Making Sense - Sam Harris - #446 — How to Do the Most Good

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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00:00:26.240 it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're

00:00:30.200 doing here, please consider becoming one. I'm here with Michael Plant. Michael, thanks for joining

00:00:39.320 me. Thanks for having me on. So we were introduced by Peter Singer, and I think you, was he your

00:00:45.080 dissertation advisor? He was. All right, so maybe you can give your background before we jump into

00:00:50.340 the topics of mutual interest. Well, so I'm a philosopher and global happiness researcher.

00:00:56.240 And I kind of got started on this interest stage, about 16. I first came across philosophy. My

00:01:01.720 first lesson on philosophy, I came across the idea of utilitarianism, that we should maximize

00:01:05.980 happiness. And I thought, oh, wow, that's, I don't know if that's the whole story of ethics,

00:01:09.680 but that's a massive story of ethics. You might say it was a waking up moment. And then over the

00:01:16.700 next 20 years, I've kind of pursued two topics. There's this philosophical question, or should we

00:01:20.860 maximize happiness? I mean, I thought that was quite plausible, but lots of people thought it was

00:01:24.580 nuts. So what's going on there? And then this empirical question of, well, how do we do that?

00:01:29.260 You know, what in fact, you know, how can we apply happiness research to finding out what really we

00:01:32.960 ought to do? And I've been kind of pursuing those tracks, and those have taken me to what I'm doing

00:01:37.160 now. So maybe we should define a few terms before we proceed. I mean, a couple will be very easy,

00:01:42.980 and then I think happiness will be very hard. But you just mentioned utilitarianism. How do you

00:01:49.440 define that? And do you differentiate it from consequentialism? And what is the rival metaethical

00:01:56.480 position or positions that, if they exist, I'm uncertain as to whether they actually exist,

00:02:02.320 but we can talk about that. Well, so utilitarianism is, or classical utilitarianism,

00:02:06.320 is the view that what one ought to do is to maximize the sum total of happiness. And then that differs

00:02:11.880 from consequentialism, where consequentialism is one ought to do the most good. So you don't necessarily

00:02:17.580 have to define good in terms of happiness. You can think of that as desires or other sorts of

00:02:22.340 things. And then these kind of consequentialist theories contrast with what are called sort of

00:02:27.360 deontological or kind of common sense ethical theories, where those theories will say, sometimes

00:02:33.400 you should maximize the good, but also there are constraints. There are things you shouldn't do.

00:02:39.040 You know, you shouldn't kill people to, you know, save lives, perhaps. And there are prerogatives.

00:02:43.920 So there are things you, you maybe would be good for you to do, but you don't have to do. So maybe

00:02:48.980 the utilitarian might say, look, you should give lots and lots of money to charity. And the

00:02:52.900 deontologist would say, well, you know, I recognize it would be better in some way for the, you know,

00:02:57.000 for the world, for people if I did that, but I don't have to do that. I have these kind of,

00:03:00.340 these kind of prerogatives. So that's that kind of lay of the land.

00:03:03.260 Now, do you feel that one of these positions wins? I mean, how would you define your

00:03:08.660 meta-ethics and in the, I mean, I think I've said this before in the podcast, but perhaps you're

00:03:14.900 unaware of it. I do think any sane deontology collapses to some form of consequentialism

00:03:21.480 covertly. I mean, if you say it's not all about maximizing the good, there's some very important

00:03:27.000 principles that we must hold to, like, you know, cons categorical imperative or some other

00:03:34.780 deontological principle. To my eye, what is smuggled in there covertly is the claim that

00:03:40.340 that principle is on balance good, right? I mean, like if someone knew that the categorical

00:03:47.220 imperative was guaranteed to produce the worst outcomes across the board, I don't think most

00:03:53.080 deontologists would bite the bullet there and say, yeah, that's what we want, the worst outcomes across

00:03:57.140 the board. They're holding to it because it is on its face intuitively a great way to implement

00:04:03.040 something like rule utilitarianism or rule consequentialism. What's your thoughts on that?

