What does it mean to be a good person? To act ethically and morally in the world? In the old days we might appeal to the instructions we get from God, but a modern naturalist has to look elsewhere. Today I do a rare solo podcast, where I talk about my personal views on morality, a variety of “constructivism” according to which human beings construct their ethical stances starting from basic impulses, logical reasoning, and communicating with others. In light of this view, I consider two real-world examples of contemporary moral controversies: Is it morally permissible to eat meat? Or is there an ethical imperative to be a vegetarian?

Do inequities in society stem from discrimination, or from the natural order of things? As a jumping-off point I take the loose-knit group known as the Intellectual Dark Web, which includes Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, and others, and their nemeses the Social Justice Warriors (though the discussion is about broader issues, not just that group of folks). Probably everyone will agree with my takes on these issues once they listen to my eminently reasonable arguments. Actually this is a more conversational, exploratory episode, rather than a polished, tightly-argued case from start to finish. I don’t claim to have all the final answers. The hope is to get people thinking and conversing, not to settle things once and for all. These issues are, on the one hand, very tricky, and none of us should be too certain that we have everything figured out; on the other hand, they can get very personal, and consequently emotions run high. The issues are important enough that we have to talk about them, and we can at least aspire to do so in the most reasonable way possible. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Click to Show Episode Transcript Click above to close. 0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll and today we’re going to have another solo podcast that is to say an episode of Mindscape with only me talking. I think that when I started Mindscape which was very close to one year ago, I think we’re close to the anniversary. I’m not sure what it is, but I had in mind I’d be doing more than once every year solo episodes. But the truth is, I just had too many interesting people to talk to, so I’ve had wonderful guests coming to my horizon, and it’s been a lot of fun talking to them, so there’s no regrets there. But I do wanna mix in some more solo episodes, so I made an effort to record this one. 0:00:39 SC: The last one, of course, was a very different one in the sense that I had written a paper on why is there something rather than nothing for a scholarly collection of essays, and I could basically go through the arguments in that paper and explain them. It was kind of figured out already, it was a completed sensible work. Today, I both want to be a little bit more controversial but also be a bit more conversational. That is to say, talk about something where I don’t have a complete polished argument. So it’s more of a conversational off the cuff ruminating about things, trying to get some thoughts into people’s minds, including my own, so thinking out loud as it were. But I will be a little bit controversial, so I wanna talk about what it means to be a good person. Or in slightly more formal language, how should we think about morality and ethics? What is right? What is wrong? 0:01:30 SC: In particular, I’m a naturalist, I don’t believe in God or the supernatural. So how should naturalists think about morality? Of course, I did organize a whole workshop a few years ago on moving naturalism forward, got a bunch of people together so rather than… The idea there was rather than argue about God not existing, which we all agreed on by the construction of who was in the room, we start with God not existing. And we ask ourselves, “Okay what next?” There’s various things that happen when you’re religious, various roles that are played by religion in one’s lives. How do we replace them? 0:02:07 SC: There are a lot of issues facing naturalists. How to find meaningfulness in your life? The issues of free will and consciousness and other programs within science that are not yet complete, but clearly one of the big issues is morality. How do you be a good person? What sets the standards for right and wrong? This is something about which naturalists disagree and I think it’s good, that naturalists disagree in the sense that we are looking for the right answer, and we haven’t yet found it or at least some of us might have found it. It’s like the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Some of us might know the right answers but we don’t agree amongst ourselves. So there’s more discussing to be done. 0:02:44 SC: As I am discussing this, as I’m talking to you right now, recording this podcast, we’ve just had a wave of laws being passed in multiple states in the United States dramatically restricting access to abortion or criminalizing abortion. Abortion is of course a classic moral dilemma kind of problem. People come down on different sides of it for very different reasons. I think a lot of people… I agree with the argument that says that a lot of people who oppose abortion rights, oppose a woman’s right to choose, do so because they like restricting women’s choices, because it’s just simply a tool of oppressing women and expressing their individuality and agency. But not everyone opposes abortion for those reasons. I certainly know people who simply in good faith because of their religious beliefs, think that abortion is wrong. They think that there’s something that happens when an egg is fertilized by a sperm and that’s when you become a person and that person deserves rights. 0:03:50 SC: This is, again, not necessarily the political reason why abortion is a controversy, but it is something that an argument you can make. What should naturalists think about this? If you don’t think that there’s anything mystical or supernatural or religious or spiritual that happens at the moment of conception, then you have a whole different set of issues in front of you and concerning whether or not abortion should be legal. On the other hand, I do think that most naturalists have the same answer to that question. That’s not a hard question for naturalists. A single cell, even if that cell is a fertilized egg, most naturalists would not attribute many rights to. So most naturalists are gonna say that women should be able to get abortions at least for a certain period of their pregnancies. 0:04:37 SC: What about the hard problems? There are plenty of hard problems; the death penalty, what we should do with end of life, how we should distribute money in society, what is fair and so forth. Trolley problems are famous moral dilemmas that we can wrestle with. So I wanna talk about a couple of things that are a little bit more… Or a little bit less obvious, I should say, for the naturalist. I wanna give my general feelings about them which are immediately themselves provisional. I’m not trying to talk about things for which I think I know the right answer. 0:05:06 SC: And rather than simply focus on broad principles and abstract reasoning, I wanna bring things down to earth with a couple of examples that people have strong feelings about. I picked two examples. One example is vegetarianism. Is it ethically okay to eat meat, to eat animals and animal products? This is something that has come up both occasionally on the podcast and also on my Ask Me Anything special podcast on Patreon. If you’re a Patreon supporter you know that every month, I do an Ask Me Anything when all supporters can ask questions and I try to answer as many of them as I can. See, how I cleverly work the existence of the Patreon in there, if you wanna go to patreon.com/seanmcarroll. Or just go to the podcast web page, you can find the link and be a patreon patron. Yeah, be a patron yourself. 0:05:55 SC: So, okay, I’m not a vegetarian, but I understand, I think, why some people would become a vegetarian. I think it’s a very, very good example of a moral dilemma facing naturalists. It’s not obvious, whether we should eat meat or not, so I will talk about that. And then the second issue I’m gonna talk about is exemplified by the intellectual dark web. This is something that you might have heard about. 0:06:19 SC: It’s a group of people -Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro -other people. Many of them are bloggers and podcasters, and they have a certain take on things that I don’t really agree with. I’m not a sort of intellectual dark web sympathizer. In some ways I am, and so when I started the podcast people were asking me whether I was becoming a member of the intellectual dark web. Not many people, not people who knew me very well. The particular thing that they talk a lot about in the intellectual dark web are issues of social justice, racism, sexism and so forth, with the angle that the people who are social justice warriors, the people who are spending a lot of their time arguing that there’s too much racism and sexism and transphobia and homophobia in our culture, and we need to do something about that have gone too far and in particular they’ve gone too far in squelching debate and being counter to the enlightenment values of open discussion and free speech. 0:07:16 SC: So I want to talk about that, and explain why I am not very sympathetic with their overall attitude. So hopefully, between having a whole bunch of committed vegetarians disagree with me, and a whole bunch of intellectual dark web supporters disagree with me, I will have annoyed or pissed off a large swath of the listenership here; that’s the goal. Or at least to get people thinking. I hope that I am thoughtful enough and open-minded enough that even if you’re a little bit annoyed, I try to give us some interesting things to think about. Like I said, my particular ideas here are not completely settled, but it’s important that we have these conversations, especially about difficult topics, especially about things with which we disagree with each other. So, let’s go. [music] 0:08:14 SC: Before examining these examples in any detail, I wanted to say a little bit about how I personally think about morality. Again, I’m not a moral philosopher myself, I am not an expert in these things. I’ve read a little bit, I’ve talked to people, I care about the issues, but I’m not gonna be giving you the complete expert opinion on the entire landscape of moral and ethical theory. I’m going to talk about how I think about it, and invite you to think about it yourself, chime in in the comment sections in various places on the internet, etcetera. Roughly speaking, when we think about morality or ethics, the rules by which we live, there’s two kinds of questions we have to talk about. One is ethics itself, the rules or the guidelines for how we behave, how we should behave. 