i think at the end you'd be tempted to call it a truth pill you would
00:29:50.680 not this would all be concealed from you and your experience was just having people come to you saying
00:29:55.100 okay whatever you do don't do that to me again now again i'm not arguing that we should have such a pill i'm
00:29:59.980 saying that all of these surface details are separable from the the core case which is which is worse
00:30:07.620 killing someone killing their children by accident as in the case of collateral damage maiming children
00:30:14.780 you know standing within 500 yards of the the bomb you dropped orphaning them or making a person you
00:30:23.520 know to be guilty and and in possession of crucial information to save lives uncomfortable to whatever
00:30:30.120 degree is necessary to get them to talk yeah i mean i i agree with what you said before which is
00:30:34.940 these are deep issues they're important issues and they're issues that we're confronted with
00:30:38.700 i i'm kind of annoyed at the sort of prissiness of some philosophers who refuse who would argue that
00:30:45.900 you know torture of any sort is absolutely wrong collateral damage of any sort is absolutely wrong
00:30:50.980 killing is absolutely wrong and failing to confront the fact that that in in the real world when we
00:30:57.160 deal with with these in times of war in times of of the criminal justice system people have to be
00:31:02.760 questioned uh people have to be uh uh detained and the the question of what is torture even if one is
00:31:11.060 categorically against it you still have to confront the case of where it begins and where it doesn't
00:31:15.920 begin you have to there's no excuse for for failing to delve into these issues and the same with
00:31:21.140 collateral damage someone who's who's for me hardcore pacifism isn't merely a sort of unrealistic
00:31:28.040 position it's basically a monstrous position yeah because because it says you should not engage in war
00:31:34.120 to to under the most even even to stop the most savage brutality even if even if a relatively
00:31:40.980 costless invasion could stop the holocaust you shouldn't do it and to me i think this is awful
00:31:46.080 yeah well recall as i did in the end of faith gandhi's position on the holocaust gandhi thought
00:31:52.060 that the jews of europe should have willingly walked into the gas chamber so as to arouse the rest of the
00:31:58.200 world to the moral horror of the nazi regime but then you ask yourself what is the rest of the world
00:32:03.600 supposed to do once they're aroused when they themselves drink the kool-aid of gandhi and pacifism
00:32:09.760 do they go into the gas chambers too i mean there's absolutely no moral core to pacifism when
00:32:15.660 you actually take it to its extremity what you're committed to doing as a pacifist is simply bearing
00:32:22.160 witness to the misery and death of innocence imposed by the world's sadists and thugs and you are not
00:32:31.240 going to dirty your hands in the process and if push comes to shove you're going to let them kill you and
00:32:36.940 your children too how this is ever sold as the not only a moral position but the highest possible
00:32:43.780 morality it's a total mystery to me but yeah again this is one of those positions where if you don't
00:32:49.300 unpack it it can pass as an incredibly scrupulous ethical view i mean as you say people there is a
00:32:58.780 burden to understand what is entailed on both sides of these arguments if you're categorically against
00:33:03.740 torture if you're categorically against abortion or for it you know whatever your position is
00:33:09.380 you have to be willing to look at what that commits you to i was rereading this article by a really smart
00:33:16.080 criminologist on violence and he was likening violence to a cancer and i thought that's the
00:33:20.660 worst analogy ever because cancer is something which is uh uh unnecessary awful and if you eradicated it
00:33:27.880 the world would be a better place but violence is inevitable and important and essential for having
00:33:33.120 a good and compassionate society uh you need the threat of violence in order to make sure that people
00:33:39.060 honor contracts that they don't rape and steal and kill one another that that uh they don't free ride
00:33:45.220 under compliments of other people and uh you know by by just about any evolutionary account the reason
00:33:51.140 why we have anger and a punitive appetite is to keep people on the up and up and to keep them from
00:33:58.640 you know from being predators upon one another so you know i'm kind of down on empathy but i've been
00:34:04.980 persuaded by people like jesse prince that anger and the punitive desire is actually it can be a
00:34:11.260 tremendously good thing if you took away an appetite for violence uh for people a desire to inflict
00:34:18.320 suffering on those who do bad i think the world would fall apart so paul bloom is against empathy
00:34:23.800 but for violence that'll be a good tweet and now i have a subtitle for my book well i i agree with
00:34:29.920 that i think it's it's also a fascinating area to talk about i still want to linger for a moment on
00:34:34.780 this topic of i guess they are taboo topics of conversation a taboo topic is something which
00:34:40.220 taints you for even mentioning it yeah i think they're hugely consequential i i wasn't planning to talk
00:34:45.660 about torture and i every single time the topic comes up and i find myself digging the hole a little
00:34:52.240 deeper i seem to regret it but it there are so many topics like this now which are like just they're
00:34:58.500 just radioactive and many are far more consequential than torture because that really is a kind of outlier
00:35:04.600 case but for instance in the news now i'm going to raise this topic and we are not going to talk
00:35:10.800 about it because i truly think this is radioactive but i just want to i'm going to raise this just to
00:35:16.100 show listeners how this sort of comes up for me the now very current topic of police brutality and
