Making Sense of Foundations of Morality ｜ Episode 3 of The Essential Sam Harris
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Summary
The goal of this series is to organize, compile, and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam Harris into specific areas of interest. This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam s perspectives and arguments, the various explorations and approaches to the topic, the relevant agreements and disagreements, and the pushbacks and evolving thoughts which his guests have advanced. The purpose of these compilations is not to provide a complete picture of any issue, but to entice you to go deeper into these subjects. Along the way, we ll point you to the full episodes with each featured guest, and at the conclusion, we'll offer some reading, listening, and watching suggestions which range from fun and lighthearted to densely academic. So if you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of The Making Sense Podcast. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, it s made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. by becoming a member of the podcasting community, you ll benefit entirely from the support made possible by the support you're getting from the membership of the Making Sense Community. You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold, and your thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its contingent relationships with others, and so you'll be better able to make sense of the topic. So, get ready to become a member! This is Sam Harris, and you'll get to hear more about what we're doing here. . in this episode of The Essential Sam Harris: Sam Harris What is The Foundations of Morality? - Episode 1: What is Morality, What is it? What does it mean to be a moral good thing? Why is it a good thing ? Why does it matter what we should be good? How can we know what it's a good good thing and what it s good for us to have a good idea of what it means to be good in the world ? What would you like to know about morality? And so on and why it s important to be moral good and moral good, anyway? Can science answer questions of morality How do we know that it s better than we can be better than other things? and so on? We ll find out in the next episode of Making Sense of the Foundations Of Morality The Moral Landscape?
Transcript
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This is Making Sense of the Foundations of Morality.
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The goal of this series is to organize, compile, and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam
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This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam's perspectives and arguments,
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the various explorations and approaches to the topic, the relevant agreements and disagreements,
00:01:18.220
and the pushbacks and evolving thoughts which his guests have advanced.
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The purpose of these compilations is not to provide a complete picture of any issue, but
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to entice you to go deeper into these subjects.
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Along the way, we'll point you to the full episodes with each featured guest, and at the
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conclusion, we'll offer some reading, listening, and watching suggestions, which range from fun
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One note to keep in mind for this series, Sam has long argued for a unity of knowledge where
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the barriers between fields of study are viewed as largely unhelpful artifacts of unnecessarily
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The pursuit of wisdom and reason in one area of study naturally bleeds into, and greatly
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You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold.
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And your thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its contingent relationships
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In this topic, you'll hear the natural overlap with theories of free will, political philosophy,
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Let's make sense of the foundations of morality.
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Sam's most important thesis might be the one we'll be exploring in this compilation.
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It's possibly his most essential argument to grasp in order to understand his positions
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in the areas of politics, violence, charity, income inequality, and even atheism and religion.
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He first set the argument down in book form when he wrote The Moral Landscape in 2010.
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He also delivered a TED Talk, which compressed the argument's central themes into a 15-minute
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That talk was entitled, Can Science Answer Questions of Morality?
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Naturally, both the book and the video are recommended to pair with this compilation.
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As we explore Sam's conversations on this subject from the Making Sense archive, we'll be treading
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into the exhaustively discussed philosophy of morality.
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There's an endless taxonomy of positions in this field.
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The ensuing picture can look like a wildly overgrown and gangly family tree, pointing to countless
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frameworks with names like consequentialism, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, care ethics, constructivism,
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nihilism, divine commandment theory, and deontology.
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But at the base of that tree is a fork that bifurcates the topic fairly sharply.
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It makes sense for us to start at that primary split and note which limb Sam climbs.
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Let's label the split with one branch marked as moral realism and the other as its negation,
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The path of moral realism contends that there are such things as objective moral truths.
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This would mean that, all things being equal, a declaration like the following is objectively
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It is morally better to give food to a starving creature than to withhold the food.
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It would mean that it's possible for moral statements like this to be right or wrong.
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And to take it even further, it would mean that the truth of this moral statement would
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remain true even if everyone were wrong and confused about it.