00:04:08.780 So lots of the objections which you might make are kind of against utilitarianism,

00:04:12.260 that it's taking maximizing too seriously, are also problems you're likely to find to a lesser

00:04:16.780 degree in non-consequentialist theories. So an example is, you know, sort of a kind of a classic

00:04:21.980 differentiating point would be you shouldn't kill one person to save lives. So you might say,

00:04:27.600 well, you shouldn't kill one person to save five people. And the consequences might say,

00:04:30.540 well, look, you probably should do that, you know, assuming that's just sort of a, there's no kind

00:04:34.300 of extra complexity to it. But then if you kind of up the ante and you say, well, what about if you

00:04:38.240 kill one person to save a million lives or a billion lives? Then the moderate consequentialist

00:04:42.600 might think, well, this is outweighed, these kind of normative badness of killing is outweighed by the

00:04:47.940 kind of the goodness of the life saved. So you might think that there's kind of still what's going on

00:04:53.680 under the hood of these deontological theories is there's still kind of some implicit maths going on,

00:04:58.880 like trading off bits and pieces. But, uh, so that's sort of an accusation that consequentialists

00:05:04.180 might make against deontologists, but I mean, deontologists will, will kind of fight back and

00:05:08.620 say, well, actually, look, you don't, I mean, there are kind of conceptions of deontological

00:05:12.000 theories where you, you kind of can't do it exactly like that. And so it's kind of a, there's an open

00:05:17.220 debate, uh, which, you know, perhaps we, it's kind of too much in the weeds, but as to whether you can

00:05:21.920 just reduce, um, deontological theories to kind of looking at value plus some kind of other normative

00:05:27.100 principles, and you know, some people think you can, and other people think that, think that you

00:05:30.200 can't. Yeah. The attacks on consequentialism always boil down in my experience to not actually

00:05:37.800 paying attention to the full set of consequences that follow from any action. So when someone says,

00:05:43.880 well, if you're a consequentialist, you should be happy to have your doctor come, you know,

00:05:47.920 you show up to the doctor's office for a checkup, your doctor, knowing that he's got five other

00:05:53.140 patients who could use your organs, uh, he should, could just come out and, you know, anesthetize 0.95

00:05:57.300 you and kill you and, and transplant your organs and his other patients. And that's a net benefit 0.94

00:06:01.380 for the world. Uh, you know, five people get organs and, and one person dies. And that's often

00:06:06.720 put forward or examples like that are often put forward as kind of a knockdown argument against

00:06:10.640 consequentialism. But what people are not adding on the balance there is all of the consequences

00:06:15.560 that follow from such a callous and horrific practice, right? I mean, if all, if everyone

00:06:21.340 knew that at any moment they might be swept off the street and butchered for the benefit

00:06:25.920 of others, I mean, what kind of society would we be living in? And what, you know, what would

00:06:29.440 it be, what would it mean to be a doctor and how would you feel about your doctor and how

00:06:32.860 would the doctor be able to, you know, sleep at night, et cetera. I mean, so the consequences

00:06:36.880 just propagate endlessly from a practice like that. And it's just obviously awful. And no one

00:06:41.780 wants to live in that society for good reason. But again, this is all just a story

00:06:44.800 of consequences. It's not the story of some abstract principle. But anyway, we don't have

00:06:48.500 to get wrapped around that axle. I just wanted to touch that. So if you're a consequentialist

00:06:54.020 of, of whatever description, what should you care about in the end?