0:09:01 SC: And then there’s meta-ethics, how we derive and justify what those rules are. So if you have a rule, “Well, you should aim for the greatest good for the greatest number,” that’s part of ethics or morality. But where did that come from? Why should we actually aim for the greatest good for the greatest number? That’s part of meta-ethics. And to make things way over-simplified, in ethics I find it always useful to distinguish between two different approaches to ethics or morality. I’m not gonna distinguish as an expert would between ethics and morality, sorry about that. There’s many different approaches to ethics and morality, but two particular examples do a very good job of illustrating kind of the space of possibilities. There’s deontology and there’s consequentialism. 0:09:48 SC: Deontology is saying that morals come from a set of rules, and if you write down the rules and you obey them, then you’ll be in good shape. Whereas consequentialists think it’s not about this is what you should do or you should not do, what matters is what the consequences of your actions are, unsurprisingly. So a utilitarian who thinks that you look for the greatest good for the greatest number, that there’s some number called utility that you can attach to different things that could happen in the world, and what you want to do is add up that number and maximize it, that would be a typical consequentialist. Whereas a Kantian, for example, Immanuel Kant suggested the categorical imperative where he says that you should make your own individual actions such that could be generalized to universal principles, that’s a more deontological approach. Both of these approaches in my view have serious problems with them. They lead us into sticky situations. 0:10:44 SC: Deontology runs into the problem that… Well, it’s the same problem that every bureaucracy runs into, right. When you have a bureaucracy, it’s typically well meaning, you want to do something like have rules for how we drive our cars on the road. But the problem is, you have to imagine that you can figure out ahead of time what every situation is in which those rules are eventually going to be applied. And eventually you come up with situations where there’s an obvious right thing to do, and the rules are telling you something different. A classic example for Kantians is the idea of lying. I’m not even sure what Kant himself believed about this, because I think if there is controversy, and I’m not an expert… But there’s the idea that you should never lie, because if you were obeying the categorical imperative then lying is not something you want to be generalized to an action that everyone should take. But what if you’re hiding a refugee in your house and a murderer wants to come and murder them right? Should you tell the murderer that the person hiding from them is in the basement? Or should you lie and say something else? So it’s easy, or not maybe easy, but at least very often possible to come up with apparent counter-examples to the deontological rules that people generally suggest. 0:12:00 SC: When it comes to consequentialism, of course it depends on your version of consequentialism. Utilitarianism again is a standard example. So the idea that you have something called utility, some number that judges or characterizes, measures, how good things are going, and we can somehow add up that number, and that’s the thing we should try to increase or to maximize, I think sounds very intuitively compelling, or plausible, but it just doesn’t hang together once you actually put it to work in the real world. There’s one famous example of a conclusion which you might not like that comes from utilitarianism, in fact it’s called the repugnant conclusion by philosopher Derek Parfit. And roughly speaking it says if you think that most or any or all human lives have positive value, that just to exist gives some positive utility or whatever it is you’re trying to maximize, then very quickly you come to the conclusion that the morally right thing to do is to just increase the number of people, no matter what else, right? You can always do better by having more people around… 0:13:13 SC: You could maximize the population of the world which sounds like not necessarily the actually right thing to do. When I’m writing my recent quantum mechanics book “Something Deeply Hidden”, I considered this puzzle in the light of the many worlds interpretation, I said if you were a naïve utilitarian trying to think about many worlds, you would say, “Look, every time I branch the wave function of the universe into two worlds, if I think that the amount of utility in each world is positive, then it’s clearly a moral good to bring new worlds into existence since I am increasing utility.” So I invented a machine called QUMAD which stands for Quantum Utility Maximizing Device. 0:13:55 SC: And the Quantum Utility Maximizing Device, QUMAD basically just takes a spin and bounces it back and forth as fast as possible measuring its value of spin up or down across perpendicular directions, and every time that happens, the wave function of the universe branches in two. So you create many more people, they all have positive utility or at least in aggregate, they have positive utilities. So you are the best person in the world in terms of how much extra utility you’re creating, even though literally no one in the world knows that you’re doing anything, you’ve had no effect on the lives of anybody. 0:14:29 SC: That sounds wrong, right? That violates our intuition. Now, in the case of many worlds, there’s a simple fix for that, just like energy conservation, you can say that in fact, the utility that you add up should be multiplied by the wave function squared, by the amplitude of that branch of the wave function squared, so then when you divide the universe in two, even though there are now two universes, the total utility doesn’t change at all. But more generally, it’s that kind of thing that gets you in trouble with utilitarianism. Our moral intuitions don’t necessarily fit easily with the ideas that there’s a number that we should maximize out there which we call the utility. 0:15:08 SC: Now, you might say, “Who cares? Why should I care about that? What difference does it make if my moral intuitions come into conflict with some systematic version of what is right and what is wrong?” If I have a moral system, if I figure it out in my mind of the once and for all correct rules of ethics and morality, then the fact that my intuitions or natural impulses go into conflict with that should be completely irrelevant. My intuitions might be wrong. The system is right, right? That’s a little bit of a sticky situation though, I think. The origin of coming up with the idea that we should maximize utility or that we should act in a way that other people should act and so forth, all of these eventually come from our moral intuitions. 0:15:52 SC: We don’t pick these things randomly, that there is some place that they originate from, and I think that our moral intuitions are it. So let’s think about that a little bit more carefully, that means moving to the meta-ethical question, right? Why are we justifying these rules in the first place? And again, there’s an enormous amount of categorization and specific theories in this field that I’m not gonna go into, but we can contrast very roughly realism versus anti-realism in morality, right? And that basically gives the definitions you might expect a moral realist thinks that moral claims like this action is good, or this action is bad or real, real in the same sense that tables and chairs and atoms and the expansion of the universe are all real, they’re objectively there roughly speaking. 0:16:43 SC: Whereas an anti-realist either might not believe in morality at all or believe that there is morality but somehow it’s subjective, that morality is a human construct that could be different, could either could have been different for different societies, or could literally be different for different people in the same society. So, this is a very good question, a very deep question and one that is nowhere near resolved as far as I can tell within the philosophical community, I think that according to a famous survey of different philosophers and their opinions about different nutty philosophical issues, the PhilPapers Survey, most philosophers are more realists, they think that there really are moral rules that objectively exist in some sense. 0:17:29 SC: I personally am not. At the very, very least, I would strongly claim that whatever moral strictures are, whatever moral guidelines are, moral rules, whatever, they don’t exist, they don’t have reality in the same sense that tables and chairs have reality. Maybe that there’s some different sense of reality that they have, I’ll be least willing to contemplate that possibility, but they don’t have reality in the same way, they’re not part of the physical universe in precisely the same way. Again, I’m completely presuming for all of this discussion that naturalism is correct. I cannot appeal to God or any supernatural being to tell me what is right and what is wrong, even if I could, that runs into famous problems that were pointed out by Plato and others, but for me, I just have the physical universe, right? 