#309 — Vulnerability, Politics, and Moral Worth
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Summary
Martha Nussbaum is a professor of law and ethics in the philosophy department and law school at the University of Chicago. She has won many prizes, including the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, the Berggruen Prize in Philosophy and Culture, and the Holberg Prize. She s written more than 22 books, including Upheavals of Thought, Anger and Forgiveness, Not for Profit, The Monarchy of Fear, and most recently, Justice for Animals, Our Collective Responsibility. In this episode, we talk about the relevance of philosophy to personal and political problems, the influence of religion, the problem of dogmatism, the Stoic view of emotions, anger and retribution, moral luck, sexual harassment, the philosophical importance of Greek tragedy, grief, human and animal flourishing, what she calls the capabilities approach to valuing conscious life, the rightness or wrongness of moral hierarchies, the fragility of goodness, and other topics. She is also the author of several books, and has been a regular contributor to many publications, including The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Huffington Post. She has also been a frequent contributor to the New Republic. This episode was produced by Sam Harris and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. It was produced in collaboration with the New York Review of Books and The New Statesman. We do not own the rights to any of the music used in this episode. If you enjoyed it, please consider becoming a supporter of The Making Sense Podcast by clicking the link below. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, we re making possible entirely through the support of our listeners, which is made possible entirely by the support we re doing here, by the Support of our subscribers. We re made possible by the kindness of our sponsorships, Sam Harris, and we re listening to you, too, too much of the good people in the making sense of the podcast. Thank you, Mr. Harris, I really do appreciate it, and I hope you like it, you re listening, too of it, too you're listening to it, I think it's a good thing, too good of a thing, and you're making it so much of that, you're not not listening it, it's good enough, and it's great, I'll say so, I say that it's Good Thing, Good Things, and so much so, good things, etc., and so on, etc.
Transcript
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I think I will save the topical stuff for the next podcast.
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But today we're talking about the more ancient questions of philosophy and human vulnerability,
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because today I'm speaking with Martha Nussbaum.
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Martha is a professor of law and ethics in the philosophy department and law school at
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She has won many prizes, including the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, the Berggruen Prize
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in Philosophy and Culture, the Holberg Prize, and these are among the prizes that are regarded
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as most prestigious for those who are not in fields eligible for Nobel Prizes.
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She has written more than 22 books, including Upheavals of Thought, Anger and Forgiveness, Not
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for Profit, The Monarchy of Fear, and most recently, Justice for Animals, Our Collective Responsibility.
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I've long been wanting to get Martha on the podcast.
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She's certainly one of the most well-regarded living philosophers, and we cover a lot in this
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It has the quality of a debate at points, especially in the second half.
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We talk about the relevance of philosophy to personal and political problems, the influence
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of religion, the problem of dogmatism, the relevance of Greek and Roman philosophy to modern
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thought, the stoic view of emotions, anger and retribution, deterrence, moral luck, sexual
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harassment, the philosophical importance of Greek tragedy, grief, human and animal flourishing,
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what she calls the capabilities approach to valuing conscious life, the rightness or wrongness
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of moral hierarchies, what she calls the fragility of goodness, and other topics.
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I am here with Martha Nussbaum, and the gods of technology have not been kind to us.
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So we've had a few hiccups here, which have tried our patience, so we're resetting, and
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happily we're talking about deep philosophical issues, which will warrant our labors thus
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Martha, can you summarize your background as a philosopher, just tell us the kinds of topics
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Well, there's a lot to get in here, because I'm 75 years old, and I started teaching when
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I was only about 27, but the two big things that I've worked on in my career are, on the
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one hand, work on the emotions, what are emotions like, what role do they play in human life,
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both personal and political, and then the other is normative political philosophy.
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And what is the right way of thinking about the things that a good society provides?
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But within that, there are a whole lot of other topics that squeeze their way in.
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First of all, the history of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, including Greek tragedy.
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Second, the relationship between philosophy and literature, and more recently, between philosophy
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The importance of the humanities for a decent public culture.