00:06:59.360 Well, there are kind of a few options as to which kind of consequences you're going to say

00:07:03.560 matter. So one which, um, I think any consequentialist is going to buy into is, is wellbeing. So wellbeing

00:07:10.040 kind of term of art and philosophy for what ultimately makes someone's life go well for them

00:07:13.980 kind of three canonical theories of wellbeing. You've got hedonism. So happiness is what

00:07:18.160 matters. You've got desire theories where getting what you want is what matters. And

00:07:21.420 then you've got this thing called the objective list where it's usually a few things. Maybe

00:07:25.000 it's, you know, a happiness and desires are on there, but it might also be things like

00:07:28.780 truth, beauty, love achievement. And I think there's, you know, so any, any, that's going

00:07:32.720 to be kind of one of the key consequences. You might also think maybe there's, you want

00:07:36.520 to account for kind of equality or justice. It's kind of a, you might think it's a bit

00:07:40.300 of an open question as to whether those are a kind of dental logical principles or sort

00:07:43.800 of a value-based principles. But when I think about this and what kind of, kind of motivates

00:07:49.040 my thinking is that it just seems that I find it, I just find it very compelling that when

00:07:53.480 we're thinking about what makes someone's go life for, uh, let their life go well for

00:07:56.640 them. It's their, their happiness and their suffering. It's the kind of the quality of life

00:08:00.480 for them. It's how they, how they feel overall. And this is, I guess it's a, you know, there

00:08:05.040 are some bits of philosophy that think that this is, is kind of a mad theory and kind of

00:08:09.300 Nozick and the experience machine, you know, would you be, if you, if you really believe

00:08:12.540 in happiness, would you plug yourself into a matrix style scenario? But I think in kind

00:08:16.080 of weighing up the three theories of, of wellbeing, I just think that the hedonism, the idea that

00:08:20.660 what, what makes your life go well for you is how you feel overall. I think that's got

00:08:23.980 the, uh, that's kind of got the strongest arguments behind it and that motivates lots

00:08:27.560 of the other things that I do.

00:08:28.460 Yeah. I mean, I think so to take Nozick's experience machine refutation of consequentialism here,

00:08:34.420 utilitarianism. It's again, is what, what he's pressing on there is the intuition, which I think

00:08:40.500 is widely shared by people is that, that we should have something like a reality bias, right?

00:08:46.220 That you don't want to be, you don't want your state of subjective wellbeing to be totally uncoupled

00:08:52.500 from the reality of your life in the world. You don't want to be in relationship with, um,

00:08:58.460 seeming others who are not in fact others. So you don't want to be hallucinating about everything,

00:09:02.840 right? So this is why you wouldn't want to be in the matrix. If you, in fact, you wouldn't want to

00:09:06.120 be in the matrix. Now I would grant that under there's certain conditions under which the matrix

00:09:10.860 becomes more and more tempting and reality becomes less and less. So, right. I mean, we can imagine

00:09:15.580 just some forced choice between a very awful universe that is real and a simulated one, which is

00:09:22.740 perfect. In which case we might begin to wonder, well, what's the point of reality in that case? But

00:09:28.360 I think it's, again, that this is, it's a story of, of yet more consequences at the level of people's

00:09:34.860 experience. I mean, to know that you're, um, you know, let me just imagine, you know, having the

00:09:39.860 best day of your life and you, or years of your life and you're in a relationship with people who

00:09:45.560 are incredibly important to you, who you love and to find out at some point that all of this was a

00:09:50.640 hallucination, right? And, uh, there was no, which is to say not merely that it's impermanent,

00:09:56.380 which any experienced empirical reality is. We'll all discover that at death, but, or the, even just

00:10:02.280 the end of any hour, but there would be this additional knowledge that it was fake in some

00:10:07.640 sense, right? Like the person you thought you were in the presence of sharing meaning and love with

00:10:13.020 was not a person, right? They had, they had no point of view on you. It was all just a hall of

00:10:17.660 mirrors. I think that we get an icky feeling from that and it's understandable. And that icky

00:10:23.140 feeling translates into a degradation of the wellbeing we would find in that circumstance.

00:10:29.780 But again, I, you, I don't think we can press that too far. I think having a, a loose reality

00:10:35.960 bias makes sense, but I think that you could easily argue for a ways in which you would want your view

00:10:41.880 of yourself or the world to not be the most brutal, high contrast, you know, right at all times view.

00:10:49.680 If in fact that would prove dysfunctional and corrosive in, in other ways, which I think it's,

00:10:55.660 you know, the, it's pretty easy to see that it might.