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Slavery was morally wrong, is not simply a statement of opinion or the suggestion of a
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Instead, it's a contention that the argument has its foundations outside of culture, personal
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preference, or historical context, and that slavery was, is, and always will be a moral
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In philosophical jargon, you could say that objectively true means that it is true from
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You've likely already gathered that the other branch of the tree, the one labeled moral anti-realism,
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rejects the entire notion of objective statements in morality.
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It contends that when it comes to moral statements, we don't have any path to access this so-called
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view from nowhere, and that moral sentiment is always really a matter of evolved preference,
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species bias, historical bias, or cultural bias.
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This branch of ethics declares that the quest for a genuine foundation for our moral sentiments
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and emotions, that rests outside of our biases, will always result in failure, and that ultimately,
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all moral sentiments are inescapably subjective, no matter how convincing or widely accepted.
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Before we go too much further, it's important to note that the outwardly expressed moral attitudes
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and political positions of realists and anti-realists can strongly cohere.
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It's entirely possible, even abundantly probable, to find both a realist and an anti-realist arguing
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that slavery is morally wrong, and to find them both voting for the same political proposition
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The difference between the two philosophies presents itself when they try to provide their deepest,
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The realist claims that slavery being wrong is a kind of objective fact, not necessarily
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exactly like the facts in mathematics or chemistry, but something a bit like them, or at least strongly
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informed and dictated by those facts, strong enough to be elevated to a factual, moral truth.
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The moral anti-realist might agree that slavery is a moral wrong, but declare that ultimately,
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the foundations for that judgment are anthropocentric biases, evolved emotions, historical context,
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and strong moral instincts, not anything like a scientific fact.
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One name you'll hear often in this compilation, and in any discussion on this topic, is David Hume.
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Hume was a brilliant philosopher from Scotland who did his writing in the 1700s.
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He formulated what has come to be known as the is-ought distinction, which argued that you can't get an
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ought from an is. Or, to reword it in philosophical hypothesis form, Hume argued that there is no
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description of the way the universe is, which tells us how the universe ought to be.
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This insight is what really fertilizes the entire branch of anti-realism in the field of ethics.
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You may have already guessed that Sam very confidently moves down the moral realism branch.
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And while he conceptually agrees with Hume's logic, he considers the confusion that it's caused,
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and its resulting moral subjectivism and cultural relativism, to be a kind of ethical and political
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emergency. Sam asserts that Hume's is-ought insight has led many people to conclude that science
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really has nothing to say about morality. The relativist argument suggests that because science
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pursues the is-side of Hume's distinction, and morality pursues the ought-side, questions of morality
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are completely divorced from science and are purely subjective matters for which there is no objective
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arbiter. Sam points out that this attitude has rendered many otherwise moral and intelligent
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people mute and blind when it comes to casting judgment on the moral behaviors of others, and
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especially other cultures. Sam's approach to objective morality allows him to escape this moral paralysis,
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and, as you can imagine, his resulting utterances have landed him in hot water from time to time.
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Before we get to our first clip, it's also important to clear something up about Sam's brand of moral
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realism early so we can avoid a common misperception. Sam's argument in favor of moral realism does not
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imply that there is only one correct answer to a moral question. It also does not imply that he knows the
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right answer. It's only a contention that there are such right answers, or, more accurately, that there are
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right directions to move towards, that it's possible to objectively compare the moral value of two
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states of being and two states of the universe, and that it is possible to have real, objective
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confidence in those moral assessments, and that it's therefore possible to make genuine moral progress.
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But, and this is the very delicate part, it is entirely possible that one must move away from that right
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direction in order to navigate towards a higher peak of moral states. This is the wrinkle that starts to
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paint his moral landscape as a kind of mountain hiking adventure, with endless peaks and valleys, foggy
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hilltops, dangerous caverns, canyons, wrong turns, impassable swamps, and open upward clearings.