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Work on global justice and global society, focusing in particular on India and development
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projects in India, and finally, work on justice for a group of subordinated people, women
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in particular, sexual orientation minorities, racial minorities, people with disabilities,
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I have a recent book on aging, which, of course, I have a natural interest in, and finally,
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So all of those work their way into those two big topics.
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I mean, I've been often asked why you work on such different things, and often people
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don't work on one thing, don't know that I've worked on the other.
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I think the unity is the idea of human vulnerability, and more recently, the vulnerability of non-human
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We're all creatures living in a world that we don't control, facing plans on attachments
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And, of course, emotions come in there because they are expressive of our links to the things
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That's why the Stoics thought we should get rid of them.
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But then politics comes in because politics has to think, what are the forms of vulnerability
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For example, the possibility of human love, which is a source of great vulnerability, the
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possibility of political involvement, which, of course, is one of the most vulnerable things
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But also, some forms of vulnerability we ought to get rid of, and a good society would not
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Hunger, thirst, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and a whole long list of other such things,
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sexual violation and sexual harassment and so forth.
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So thinking about what are the good forms of vulnerability?
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What should a good society do to create spaces for the good forms and to wipe out the bad
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That really is a big connection between the two areas of my work.
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Well, what role should philosophy play, do you think, in our intellectual and moral and
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Because, you know, from within the academy and also from without, it seems there's been a
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trend that has been several, even many centuries long, which has tended to divorce academic
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philosophy, at least, from the urgent problems of practical ethics in most people's lives and
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I mean, you know, this is a turn that was, you know, very clear in the middle of the 20th
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Yeah, it sounds like you have largely escaped that as a philosopher, but I'm wondering how
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you view philosophy as a field and its relevance to the rest of what we're doing to try to
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Well, of course, this need for cooperation comes from both sides.
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On the side of philosophy, I think you're right that there was a time, particularly in the 1950s,
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when Anglo-American philosophy did not engage very much with ethical problems because, for one
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thing, they thought that they were not capable of any rational answer.
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So, John Rawls really recreated political philosophy and he connected it to a long, long tradition,
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of course, including such figures as Kant and Adam Smith, but also the Greeks and Romans.
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And now it's one of the main fields of philosophy, so I'm by no means alone.
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But there's also the question of who's going to listen to you.
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Now, in the United States, I would say people don't want to listen to philosophers, and that's
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part of a long American tradition of partly anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism, partly
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of deferring much more to religion than to philosophy.
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I mean, I can talk to people in government in many nations of the world, most European nations.
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I go to the Bundestag in Germany, I go to lecture in central places in France, Italy, but also
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India, you know, but in the United States, you know, no one in Congress, when I gave the
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Jefferson lecture at the big humanities lecture, it's for Congress, but not one congressional
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I know personally only one congressman, and he was a student of mine.
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I think, you know, it is a different tradition, and I think part of the basis is actually right.
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That is, I agree with John Rawls that in a pluralistic society, we should not base public
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choice on any single comprehensive doctrine of the good life.
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We all have different secular or religious ideas of how to live.
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What we should do in politics is to focus on a subset of that, that we could expect people
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to concur in and form what Rawls calls an overlapping consensus, and that should be the place where
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philosophy would step in, along with other disciplines.
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So that is a much more restricted role for philosophy than some people have thought, but I think it's
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So that's the role that I would want to have if anyone wanted to hear from me.
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What about one's personal orientation toward the good life?
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I guess there are two levels at which we can talk about solving our problems.
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There's the collective systemic level, and this is where we engage politics and law, etc.
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But then there's just the private reflections and life choices of the individual and the
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kinds of thoughts one is apt to think when one wakes up at four in the morning.
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How do you view the relevance of philosophy there to one's private struggles to be happy
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First of all, I don't think philosophers should be telling people what to do or how to live.
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I don't think you should ever tell people what to do unless they've asked your advice.
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I think it's quite nosy and wrong to go around preaching to other people.
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Well, I do think that philosophy can give advice on political discourse because we all have
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And the language of philosophical argument is a very, very good language.
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Socratic reasoning, where we ask the origins of our beliefs and the basis of our beliefs.
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This has a big role to play in most people's lives because we have to reason together with
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So when I teach, especially when I teach undergraduates, that's what I would focus on.