0:18:20 SC: The universe is what exists, that’s what’s real. And in that universe, I don’t see any moral stances, any moral rules. I see stuff obeying the laws of physics. Now, you may have heard on certain corners of the internet, that we should be able to derive moral rules from the universe. The idea of deriving ought from is. What you ought to do from what is actually happening out there in the world. And I’m also sympathetic to this in some sense, right? I mean my best glib argument that you should be able to derive ought from is, “Is is all that is.” I just said that I just believe the, a universe exists, right? That’s what is real, and there’s nothing extra that is real other than the universe. So if we’re going to talk about oughts, about moral rules, where else would they come from but from the universe, but from what actually is. 0:19:20 SC: But sadly, that doesn’t work. There is another option, which is to say that you can’t derive moral rules from anything. You can have moral rules, you can suggest them, you can talk about them, you can debate them and you can try to persuade others that they exist, but they’re not being derived from something deeper than that. So it is literally… I know that you might have heard I had a debate with Sam Harris about this. Sam doesn’t like to put it always in the terms of deriving “ought” from “is,” but he has put it that way sometimes, and I debate him just because it’s a logical impossibility to derive “ought” from “is.” There’s deeper in words, careful ways of saying this, but basically it is, as in computer science, you have garbage in, garbage out. In logic, you have is in, is out. 0:20:15 SC: If you make a bunch of premises to your deductive argument that are all about what does happen in the world, you could not have a conclusion that says, “Therefore this should happen in the world.” There are a number of famous attempts to do exactly that, but either they… Well, but always they cheat. Let’s put it that way. Either they cheat by using ambiguities in natural language to make you think that we’ve gone from “is” to “ought” or they smuggle in some extra assumption which has ethical power, an extra assumption about what ought to be and say, “Well, look, this is so obvious that clearly you accept it.” That’s what Sam Harris tries to do. He says certainly we shouldn’t think that the moral thing to do is to maximize misery and unhappiness for anyone. 0:21:06 SC: Well, maybe we shouldn’t. I don’t want to maximize misery for everyone, but that is an assumption. That is not something you derive from what is out there in the world. So I just want him to state that that is an assumption because then we can debate whether that’s the right assumption to make. The thing I disagree with is the idea that it’s not an assumption at all. So I don’t think that you can get moral rules just by being out there looking at the world. The world doesn’t have moral judgments. The world doesn’t care what you do, right? The world just obeys the laws of physics. If I give you the wave function of the universe, it evolves over time according to the Schrodinger equation or whatever future physics we some day have. There’s no judgments there. The wave function of the universe doesn’t say, “Oh, that was a mistake to evolve in that way. That was an ethically bad practice that you just indulged in.” 0:21:57 SC: It just goes on uncaring, unfeeling. We human beings as a part of the world, once we describe the world at a higher level of the human world, the manifest image of the world where there are people in it and those people think and reflect and act, we people judge the world. We attach moral meanings to certain actions or certain things going on out there in the world. But they’re not inherent in the world itself. 0:22:28 SC: Now there’s clearly a lot of other ways to be a moral realist even if you don’t derive ought from is in some literal sense. There’s different ways of justifying the idea that in addition to the physical reality of the world, there are once and for all objectively true moral standards. I’m not gonna go through all the different ways to do that and sort of argue against all of them, I’m just going to put forward the idea that I don’t think any of them work despite the fact that this puts me in the minority of working philosophers who are much more educated about this. There’s also a healthy minority that agree with me about this. I do think that a motivation for searching for moral realist justifications, meta ethics, often comes from the idea that we like certainty, right? And this goes back to Descartes and many other people, goes way back before that, the idea that we want absolutely once and for all certain groundings for our belief. Descartes was interested in our belief in the physical world, what we would now think of as empirical questions: Are we sure we’re not being fooled by some malevolent demon? 0:23:31 SC: But it’s very common that you really just want to be able to say, not that you, not simply that you think that was wrong what you just did, but that it is objectively wrong. It’s the same kind of impulse that people have about aesthetics, that not only is this song good in the sense that I like it or I enjoy it or other people enjoy it, but is it objectively good? There’s a sense in which it is simply better once and for all and you can’t argue against it. So I don’t believe either one of those stances. Certainly again, if you compare it to how we think about science, how we think about empirical questions about the world, if you make a statement like the universe is expanding, that’s when we can judge by going out there and looking. But crucially, it could have been different, right? We can imagine a universe which was not expanding. We can imagine a universe that is expanding, we can imagine one that’s contracting, we can imagine one that’s static. So we have many different possible universes, and then we go out and do observations, collect data to decide which of those universes we live in. 0:24:37 SC: That’s just a completely different procedure than we have for morality. Very few moral realists think, “Oh, I can imagine many different systems of ethics and morality and I’m gonna go out and do experiments and decide which one is true.” That’s generally not how it works. So I think that we need to be comfortable to get ourselves happy with the idea that morality may be something that’s important to us, but it’s constructed, it’s constructed by human beings just like bridges are very important for human beings and they’re constructed by human beings as well, or the game of basketball is constructed by human beings. Once you’ve constructed it, it’s there, but it’s not inherent in the universe itself. So this point of view, which again, I’m not gonna do justice to all the details of, but you can find it online, this goes by the name of, guess what? Moral constructivism. Moral constructivism is just the idea that what you and I take to be ethical principles are made up by human beings, not made up necessarily arbitrarily. There might be good reasons to make up some rather than others, but ultimately, they come from within us as judgments, not from out there in the world or objective principles of reasoning or logic or anything like that. 0:25:56 SC: It’s important here to distinguish between moral constructivism and moral relativism. They are closely related, but different. They’re both anti-realist versions of morality, but a relativist would say you have some sort of community, you have a society, and that society comes up with moral standards. And then what is right and wrong is judged only relative to what that society believes. And it’s sort of a quietist view of morality in the sense that if you’re not a member of that society, then you don’t get to have an opinion. You don’t get to judge, if you think that something is personally repulsive, but it’s going on in that society over there and they think it’s okay, then you don’t have the right to say anything. Whereas a constructivist doesn’t say that. A constructivist simply admits the reality that human beings are the ones who construct moral rules. But once we’ve constructed them, constructivism lets you be judgy of other people. It’s not a quietist point of view at all. If I have my moral rules and I’ve come up with them for what I think are good reasons, I can apply them, and I will and do apply them elsewhere. 0:27:03 SC: And I can use that as a justification for acting in the world, for making things better, even if other people disagree with me. Now, what I want to emphasize here is that this picture of morality given by constructivism can sound a little wishy washy, can sound like, well, it’s not strong enough for me. If I’ve still bought into this picture where I want absolute metaphysical certitude for my moral impulse, for my moral rules in some sense, then the idea that it’s just made up by people might not sound robust enough. However, I would like to point out that it is nothing more or less than what actually happens in the world. We actually do come up with our moral theories in this particular way. I think that there’s this slightly, not perfectly articulated fantasy that more realists have that says that, “If I could just find the objective moral rules, then when I came into disagreement with somebody else in the world, we could sit down over coffee and I could convince them that they were wrong, because I’m objectively right and they’re therefore objectively wrong.” 0:28:13 SC: So I don’t think that that’s actually ever what does happen. You typically would not succeed, sometimes maybe you would, good for you. But I can certainly imagine situations in which you would not succeed in using the pure force of reason to convince someone that they should obey your objectively true moral guidelines. Whereas moral constructivism says, “Yes, I come up with some moral rules that I think are the right ones. Someone else has come up with some moral rules that they think are the right ones. And we can talk about who’s right and who’s wrong, which ones should be enshrined in rules, and legislation, and laws, and things like that. And sometimes we might just disagree in a profound way and not be able to overcome that disagreement.” Guess what? This is what really happens in the world. Moral constructivism is just about bringing the way that we theorize about ethics into line with the reality of how we practice ethics in the world. 0:29:11 SC: Now, having said all that, I talk a little bit about these ideas in The Big Picture in my last book. And it’s really focusing there on these meta-ethical questions, and I argue against moral realism and in favor of constructivism. But then you wanna go from that meta-ethical stance, morals are things that we construct, to an ethical stance. Okay, so what are the morals that we should construct? And in the book, I more or less punted on that, ’cause it wasn’t the point. I didn’t want to say, “Okay, here are the rules we should use.” I made some vague gestures in that direction, but that was not what I was trying to do. What I was trying to do was to set up the idea that we can live in a way that is both moral and intellectually fulfilling in a naturalistic universe. So it still leaves us the job of coming up with the right moral rules. So how do we do that? And there’s a long, complicated process, obviously there’s work being done here. I think that there’s two crucial components about how we should go about constructing our moral rules or our ethical guidelines. 