Making Sense - Sam Harris - Making Sense of Foundations of Morality ｜ Episode 3 of The Essential Sam Harris

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.

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00:00:49.060 Welcome to The Essential Sam Harris.

00:00:51.480 This is Making Sense of the Foundations of Morality.

00:00:55.440 The goal of this series is to organize, compile, and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam

00:01:03.520 Harris into specific areas of interest.

00:01:06.480 This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam's perspectives and arguments,

00:01:12.220 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.

00:01:21.960 The purpose of these compilations is not to provide a complete picture of any issue, but

00:01:29.060 to entice you to go deeper into these subjects.

00:01:32.480 Along the way, we'll point you to the full episodes with each featured guest, and at the

00:01:37.720 conclusion, we'll offer some reading, listening, and watching suggestions, which range from fun

00:01:43.640 and light to densely academic.

00:01:47.400 One note to keep in mind for this series, Sam has long argued for a unity of knowledge where

00:01:53.260 the barriers between fields of study are viewed as largely unhelpful artifacts of unnecessarily

00:01:58.820 partitioned thought.

00:02:00.660 The pursuit of wisdom and reason in one area of study naturally bleeds into, and greatly

00:02:06.160 affects, others.

00:02:07.360 You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold.

00:02:14.160 And your thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its contingent relationships

00:02:19.200 with others.

00:02:20.840 In this topic, you'll hear the natural overlap with theories of free will, political philosophy,

00:02:27.060 violence, belief and unbelief, and more.

00:02:31.080 So, get ready.

00:02:33.360 Let's make sense of the foundations of morality.

00:02:36.400 Sam's most important thesis might be the one we'll be exploring in this compilation.

00:02:47.820 It's possibly his most essential argument to grasp in order to understand his positions

00:02:52.420 in the areas of politics, violence, charity, income inequality, and even atheism and religion.

00:03:00.260 He first set the argument down in book form when he wrote The Moral Landscape in 2010.

00:03:05.580 He also delivered a TED Talk, which compressed the argument's central themes into a 15-minute

00:03:11.820 presentation.

00:03:13.440 That talk was entitled, Can Science Answer Questions of Morality?

00:03:18.340 Naturally, both the book and the video are recommended to pair with this compilation.

00:03:22.480 As we explore Sam's conversations on this subject from the Making Sense archive, we'll be treading

00:03:30.140 into the exhaustively discussed philosophy of morality.

00:03:33.440 There's an endless taxonomy of positions in this field.

00:03:37.720 The ensuing picture can look like a wildly overgrown and gangly family tree, pointing to countless

00:03:44.140 frameworks with names like consequentialism, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, care ethics, constructivism,

00:03:52.700 nihilism, divine commandment theory, and deontology.

00:03:56.700 But at the base of that tree is a fork that bifurcates the topic fairly sharply.

00:04:03.100 It makes sense for us to start at that primary split and note which limb Sam climbs.

00:04:09.980 Let's label the split with one branch marked as moral realism and the other as its negation,

00:04:17.060 moral anti-realism.

00:04:18.460 The path of moral realism contends that there are such things as objective moral truths.

00:04:26.120 This would mean that, all things being equal, a declaration like the following is objectively

00:04:31.980 true.

00:04:33.440 It is morally better to give food to a starving creature than to withhold the food.

00:04:38.980 It would mean that it's possible for moral statements like this to be right or wrong.

00:04:43.620 And to take it even further, it would mean that the truth of this moral statement would

00:04:49.520 remain true even if everyone were wrong and confused about it.

00:04:54.720 For a moral realist, a statement like,

00:04:57.780 Slavery was morally wrong, is not simply a statement of opinion or the suggestion of a

00:05:03.380 distaste for the practice.

00:05:05.280 Instead, it's a contention that the argument has its foundations outside of culture, personal

00:05:10.660 preference, or historical context, and that slavery was, is, and always will be a moral

00:05:17.700 wrong.

00:05:19.100 In philosophical jargon, you could say that objectively true means that it is true from

00:05:25.600 the view from nowhere.

00:05:28.400 You've likely already gathered that the other branch of the tree, the one labeled moral anti-realism,

00:05:34.960 rejects the entire notion of objective statements in morality.

00:05:38.520 It contends that when it comes to moral statements, we don't have any path to access this so-called

00:05:45.100 view from nowhere, and that moral sentiment is always really a matter of evolved preference,

00:05:51.480 species bias, historical bias, or cultural bias.

00:05:56.300 This branch of ethics declares that the quest for a genuine foundation for our moral sentiments

00:06:01.780 and emotions, that rests outside of our biases, will always result in failure, and that ultimately,

00:06:08.360 all moral sentiments are inescapably subjective, no matter how convincing or widely accepted.

00:06:16.500 Before we go too much further, it's important to note that the outwardly expressed moral attitudes

00:06:22.420 and political positions of realists and anti-realists can strongly cohere.

00:06:28.000 It's entirely possible, even abundantly probable, to find both a realist and an anti-realist arguing

00:06:35.260 that slavery is morally wrong, and to find them both voting for the same political proposition

00:06:41.280 to outlaw the practice.

00:06:43.380 The difference between the two philosophies presents itself when they try to provide their deepest,

00:06:48.580 foundational basis for this moral judgment.

00:06:52.120 The realist claims that slavery being wrong is a kind of objective fact, not necessarily

00:06:58.900 exactly like the facts in mathematics or chemistry, but something a bit like them, or at least strongly

00:07:05.180 informed and dictated by those facts, strong enough to be elevated to a factual, moral truth.

00:07:12.300 The moral anti-realist might agree that slavery is a moral wrong, but declare that ultimately,

00:07:18.580 the foundations for that judgment are anthropocentric biases, evolved emotions, historical context,

00:07:25.560 and strong moral instincts, not anything like a scientific fact.

00:07:30.660 One name you'll hear often in this compilation, and in any discussion on this topic, is David Hume.

00:07:37.820 Hume was a brilliant philosopher from Scotland who did his writing in the 1700s.