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That's where I think philosophy should give advice and should train people in certain modes
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But, you know, if they're evangelical Christians, they'll use that in political discourse.
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But in private, they'll do something completely different because they will not want to base their
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I happen to be a Reformed Jew, and that's a religion that is about as rationalistic as
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And so, of course, there's great continuity between my personal deliberation as a Reformed Jew
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But most forms of Protestantism believe that faith takes priority over reason.
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And I'm not going to tell people that that's wrong.
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But I do think that in this country where we have many different religions, we've got
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And that is where I think philosophy has a place.
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But doesn't that presuppose that at least a certain willingness to divorce oneself from
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one's cherished dogmas in order to have this conversation across sectarian lines?
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What kind of conversation can mutually canceling dogmatists really aspire to have politically,
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if these are dogmas they really are willing to live and die for?
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Well, I think, first of all, it has to be on a narrow range of topics.
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You don't want to get into discussion of the ultimate fate of the soul after death.
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It isn't part of the political problems that you're facing.
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But it also should be, as it were, metaphysically thin.
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So you don't use notions that stir up endless controversy, like do we have a soul or not?
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And actually, the people who framed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did a really good
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job on that because they realized they came from, let's say, a French Catholic was one
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And they realized right away that they couldn't use the metaphysical language of any of their
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So they found the neutral language of human dignity, which they felt they could agree on.
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And that's why the human rights tradition has proceeded the way it has.
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We think about agreeing on the idea that all human beings have a fundamental dignity that
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But we leave it to the religions to say, how do we cash that out?
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Because that's not the business of philosophy in the public sphere.
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But it just seems to me that when it really matters, which is to say when push comes to
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So you have various religious cultures that are, you know, honor cultures effectively.
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And one can argue whether the honor part is, you know, orthogonal to the actual religious
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And I think in most cases, you can't really argue that, although people have tried.
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I think the honor is built into many of the dogmatic beliefs.
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And so you have a notion that, you know, let's say when a young woman gets raped, she has brought
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And it's the sort of shame that in certain cultures and even subcultures in the West could
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cause her to be the victim of violence from her father or her brother or her husband.
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And so clearly, we can't tolerate that politically in a developed society where we care about the
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And yet a significant portion of any society can argue that this is part of their deeply
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held religious worldviews to treat women this way.
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I'm just wondering how you would advocate we navigate moments like that, given the respect you have for
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people's religious beliefs and given your recognition that since there are so many diverse beliefs on
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offer, you have to negotiate sort of above all of those commitments in some way.
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I think, you know, you just have to forge ahead and see how far you can get.
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Most religious people are interested in living on terms of, on the one hand, religious freedom,
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and on the other hand, goodwill and cooperation with their fellow citizens.
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And the religions have evolved in keeping with that.
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Religions like my own have evolved, but also so too has Islam.
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Muslims in America do not try to enforce genital mutilation or any part of the honor code.
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Muslims in India, starting at independence, already had gone through a kind of reformation
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where Islam had become very rationalistic and very feminist.
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So, you know, religions change because they want to live on good terms with their neighbors.
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Now, when that breaks down, and I think to some extent it has broken down in the United States,
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though not as badly perhaps as one might think, then we have a problem.
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But so long as we, our project is to form fair terms of cooperation with our neighbors
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and where everyone has to give and take, then I think we're going to be okay.
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Atheists may hate religion, but they too want to live on good terms with their neighbors.
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So they want a society that respects the freedom of religion and so on.
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I actually have a program at the law school that I established with a grant from one of
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the prizes that I won, which is called the Nussbaum Lunches, where people get together
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It's students with two faculty who differ on the issue.
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I sit together for an hour and a half because I found that people who had a different view
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from mine would not take my classes because we're polarized already.
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So I thought, what's a way of getting these diverse people into the same room?
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And so for an hour and a half over lunch, they would come, and we knew a little bit beforehand
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about what the range of positions in the room was.
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And I've always done these on topics such as gay rights issues, abortion issues, and so
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other people take other issues like intellectual property and, you know, all kinds of things
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On the bakery cases, you know, should bakers be able to exclude gay and lesbian people when
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The room actually figured out, even in that hour and a half, a compromised position that
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So take the legalization of hard drugs, which is a hard issue, I think.