00:10:58.540 Yeah. So, I mean, in addition to that, I think a reason not to get into the,

00:11:02.540 into the experience machine is I think we have more responsibilities. If you're just stuck in

00:11:06.100 the experience machine, you can't make a difference to, to anyone else. I also, um,

00:11:10.960 a couple of more thoughts. I also think it's sort of, I'm using that the experience machine is taken

00:11:15.000 as a sort of a slam dunk objection to hedonism. When, you know, if we look at how technology is

00:11:19.880 changing, we are increasingly living in something like the experience machine. I mean, there are

00:11:23.440 some days where like, I don't leave my house. Like I interact with people the whole day,

00:11:27.660 you know, through, through the, the magic of, uh, of the internet and so on. Am I, am I in fact in

00:11:32.980 the experience machine? Right. But anyway, leaving those, uh, those bits to the side, I think a point

00:11:38.280 that's really substantially overlooked is when there's discussion about what wellbeing is, it's

00:11:42.960 often, okay. So the argument is, is happiness the only thing that matters. And then there's this sort

00:11:48.080 of, there's this sort of cognitive mistake from being, well, if happiness isn't the only thing

00:11:51.260 that matters, then it doesn't actually matter very much. And so I, I often find I have to remind

00:11:55.720 people, even if they are not hedonists and few people are, and that's, you know, that's fine.

00:12:00.020 But look, even if you don't think it's anything that matter, you do still think that it matters.

00:12:03.860 If you didn't think that it matter, you would think that people's suffering and misery

00:12:06.940 didn't matter in and of itself. And that's a very peculiar thought. So it's at least going to be

00:12:12.600 one of the things that matter, or it's going to be very important to whatever it is else that

00:12:16.840 matters intrinsically. So if you're engaging in morality and you're not taking happiness seriously

00:12:21.720 and taking suffering seriously, then you're missing a major, a major part of, um, of what really

00:12:27.520 matters. So what do you do with the fact that happiness and wellbeing are these elastic concepts that

00:12:34.600 are really impossible to define in any kind of closed way, because there's, there are frontiers

00:12:40.640 of happiness and wellbeing that we are gradually exploring. And presumably there are experiences

00:12:46.840 that, uh, we would all recognize that are, you know, better than any we've yet had. And they're

00:12:52.080 sort of out there on the horizon. And we can't, we can't really close our accounts with reality at

00:12:56.320 this point and say, Hey, you know, wellbeing, ultimate human wellbeing is this because a thousand

00:13:00.980 years from now, it may consist of something, you know, that, that we can't even form a concept

00:13:05.940 around presently. And what do you do with the fact that, and this is explicit in many of the

00:13:11.060 objections to the concept of happiness, because it somehow seems thin and doesn't somehow capture

00:13:17.100 everything that's worth wanting. What do you do with the fact that there are certain forms of

00:13:21.300 suffering and stress that seem integral to the deeper reaches of wellbeing, you know, so that it's not,

00:13:29.320 it can't purely be about avoiding pain or avoiding stress or maximizing short-term pleasure, right?

00:13:37.040 I mean, we all know what it's like to, or many of us know what it's like to go to the gym and work

00:13:41.000 out hard. And if you could experience sample that hour, it would be true to say that much of it was

00:13:47.340 excruciating. Uh, and if you were having that experience for some other reason, like if you woke up

00:13:51.820 in the middle of the night and felt the way you felt, you know, doing a deadlift or whatever, you would

00:13:55.980 run straight to the hospital, you know, convince you're, you're about to die. But because of the

00:14:01.040 context and because of the consequences of spending that hour that way, most people learn to love that

00:14:06.940 experience, even if it's negatively valenced as a matter of, you know, sensation and physiology while

00:14:12.640 having it, how do you define wellbeing or flourishing or happiness to encompass those wrinkles?