00:07:42.600 He formulated what has come to be known as the is-ought distinction, which argued that you can't get an

00:07:49.800 ought from an is. Or, to reword it in philosophical hypothesis form, Hume argued that there is no

00:07:57.880 description of the way the universe is, which tells us how the universe ought to be.

00:08:02.760 This insight is what really fertilizes the entire branch of anti-realism in the field of ethics.

00:08:10.280 You may have already guessed that Sam very confidently moves down the moral realism branch.

00:08:16.720 And while he conceptually agrees with Hume's logic, he considers the confusion that it's caused,

00:08:22.820 and its resulting moral subjectivism and cultural relativism, to be a kind of ethical and political

00:08:28.660 emergency. Sam asserts that Hume's is-ought insight has led many people to conclude that science

00:08:35.620 really has nothing to say about morality. The relativist argument suggests that because science

00:08:41.460 pursues the is-side of Hume's distinction, and morality pursues the ought-side, questions of morality

00:08:48.420 are completely divorced from science and are purely subjective matters for which there is no objective

00:08:54.200 arbiter. Sam points out that this attitude has rendered many otherwise moral and intelligent

00:09:00.800 people mute and blind when it comes to casting judgment on the moral behaviors of others, and

00:09:06.840 especially other cultures. Sam's approach to objective morality allows him to escape this moral paralysis,

00:09:14.900 and, as you can imagine, his resulting utterances have landed him in hot water from time to time.

00:09:20.440 Before we get to our first clip, it's also important to clear something up about Sam's brand of moral

00:09:27.300 realism early so we can avoid a common misperception. Sam's argument in favor of moral realism does not

00:09:35.620 imply that there is only one correct answer to a moral question. It also does not imply that he knows the

00:09:42.120 right answer. It's only a contention that there are such right answers, or, more accurately, that there are

00:09:49.200 right directions to move towards, that it's possible to objectively compare the moral value of two

00:09:56.100 states of being and two states of the universe, and that it is possible to have real, objective

00:10:02.220 confidence in those moral assessments, and that it's therefore possible to make genuine moral progress.

00:10:09.440 But, and this is the very delicate part, it is entirely possible that one must move away from that right

00:10:18.220 direction in order to navigate towards a higher peak of moral states. This is the wrinkle that starts to

00:10:24.240 paint his moral landscape as a kind of mountain hiking adventure, with endless peaks and valleys, foggy

00:10:30.600 hilltops, dangerous caverns, canyons, wrong turns, impassable swamps, and open upward clearings.

00:10:39.440 What Sam argues is that morality, when properly understood, is a navigation problem which requires

00:10:45.980 ever-improving methods to draw better maps, manufacture accurate compasses, and devise a

00:10:52.360 good pair of binoculars so that we can have confidence that we are climbing to higher and

00:10:56.540 higher ground. So, when we brought up our first example to show the split between moral realists

00:11:04.740 and anti-realists, the idea that feeding a starving creature rather than depriving it,

00:11:10.800 we added a tiny four-word phrase in passing to qualify it, all things being equal. But the funny

00:11:18.520 thing about our actual lives and real-world situations is that all things are almost never

00:11:24.220 equal. In an actual situation you might encounter in the world, the food in question may be your last

00:11:30.720 bites, and you'll starve to death if you feed the creature. Or there may be several starving creatures

00:11:36.340 in front of you, and you only have enough food for one of them. Or maybe this creature will devour 0.82

00:11:41.880 two other healthy creatures if you feed it. Adding wrinkles like this and playing with all of these

00:11:47.660 crazy variables tends to make things unequal and morally complex. But, in an effort to distill and

00:11:55.080 expound upon different moral frameworks and discover psychological and philosophical insights,

00:12:01.000 philosophers and writers have been conjuring up fun and sometimes diabolical thought experiments in

00:12:06.560 situations like this to try to flatten or equalize certain elements and isolate others.

00:12:13.200 We'll be hearing some fun thought experiments, and some not-so-fun ones, throughout this compilation.

00:12:18.340 So, let's get to our first clip and introduce a famous thought experiment that we'll be returning

00:12:24.360 to frequently. The clip is a conversation with Australian philosopher Peter Singer, who at this

00:12:30.740 point seems to have the descriptor of world's most influential living philosopher as a permanent

00:12:36.260 addendum to his name. We'll begin with what has become a famous simple thought experiment that

00:12:42.460 Singer used in 1971 in Philosophy and Public Affairs, an academic journal that was little

00:12:49.060 known at the time. The thought experiment goes like this.

00:12:55.300 Imagine you have just purchased a nice pair of new shoes, and you're walking by a pond.

00:13:00.820 You know this pond well, and you know its depth and probable dangers. It's very shallow. It only comes

00:13:06.720 up to your waist. Suddenly, you see a small child in the pond flailing for her life and struggling.

00:13:15.120 She's clearly in distress and in imminent danger of drowning.

00:13:19.200 Do you run into the pond and rescue her, knowing that you will muddy your shoes and certainly ruin them?

00:13:26.640 If you're waiting for a more complicated or challenging choice, it's not coming.

00:13:31.760 That's the whole story, and that's the whole thought experiment.

00:13:34.520 Nearly everyone responds by saying,

00:13:37.760 Of course I run into the pond. Who cares about the shoes?

00:13:42.000 Now, Singer takes that answer and suggests that we,

00:13:45.480 and he's speaking mostly about those of us in the affluent world,

00:13:49.440 that we are all the time in a very similar moral position as the pedestrian walking by the pond.

00:13:55.880 Let's say that the shoes cost $90.

00:13:58.840 And let's also say you already had a pair of perfectly usable shoes at home.

00:14:02.740 This purchase was a luxury.

00:14:05.760 Go back to the moment when you were at the shoe store and looking at them on display.

00:14:10.820 What if, instead of making that purchase, you knew that you could donate that $90 to a charity

00:14:16.220 which had displayed solid data that it could use that money, with a very high degree of probability,

00:14:21.600 to save the life of a child in Eritrea who would otherwise soon die?