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And it's hard for me, and it was actually hard for the faculty member that I gave the
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thing with, because I think, although he's a so-called conservative, he's really a libertarian,
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and so he was more interested in the legalization of hard drugs than I am.
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And, you know, it was very hard for us, but we worked through it, and we tried to think,
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well, what are the set of solutions that's really on the table?
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And the students were very helpful in that setting.
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And everyone learned a lot, because I didn't really know much about the data on hard drug
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Then, a couple of months ago, we gave one on abortion.
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Now then, the wife of my faculty colleague, and she is herself on the left, she said, this
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But I knew that there were a lot of students I knew in the room, and I shaped the discussion
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in the beginning by calling on a student of mine who was, I knew, a Roman Catholic, but
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I knew she was also a particularly subtle and respectful person.
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And she began by saying, well, I used to be a part of these anti-abortion groups, but I
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felt that they were too narrow, that they were too hysterical, and I dropped away from that,
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And then, it really did open up the room to a much wider set of positions.
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There were Jews who said, in my religion, the fetus is just like water, so we have to
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And then there were some Catholics who did not drop away from the anti-abortion groups,
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And they were surprised to hear me say that a Linus thought abortion was permissible up
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You know, they learned stuff that they didn't know before.
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And later, that one most conservative in the room came up to me in the elevator, and she
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So I think the minute that people know that they're respected and that they're listened
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to, we have a little wedge in the door where we make progress.
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It might have something to do with what you're serving at those lunches.
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I mean, I don't eat because I just can't eat when I'm talking, but I think usually I try
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to get it to be vegan food, but I don't know whether it always is.
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That's what my money pays for because, of course, I donated money for this, but
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I know you've spent a lot of time on ancient philosophy and Greek philosophy, in particular
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But can you summarize the contributions of perhaps Plato and Aristotle to our thought
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I mean, just how much do we owe these two men at this point?
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First of all, I want to say, let's never, ever talk about ancient philosophy without saying,
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Because first, whenever people say ancient philosophy, they really need ancient Greek
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and Roman, and they don't realize that they're excluding India and China and Africa.
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But myself, the Romans are really, really important for me.
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So in the beginning of my career, it is indeed true that I worked particularly on Aristotle.
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But as time went on, I worked much more on the philosophers of the Hellenistic period.
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I just finished teaching a graduate seminar on Hellenistic ethics, the Epicureans, the
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Now, those, I think, make tremendous contributions.
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But when you say through our thought, I think you mean not all Americans, because Americans
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come from China and from India and from lots of different traditions.
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But you probably mean the history of modern Western European philosophy.
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But if you mean that, the Hellenistic philosophers actually make a bigger contribution than Plato
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In the Middle Ages, Aristotle was taken up by the Catholic thinkers, and the whole scholastic
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tradition is based loosely and with a lot of changes on Aristotle.
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Plato, not so much, but he was certainly known.
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But then, starting around the Renaissance and the Reformation, people didn't know Greek.
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Even by the time Aquinas was writing, very few people knew Greek.
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And that meant that they read the Romans a lot more than the Greeks.
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So, Lucretius, Seneca, Cicero, they are the ones who shaped the history of early modern philosophy.
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When Descartes and Princess Elizabeth want to correspond about an ethical problem that she's
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facing, they choose Seneca's De Vita Beata to talk about.
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When Adam Smith is talking about global cooperation and global justice, he quotes from lots of people.
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But when he quotes from Aristotle, there's always a footnote.
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When he quotes from Cicero, it's just like in his own prose.
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He just incorporates huge chunks of Cicero in his own prose because it's like Shakespeare
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He expects the reader to understand where it comes from.
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So, that was the dominant thing until basically mid-19th century when Hegel and then Nietzsche
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brought people back to much more of an interest in the Greeks.
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And the Hellenistic philosophers have kind of fallen out of fashion in core curricula because
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people think that Romans are not very philosophical and I think a big mistake.
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But they also find it hard to teach them because the Greek Hellenistic philosophers are a series
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And the fragments are fragments of very important works that were lost.