0:30:15 SC: Number one, we reflect on what our inner moral impulses are. We human beings are not blank slates, we are not devoid of moral judgment until we read our first philosophy books. We have feelings about what is right and what is wrong. So reflecting on those feelings means accepting and recognizing the fact that sometimes, our moral intuitions if you like, are not coherent, are not compatible with each other. This is part of the job of moral philosophy, to take our sort of inchoate, rambling moral intuitions and systematically turn them into something that is logically clear, that says very definite things that do not contradict each other. This is the kind of thing that we try to do using ideas like a trolley problem thought experiment. The famous trolley problem, you have a trolley headed to kill somebody. Sorry, a trolley headed to kill, let’s say five people. And there’s a switch that would move over the trolley onto a different track where only one person would die. 0:31:17 SC: If you’re a deontologist who says, “You don’t want to take an action that would bring harm to anyone,” then you do not flip the switch, ’cause that’s a rule that you’re not allowed to do it. It’s not your action that is literally hurting someone. Whereas if you’re a utilitarian that says, “Clearly, we should have the smallest number of people dying,” then you would flip the switch, no problem. And there’s no right or wrong answer. These are two different impulses that we simultaneously have. And the job of moral philosophy is to sort of reconcile them somehow. And a moral constructivist would say, “There might not be a right or wrong reconciliation once and for all, there’s no objective standard. But this is the task we have before us.” And the other thing we need to do is to communicate. The first thing to do is reflect on our inner impulses. 0:32:05 SC: The second thing we need to do is to talk to other people. Ask them what their impulses are, ask them what their theory of morality is. Again, there’s no guarantee that if we do sit down over coffee, and communicate with each other, and share our moral intuitions, and try to reason together to come up with a mutually agreeable moral system, that we will succeed. There could be fundamental irreconcilable differences that we never get over. So we figure out some political way of dealing with that. We have value diversity and pluralism in a liberal democratic society for example. So we have to figure out a way to get around that, but it’s crucial along the way to actually ask people what they care about, what they think is right and wrong, not simply to assume that we can logic our way into coming up with the objectively right answers. 0:32:54 SC: And I think at the end of the day, I’m a little skeptical, and this is a very, very tentative position on my part, so don’t take me too much at face value or too seriously. I’m tentatively thinking that there isn’t a simple maxim that sums up the right way that I believe we should be moral. I don’t believe that there’s anything quite as easy as the categorical imperative or the greatest good for the greatest number that will ever work. I think that we human beings start out as sort of a jangly bag full of moral intuitions, values, if you wanna call them, impulses that we have. And some of these come from biology and evolution, some of them come from our upbringing, some of them come from society, some of them come from our cognitive, careful, philosophically logical reflection on what we should believe and what we do believe. And at the end of the day, we’re gonna have a bunch of rules of thumb for how to deal with different situations. And we might grow and get better, and not even get better, maybe that’s a little bit of a morally realist language sneaking into my rhetoric here. 0:34:04 SC: But we evolve, let’s just put it that way. We can change over time. And what we think should be that the balance between different values, values like you should be kind to each other, you should care about other people, you should make people happy, you should not insult them, you should respect their personal space, and their liberty, and so forth. A whole bunch of values that we can all talk about and judge which should be different levels of importance in different particular situation. Now, is that unsatisfying, is that not quite as pristine and clear as you would like, especially if you’re used to the kind of theories that we get in math, or logic, or physics? Sure, it is unsatisfying if that were your standard, but maybe that should never have been the standard. Maybe we should accept the idea that morality is something that is always a little bit in flux, that we’re aiming toward it without their actually being an it that we will ever achieve. Literally, it’s about the journey rather than the destination. And we can talk to each other and we can surprise ourselves. 0:35:11 SC: We can say, “Oh yeah, I used to think that was the right thing to do, but upon reflection, after talking to people, after growing in my personal experience, and learning things, now I realize that I think that that was wrong,” and that’s a perfectly good way to live. So, with all those in mind, let’s think about how to actually take that philosophy of right and wrong and apply it to some sticky situations that we actually run across in the real world. The first test case I wanted to talk about is the notion of vegetarianism. Is it okay to eat animals? The ethics of being a meat-eater. I do think that this is a topic where, I’m a meat-eater, I’m an omnivore, if you wanna put it that way. But I think that most omnivores are un-reflective about their omnivorous-ness. I think that they grew up that way, they figure that’s fine, this is life, and that’s how it is. I do wish that most people who ate meat gave more thought to the ethics of it, to whether it was right and wrong. Of course, this is part of the motivation I had for Moving Naturalism Forward that I don’t think that naturalists or people in general give nearly enough brain power, forethought to the moral and ethical values that they live by. 0:36:24 SC: And so, I respect vegetarians who become vegetarians for ethical reasons. I think that makes sense to me why you would do that, even if I don’t end up being in agreement with it at the end of the day. So what are the arguments for not eating meat, for becoming a vegetarian? I think there’s two broad classes. Although again, there’s many little sub-arguments here, I’m not gonna go into all the details. One broad class of arguments in favor of vegetarianism comes down to the environment to more or less practical issues centered on the practice of agriculture in our actual world. I think it is a true statement and a very real concern that modern agricultural practices are very often harmful to the environment. We cultivate huge herds of cattle, and pigs, and chickens, and sheep, and lamb, and goats, and this stresses nature in ways that are very clear. These various forms of livestock create methane, which is a greenhouse gas, which leads to global warming. And also the creation of farms often involves deforestation, tearing down, or burning down trees, and hurting the environment that way. 0:37:40 SC: And I think that these worries are perfectly good worries, I completely agree with these arguments. But I think that the conclusion of these arguments is we should change the agricultural practices. We should disincentivize harming the environment. I don’t think that these are arguments for becoming a vegetarian. I think that this is an example, where believe it or not, I agree with Dick Cheney, our former Vice President in the philosophy of this. Dick Cheney was once asked about conservation of energy, not conservation of energy in the physics sense, but conserving energy in the sense of not running the heater or the air conditioner in your house or driving too much and things like that. And he said, as far as he was concerned, that was a matter of personal virtue, not a matter of public policy. And I think that’s right. I think that whether or not you let the house be a little bit cooler than is comfortable and wear a sweater to make up for that, that is a matter of personal virtue. I think that the collective behavior of many, many people doing that, well, you know what, it’s not that many people doing it, it doesn’t really make that much of an impact on the world. 0:38:43 SC: Where I disagree with Dick Cheney is that there, I believe there should be public policies that do create a penalty for hurting the environment. So if you wanted to argue for legislation to charge agro businesses money when they do things that harm the environment, because they’re in some sense poisoning the public commons in a very real way, that I could very much get behind. But I don’t think that you, or me, or any set of individual people choosing not to eat meat has a big impact on that. So that’s a way in which I would disagree with someone like Kant, who says, “You should act in the way that if everyone did it, that would be the right way to act.” I think that if not everyone is doing it, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s not otherwise ethically bad. The question is: How do we affect important, relevant, effective social change? It’s not by individual virtue, it’s by legislation, or sharp, strong demonstrations, or something like that, ways to manifest the public will. There’s various ways to get things done, me not eating hamburgers, I don’t think is really doing it. 0:39:55 SC: So the other sets of arguments which I think are more relevant for the current discussion are the more purely ethical ones about eating meat. The idea that roughly, again roughly speaking, because there’s many variations on this theme, but we assign, we might imagine assigning an objective value to life, whether it’s human life or animal life or whatever. And we might draw the line as to where life is or is not important. Some people would count plants. What about insects? What about viruses or something like that? Okay, but there’s some group of living beings, maybe just animals, maybe conscious creatures in some sense, that deserve to not have their lives ended. I’m not saying that’s true, I’m saying that is a potentially relevant, interesting moral claim. In that case, killing, whether it’s human beings or animals is simply wrong. One way of putting this is why would you think it’s okay to kill cows and pigs and then eat them, but not kill cats and dogs and horses and other animals that we choose for pets? 0:40:57 SC: So this is where the rubber hits the road, in terms of thinking through our ethical rules that we’re going to construct as good moral constructivist. Should we judge it to be wrong to kill animals in of itself? After all, we judged it to be wrong to kill humans. And you might have thought back in the day, before naturalism came along, well there was a reason why killing human was bad because there’s an objective value to human life, given by the special place that humanity has in the world, either because of God, or because of something slightly vaguely, more vaguely mystical in some way. We don’t have that anymore, so maybe the question we should be asking is not, why is it okay to kill cows, but why is it wrong to kill humans. We don’t have that objective moral standard that we had when we were religious. We have to do something different. So as a moral constructivist I would argue that it is wrong to kill human beings, but not because it’s some objectively, absolutely true reality of the moral world, not because of some quasi-mystical attribution of an unbreakable right to live on the part of human beings. 