00:14:26.100 Is choosing to purchase the shoes anyway a choice that is morally equivalent

00:14:31.160 to strolling past the drowning child and keeping your new shoes shiny and clean

00:14:35.760 while she drowns to death in front of you? 1.00

00:14:37.800 This arresting question has spawned a swarm of responses, supportive movements, clever challenges,

00:14:47.880 creative edits, defeated frustrations, and counter-considerations.

00:14:52.760 We'll be playing with Singer's shallow pond a good bit throughout this compilation

00:14:56.880 to flesh out Sam's take on it and his particular run at the eternally vexing problem of morality.

00:15:04.540 An obvious distinction to draw between the moment at the pond versus the moment at the shoe store

00:15:09.400 is something like an act of omission versus an act of commission.

00:15:14.640 In other words, is there a difference between failing to act and choosing to act

00:15:19.320 if they result in the same moral outcome?

00:15:21.460 Let's jump into the first clip, where Sam is speaking with Peter Singer in episode 48.

00:15:28.220 What is moral progress?

00:15:31.420 Is there an important moral distinction between acts of omission and acts of commission?

00:15:37.000 We certainly act as though there were.

00:15:40.300 So how does, and your famous shallow pond example put some pressure on this here.

00:15:46.700 So how do you think about the difference between not saving a life that would be very easy for you to save

00:15:53.160 and taking one actively?

00:15:56.160 And this obviously also relates to end-of-life considerations of the sort you mentioned,

00:16:00.640 the difference we seem to hold on to between removing life support

00:16:05.340 and passively letting someone die versus actively killing them,

00:16:09.300 which in many cases might be the more merciful thing to do. 0.90

00:16:12.540 Yeah, so my view is that the distinction between killing and letting die

00:16:19.000 or between acts and omissions, it's put in different ways,

00:16:23.100 is not itself of great intrinsic significance.

00:16:28.200 It may be a marker for other things of more significance,

00:16:31.740 like it may be a marker for motives, for instance.

00:16:35.180 So if somebody were to say to me, suppose I say, look, you should give to this effective charity.

00:16:43.140 Let's be specific.

00:16:44.420 You should give to the Against Malaria Foundation because it will distribute bed nets 1.00

00:16:48.300 in places where there's a lot of malaria and where children die from malaria.

00:16:53.180 And if you donate what I know you can afford to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation,

00:16:58.440 they will use it to distribute bed nets and you will be saving at least one child's life.

00:17:02.740 And that's factual, I think.

00:17:04.480 That is a real organization and a real example.

00:17:07.340 And let's say the person doesn't do that, right?

00:17:10.020 So then that person has, in one sense, let a child die.

00:17:13.420 Do I think of that person exactly the same as somebody who traveled to Africa,

00:17:18.700 shot a small child and then traveled back to the United States?

00:17:21.840 Of course not.

00:17:22.500 I know that there's a huge psychological difference in that person that many of us are apathetic

00:17:31.860 or don't care enough, don't feel psychologically drawn to help people who we can't even see.

00:17:40.280 But for someone to actually have the malice and the will to travel, to find a child, 0.97

00:17:46.160 to kill that child, has to be a completely horrible, depraved person.

00:17:51.380 So sometimes the distinction between acts and omissions will signal something like that. 0.64

00:17:56.880 Why did this person go out of their way to kill?

00:17:59.460 Whereas in the other case, they simply didn't do enough to save a life.

00:18:04.260 But then let's look at another case, the medical case that you mentioned.

00:18:09.260 So an infant has been born prematurely and has had a very severe bleeding in the brain,

00:18:17.540 a hemorrhage.

00:18:18.020 The doctors do a scan of the brain.

00:18:20.540 They find that all of the parts of the brain that are associated with consciousness,

00:18:26.440 like the cortex, have been irreversibly destroyed.

00:18:30.440 Now, there's two possible things that might happen in these circumstances.

00:18:36.720 One might be that the doctors, after discussion with the parents, say,

00:18:42.280 look, your child really has a hopeless future.

00:18:44.600 They'll survive if we continue to treat them, but they'll just lie in bed all day and never

00:18:50.860 be able to communicate with anyone, probably never have any conscious experiences at all,

00:18:55.780 have to be fed through a tube and so on.

00:18:58.100 And the doctors will then say, and the parents will usually agree, so we could withdraw the

00:19:02.820 respirator.

00:19:03.600 Your baby is too small to breathe on his own.

00:19:06.960 We can withdraw the respirator and your baby will die. 0.87

00:19:09.780 And parents will typically say, if you think that's best, doctor, then I'm okay with that.

00:19:14.800 And the baby will die.

00:19:16.240 Now, that is seen as a letting die, as an allowing to die, not as a killing.

00:19:21.760 On the other hand, it might have happened that because it took some time to carry out the

00:19:27.300 diagnosis, because the baby was particularly vigorous and so on, that the baby no longer needs

00:19:33.460 a respirator.

00:19:34.860 So the prognosis is exactly the same.

00:19:36.880 The baby is never going to communicate in any way, probably never going to be conscious.

00:19:40.660 She's going to have to be fed through a tube and lie in a bed. 1.00

00:19:42.960 But you can't bring about the baby's death by withdrawing the respirator.

00:19:48.060 And let's just say that there's nothing else you can do that will bring about the baby's

00:19:51.440 death.

00:19:51.700 The baby is otherwise, apart from this massive and irreparable brain damage, the baby is

00:19:56.860 otherwise healthy.

00:19:57.660 Now, I think that if you're prepared to say that it was justifiable to withdraw the respirator,

00:20:04.380 you ought to be prepared to say it would be justifiable to give the baby a lethal injection

00:20:08.440 so that the baby dies without suffering.

00:20:10.980 There is no moral difference.

00:20:12.520 In both cases, you know exactly what the consequences of your action will be.

00:20:16.620 In both cases, your intention is to bring about the death of the child.