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I mean, Greek Stoicism invented propositional logic.
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They invented the philosophy of language, which we all use and rely on.
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But nobody teaches that because it's a series of fragments.
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So, the ones that survive in whole works are Seneca and Cicero.
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But it's not easy to teach philosophy to undergraduates with those texts because the arguments are not
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very clearly disengaged from the rhetorical purpose of the work.
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So, anyway, they're not as widely taught, which I think is a great pity.
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I think, of course, Lucretius is not only a great philosopher, but he's also a great poet.
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And he's appreciated more as a poet than as a philosopher, which, again, I think is a great pity.
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So, I'm always campaigning for the Hellenistic philosophers.
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The idea that human beings have dignity wherever they are in the world and that we have duties
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Aristotle says a few things about the emotions.
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But, really, it was the Hellenistic philosophers that made that a huge topic.
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But we're lucky to have big fragments of Christophis' work on the emotions.
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And then, Seneca, Cicero, they have very lengthy works of their own on emotions.
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So, we know quite a lot about what they thought about that.
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And that's the basis for all of my work on emotions.
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I thought, we'll probably talk about this when we talk about emotions, but I thought you were
00:26:00.480
In fact, I think you might have said as much a few minutes ago, not such a fan of their
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But, as you may or may not know, Stoicism is very much in vogue, especially outside the
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There's just this resurgence of interest in the Stoics, including people like Marcus Aurelius
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And there are several popular authors who have written a lot about the Stoics of late.
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And people are applying the tenets of Stoicism, such as they are, to their lives in very much
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the way I was asking you about a few minutes ago.
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Just not so much as a framework through which to view our political projects, but much more
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a framework through which to view one's personal collisions with the vicissitudes of life.
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So, maybe just, let's talk a bit about Stoicism specifically, and maybe some of the reservations
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What the Stoics said when they said what emotions are.
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Stoicism, and then completely separate is the normative view they take about whether
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we should have them, whether we should get rid of them, and so forth.
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So, I actually think the first is they're deeply insightful and mostly correct, although
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But on the second, I think they're just dead wrong.
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And the people who write about Stoicism today don't make that distinction for the most part.
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A lot of the work that you're talking about really doesn't do serious work on Stoicism.
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So, if your listeners want a really good book, there's a recent book by my former student,
00:27:49.680
Nancy Sherman, a really excellent philosopher, which tells what she thinks the Stoics were
00:27:54.980
really on about, what the normative tenets of Stoicism are, and what is the part that we
00:28:03.660
So, I would strongly recommend that book to anyone who really wants to know.
00:28:10.920
But anyhow, no, what I'm interested in is what they think emotions are.
00:28:14.920
The claim that they make, which at the time was not so surprising, but later, I guess,
00:28:21.860
people have come to doubt it, and now it's back in vogue again, is that emotions are not
00:28:26.640
just mindless gusts of wind or impulses that flow through our bodies, but they're forms of
00:28:33.140
thinking about the important goods outside ourselves that we don't control.
00:28:38.140
Now, as I say, for a long time, all the way up through Adam Smith, that was the dominant
00:28:49.140
But then along came both Hume and William James, and they created a much more irrationalistic
00:28:56.140
view of emotions such that they're mere impressions recognized by the way they feel without any
00:29:04.920
And that view held sway in England and the United States, while on the continent, Satra,
00:29:11.440
who stuck to the more original Stoic view, had a lot more to say about emotions.
00:29:17.220
So, for a long time, the philosophy of emotions was very arid.
00:29:20.620
But then a group of psychologists noticed that it actually, the Humean view, doesn't
00:29:27.200
explain the behavior of animals or humans either.
00:29:30.580
The great psychologist named Richard Lazarus, who said, we really have to go back to Greece,
00:29:35.280
you know, because we're now on the wrong track.
00:29:37.760
And so that work and work by other later psychologists put us back on the right track.
00:29:42.880
And then, more recently, work by biologists who study the emotions of animals, the great
00:29:49.320
primatologist Frantz de Waal has a new book on this called Mama's Last Hug.
00:29:56.740
Anyway, he says by now, everyone agrees that emotions involve thought about the world.