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What Sam argues is that morality, when properly understood, is a navigation problem which requires
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ever-improving methods to draw better maps, manufacture accurate compasses, and devise a
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good pair of binoculars so that we can have confidence that we are climbing to higher and
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higher ground. So, when we brought up our first example to show the split between moral realists
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and anti-realists, the idea that feeding a starving creature rather than depriving it,
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we added a tiny four-word phrase in passing to qualify it, all things being equal. But the funny
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thing about our actual lives and real-world situations is that all things are almost never
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equal. In an actual situation you might encounter in the world, the food in question may be your last
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bites, and you'll starve to death if you feed the creature. Or there may be several starving creatures
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in front of you, and you only have enough food for one of them. Or maybe this creature will devour
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two other healthy creatures if you feed it. Adding wrinkles like this and playing with all of these
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crazy variables tends to make things unequal and morally complex. But, in an effort to distill and
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expound upon different moral frameworks and discover psychological and philosophical insights,
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philosophers and writers have been conjuring up fun and sometimes diabolical thought experiments in
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situations like this to try to flatten or equalize certain elements and isolate others.
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We'll be hearing some fun thought experiments, and some not-so-fun ones, throughout this compilation.
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So, let's get to our first clip and introduce a famous thought experiment that we'll be returning
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to frequently. The clip is a conversation with Australian philosopher Peter Singer, who at this
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point seems to have the descriptor of world's most influential living philosopher as a permanent
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addendum to his name. We'll begin with what has become a famous simple thought experiment that
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Singer used in 1971 in Philosophy and Public Affairs, an academic journal that was little
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known at the time. The thought experiment goes like this.
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Imagine you have just purchased a nice pair of new shoes, and you're walking by a pond.
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You know this pond well, and you know its depth and probable dangers. It's very shallow. It only comes
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up to your waist. Suddenly, you see a small child in the pond flailing for her life and struggling.
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She's clearly in distress and in imminent danger of drowning.
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Do you run into the pond and rescue her, knowing that you will muddy your shoes and certainly ruin them?
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If you're waiting for a more complicated or challenging choice, it's not coming.
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That's the whole story, and that's the whole thought experiment.
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Of course I run into the pond. Who cares about the shoes?
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Now, Singer takes that answer and suggests that we,
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and he's speaking mostly about those of us in the affluent world,
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that we are all the time in a very similar moral position as the pedestrian walking by the pond.
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And let's also say you already had a pair of perfectly usable shoes at home.
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Go back to the moment when you were at the shoe store and looking at them on display.
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What if, instead of making that purchase, you knew that you could donate that $90 to a charity
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which had displayed solid data that it could use that money, with a very high degree of probability,
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to save the life of a child in Eritrea who would otherwise soon die?
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Is choosing to purchase the shoes anyway a choice that is morally equivalent
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to strolling past the drowning child and keeping your new shoes shiny and clean
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This arresting question has spawned a swarm of responses, supportive movements, clever challenges,
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creative edits, defeated frustrations, and counter-considerations.
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We'll be playing with Singer's shallow pond a good bit throughout this compilation
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to flesh out Sam's take on it and his particular run at the eternally vexing problem of morality.
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An obvious distinction to draw between the moment at the pond versus the moment at the shoe store
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is something like an act of omission versus an act of commission.
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In other words, is there a difference between failing to act and choosing to act
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Let's jump into the first clip, where Sam is speaking with Peter Singer in episode 48.
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Is there an important moral distinction between acts of omission and acts of commission?
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So how does, and your famous shallow pond example put some pressure on this here.
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So how do you think about the difference between not saving a life that would be very easy for you to save
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And this obviously also relates to end-of-life considerations of the sort you mentioned,
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the difference we seem to hold on to between removing life support
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and passively letting someone die versus actively killing them,
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which in many cases might be the more merciful thing to do.
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Yeah, so my view is that the distinction between killing and letting die
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or between acts and omissions, it's put in different ways,
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It may be a marker for other things of more significance,
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like it may be a marker for motives, for instance.