00:20:21.240 Your motivation is equally, I would say, equally good, equally reasonable in both cases.

00:20:28.900 So the means is really irrelevant.

00:20:33.020 But legally, of course, one is murder and the other is, well, maybe it's slightly gray in

00:20:40.260 some countries.

00:20:40.820 But anyway, it's done in every neonatal intensive care unit in every major city in the United

00:20:46.580 States.

00:20:47.680 And nobody ever gets prosecuted for it.

00:20:49.700 So it seems to be legally acceptable.

00:20:54.040 But that's, as I say, that's a case where I would think we ought to be able to accept

00:21:01.020 active steps on the basis of saying it's no different from the other case.

00:21:06.200 And certainly there are cases where the active step is the one that bypasses an immense amount

00:21:11.800 of suffering, right?

00:21:13.240 Where the passive one may...

00:21:14.140 Absolutely.

00:21:14.660 That's right.

00:21:15.140 In other cases where there is some consciousness, not exactly the case I described, but there

00:21:19.580 is some consciousness, I do know of cases where people will say, you know, no, we can't

00:21:24.920 actually take active steps to end life.

00:21:26.500 But if the baby gets pneumonia, we won't give antibiotics.

00:21:30.820 And so then the baby will suffer a lingering death from pneumonia over days or maybe even

00:21:37.480 a couple of weeks, you know, which is a horrible thing and a pointless thing to do if you decided

00:21:41.920 that it's better that the baby should die.

00:21:44.160 You know, why let the baby suffer in this way?

00:21:47.040 I want to go back to the issue of the shallow pond.

00:21:50.620 So you admit that there's a difference.

00:21:52.180 It would take a very different sort of person to go to Africa with the intention of killing 0.95

00:21:57.040 someone than merely decline to buy a bed net when told on good information that this would

00:22:05.120 save a human life.

00:22:06.780 Those are very different people.

00:22:08.320 But I think you're saying that it's natural for us to view them as different.

00:22:12.200 And because it requires actually a different psychology to do one versus the other, they

00:22:18.960 are different.

00:22:19.820 But if we abstract away from those differences and talk about public policies and what governments

00:22:25.800 should do, then the act and omission difference shouldn't be morally salient to us anymore.

00:22:33.440 Is that where you're headed with that?

00:22:35.400 I'm not going to say that it shouldn't be at all morally salient because there are questions

00:22:39.020 in what governments do in terms of the examples that they set.

00:22:43.360 But I do think it's very serious that governments allow people to die when they could prevent

00:22:47.900 them, when they have the resources to prevent them.

00:22:51.060 And so I certainly think that the governments of the wealthier nations of the world should

00:22:57.400 be getting together and developing policies to eliminate preventable child deaths and preventable

00:23:05.100 suffering from diseases.

00:23:06.600 They did make a reasonable effort in terms of the Millennium Development Goals to reduce

00:23:12.500 suffering and progress was made.

00:23:14.640 The number of children dying fell quite significantly during that period, as did the number of people

00:23:20.700 in extreme poverty.

00:23:22.380 And that's a good thing.

00:23:23.800 But I'm concerned whether sufficient progress is continuing to be made.

00:23:29.760 I think more progress could have been made even in that period, although some progress was

00:23:34.560 made, and I think we should be doing more.

00:23:37.400 And that applies to governments, but it also applies to individuals.

00:23:41.140 I think all of us who can afford to donate to effective charities ought to be doing that

00:23:49.680 because the governments are not doing enough.

00:23:52.300 How do you view the ethical significance of proximity, if there is any?

00:23:57.640 I mean, obviously, there's an immense psychological significance that the starving person on my

00:24:02.140 doorstep is different, certainly more salient than the starving person in a distant country

00:24:08.040 whose existence I know about, at least in the abstract.

00:24:11.480 Presumably, you think that that difference is far bigger than it should be.

00:24:17.460 But is there any ethical significance to proximity, the problem in your backyard as opposed to the

00:24:23.580 problem an ocean away?

00:24:26.160 Well, I'd say not to proximity in itself, again.

00:24:30.060 We can perhaps be more confident about what we're achieving when things are in our backyard

00:24:35.000 and we actually can see what's happening.

00:24:36.800 We can talk to the people who are affected by it.

00:24:38.700 But we do have very good research now about effective non-profit organizations that are

00:24:45.060 trying to help people far away.

00:24:47.960 So there's organizations like GiveWell that do research on effective charities.

00:24:53.680 There's an organization I founded called The Life You Can Save, and it has a website which

00:25:00.480 lists charities that we've vetted, and some of it draws on GiveWell's research, some of it

00:25:06.360 draws on other research.

00:25:07.340 So that we recommend effective charities.

00:25:10.940 And if you can have a high level of confidence in the effectiveness of what you're doing,

00:25:16.300 then it's not very different morally.

00:25:19.380 As you correctly said, it is very different psychologically.

00:25:22.760 But morally, it's not very different from things that are going on in your backyard.

00:25:28.040 Given that it is so different psychologically, I mean, presumably, if I told you that there's

00:25:32.860 a starving person by my front door today that I just stepped over on the way to this podcast

00:25:37.900 because I was, you know, I'm busy, you would view me with something close to horror and repugnance

00:25:44.680 and would be right to.

00:25:46.200 But if I told you that I got yet another appeal from a good charity, which I didn't act on, you

00:25:54.880 would just view me as a more or less psychologically normal, if somewhat aloof person.

00:26:01.320 Do you view our moral progress personally and collectively as a matter of collapsing that

00:26:08.760 distance as much as psychologically possible so that we really can't put distant suffering

00:26:14.800 out of sight and out of mind?

00:26:16.180 Yes, I do think that's an indicator of progress.

00:26:19.600 And it's, you know, the psychology is understandable, of course.

00:26:23.180 Our ancestors for millennia, for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, if we go back even,

00:26:29.900 could go back even to social primates before there were humans at all, these ancestors lived

00:26:36.320 in small social groups, face-to-face groups where they knew people and they would help others

00:26:42.580 and cooperate with them in various ways, but they had no relations perhaps even to people

00:26:47.460 who lived across the mountain range in the next valley.