0:42:10 SC: It’s wrong because we humans generally think that killing each other is wrong. We have that moral impulse, we have that value, we have that intuition that killing each other is a bad thing. If nothing else, we human beings generally don’t want ourselves to be killed. So if I didn’t want myself to be killed and I was completely neutral on killing other people, the communication part of the way in which we come up with our moral rules would say, I would go around asking other people, “Do they want to be killed?” And most people would say, “No.” So we would agree to come up with a rule that said, “Alright, let’s not kill each other, okay?” That’s the kind of thing that happens both in the real world and in the theory of moral constructivism. Of course, I’m sure that you’re thinking out there, some people will disagree. There are some people who think that it is okay to kill people. John Wick clearly thinks it’s okay to kill people, in certain circumstances. Less fancifully, there are plenty of people who think the death penalty is okay. There’s plenty of people who think that there are just wars where you can go out and kill the enemy. 0:43:15 SC: So there’s different ways of dealing with that. You need to sort of think a little bit more subtly about when it is okay and it’s not okay to invent this rule about not killing people. And when someone is just a sociopath, someone who just wants to kill people, we lock them up, we put them in prison, at least once they have killed somebody or they have done some violent act, that’s how mature societies deal with this problem. We’ve invented a rule, and those who stubbornly insist on violating it are punished in some way. That is, again, both what we do in the real world, and I think what we should admit is what we’re doing. It’s not a matter of some objectively real rule out there. We construct the rule, and then, we enforce it. So if that’s the case, if the reason why we don’t like killing people is because we don’t want to kill or do we want to be killed, what do we start thinking about animals? And I think that, personally, my feeling is that animals are different. Now, it’s always tricky to directly draw the line between what’s an animal and what’s the human? How are we different from each other. 0:44:22 SC: If you listened to my podcast with Adam Rutherford, you know how subtle that distinction can get. But I think that there is never the less a distinction worth drawing. Obviously, human beings have eaten animals throughout history. Animals eat each other. Nature is red in tooth and claw. That’s not an argument that it’s okay to kill animals, or that it should be okay, or we should construct rules that says it’s okay. It’s just a preemption of the idea that not killing animals is somehow natural, right? The natural state is that everyone kills everyone else, or they don’t care because they’re not omnivorous. Most animals actually don’t kill other animals, but it’s not because they mind it, it’s not because they invented a law or moral structure against it, it’s ’cause they’re not interested, they don’t get any benefit from it. Where animals do benefit from killing any other animals, that’s generally what they do in human history. So, we are faced, we need to come face-to-face with this issue, that we’re inventing the rules, what rules should we invent? 0:45:27 SC: There’s a couple of things that mattered to me here when it comes to how animals are different. And it basically comes down to the communicative part of how we invent, how we construct our moral rules, and a particular ability that human beings have to conceptualize the future in certain ways. Parenthetically, I should say, of course, any time we try to draw a line between humans and animals, we might imagine humans that are injured, or handicapped or disabled, or have genetic defects or something like that, where individual human beings might not fit into this categorization that we have. But I think it’s perfectly sensible to say that where we’re choosing to draw the lines is around the human species compared to other species in the world. So I think that’s just a footnote that we’re not gonna get into in any detail. What I’m trying to do is ask what is the distinction between animals, non-human animals as a set, and human animals? And again, another parenthesis here, other people might disagree and that’s okay, and we can talk about that, that’s cool, we should do that. 0:46:31 SC: I have friends who will not eat animals, or creatures with certain advanced nervous systems. There’s a famous rule that you shouldn’t eat things with a face. So I’m drawing it between human beings and elsewhere and I’m trying to explain, why? And again, number one, there’s the communication issue, and number two, the future issues. So let me explain what I mean by that. 0:46:53 SC: The communication issue, what I mean is, that we can’t sit down with animals and discuss moral laws. The part of the inventing our morally constructed, sorry, yeah, our constructed morals, is that we talk to each other and ask what each other want. And we do this in highly abstract ways. You know, there’s some ways in which we can imagine talking, communicating with animals. That’s absolutely true. But there’s also, unmistakably, a level of abstraction that we human beings can reach that the animals can’t. We can draw up contracts, right? And it’s actually, I’m realizing literally as I’m saying this, that the boundary between these two points I’m trying to make is a very fuzzy one, the one point about how we communicate and the other about how animals conceptualize the future. 0:47:44 SC: The point being that you can certainly see that animals know about the future, they worry. In certain circumstances, things are going wrong, the thinking of the example I have in mind is that when my cats, Ariel and Caliban, think that we’re gonna take them to the vet, they get upset. They run away and hide. When we pull out the cat carriers in a way that is obviously antecedent to putting them in the cat carriers, and then getting in the car and going to the vet, they know what that means. They know that the cat carriers indicate something bad is about to happen. And I think that cats are not the single smartest other set of animals out there. So, there’s no question that animals can conceptualize the future in some way. 0:48:26 SC: But what’s important to me is the idea of conceptualizing the future in a hypothetical way, in a purely abstract way that gives us the ability to draw up mutually agreed upon rules and contracts. You can train an animal, there’s no doubt, but what you can’t do is say, “Alright, look, if you do this for me tomorrow, then next year, I will do the following thing for you.” That’s the kind of thing that as far as I know, based on the science and the neuroscience that I’m aware of, I could be wrong about this, that other species other than human beings are not capable of. So, the cats might run and hide when we pull out the cat carriers. But when Jennifer and I are just talking about, “Oh, we need to take Ariel and Caliban to the vet next week,” Ariel and Caliban do not react to that. They don’t know that it’s gonna be this bad thing. They can’t quite conceptualize that future event. 0:49:20 SC: I think that’s important because I think that that idea of how we conceptualize the future is really secretly at the heart of why I think that killing people is wrong. And again, I’m gonna keep saying this over and over again, all this is tentative, and maybe I’m wrong. So, let’s keep thinking about it together. But the example that comes to mind, again from my Quantum Mechanics book, is quantum suicide. You may have heard of this thought experiment. Max Tegmark popularized it, although other people talked about it. If you believe in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, so you believe that when a macroscopic system observes a microscopic system, that the universe branches into multiple copies. And there’s different things going on, different measurement outcomes happening in each of those multiple copies. Then, imagine the following experiment: That you basically do a quantum measurement, with like a Geiger counter, or a spin, or something like that. And you hook up a machine where if the measurement comes out one way, you will be instantly killed. Instantly is very important because you’re not suffering, you just cease to exist right away as much as technologically possible. 0:50:30 SC: And then the other branch of the wave function where the other measurement outcome was obtained, you’re still there, nothing happens to you, okay? The idea is that in some sense, and Tegmark himself doesn’t say this, but other people have said this, you shouldn’t mind being put through this thought experiment, roughly speaking, because there’s now two branches of the wave function where there was only one. In one branch, you’re alive. You have nothing to worry about in that one. And in the other branch you don’t exist. You’re dead. Again, we’re presuming naturalism. There’s no life after death, or anything like that. So, why should you mind? There’s nothing there to be minding. There’s no you there to be upset that you got killed, okay? So, we’re putting aside issues that maybe you have friends, and they will be upset. We’re imagining an isolated loner kind of person. 0:51:16 SC: So, I don’t think that this logic works, as I explain in the book, Something Deeply Hidden. I say, “Look, imagine a classical universe in which there was a machine that could kill you instantly. So, forget about branches of the wave function. Just imagine that Newton was right, and there was only one thing that ever happened in the world, but there was a machine that could kill you instantly. You wouldn’t know that you were dying, right? You would be dead instantly. You wouldn’t suffer, and then after it happened, you’re no longer there to be upset. Should you mind if such a machine kills you? Well, my argument is I should be upset at the prospect of such a machine killing me ’cause I wanna live on. So, the reason why that would be bad is not because I would be upset after I was dead. It’s because I’m upset now at the prospect of it happening because right now I’m imagining all sorts of possible futures for myself. And that set of possibilities is abruptly terminated by this crazy machine. 