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So if somebody were to say to me, suppose I say, look, you should give to this effective charity.
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You should give to the Against Malaria Foundation because it will distribute bed nets
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in places where there's a lot of malaria and where children die from malaria.
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And if you donate what I know you can afford to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation,
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they will use it to distribute bed nets and you will be saving at least one child's life.
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That is a real organization and a real example.
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And let's say the person doesn't do that, right?
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So then that person has, in one sense, let a child die.
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Do I think of that person exactly the same as somebody who traveled to Africa,
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shot a small child and then traveled back to the United States?
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I know that there's a huge psychological difference in that person that many of us are apathetic
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or don't care enough, don't feel psychologically drawn to help people who we can't even see.
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But for someone to actually have the malice and the will to travel, to find a child,
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to kill that child, has to be a completely horrible, depraved person.
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So sometimes the distinction between acts and omissions will signal something like that.
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Why did this person go out of their way to kill?
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Whereas in the other case, they simply didn't do enough to save a life.
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But then let's look at another case, the medical case that you mentioned.
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So an infant has been born prematurely and has had a very severe bleeding in the brain,
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They find that all of the parts of the brain that are associated with consciousness,
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like the cortex, have been irreversibly destroyed.
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Now, there's two possible things that might happen in these circumstances.
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One might be that the doctors, after discussion with the parents, say,
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They'll survive if we continue to treat them, but they'll just lie in bed all day and never
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be able to communicate with anyone, probably never have any conscious experiences at all,
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And the doctors will then say, and the parents will usually agree, so we could withdraw the
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We can withdraw the respirator and your baby will die.
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And parents will typically say, if you think that's best, doctor, then I'm okay with that.
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Now, that is seen as a letting die, as an allowing to die, not as a killing.
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On the other hand, it might have happened that because it took some time to carry out the
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diagnosis, because the baby was particularly vigorous and so on, that the baby no longer needs
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The baby is never going to communicate in any way, probably never going to be conscious.
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She's going to have to be fed through a tube and lie in a bed.
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But you can't bring about the baby's death by withdrawing the respirator.
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And let's just say that there's nothing else you can do that will bring about the baby's
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The baby is otherwise, apart from this massive and irreparable brain damage, the baby is
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Now, I think that if you're prepared to say that it was justifiable to withdraw the respirator,
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you ought to be prepared to say it would be justifiable to give the baby a lethal injection
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In both cases, you know exactly what the consequences of your action will be.
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In both cases, your intention is to bring about the death of the child.
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Your motivation is equally, I would say, equally good, equally reasonable in both cases.
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But legally, of course, one is murder and the other is, well, maybe it's slightly gray in
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But anyway, it's done in every neonatal intensive care unit in every major city in the United
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But that's, as I say, that's a case where I would think we ought to be able to accept
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active steps on the basis of saying it's no different from the other case.
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And certainly there are cases where the active step is the one that bypasses an immense amount
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In other cases where there is some consciousness, not exactly the case I described, but there
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is some consciousness, I do know of cases where people will say, you know, no, we can't
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But if the baby gets pneumonia, we won't give antibiotics.
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And so then the baby will suffer a lingering death from pneumonia over days or maybe even
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a couple of weeks, you know, which is a horrible thing and a pointless thing to do if you decided
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I want to go back to the issue of the shallow pond.
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It would take a very different sort of person to go to Africa with the intention of killing
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someone than merely decline to buy a bed net when told on good information that this would
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But I think you're saying that it's natural for us to view them as different.
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And because it requires actually a different psychology to do one versus the other, they
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But if we abstract away from those differences and talk about public policies and what governments
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should do, then the act and omission difference shouldn't be morally salient to us anymore.
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I'm not going to say that it shouldn't be at all morally salient because there are questions
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in what governments do in terms of the examples that they set.
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But I do think it's very serious that governments allow people to die when they could prevent
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them, when they have the resources to prevent them.