00:26:51.800 And now suddenly, suddenly in terms of evolutionary time anyway, we live in a world where we have

00:26:57.560 instant communications, where we have very rapid delivery of assistance, where we have good

00:27:03.600 ways of working out what is going to help people most effectively.

00:27:07.800 And our psychology has not changed rapidly enough to cope with this.

00:27:18.560 There's an interesting note about Singer's pond analogy and the idea that Sam raised about

00:27:23.780 evaluating the kind of person who would stroll by a child drowning in a pond versus the kind

00:27:29.680 of person who declines to donate to a charity.

00:27:31.860 Singer originally wrote the pond story in an essay about a mass humanitarian crisis in East

00:27:38.780 Bengal in 1971, spurred on by a civil war and a devastating cyclone.

00:27:44.820 He presented the pond to argue for the presence of a moral opportunity, and perhaps for a moral

00:27:50.080 obligation, of wealthy countries to intervene with food, shelter, and rescue.

00:27:55.800 We can map that same character analysis that Sam suggested onto the national level and ask,

00:28:01.860 what kind of country declines to feasibly rescue those in a foreign crisis versus what kind

00:28:08.340 of country declines to offer generic foreign aid absent any acute humanitarian crisis?

00:28:14.820 A screaming child drowning in a pond is an emergency, but the slow drip of individual preventable

00:28:21.360 deaths from hunger, illness, and poverty, and spread across entire continents does not seem

00:28:27.780 to present itself in that way, or to expose the kind of people we are.

00:28:32.840 But shouldn't it?

00:28:34.260 What if we gathered all of those individuals into one location, like a sports stadium, and 0.94

00:28:39.500 announced that a bomb would kill them all at midnight unless we easily diffused it?

00:28:44.360 That edit sounds extreme, but it only gathers the location of these preventable deaths to the

00:28:50.300 same venue, and it makes explicit the imminence of their demise.

00:28:54.000 Somehow that makes it feel more like a newsworthy emergency that only a moral monster would ignore.

00:29:01.060 But again, Singer argues that this may actually be the situation that most of us are in today,

00:29:06.780 if we only bothered to notice it.

00:29:09.980 This is the deeply challenging work that the pond analogy does.

00:29:13.660 So, let's stay with that last thread from Sam and Singer's conversation of proximity,

00:29:20.220 and the tension between psychology and moral philosophy.

00:29:24.660 Like all moral dilemmas and thought experiments, you can start to tinker with the variables in

00:29:29.820 certain ways that are designed to highlight how your moral intuitions might shift with each

00:29:34.340 edit.

00:29:35.440 For example, replay the pond analogy.

00:29:37.940 But this time, you see five children drowning instead of one.

00:29:44.160 They're all at different distances from you, spread throughout the pond.

00:29:48.500 You're quite certain that in the time it will take you to reach and rescue one of them,

00:29:52.680 the other four will drown and die.

00:29:55.240 Which do you go for? 0.75

00:29:56.940 Assuming you're still willing to ruin your shoes.

00:30:00.720 Maybe you decide that flipping a coin is the best method.

00:30:04.000 But what if one of the children happens to be your child?

00:30:06.700 Do you go for her no matter what?

00:30:09.700 Waiting past the cries for help from an unfortunate, unknown child?

00:30:14.460 How about if you knew all of the struggling children,

00:30:17.140 and you know that one of them has a terminal illness,

00:30:19.560 and is unlikely to live another year anyway?

00:30:22.440 Do you avoid going for that child?

00:30:24.980 What if one of the children is known to be showing signs of being a scientific prodigy,

00:30:29.480 and there are high hopes for her future,

00:30:31.860 and she's likely to be a great benefit to humanity?

00:30:34.260 What if you think all of these factors are just too vulgar,

00:30:39.200 and you simply go to whichever one happens to draw you first while you close your eyes?

00:30:44.140 Would that method favor the child who happens to yell the loudest?

00:30:48.320 If we keep our eyes open and just follow our instinct,

00:30:51.840 would we inevitably end up being drawn towards the child who's the cutest?

00:30:55.320 Or even the child who looks a little like us and reminds us of our kin?

00:31:00.100 We can keep playing these kinds of games forever.

00:31:03.340 We could even make it nearly identical to the famous trolley problem,

00:31:07.240 the thought experiment which ties five people to a railroad track,

00:31:11.140 while one person is fastened to a separate track.

00:31:13.500 In that now well-known nightmare,

00:31:16.880 you're given the choice to divert an out-of-control trolley towards the one,

00:31:21.180 rather than the five, by flipping a switch.

00:31:24.320 In our pond, we can imagine that four of the children are clinging to a rapidly deflating life raft,

00:31:30.420 and they could all grab hold of it and be dragged to safety by you,

00:31:33.740 while one isolated child is drowning by himself a hundred feet away.

00:31:37.480 Is there a right choice for problems like these?

00:31:42.040 We're going to go to our second clip to focus on the suggestion

00:31:44.940 that there are right answers to these questions.

00:31:48.500 This guest will argue that our intuitions lead us to actions

00:31:51.920 that are compromised by our evolved psychological biases

00:31:55.260 to favor creatures with which we can empathize.

00:31:58.800 To return to the issue of proximity,

00:32:01.620 it's certainly easier to empathize with someone who's close enough

00:32:04.840 to be in our visual and auditory field

00:32:06.940 and whose screams we can hear,

00:32:09.440 rather than a distant, nameless, faceless, voiceless child.

00:32:14.200 We know that it's also easier to empathize with a single child

00:32:17.740 whose name and story we know

00:32:19.340 over a huge number of distant, nameless children

00:32:22.680 who you'll never meet.

00:32:24.600 In fact, as you'll hear Sam and this next guest point out,

00:32:28.420 this specific aspect of our psychology is even more curious,

00:32:32.480 where our ability to empathize with a specific starving child

00:32:35.760 is reduced when you simply place the same child

00:32:39.040 amongst the company of thousands of others just like him.