0:52:14 SC: And I think that the same logic works for quantum mechanics and many worlds. I think that the prospect that in some branches of the wave function I won’t exist can upset me just as much as not existing at all in a single classical universe would be bad. And if that’s the reason why we should be upset at killing, it’s because the people now who are alive don’t like the prospect of dying, apart again from the fact that their friends might mind and so forth. 0:52:43 SC: Then, I don’t think that animals think the same way. As far as I know, that’s my reading of the literature. I don’t think that they have that sort of future oriented hypothetical imagination that lets them think about a universe in which they don’t exist. And this is crude, and subject to revision upon future scientific advances. But to me, as far as I can tell, that is a crucial difference between human beings and animals. And it’s one that makes me not attribute this right to continue existing to animals in the same way that my morally constructed rules attribute it to human beings. Now clearly, there’s a lot of details here. There’s a lot of more specific ways we could go into that. Maybe someday we’ll discover that animals do have this ability. We just didn’t realize how we could talk to them, and then I would update my beliefs. I would change my beliefs about what we can do. 0:53:44 SC: And again, it does affect questions like is it okay to murder pets, other people’s pets? Well, I think that what matters there is the human attachment to them. I think that, forget about cats and dogs versus cows and horses, I think that if you live in a culture where cats and dogs are not pets, where they are livestock, then I don’t think that there’s anything morally wrong about eating them. Go ahead. I think that the reason why in our culture, in my culture, in my house, eating cats and dogs is bad it’s because I have cats and I’m attached to them, and that’s an emotional feeling that I as a human being have and that matters to me that is considered in my moral calculations. Now, this is different than suffering, of course. Now, I did this thought experiment with an imaginary machine that ends your life instantly. That’s an imaginary machine, that’s not the real world, in the real world killing often does involve suffering, and I think that suffering is bad, and there’s no doubt that in the real world of farming animals often suffer and I disagree with that, I don’t want them to suffer. 0:54:54 SC: I am in favor of the animals on farms living as happy a life as they can up until the moment that they are killed. I think that the killing again, is sort of morally-neutral because the animals are not anticipating dying at some point in the far future because they overheard it, but the actual suffering in the moment that animals undergo I think, should be minimized as much as possible just as it should for humans. Again, the question is about how to actually make that social change and it should be about laws and regulations that make happy, I don’t know what, if there’s a technical term for the kind of farming… Humane farming, I suppose, that respects the existence on a moment to moment basis of the animals, which I do think, has some moral weight. And again, among… There’s another complication that I should mention cause morality is much harder and more complicated than physics is. We human beings might value the idea of things living, if not actual every specific thing. You can’t be too hung up on individual organisms living because we all die eventually. 0:56:04 SC: You cannot put absolute value on organisms, animals and so forth living forever ’cause that’s not plausible. Death is real and important and you must face up to it. But maybe and I think very reasonably you might care about the fact of life itself. The existence of living beings, maybe you even care about variety and diversity within the space of living beings cause maybe you think that a diverse set of species in a diverse ecosystem is an independent value. I can totally get on board with that actually, I think that its perfectly sensible to be against allowing endangered species go extinct. Preserving a variety of habitats and animal species in the world is something that I think is a perfectly reasonable value for we humans to get behind. Again, as before, I don’t think it leads us to vegetarianism. I think that we can have both the value of having a diverse ecosystem and eating meat at the same time. 0:57:09 SC: Having said all this, let me say, in case it’s not perfectly obvious, again, I totally respect people who don’t go along with this kind of thinking. I want us… I want there to be mutual respect. I don’t want to lecture vegetarians, I don’t want vegetarians lecture me, I don’t want anyone to lecture anyone else in a sort of hectoring way, I’m happy to talk about it in a rational way, and maybe someone’s mind will even be changed. Vegetarians and vegans especially have a reputation of being lecturers of pushing their values on other people. I know that there are… That vegans and vegetarians are like that, but look, there are meat eaters who are like that too. I’ve had plenty of examples of seeing meat eaters try to put their meat eating and shove it in the face of vegans and vegetarians. We tend to be defensive about our own personal values and that might be something that actually happens, but it’s not something we should be proud of, we should strive to do better. 0:58:12 SC: Which brings us to the other example I promised to talk about, the Intellectual Dark Web and their engagement with political correctness, Social Justice Warriors, things like that. I do recognize this is a subject some people are tired of, other people don’t wanna hear about, it becomes emotional and fraught, and people take sides and get very passionate about it, that’s why I put it at the end of this podcast, you’re welcome to skip it if you want to. But personally, I think it’s important that we talk about these issues. Even if it can get heated sometimes. We have to be able to have reasonable good faith dialogue about things we disagree about even if the underlying issues are by construction ones that are very, very personal, very, very close to the heart of the people who are talking about them. And why would I bring up the intellectual dark web in a discussion that supposed to be about morality and meta-ethics. 0:59:11 SC: Well, for one thing, of course, if we’re talking about social justice, justice is important part of ethics and morality. For another, I think, this is a good test case for thinking about the relationship of morality and rationality. Ethics and reason, these are two things morality and reason, that are not opposed to each other, that we need to work in concert in some way, but they’re different things. And so how exactly they come together is an important issue when we’re thinking about how to be moral. What is the role of rationality, when are we using it, when are we misusing it? The intellectual dark web was coined as a term by Eric Weinstein, Eric is the managing partner at Thiel Capital I believe, I might not get exactly his job title right. I first heard his name a few years ago when he was in the news, at least he was in The Guardian in the United Kingdom the newspaper, when there were headlines saying that there was a new theory of everything and Eric Weinstein might be the next Albert Einstein, revolutionizing physics. Many people objected to this since Eric had not actually written any physics papers including about his new theory of everything, and it doesn’t seem quite sensible to dub someone the new Einstein when they haven’t even written a paper yet. 1:00:33 SC: As far as I know, the paper still hasn’t been written, maybe it has, I haven’t kept track, but I’m pretty sure it has not revolutionized physics. I think I would have known about that, I would have been informed about that thing. But it’s just the term that Eric coined, there’s many other people in the group, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Christina Hoff Sommers, there’s a sort of ‘losin’ it’ collection of people. Nothing official, I don’t think there are membership cards or anything like that. But there’s this idea that there’s a group of people, intellectuals who are trying to reach the public through non-traditional means, not just getting fancy professorships at Ivy League universities, publishing high-profile books, getting reviewed in the New York Review, and things like that. 1:01:15 SC: I will confess that it always rubs me a little bit the wrong way, when people foreground the idea that what they’re saying is forbidden or contrarian or naughty, rather than what they’re saying is correct, or right, good ideas, not just forbidden ideas. But okay, that’s a stylistic choice that I won’t hold against them. What is the idea of the Intellectual Dark Web, other than this ‘losin’ it’ group of people, like how would you define what group of people it is, besides their methodology for using podcasts and videos not just books. So you can look on Reddit, there’s a Reddit subreddit dedicated to the IDW, as you might call them, the Intellectual Dark Web, and there it says, the term Intellectual Dark Web refers to the growing community of those interested in space for free dialogue held in good faith. 1:02:07 SC: The community exists outside of any governing body and has no biases to adhere to. It’s a collection of people willing to open rational dialogue, spanning a variety of issues from politics to philosophy. So I think this is a very problematic definition in a number of ways. It’s number one, the statement that there are no biases to adhere to, sounds rather unrealistic to me, but again, that’s not what I’m gonna focus on right now. More importantly, is that this is not a correct definition, it’s obviously not an accurate definition, if you want to define what is holding together this particular group of people. And it’s inaccurate in at least two ways. First, the idea that this particular group of people is dedicated to open free dialogue is not at all borne out by the evidence. 