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And so I certainly think that the governments of the wealthier nations of the world should
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be getting together and developing policies to eliminate preventable child deaths and preventable
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They did make a reasonable effort in terms of the Millennium Development Goals to reduce
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The number of children dying fell quite significantly during that period, as did the number of people
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But I'm concerned whether sufficient progress is continuing to be made.
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I think more progress could have been made even in that period, although some progress was
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And that applies to governments, but it also applies to individuals.
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I think all of us who can afford to donate to effective charities ought to be doing that
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How do you view the ethical significance of proximity, if there is any?
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I mean, obviously, there's an immense psychological significance that the starving person on my
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doorstep is different, certainly more salient than the starving person in a distant country
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whose existence I know about, at least in the abstract.
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Presumably, you think that that difference is far bigger than it should be.
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But is there any ethical significance to proximity, the problem in your backyard as opposed to the
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Well, I'd say not to proximity in itself, again.
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We can perhaps be more confident about what we're achieving when things are in our backyard
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We can talk to the people who are affected by it.
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But we do have very good research now about effective non-profit organizations that are
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So there's organizations like GiveWell that do research on effective charities.
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There's an organization I founded called The Life You Can Save, and it has a website which
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lists charities that we've vetted, and some of it draws on GiveWell's research, some of it
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And if you can have a high level of confidence in the effectiveness of what you're doing,
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As you correctly said, it is very different psychologically.
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But morally, it's not very different from things that are going on in your backyard.
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Given that it is so different psychologically, I mean, presumably, if I told you that there's
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a starving person by my front door today that I just stepped over on the way to this podcast
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because I was, you know, I'm busy, you would view me with something close to horror and repugnance
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But if I told you that I got yet another appeal from a good charity, which I didn't act on, you
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would just view me as a more or less psychologically normal, if somewhat aloof person.
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Do you view our moral progress personally and collectively as a matter of collapsing that
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distance as much as psychologically possible so that we really can't put distant suffering
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Yes, I do think that's an indicator of progress.
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And it's, you know, the psychology is understandable, of course.
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Our ancestors for millennia, for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, if we go back even,
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could go back even to social primates before there were humans at all, these ancestors lived
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in small social groups, face-to-face groups where they knew people and they would help others
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and cooperate with them in various ways, but they had no relations perhaps even to people
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who lived across the mountain range in the next valley.
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And now suddenly, suddenly in terms of evolutionary time anyway, we live in a world where we have
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instant communications, where we have very rapid delivery of assistance, where we have good
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ways of working out what is going to help people most effectively.
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And our psychology has not changed rapidly enough to cope with this.
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There's an interesting note about Singer's pond analogy and the idea that Sam raised about
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evaluating the kind of person who would stroll by a child drowning in a pond versus the kind
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Singer originally wrote the pond story in an essay about a mass humanitarian crisis in East
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Bengal in 1971, spurred on by a civil war and a devastating cyclone.
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He presented the pond to argue for the presence of a moral opportunity, and perhaps for a moral
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obligation, of wealthy countries to intervene with food, shelter, and rescue.
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We can map that same character analysis that Sam suggested onto the national level and ask,
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what kind of country declines to feasibly rescue those in a foreign crisis versus what kind
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of country declines to offer generic foreign aid absent any acute humanitarian crisis?
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A screaming child drowning in a pond is an emergency, but the slow drip of individual preventable
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deaths from hunger, illness, and poverty, and spread across entire continents does not seem
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to present itself in that way, or to expose the kind of people we are.
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What if we gathered all of those individuals into one location, like a sports stadium, and
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announced that a bomb would kill them all at midnight unless we easily diffused it?
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That edit sounds extreme, but it only gathers the location of these preventable deaths to the
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same venue, and it makes explicit the imminence of their demise.
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Somehow that makes it feel more like a newsworthy emergency that only a moral monster would ignore.