00:32:41.780 The next guest is Paul Bloom,

00:32:45.940 a professor of psychology formerly of Yale University

00:32:49.080 and now with the University of Toronto.

00:32:52.380 Bloom has had several wonderful conversations with Sam,

00:32:55.500 and this is their first,

00:32:56.600 which came just after the release of Bloom's book

00:32:59.480 with the provocative title Against Empathy.

00:33:02.240 In it, he argues that our much-ballyhooed capacity for empathy

00:33:07.180 is not the clean moral panacea

00:33:09.760 which it is sometimes advertised to be.

00:33:12.400 In fact, it may often be more of a bug than a feature

00:33:15.600 when it comes to our moral reasoning.

00:33:18.520 Here is Sam with Paul Bloom from episode 14,

00:33:22.420 In Cold Blood.

00:33:23.300 You've come down very much on the,

00:33:28.580 really, a side of a controversy

00:33:30.180 that most people didn't even know existed,

00:33:33.020 which is that empathy, in many cases, is harmful

00:33:36.620 and is not a good piece of software

00:33:40.060 if you want to be a reliable moral actor

00:33:42.480 in normative terms.

00:33:43.720 So tell me about what you've said about empathy

00:33:46.200 and let's get into the details.

00:33:48.360 So I always have to begin

00:33:49.560 with the most boring way ever to begin anything,

00:33:51.740 which is we're talking about terminology

00:33:53.520 because people use the term empathy

00:33:56.240 in all sorts of ways

00:33:57.320 and I think my position is easily misunderstood.

00:34:00.820 If you think, some people think empathy

00:34:02.840 just as a word referring to anything good,

00:34:05.840 compassion, care, love, morality,

00:34:07.840 making the world a better place and so on.

00:34:10.120 Under that construal of empathy,

00:34:11.540 I have nothing against it.

00:34:12.700 I'm not a monster.

00:34:13.620 I mean, I want to make the world a better place.

00:34:15.960 Other people use the term empathy very narrowly

00:34:18.640 to refer to understanding

00:34:20.540 in a cold-blooded way

00:34:22.020 what's going on in the minds of other people,

00:34:24.400 understanding what they think and what they feel.

00:34:26.720 And I'm not against that too, though,

00:34:28.520 and we might want to talk about this.

00:34:30.120 I think it's morally neutral.

00:34:31.820 I think very great and wonderful and kind people

00:34:34.500 have this sort of cognitive empathy,

00:34:37.600 if you want to call it that, 0.78

00:34:38.920 but so do con men, seducers, and sadists. 0.98

00:34:44.000 Bullies are, 0.96

00:34:45.180 one reason why bullies are very good at being bullies

00:34:47.740 is that they exquisitely understand

00:34:49.520 what's going on in the heads of their victims.

00:34:51.540 Yeah, yeah.

00:34:52.360 That's often misunderstood, by the way.

00:34:53.960 We should just footnote that,

00:34:55.180 that this form of cognitive empathy

00:34:57.520 that you've just distinguished

00:34:59.460 from the other form that you're about to describe 0.85

00:35:02.100 is something that psychopaths have in spades.

00:35:05.020 When we talk about psychopaths being devoid of empathy,

00:35:08.240 it's not the empathy that allows us

00:35:10.680 to understand another person's experience.

00:35:13.300 That is not something that prototypically evil people lack.

00:35:16.900 In fact, they, as you just said,

00:35:19.000 they use this understanding

00:35:20.380 to be as successfully evil as they can be.

00:35:23.780 That's exactly right.

00:35:24.740 So, you know, another term for cognitive empathy

00:35:28.100 is social intelligence.

00:35:29.880 And I like that way of talking

00:35:31.040 because it captures the point

00:35:32.120 that intelligence is an extraordinary tool.

00:35:35.380 Without it, you know,

00:35:36.480 we couldn't do any great things.

00:35:38.080 But in the hands of somebody with malevolent ends,

00:35:40.460 intelligence could be used to make them a lot worse.

00:35:43.340 And I think that that's,

00:35:44.480 that social intelligence is exactly like that.

00:35:47.660 Mind reading, another term for it,

00:35:50.320 is a tool that could be used any way you want it.

00:35:53.100 And the very best people in the world have tons of it.

00:35:55.800 And so do the very worst people in the world.

00:35:58.520 So the sense of empathy I'm using,

00:36:01.680 and this actually matches what most psychologists

00:36:04.520 and most philosophers,

00:36:06.500 how they use the term,

00:36:08.040 is empathy is in the sense of what Adam Smith

00:36:11.380 and David Hume and other philosophers call sympathy.

00:36:14.800 And what it refers to is feeling what other people feel.

00:36:19.540 So if you're in pain,

00:36:21.160 and I feel empathy for you,

00:36:24.080 I will feel to some degree your pain.

00:36:26.820 If you're humiliated,

00:36:27.940 I will feel your humiliation. 0.85

00:36:29.260 If you are happy, 0.64

00:36:29.980 I will feel your happiness.

00:36:31.980 And you could see why people are such fans of this.

00:36:35.740 It brings me closer to you.

00:36:37.320 It dissolves the boundaries between me and you.

00:36:40.200 And there's a lot of psychological research showing

00:36:42.360 that if I feel empathy towards you,

00:36:44.720 I'm more likely to help you.

00:36:46.740 Dan Batson has done some wonderful studies on them,

00:36:48.720 and I don't contest that at all.

00:36:50.920 But the problem with empathy,

00:36:52.600 and one of the problems with empathy,

00:36:54.120 there are many,

00:36:55.020 but the main problem is it serves as a spotlight.

00:36:57.880 It zooms me in on a person in the here and now.

00:37:00.680 And as a result, it's biased, it's parochial,

00:37:06.420 it's short-sighted, and it's innumerate.

00:37:10.500 One way I put it is it's because of empathy

00:37:13.260 that governments and societies care so much more

00:37:17.000 about a little girl stuck in a well

00:37:18.900 than about millions or more people

00:37:21.520 suffering and dying through climate change.