00:30:03.980
And the person he gives most credit to, and I think a very extraordinary person, is the
00:30:10.700
So, Damasio studied a patient whose brain had been damaged, and he was damaged in a way
00:30:21.480
It harked back to an earlier case with damage in a similar part of the brain.
00:30:25.600
But anyway, this patient not only felt no emotions, but he couldn't make up his mind about what
00:30:37.300
But he couldn't tell what he was going to do next.
00:30:40.700
Because nothing stood out as mattering more to him than anything else.
00:30:45.100
And so, from this, Damasio developed the view, which the Stoics already had, that emotions
00:30:50.560
are responses to things to which we ascribe great value out there in the world.
00:30:58.180
Well, of course, the Stoics didn't believe in evolution, but Damasio did.
00:31:06.060
So, an animal needs to know what is the bad out there.
00:31:18.700
And the appraisals of the external thing are what I would call eudaimonistic.
00:31:24.020
That is, they're pertinent to our own well-being.
00:31:33.160
And there are still some philosophers who cling to the Humean model.
00:31:37.100
I teach a course called Emotions, Reason, and Law.
00:31:42.060
When I started, there were people whom I could assign as modern Humeans.
00:31:47.160
But by now, those people have qualified their views so much that really, there's none that
00:31:55.440
Because biology is something everyone has to pay attention to.
00:31:59.440
And the biologists are saying, with one accord, emotions involve thought.
00:32:05.840
And the Stoics have, you know, won the battle, as it were, against the Humeans.
00:32:09.860
Yeah, but back to the norms of Stoicism, which it sounds like you distrust, at least with
00:32:15.500
respect to certain emotions, there's this idea that we shouldn't be guided by our emotions
00:32:24.400
So, you take an emotion like anger, you know, someone has said something that you find powerfully
00:32:29.000
annoying, and the recognition of this event out in the world, which you can't control,
00:32:35.360
you know, the small mouth noises made by one of your detractors, causes you to feel a surge
00:32:42.640
of anger, which seems to suggest some kind of behavioral imperative, right?
00:32:49.040
If you're going to follow this gust of anger to its logical conclusion, you will say or do
00:32:55.480
something which will further compound, on the Stoics account, further compound your problem.
00:33:02.120
And that the deeper problem is that you yourself are being blown around by events over which
00:33:08.820
you have no control, and normatively, you should recognize how absurd this is, and what a waste
00:33:17.300
of your energy and attention it is to be so captivated by the thoughts and words of other
00:33:24.400
people. And you should, you know, seize some kind of sovereignty over your inner life here and
00:33:31.240
simply let go of anger. You should have woken up that morning, realizing that you were going to
00:33:38.000
confront a host of imbeciles throughout the day who are going to say things that were designed to
00:33:42.180
provoke you, and you should be unprovokable. What about that picture do you not like, if anything?
00:33:50.300
Well, you'll soon see that anger is a special case for me. But let me just talk about the general
00:33:57.700
issue. So what Stoics think is that we all should not ascribe any high importance or value to anything
00:34:05.700
outside ourselves that we do not control. And they think, for example, you shouldn't really love
00:34:11.780
your children. And if the child dies, you should think, in fact, this is a direct quote from Cicero,
00:34:18.460
I was already aware that I had begotten a mortal. Now, what I think is there are some things to
00:34:25.640
which people ascribe great importance outside themselves about which the Stoics are right.