00:14:20.420 Yeah. So I think the definitional problems are maybe not so sharp. I mean, in, in kind of philosophy,

00:14:28.100 we just sort of nail them down one way or another. So wellbeing, what makes your life go well for you

00:14:32.980 overall? And then happiness, I just understand as feeling good overall. So it has this intrinsic

00:14:38.940 quality of pleasure. If you don't know what pleasure is, sorry, I don't think I can tell you what that

00:14:43.480 feels like, but that's sort of the, you know, the kind of end of the line. We just sort of recognize

00:14:47.860 there is an intuitive kind of pleasantness, kind of positive or negative valence in our experiences.

00:14:52.920 So then there's this question about the causes of happiness and, you know, what does happiness

00:14:57.040 consist in? So what I think happiness consists in is positive valence experience. And then what are

00:15:01.420 the causes of happiness? Well, you know, that's a, that's an empirical question. You're, you're

00:15:05.160 absolutely right that, you know, our, we can possibly discover lots about what are the causes of

00:15:11.440 happiness and how do they compare to each other over time? And what in fact are the best ways to

00:15:16.260 promote happiness, which hopefully we will, we will come to a due course on the bit about

00:15:20.400 suffering. Yeah. This comes up quite a bit as like, well, you know, but if you only live the

00:15:24.420 happy life, wouldn't you, this is a bit like the point you're making about kind of consequentialism

00:15:28.000 people say, well, if you, if you only experience happiness, that would in fact not maximize your

00:15:32.500 sum total of happiness over time, because you need the misery to have some happiness. But I mean,

00:15:36.580 I think that's, you know, sort of fine as a fact of the matter. If you're looking at your

00:15:40.360 experiences over time, then you, you do want some kind of good stuff and, and, and, and some bad stuff.

00:15:45.280 If you're going to, um, you know, have the greatest area under the line. I mean, we, you know, we know

00:15:50.080 this, we, uh, we do things like we take ourselves camping because we know it's going to be a miserable

00:15:55.400 experience so that then we can go back to civilization and enjoy the fruits of civilization.

00:15:59.900 Some of us do. I've stopped camping. I've retired.

00:16:04.740 Yeah.

00:16:04.840 I mean, you've, you've had the camping experience and maybe that, you know, you can remember,

00:16:08.000 oh, thank God I'm, I'm, I'm not doing that.

00:16:10.380 Yeah. Well, so, but do you actually think that my intuition kind of runs the other way? I don't

00:16:15.460 think we need awful things to compare our happiness to, to recognize that we're happy. I think happiness

00:16:21.640 or human wellbeing could become increasingly refined such that the thing you're comparing the best

00:16:28.280 experience to is like, it's still a very good experience. It's just not, not nearly as good

00:16:33.700 as the best. So there's some version of camping that is better than what 99% of people experience

00:16:39.140 on a day-to-day basis, but which could become the, the reference point if one were needed of

00:16:44.460 comparison to some yet future state that's even more blissful and expansive and creative and

00:16:49.420 beautiful and, and encompassing of depth and intuitions that we, you know, very few people

00:16:54.960 ever experience.

00:16:56.480 Yeah. So I don't think I agree with you. It's not sort of logically necessary, but if you look at how

00:17:00.620 kind of happiness seems to work for people, it's, uh, it's highly comparative and there's some

00:17:05.000 kind of oddnesses about the things we choose that could compare ourselves to and, uh, and not others.

00:17:09.420 So I'll kind of, uh, a case in point that's kind of relevant for the moment is in the kind of the

00:17:14.820 West of world, you know, your side of the pond, my side of the pond, we're talking about a cost of

00:17:17.840 living crisis. Okay. And people are sort of feeling like they're, they're feeling the pinch, incomes are

00:17:23.140 going down, things are more expensive, but look, here's sort of another perspective on this.

00:17:27.100 If you earn the median salary in the U S which are like $40,000, you're in the top 2% of the global

00:17:34.360 distribution. And if you think about how many people, I think it's more than that. I thought

00:17:38.620 the, um, you said median, but I think the mean per capita GDP in the U S is like 65,000, something

00:17:45.480 like that. It's, I think it's, it is higher than that, but it's higher than the UK. Yeah. I'm, I'm

00:17:49.580 thinking, I'm thinking of the median. I don't, I don't know the meat, the mean, uh, GDP. Yeah. I guess,

00:17:53.480 I guess the median way is considerably lower because there's some very rich people. Yes.