1:02:55 SC: The most celebrated current member of the Intellectual Dark Web would certainly be Jordan Peterson, he’s accrued a good amount of celebrity in the last couple of years. And he infamously threatens to sue people who insult him, by calling him a misogynist for example. He has called for university departments that he disagrees with, to be shut down. At one point, he was planning a website that would keep track of college courses containing what he labeled “Post-modern content” so that students could avoid them if they didn’t wanna be exposed to such ideas. 1:03:28 SC: Just a couple of weeks ago, as I’m recording this, Peterson met with Viktor Orbán, who is the president of Hungary, if you’re not up on modern Hungarian politics, Orbán is part of the populist wave that is sweeping the world, at least a mini wave. And he is, let’s just say, not a friend of free speech, let’s put it that way. Among other things, he’s cracked down on Hungarian ideas that he doesn’t agree with in many ways, so much so, that the Central European University which was located in Budapest, has fled. It’s moving to Vienna, in Austria, because of the crack down by Orbán. Peterson seemed to have a collegial meeting with Orbán, in which they bonded over their mutual distaste for political correctness. So these are not the actions of someone who is truly dedicated to the ideals of free speech. 1:04:22 SC: Members of The IDW who are also not uniformly pro-science. Peterson and Shapiro are… Have expressed sympathy for climate skepticism, they don’t really think that the earth is warming. And Shapiro at least, I haven’t dug up everyone’s bio here, but I know that Ben Shapiro has been sympathetic to intelligent design as opposed to ordinary Darwinian evolution, so it’s not obviously a pro-science group of people. However, okay, I’m just mentioning these ’cause I think that they’re important issues, but what I wanna get at for this particular discussion is, the Reddit description of what the IDW is, is only about methodology, it does not mention the substantive beliefs that these people have. 1:05:05 SC: It just says we’re open to free discourse, rational open-minded good faith discussions. But about what? And what are the positions that they’re advocating in these good faith discussions? The members of the IDW seemed to be very insistent that they are not politically homogeneous, that they have a diversity of viewpoints within their groups, there are conservatives, there are liberals what have you, they just want to advocate for free speech. But the reality is that they actually do agree on some substantive issues. I think that a lot of people who really are dedicated to the traditional left-right dichotomy, have tried to shoe horn the IDW into conservativism, or even a gateway to the alt-right, I think that’s kind of a waste of time. 1:05:53 SC: I’m not that interested in who is a gateway to what, if you disagree with somebody, then disagree with what they actually say, don’t disagree with them because they might lead someone to follow someone even more extreme. If someone says true things, and then for whatever reason that leads to more extremism down the road, the things they’re saying are still true. So, the extent which I care about what the IDW says, is what they are actually saying, not where they might lead. 1:06:20 SC: And I agree that it’s not really easy to put them on a conservative liberal spectrum fully. Because there is a diversity of opinions but again, they agree about some things, the things they disagree about are things like abortion rights or healthcare or climate change. So there they are literally on the filling the spectrum of political ideas. What they agree about… Well, let’s look at the New York Times. There’s this famous article by Bari Weiss, that introduced the IDW to the world where she mentioned certain things they agree about including there are fundamental biological differences between men and women and identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. 1:07:02 SC: And probably even though he doesn’t say it quite there in that paragraph, they would include the idea that there could be racial differences in IQ that separates let’s say blacks from whites or Asians. These are the kinds of ideas that the IDW, wants out there in the public sphere being talked about. So not including that the fact that they don’t want to mention that in certain definitions of who they are is another sort of red flag, in my mind. I think that you should be candid about the beliefs that you have and want to spread. There’s certain ideas, you will not find being promulgated in IDW discussions. You will not find good faith dialogue saying, “Well maybe we should all become intersectional feminists or maybe we should support Sharia law courts here in the United States.” 1:07:53 SC: What they agree on, there are cultural debates here in the United States, I’ll include Canada because Jordan Peterson, is Canadian. It might very well include other places in the world, but I personally am just not familiar enough with what the cultural divides are in those places to opine about that. Here in the US, we have certain cultural disagreements. There is the idea on the part of the IDW, that one side of those ongoing cultural debates is being repressive, is being closed-minded to the discussion of ideas, is shutting down debate. And the side that they’re accusing of doing that is the progressive social justice side. 1:08:35 SC: So while they may disagree on abortion or healthcare, they agree that there is a threat to free speech and open dialogue coming from the left. That is why it is sort of natural for some people to dub them conservative, even if though they themselves wouldn’t like that. So that’s fine, intellectually it’s fine to disagree with leftist on certain things. They might be right, it’s a little worrisome, they don’t wanna be candid about that substantive set of beliefs, but it’s certainly okay to have substantive opinions. But let’s think about what these substantive opinions are actually about what they’re actually saying. For one thing they’re not that naughty, the idea there are fundamental biological differences between men and women, you would have to work really, really hard to find people who disagreed with that statement. 1:09:25 SC: There are implications of that statement that people might disagree with, but they’re not putting those implications front and center, they’re not admitting to those, they wanna have this incredibly banal statement about there are biological differences between men and women, which is not really very controversial in most quarters. But if you think about what these statements are the existence of these differences and then the implications that they tease out from them between men and women, different races, people who might qualify as transgendered or lesbian, gay, queer those kinds of people. You think about what all these opinions are saying these are not cutting edge scientific discoveries, the idea that there are differences between men and women. These are Archie Bunker opinions. 1:10:09 SC: These are opinions that your racist uncle at Thanksgiving would have no trouble endorsing. These are just sort of standard issue conservative opinions, about the natural differences between different groups of people. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong, that doesn’t mean they’re incorrect, just because these opinions have been around for thousands of years. They could still be right even though they’ve been around for thousands of years, that often happens. But the fact that they might be cast as controversial, in this context, despite the fact that many people do hold them suggest we should think about them carefully. Suggest that we should say, “Well, not only what is the evidence for or against this opinion?” But why is it that certain people hold these opinions? Why is it that other people have become suspicious of these opinions, what is the history of this? 1:10:58 SC: And that’s because when we’re trying to think about being rational, we’re getting into the relationship between rationality and morality, we have to admit that we have opinions, we have histories, we have pre-existing ideas in our head. I like to think about being rational, and making choices about what propositions to believe in as a Bayesian, which is a fancy way of saying, you say that for all the propositions about the world you could imagine you assign some probability that they are true. And if you do that before you go out there and look at the world you call these your prior probabilities. 1:11:35 SC: And of course you never do that, before you go out there and look in the world, you haven’t assigned any priors at all. All of us look at the world before we ever hear about Bayesian reasoning, so really what we’re thinking about is before you make extra observations of the world you try to explicitly state what your beliefs about the world are. You have background information about your experience in life, about how you grew up, about what you’ve learned. And in that listing of your priors you better keep track of the fact that you have biases. We’re all bundles of biases. If Neuroscience and Psychology have taught us anything, we are not perfect reasoning machines, we can strive to be rational, we can aspire to get there to have our cognitive capacities have a stronger influence over how we live our lives and make choices and assign credences to propositions. But in the real world, there’s all sorts of ways in which we fall short at being perfectly rational. 1:12:33 SC: Not only do we have biases that affect our beliefs, but also in what we pay attention to in the world, what we care about, what we value. And it’s not that we should strive to get rid of our biases entirely. We move toward that, but we’ll never get there, okay? We will never not have biases. That’s just not psychologically or neuro-scientifically possible. If you read Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, it’s a good framework for thinking about these things. System 2 is our rational cognitive capacities. System 1 in his classification is all of our underlying heuristics and short cuts and intuitive ways of thinking about the world, and System 1 is the boss, really. Like System 2 thinks it’s in charge, but it’s analogized to the tiny little person riding an elephant, you know? The tiny little person thinks they’re in charge, but the elephant is doing all the work here, and that’s our heuristics, our biases. 