00:34:30.940
For example, we probably shouldn't ascribe much importance to reputation or gossip and things like
00:34:37.820
that. And a lot of the examples that the Stoics use are of that kind, because Roman society,
00:34:42.980
people are getting very wrought up over, I mean, Seneca meditates at the end of each day,
00:34:49.340
and he got all wrought up because somebody, the doorman was rude to him, somebody seated him at
00:34:54.440
the wrong table, and so on. But I think, you know, it's very important to love. And the Stoics don't
00:35:00.520
make room for love. They just don't. They think that we should have attachment only to our own rational
00:35:07.840
being and that that can never be damaged. So, of course, we don't have to have fear in that connection
00:35:13.220
or grief. And so there's no place, no place for fear, no place for grief, and that we should care
00:35:20.020
for one another in a rational way. But if one person dies, not an occasion for grief. The community can be
00:35:27.580
based on a kind of rational goodwill. And this is, you know, this is, I think, wrong. I think deep love
00:35:35.400
always causes some problems in political life, for sure. It causes problems in anyone's life,
00:35:40.220
but the right thing is not to get rid of it. So I don't, do not think that we should or could get
00:35:46.500
rid of love and therefore not of fear, but we can calibrate them and think, when is this fear
00:35:52.000
justified? Am I fearing too much or for the wrong reasons? All of those things. But now anger. Okay,
00:35:58.980
so anger is usually defined in this tradition as not only involving the thought that you have been
00:36:05.160
wronged by somebody, but the thought that it would be right to take some kind of retribution or
00:36:11.800
retaliation against that person. So it includes the desire for either revenge or retaliation as a part
00:36:20.080
of what anger itself is. Now, what I say, and I came to this realization later, it was when I was
00:36:27.540
working on my lock lectures for Oxford that I gave in 2014. And so it's in my book, Anger and
00:36:34.280
Forgiveness in 2016. I had not talked much about anger before that. I talked mostly about grief and
00:36:40.340
love and the ones that I particularly like. But anger, I just sort of slipped by me and I included
00:36:48.400
it in lists. But when I began to actually work on it and think about the damage done by retributive
00:36:54.540
wishes, I came to the conclusion that this wish for payback, which is very influential in both personal
00:37:02.120
life and political life is not only counterproductive, but it's actually a form of kind of empty magical
00:37:08.780
thinking. People think, oh, my child has been killed. Well, if I make sure that this offender
00:37:14.420
gets the death penalty, then that will pay back and then things will be even in the cosmos, the cosmic
00:37:20.240
balance will be struck. And it doesn't do anything to assuage the grief. And it doesn't do anything
00:37:26.080
to make a world in which fewer crimes would occur. So while I think punishment is often justified,
00:37:33.520
I think the reason for which it's justified is never backward looking retribution, which does no
00:37:39.320
good and is empty. But rather, it's always forward looking. That can include reform of the offender.
00:37:46.060
It can include deterrence of the offender, deterrence of other people. And it can also include
00:37:52.280
expression of society's most important values. But that's all forward looking. So there is a kind of
00:37:59.400
anger that I sort of give a name to, because I think all of the ordinary words are unclear as to
00:38:05.720
which type they're talking about, which I call it transition anger, an anger that faces forward and
00:38:12.220
says, well, that was outrageous. Now, let's see what we can do about that. That should not happen again.
00:38:18.580
And that kind, I think, is very, very important. And since we're on Martin Luther King's birthday
00:38:24.940
today, I want to point out that he made that distinction. I only discovered that he made it
00:38:30.160
later after I had kind of invented it myself. But he made exactly that distinction. He says there's
00:38:35.500
one kind that's retaliatory, backward looking, and it does no good. And it's, he interestingly says,
00:38:42.820
it's not revolutionary. And I think he's absolutely right, because you can't have a revolution. If
00:38:49.100
you're just looking behind you, you have to look forward. And of course, his speeches include many
00:38:54.480
injunctions to India, a kind of transition anger, because he points to the outrageous things that
00:39:00.900
racism has done. But he then turns to what can we do about it? And we have to face the future,
00:39:07.480
he always says, in the spirit of hope, faith, and love. And then he quickly says, I don't mean
00:39:14.080
romantic love. And I don't mean you have to like the people. But I mean, the kind of love that sees
00:39:19.740
in that person, a possibility of change. And that's the kind of love that he preached. So you know,
00:39:27.180
that's what I said in anger and forgiveness. And I say it again. So I think anger is unusual,
00:39:32.660
in the sense that the Stoics are more right about that than they are about other things. But they
00:39:37.440
don't, you know, they don't do it for the right reasons.