00:17:57.100 Yeah. And then, um, if you're looking, uh, not just at the moment, but across time, I mean,

00:18:02.420 you know, how long of, when did homo sapiens become homo sapiens? But if by, by one estimate,

00:18:07.680 there's like 120 billion people who have ever lived. So if you put those together, if you're

00:18:12.360 alive today and earning a median salary in the U S you're in the top 0.1 to richest people,

00:18:17.940 0.1% of rich people who have ever lived. Yes. And yet what are people talking about? They're

00:18:23.040 saying, ah, it's the cost of living crisis. Things are so expensive. And, and when I,

00:18:27.100 what I make this point to people, they'll look at me like I'm strange. Well, you know,

00:18:31.100 of course that's not relevant. Like that's not how I think about my life, but you know,

00:18:34.400 that's the, that's the kind of curiosity there is that, um, how there are certain things we

00:18:39.180 compare our lives to and sort of naturally intuitively, but we could make different

00:18:43.380 comparisons. And so relating to your point, you know, we could, uh, you know, bring ourselves

00:18:47.900 to think of the misery in the world that we are otherwise avoiding. And that would give

00:18:51.480 us, uh, uh, greater happiness. But in fact, you know, we, we're in quite narrow tracks

00:18:56.600 and the kind of, we just compare ourselves to the things which are salient, the people

00:18:59.400 near around us. Yeah. And so in practice, maybe you do need that reminding now and then

00:19:04.500 of, of some misfortune that can make you grateful for the rest of your, uh, for the other parts

00:19:08.800 of your life. Well, this issue of comparison, I think runs pretty deep because given that

00:19:13.620 so much of our judgments of our own wellbeing and, and in fact, our experience of whether or not

00:19:20.720 we are flourishing is based on comparison is based on context. It's based on the, on the

00:19:27.060 cognitive framing that is laid over the, just the cut the raw sensory experience of being

00:19:34.440 oneself moment to moment. One could ask, I mean, what, what is the, we're going to get,

00:19:39.560 going to get into kind of effective altruism and what is, you know, what, what problems on

00:19:43.360 earth are worth solving and how we prioritize those things. But if it's a matter of alleviating

00:19:48.580 suffering and alleviating the most excruciating suffering first, presumably and maximizing

00:19:54.620 human wellbeing, maybe it's in fact true to say that the homeless on the streets of San

00:20:00.140 Francisco are suffering more than the poorest of the poor in sub-Saharan Africa or in an

00:20:06.760 Indian village or somewhere where objectively they are more deprived, right? Because there's 0.96

00:20:10.500 no one starving to death in San Francisco, whatever their condition. I mean, they could, they

00:20:14.660 might be dying of fentanyl abuse or something else, but there's no one starving to death

00:20:19.680 in America. That's just not a thing because there's just so much food and you can go to

00:20:24.140 a shelter, you can, you can go to a pantry or you can go to a dumpster. I mean, you can

00:20:27.960 get food, but there are places on earth where people still starve to death. Happily, that's

00:20:33.280 less and less the case. And yet, if you imagine the experience of being homeless, you know,

00:20:39.000 right outside of Salesforce Tower or wherever you are in San Francisco, the prospect of comparing

00:20:44.780 the unraveling of your life with the lives that seem to be going on so smoothly all around you

00:20:50.240 suggests to me that it's at least conceivable that that suffering, that mental suffering,

00:20:55.480 the experience of being in that bad condition is worse than much or maybe everything that's going

00:21:01.940 on in objectively poorer parts of the world. How do you think about that?

00:21:06.580 Yeah, I find that extremely plausible and very probably true. Having walked through the streets

00:21:13.360 of San Francisco and also visited some of the poorest bits of the world, yeah, I would imagine

00:21:17.600 that...

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - December 01, 2025

#446 — How to Do the Most Good

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