00:37:24.500 It's because of empathy, at least in part,

00:37:27.900 that we freak out and panic

00:37:30.040 over mass shootings,

00:37:33.000 which, however horrible,

00:37:35.460 are a tiny proportion of gun homicides in America,

00:37:38.960 0.01% roughly.

00:37:41.240 Yeah.

00:37:41.740 I mean, so if you ask people,

00:37:43.720 they would say mass shootings

00:37:44.720 are the most terrible things there are.

00:37:46.380 And, you know, I live in Connecticut.

00:37:47.880 Newtown's not that far away.

00:37:49.320 After the Sandy Hook killing,

00:37:50.940 people were, including me,

00:37:52.300 were deeply upset.

00:37:54.040 But intellectually,

00:37:55.680 if you could snap your fingers

00:37:57.200 and make all the mass shootings go away forever,

00:37:59.360 and then you did that,

00:38:01.360 nobody would know based on the homicide numbers.

00:38:04.680 Yeah.

00:38:05.520 It's so tiny.

00:38:06.740 So it misdirects us.

00:38:08.360 It causes us to focus on the wrong thing.

00:38:10.920 It causes us to freak out at the suffering of one

00:38:13.540 and ignore the suffering of 100.

00:38:15.500 And in one of your books,

00:38:18.880 I forget which one,

00:38:20.220 you talk about the study

00:38:22.160 where we care more about one than about eight.

00:38:25.580 Yeah.

00:38:25.800 And you say something to the effect of,

00:38:27.480 if there's ever a non...

00:38:28.640 That's Paul Slovic's work.

00:38:30.320 That's right.

00:38:30.840 That's right.

00:38:31.640 Some wonderful studies.

00:38:32.920 And also,

00:38:33.960 somebody in Ritoff

00:38:34.900 and other investigators

00:38:36.460 have done this since.

00:38:38.520 And, you know,

00:38:39.500 and you described us

00:38:40.980 that if there's ever

00:38:41.960 a non-normative finding

00:38:44.120 in psychology,

00:38:44.840 that's it.

00:38:45.860 And so,

00:38:46.740 I think we could,

00:38:47.840 I think there's many more examples like this

00:38:49.520 that we could say,

00:38:50.420 we could look and say,

00:38:51.440 and say as rational people,

00:38:54.100 well, you know,

00:38:55.080 a black life matters

00:38:56.380 as much as a white life. 1.00

00:38:58.240 The life of an ugly person 0.99

00:38:59.780 who doesn't inspire my empathy

00:39:01.800 matters just as much

00:39:03.160 as a beautiful person who does.

00:39:05.040 And the lives of a hundred

00:39:06.460 matter more than the life of one.

00:39:09.180 Especially,

00:39:10.040 and this is the amazingly

00:39:11.900 non-normative finding

00:39:13.900 from Slovic's work,

00:39:15.120 is that especially

00:39:15.800 if those hundred

00:39:16.920 include the one

00:39:18.920 you were caring about.

00:39:20.840 So, you can set up this paradigm

00:39:22.300 where you show

00:39:23.740 a reliable loss of concern

00:39:27.060 when you add people

00:39:28.960 to the group.

00:39:30.600 So, you start with one

00:39:31.460 little girl

00:39:32.100 whose story is

00:39:33.000 very emotionally salient

00:39:34.320 and people care about her

00:39:35.920 to a maximal degree.

00:39:37.820 And then you add her brother

00:39:39.260 to the story

00:39:40.340 and people care a little less.

00:39:41.960 And then you add

00:39:42.680 eight more people

00:39:43.480 to the story

00:39:44.060 keeping the same girl 1.00

00:39:45.200 and people's care

00:39:46.440 just drops off a cliff.

00:39:48.200 That's truly amazing.

00:39:49.360 It's not one attractive girl 1.00

00:39:50.860 versus a hundred

00:39:52.580 faceless people.

00:39:54.340 It can be the one

00:39:55.340 attractive girl 0.97

00:39:56.160 along with the hundred

00:39:57.300 and you care less.

00:39:58.720 It's a magnificent

00:39:59.680 and horrible finding.

00:40:01.540 And, you know,

00:40:02.520 I've long championed

00:40:04.360 the forces of reason

00:40:05.620 and rationality

00:40:06.520 and moral judgment.

00:40:07.340 I think far more

00:40:08.480 than many social psychologists

00:40:09.640 that were capable of that.

00:40:11.560 And so,

00:40:12.200 there's an interesting

00:40:13.100 duality here.

00:40:14.420 On the one hand,

00:40:15.460 our gut feelings

00:40:16.360 push us

00:40:17.020 towards the one girl

00:40:18.080 and not the hundred,

00:40:19.180 even if the hundred

00:40:19.700 includes the girl.

00:40:21.020 On the other hand,

00:40:22.080 we're smart enough

00:40:22.780 to recognize

00:40:23.540 when we put it

00:40:24.540 in this abstract way

00:40:25.560 that that's a moral mistake.

00:40:27.080 In some way,

00:40:28.940 you could view

00:40:29.280 the moral mistakes

00:40:30.340 caused by empathy

00:40:31.260 as analogous

00:40:32.560 to the mistakes

00:40:33.160 and rationality

00:40:34.140 that people like

00:40:34.800 Donny Kahneman

00:40:35.400 have chronicled.

00:40:36.740 Where you see people

00:40:38.100 just, you know,

00:40:39.000 you get these puzzles

00:40:40.300 and you ignore

00:40:41.020 the base rates

00:40:41.880 and you get things

00:40:42.420 all messed up.

00:40:44.000 And that's,

00:40:44.420 when you step back

00:40:45.520 and look at it

00:40:46.160 and do the math,

00:40:46.940 you realize,

00:40:47.560 wow, that was a mistake.

00:40:49.020 My gut led me

00:40:49.780 in the wrong way.