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But again, Singer argues that this may actually be the situation that most of us are in today,
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This is the deeply challenging work that the pond analogy does.
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So, let's stay with that last thread from Sam and Singer's conversation of proximity,
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and the tension between psychology and moral philosophy.
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Like all moral dilemmas and thought experiments, you can start to tinker with the variables in
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certain ways that are designed to highlight how your moral intuitions might shift with each
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But this time, you see five children drowning instead of one.
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They're all at different distances from you, spread throughout the pond.
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You're quite certain that in the time it will take you to reach and rescue one of them,
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Assuming you're still willing to ruin your shoes.
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Maybe you decide that flipping a coin is the best method.
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But what if one of the children happens to be your child?
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Waiting past the cries for help from an unfortunate, unknown child?
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How about if you knew all of the struggling children,
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and you know that one of them has a terminal illness,
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What if one of the children is known to be showing signs of being a scientific prodigy,
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and she's likely to be a great benefit to humanity?
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What if you think all of these factors are just too vulgar,
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and you simply go to whichever one happens to draw you first while you close your eyes?
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Would that method favor the child who happens to yell the loudest?
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If we keep our eyes open and just follow our instinct,
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would we inevitably end up being drawn towards the child who's the cutest?
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Or even the child who looks a little like us and reminds us of our kin?
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We can keep playing these kinds of games forever.
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We could even make it nearly identical to the famous trolley problem,
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the thought experiment which ties five people to a railroad track,
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while one person is fastened to a separate track.
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you're given the choice to divert an out-of-control trolley towards the one,
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In our pond, we can imagine that four of the children are clinging to a rapidly deflating life raft,
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and they could all grab hold of it and be dragged to safety by you,
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while one isolated child is drowning by himself a hundred feet away.
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Is there a right choice for problems like these?
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We're going to go to our second clip to focus on the suggestion
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that there are right answers to these questions.
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This guest will argue that our intuitions lead us to actions
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that are compromised by our evolved psychological biases
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to favor creatures with which we can empathize.
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it's certainly easier to empathize with someone who's close enough
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rather than a distant, nameless, faceless, voiceless child.
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We know that it's also easier to empathize with a single child
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over a huge number of distant, nameless children
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In fact, as you'll hear Sam and this next guest point out,
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this specific aspect of our psychology is even more curious,
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where our ability to empathize with a specific starving child
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is reduced when you simply place the same child
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amongst the company of thousands of others just like him.
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a professor of psychology formerly of Yale University
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Bloom has had several wonderful conversations with Sam,
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which came just after the release of Bloom's book
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In it, he argues that our much-ballyhooed capacity for empathy
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In fact, it may often be more of a bug than a feature
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which is that empathy, in many cases, is harmful
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So tell me about what you've said about empathy
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with the most boring way ever to begin anything,
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and I think my position is easily misunderstood.
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I mean, I want to make the world a better place.
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Other people use the term empathy very narrowly
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understanding what they think and what they feel.
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I think very great and wonderful and kind people
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one reason why bullies are very good at being bullies
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from the other form that you're about to describe
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When we talk about psychopaths being devoid of empathy,
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That is not something that prototypically evil people lack.
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So, you know, another term for cognitive empathy
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But in the hands of somebody with malevolent ends,
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intelligence could be used to make them a lot worse.
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is a tool that could be used any way you want it.
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And the very best people in the world have tons of it.
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and this actually matches what most psychologists
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and David Hume and other philosophers call sympathy.
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And what it refers to is feeling what other people feel.
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And you could see why people are such fans of this.
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It dissolves the boundaries between me and you.
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And there's a lot of psychological research showing
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Dan Batson has done some wonderful studies on them,
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but the main problem is it serves as a spotlight.
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It zooms me in on a person in the here and now.
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that governments and societies care so much more
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are a tiny proportion of gun homicides in America,
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and make all the mass shootings go away forever,
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nobody would know based on the homicide numbers.
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It causes us to freak out at the suffering of one