00:35:25.100 racism and the inequality between the way blacks and whites have to deal with the misuses of police
00:35:33.060 force all of that is has i think been appropriately shocking to people and no news to anyone now this is
00:35:39.740 hugely talked about in our society in the last 12 months or so ever since the killing of michael brown
00:35:46.300 or actually even before that it wasn't it wasn't police related violence but the trayvon martin case
00:35:51.100 i think primed this discussion and then now we've had maybe a dozen very high profile cases where cops have
00:35:58.160 killed a black man in very different circumstances now there's a range of circumstances here and this is
00:36:05.360 what cannot be talked about everyone on the side of the outrage insists upon grouping all of these cases
00:36:13.280 together as almost like a single datum a single proof that white racist cops are killing black men
00:36:23.920 based on their racism and this is a a fact that is so obvious as to be undeniable and to attempt to
00:36:33.040 parse it in any way is going to stigmatize you for the rest of your life but i think one thing should
00:36:38.800 be absolutely obvious is that these cases are very very different they're very different uses of
00:36:43.920 violence on the parts of the cops they're very different victims in terms of what they were
00:36:48.640 actually doing in the world now to my eye we've had in 12 months really the full range of yeah of
00:36:56.160 example where you have a case of a sadistic stupid poorly trained cop essentially committing a murder
00:37:04.080 and he should be in the cop should be in prison for the rest of his life all the way to a totally
00:37:10.320 appropriate understandable and conservative use of force which resulted in the death of the criminal
00:37:19.760 suspect and everything in between right and so and yet you cannot talk about this and it's it has to
00:37:26.400 be talked about because anyone who's going to group all of these together as a single problem
00:37:31.040 is just not even remotely speaking honestly about what's going on in our world and about
00:37:36.640 what it takes for cops to do their jobs or what kind of cops you want or what what is an appropriate
00:37:42.000 use of force given the situation we can't talk about any of these things because of how
00:37:46.720 taboo it is to differentiate among these instances wherein a black man died in the presence and
00:37:56.160 and because of the actions of cops black or white i think that's that's a correct diagnosis but leans a
00:38:02.880 bit towards the pessimistic i mean obama's justice department for instance parsed it pretty nicely with
00:38:08.800 regard to ferguson where they said you know on the one hand uh the killing of michael brown was legitimate
00:38:15.040 it was it was the justify a justified uh shooting by police officers and and there was no reason to
00:38:21.120 have further charges but at the same time the ferguson police department did have a history
00:38:25.760 of systematic racism you you you can't you can parse it it it's true there's a certain dynamic
00:38:31.920 where if you were to rush out on facebook or twitter and then say well this shooting of an unarmed black
00:38:38.000 kid was justified people would immediately take all sorts of implications from it from your statement about
00:38:43.760 that yeah and and there is a certain dynamic um similarly if one was to go on facebook or twitter
00:38:48.640 and say that it was unjustified it was murder you know a cop you know committing murder because he
00:38:54.080 could people draw justifications from that too so there is there's a sort of a bizarre polarization
00:39:00.080 that happens with these issues which is you know you're forced to um once you take a side you're
00:39:05.120 forced to categorize all instances that bear on the debate as falling into your your side of the of of the issue
00:39:12.880 um even even even if this is just irrational i mean the the shorter version of all this is
00:39:19.600 nuance is underappreciated in certain contexts quite consequentially so i just think it's it's a
00:39:25.920 i'm i'm sort of arguing from an n of one here i'm just kind of what it's like to be me because i seem to
00:39:31.920 to touch all of these controversial topics because i find them one interesting but two you know very consequential i just think i think the the intersection between
00:39:41.200 philosophically interesting phenomenon philosophically and scientifically interesting phenomenon and
00:39:47.520 huge social consequence that is the most interesting intersection of all and that's where i want to spend
00:39:52.800 my time but the consequences are you wind up touching topics like violence and racism and war and these are the
00:40:01.920 the big moments in in life however statistically rare they they are these are huge cases where we have to get
00:40:10.880 things ethically straight yet but the personal psychological and social cost of dealing with
00:40:18.560 these with with the blowback on these topics is understandable there's just that is a bandwidth
00:40:23.440 problem people don't necessarily have the time to fully understand what you what you said or what you meant
00:40:30.080 to say or what was actually in the original article they just see the sliming of you that is is the
00:40:36.400 loudest thing out there and so the style of arguing where you just maliciously misrepresent someone's views or
00:40:44.320 encourage a misunderstanding of them again i'm just kind of marshalling time and attention and kind of
00:40:50.560 emotional resources now and obviously doing it badly because in this conversation we've raised torture
00:40:55.920 we've raised you know all of these topics it's just gun control and racial profiling yeah exactly let's
00:41:01.280 let's go straight there it's an interesting question how much of the sliming is a sort of accidental
00:41:06.880 byproduct of how people's minds work and how much of it is a purposeful strategy and people of people on
00:41:13.040 certain sides and and i think it's both i think you can dissect that out if you'd like to continue
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