00:40:51.720 Visual illusions

00:40:52.560 are another case.

00:40:53.280 It looks this way,

00:40:54.500 but it isn't.

00:40:55.140 You take out the ruler

00:40:55.920 and you measure it

00:40:56.660 and although the lines

00:40:57.620 look like they're

00:40:58.140 different lengths,

00:40:58.760 they're the same.

00:40:59.900 So we have this

00:41:00.660 additional capacity

00:41:01.680 to do this,

00:41:02.920 both for things

00:41:04.300 that connect

00:41:04.740 to the external

00:41:05.260 war-like vision,

00:41:06.060 but also for morality

00:41:07.060 where we have standards

00:41:08.040 of reason and consistency.

00:41:09.680 And we could use this

00:41:10.340 to say,

00:41:11.120 wow, our empathy

00:41:11.880 is pushing us

00:41:12.580 in the wrong direction.

00:41:13.760 Yeah.

00:41:13.920 So now,

00:41:14.400 do you see us

00:41:15.460 correcting for this

00:41:16.860 in a way

00:41:17.660 that is adequate

00:41:19.160 to the magnitude

00:41:20.580 of the moral error

00:41:21.640 or is our way

00:41:23.180 of correcting for it

00:41:24.120 more haphazard

00:41:25.380 than that?

00:41:25.980 Our way of correcting

00:41:26.920 this is always haphazard,

00:41:28.660 but the analogy I make

00:41:30.160 is with racism.

00:41:31.860 So we know

00:41:32.880 we have racist biases.

00:41:34.240 Many of us

00:41:34.700 have explicit racist biases,

00:41:36.580 but there's a lot

00:41:37.100 of evidence

00:41:37.500 for implicit racial biases,

00:41:39.280 biases that we don't know

00:41:40.640 we have even,

00:41:41.880 but that influence us

00:41:43.120 in all sorts of ways.

00:41:44.680 So what do you,

00:41:45.220 so suppose,

00:41:45.920 if you think racism

00:41:46.760 is okay,

00:41:47.480 then there's not a problem.

00:41:48.560 But suppose,

00:41:49.360 you know,

00:41:49.580 as you and I do,

00:41:50.380 we think racism is wrong.

00:41:52.020 So what do you do

00:41:53.140 about it?

00:41:53.980 Well,

00:41:54.500 the answer is not

00:41:55.420 you try harder.

00:41:56.840 You know,

00:41:57.100 we know trying hard

00:41:58.440 doesn't work

00:41:59.000 for these sort of biases,

00:42:00.680 but there are

00:42:01.700 different sorts of fixes.

00:42:03.420 So in fact,

00:42:04.080 for biases,

00:42:06.160 often there's

00:42:06.760 technological fixes.

00:42:08.700 One story,

00:42:09.460 this may be apocryphal,

00:42:10.500 but it's a good story,

00:42:11.620 is that symphony orchestras

00:42:13.120 were heavily biased

00:42:14.120 in favor of men

00:42:15.040 because they claimed

00:42:17.040 that, you know,

00:42:17.500 the people making judgments

00:42:18.380 who were both men

00:42:19.140 and women said, 1.00

00:42:20.040 men just sound better.

00:42:20.940 They have stronger,

00:42:21.640 more powerful styles.

00:42:23.620 So what they did

00:42:24.560 was they started

00:42:25.180 auditioning people

00:42:26.000 behind a screen.

00:42:27.820 And this is,

00:42:28.540 and then the sex ratio

00:42:30.540 became more normal.

00:42:31.900 So this is an example

00:42:32.920 of you've got a bias,

00:42:35.060 you don't like it,

00:42:36.400 and so you try

00:42:37.060 to fix the world

00:42:38.040 so it doesn't apply.

00:42:39.340 And I can imagine

00:42:39.980 similar things

00:42:40.720 happening with empathy,

00:42:42.760 where you change

00:42:43.520 laws and policies

00:42:44.660 so that empathy

00:42:45.320 plays less of a role.

00:42:46.680 Bloom and Sam

00:42:50.480 agree quite a bit

00:42:51.560 on a lens of morality

00:42:52.700 and how we ought

00:42:53.700 to work to discover

00:42:54.720 and then mitigate

00:42:55.940 our worst built-in

00:42:57.800 psychological impulses

00:42:59.200 when making moral decisions.

00:43:01.540 But to underline

00:43:02.660 the distinction

00:43:03.220 between what Bloom

00:43:04.260 was calling

00:43:04.860 cognitive empathy

00:43:06.220 and other forms

00:43:07.500 of concern for others,

00:43:09.560 let's note the subtitle

00:43:10.740 of Bloom's book,

00:43:11.780 which is

00:43:12.200 The Case for Rational Compassion.

00:43:16.280 Bloom's argument

00:43:17.100 is a fascinating counter

00:43:18.540 to the common advice

00:43:19.700 to trust your gut

00:43:21.160 when it comes

00:43:22.240 to difficult moral decisions.

00:43:25.120 Gut versus reason

00:43:26.260 or heart versus head

00:43:28.200 are colloquial phrases

00:43:29.860 that people use

00:43:30.840 to express the tense boundary

00:43:32.380 between our evolved instincts

00:43:33.900 and our rational moral reasoning.

00:43:36.380 We're going to continue

00:43:37.680 to trace our way

00:43:38.700 along that boundary

00:43:39.680 in this compilation,

00:43:41.260 and this time,

00:43:42.200 we'll jump back

00:43:42.940 towards the philosophical

00:43:43.940 side of things.

00:43:45.920 To return to our initial

00:43:47.580 taxonomies of moral philosophy,

00:43:49.900 we should zoom in

00:43:51.060 on another major fork

00:43:52.300 in the tree.

00:43:53.840 This is the split

00:43:54.780 between consequentialism

00:43:56.200 and deontology.

00:43:58.280 If you'd like to continue

00:43:59.480 listening to this conversation,

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00:44:24.700 Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris

Making Sense of Foundations of Morality ｜ Episode 3 of The Essential Sam Harris

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