00:39:40.800
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I think I hit upon a similar distinction in shades of anger. You use
00:39:47.380
the word in describing it, I think of a distinction between personal anger and what I would call moral
00:39:54.480
outrage. You know, and the outrage is this transitional forward looking response, which is obviously a close
00:40:01.580
cousin of anger. It may in fact be just anger in one of its modes, but it has as its object not
00:40:07.140
retaliation or retribution, but stopping whatever ongoing harms can be stopped and making the world
00:40:15.660
better. But it does have this divisive energy of recognizing in a very visceral way that certain
00:40:22.060
things out in the world are unacceptable and shouldn't be tolerated. But it's the transitional part is
00:40:29.800
in the mode that that the intolerance of the unacceptable takes going forward. And whether
00:40:36.280
that is a vengeful, backward looking, magical attempt to settle a score, or if it's actually
00:40:45.060
a forward looking attempt to just make the world a better place. There's some other emotion. Go ahead.
00:40:51.140
I want to say that there are a lot of people who do make the distinction, but they still like the
00:40:57.420
retributive. If you look at the field of law, the justification of punishment, I would say the
00:41:02.780
majority of people in the United States think that retribution is the primary justification for
00:41:08.740
punishment. The deterrence people have been around ever since the British utilitarians. The
00:41:13.800
utilitarians thought that deterrence was the only rational purpose of punishment. So people like
00:41:20.120
Bentham and Beccaria. And then, of course, they argued that the death penalty makes no sense. But most
00:41:26.720
people today, you know, both the lay public who love retribution and the legal thinkers who still
00:41:35.920
I actually hadn't thought to talk about this, but this is, I just find this such an interesting
00:41:40.200
question. How do you think about cases of punishment when someone has committed a crime and committed
00:41:48.960
real harm? But it's obvious from the nature of the case that this is not a person who is ever going
00:41:55.700
to create such harm again. So you can't tell yourself the story that this person belongs in prison because
00:42:02.620
of all the harm they may yet do other people. You know, crimes of passion fall in here. But
00:42:09.900
I thought of a case the other day which is similar, which you think of, and actually this goes to
00:42:16.000
the question of moral luck, which I wanted to speak with you about. You know, many of us, this is a
00:42:21.460
point that Thomas Nagel has made and perhaps others have made as well, that, you know, so much of acting
00:42:27.460
for the good or the bad in the world comes down to luck. You know, many of us have gotten away with
00:42:33.700
things that would have been astounding and life-deranging examples of negligence had we not gotten away
00:42:41.800
with them. So we've all driven a car having had too much to drink. There are many people out there
00:42:48.000
driving a car while looking at their phones when they shouldn't or adjusting their stereos at
00:42:53.340
dangerous moments. And some number of people don't get away with this, right? So somebody's going to be
00:42:58.680
texting on their phone today behind the wheel and they're going to run over somebody's child. And
00:43:04.380
obviously that's going to be a terrible outcome for the child and the child's family. But it's also going to be a
00:43:10.260
terrible outcome for the quite ordinary person who did something stupid for half a second and his or her life
00:43:18.540
will never be the same as a result. And we currently punish such people. I mean, people do go to prison for
00:43:24.680
having been texting while driving and being unlucky enough to kill somebody. But the truth is, we all know that
00:43:32.740
what it's like to be that person because virtually all of us have been that person and merely been lucky enough
00:43:39.260
not to suffer any consequences. So I guess this is a two-part question. How do you think about
00:43:44.880
punishment in cases like that when it's obvious that the, in the case of the person who was texting
00:43:49.880
while driving, that person's already suffering the punishment of the damned because they killed
00:43:55.720
someone's child when they were just looking at their phone and they're being, you know, these are,
00:44:00.740
let's stipulate, completely ordinary, well-intentioned people who just did something stupid. You know,
00:44:05.700
this person's life is never going to be the same. Now we're going to put them in prison, presumably
00:44:10.460
just to make an example of them and to deter, hopefully deter other people from texting while
00:44:15.520
driving. But it strikes me as a morally questionable or at least interesting case because we know this
00:44:22.500
person is not, this is the last person who's going to be texting while driving ever again. And we know
00:44:28.340
their, their life has already been ruined by what has occurred. So I guess this is the question is,
00:44:34.940
how do you think about cases like that? And then more largely, how do you think about the moral
00:44:40.160
significance of luck? Okay. Well, that's a big question.
00:44:45.160
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