1:13:30 SC: We’re not gonna get rid of them. What we can do is work to be aware of them, to take them into consideration, and I think that’s the primary message I wanna get at here in this particular discussion, as I started to say, maybe I didn’t finish saying it, I don’t care that much about the intellectual dark web as such. I am using them as an example, as a test case, for thinking about these issues of social justice, political correctness and so forth. None of this is new. When I was in college in the 1980s, people were complaining about political correctness. It’s like sex, right? Every new generation thinks it invented these ideas, but they’ve been around for a very, very, very long time. 1:14:11 SC: And so I think that the… What we wanna get at here is how we can best deploy rationality in a world where we recognize we are not perfectly rational. We want to be moral, we wanna be good people, we want to use the force of reason to help us decide what is right and what is wrong. We can never forget that the force of reason is imperfect in real actual human beings. So the intellectual dark web has put the word “intellectual” into their title. I think that’s good. I’m in favor of the word intellectual. I’m not gonna begrudge them, the ability to name themselves whatever they want. It’s important, but that word matters to me, okay? The word intellectual has power and it should be taken seriously. Intellectual doesn’t mean intelligent, it doesn’t mean knowledgeable, it doesn’t mean you’re an academic or a professor or anything like that, what it means to be an intellectual is that you hold the truth as the highest value, that you will work towards being correct forgetting about all of the other influences, all the other motivations, all the other biases you might have. 1:15:19 SC: Whatever truth you find out, you will stick up for regardless of what other implications there are. That, in my mind, is really what it means to be an intellectual even if those truths are inconvenient, uncomfortable, and so forth. The opposite of intellectual isn’t a stupid person, a dumb person, an uneducated person. The opposite of an intellectual is a flack, an ass kisser, a toadie, someone who makes up arguments to support a pre-existing position regardless of whether the evidence and rationality actually leads them there. A typical person who is not an intellectual might be an apologist for power, for money, for influence, people who are deploying their forces of persuasion for some purpose other than finding the truth. Telling people what they want to hear is the opposite of being an intellectual, and included in the list of people is of course yourself. Telling yourself what you want to hear is not what an intellectual should be doing. 1:16:23 SC: And we recognize this, for example, in science. In science, we know that this striving for getting at the truth is a constant battle against our biases, right? That’s why we invent blind analyses, double-blind studies, and so forth. If you heard my podcast with Kip Thorne, you know about the example of LIGO, the Gravitational-Wave Observatory, where they were so afraid of giving in to the temptation to find something even if it wasn’t there, that they instituted the system where they would inject fake signals into the data and not tell anybody. There was like a tiny group of people, a committee within the huge collaboration, that was in charge of injecting fake signals into the data with the idea being that the rest of the collaboration wouldn’t know whether that signal was fake or a real discovery out there in the sky and their job would be to take it seriously, to analyze it as if it were completely real. And then only at the end would it be revealed, “Oh, no, we just faked you.” 1:17:21 SC: And the idea is that you need to be on guard against fooling yourself. They wanted to make sure that they would be able to tell the difference between something that really happened and something that they were just patting themselves on the back into thinking actually happened. So I wanna extend this practice of science, the practice of knowing perfectly well, that we human beings are not rational and have biases and like to give into them and therefore should make extraordinary measures to safeguard against doing that, and I wanna extend it to morality and to rationality more generally. I think it is an important… A very important aspect of being a rational person. 1:18:01 SC: So the intellectual dark web, if you think about what is these substantive positions that they are supporting, we live in a world where there are certain cultural fault lines, okay, where certain groups have been picked on historically, certain other groups have been dominant, certain groups have been oppressed, certain groups have been powerful. And when it comes to these cultural fault lines, the IDW inevitably ends up supporting the group which here in the US or North America, has been historically dominant, the powerful, the ruling group. They are acting as apologists for the established order of things. They want to say that the unequal representation, for example, or at least they want to let’s say… Let’s be try to be more fair. They want to argue for the possibility that we should at least consider that things like the unequal representation of blacks and whites, men and women, gays and straights, and so forth, in various positions of power and influence and wealth in the United States is not a result of bias or discrimination. It’s just a reflection of the underlying natural order of things, an unbiased playing out to people’s talents and inclinations. That is the general impression that they want to either give or at least open to the… Be open to the possibility of. 1:19:23 SC: So if you think about that claim, if you think about the claim that the difference between the number of men and women in science, or in the United States Senate, or in positions of CEOs, or on the Forbes 500, I don’t know, what is the Forbes list? 400 people, 500 people, billionaires, the richest people in the United States? They’re not equal men and women, they don’t reflect the actual percentage of men and women in the population, or blacks and whites, etcetera. So do you really want to claim that this is just how things should be? It’s not actually a result of of bias and discrimination. That’s a very remarkable claim, if you want to state it quite that boldly. We’ve clearly had bias and discrimination in our society for a very long time, and it hasn’t gone away. In my mind, it’s pretty clear that it’s still out there. It’s clear that we have made progress. There are people whose ancestors not too long ago were slaves here in the United States, and there are still effects of that, but it’s much more recent than that. When I was born in 1966, okay, so not that long ago, within my lifetime, women were not allowed to apply to go to college at places like Princeton, Yale, Georgetown, the University of Virginia, okay, a giant public school. 1:20:42 SC: The idea that women should go to these places just wasn’t countenanced, blacks were openly discriminated against in countless ways. If you’re familiar with the history of how blacks were discriminated against long after slavery was officially eliminated, you should read on the history of red lining, the idea of drawing lines around certain areas of certain cities where blacks were concentrated, and refusing to give housing loans or mortgages to anyone who wanted to buy a house in those areas. This was an enormously influential policy, not an official policy written down in laws, at least not in those places, but an enormously influential practice, I should say, that prevented African-American families and communities from accumulating wealth and owning their own houses and lands for a very long time. It was officially declared illegal in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act. But of course it kept on going, unofficially, for a long time. There’s a study in the 1980s where it was much easier for poor white families in Atlanta, Georgia, to get a mortgage loan than for middle income or high income black families in Atlanta. 1:21:53 SC: And the results of this have been pretty astonishing. And 2009 is the most recent year I could find numbers for the wealth, not the income which is sort of the amount of money you make per year, but the wealth, so the total of your assets minus your debts. The wealth of a median white family in the United States is over $100,000, whereas the wealth of a median black family is under $6000. There’s an enormous wealth gap between whites and blacks in the United States. So the idea that in situations where very recently there was official discrimination, and still today there are the lingering effects of discrimination and bias in our society. The idea that somehow these effects don’t play a huge role in deciding who gets what job, who is promoted to what position, who is paid attention to, who we listen to. That seems wildly unlikely to me. We all know about how recently gay marriage was finally accepted here in the United States. It would be very, very, very strange indeed to think that the attitudes that led to these discriminatory policies, suddenly evaporated when the policies themselves were finally overturned. 1:23:07 SC: Presumably there were reasons why we had these policies, people had beliefs that made these policies seem like the right thing to do, and even if you change the law, the beliefs don’t necessarily change, even if they change with some people they don’t change with others. So to me, as a good Bayesian, thinking about what my biases are and what society’s biases probably are, it’s much more sensible to believe that our society is suffused with discriminatory ideas, in ways both obvious and subtle. So as rational people, it should be our job to accept that, to face up to that reality, and to keep as much vigilance as we can, to make sure that the effects of this discrimination and the underlying attitudes that led to this discrimination, don’t distort the world we live in, we want to live up to the ideals of the enlightenment. People who were… Famously people who were the enlightenment thinkers, who found the enlightenment, didn’t themselves always live up to the ideals of the enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and raped one of his slaves. Our actual people in the past fall short of their own self-promulgated ideals. But we can try to do better, we can try to be as close to those ideals as we can. 1:24:24 SC: The enlightenment teaches us that we are all created equal, and we live in a world where we are not all treated equal. So there’s a mismatch and we should fight against that. The example of such a mismatch that I’m most familiar with, and so I talk about it a lot, is Women in Science. This has flared up as an issue over the last year or two. There’s a famous example where the physicist Alessandro Strumia gave a talk at a conference, that he got in hot water for giving. So this… And it has become, as you might expect, especially on the internet, a hot button issue, where people have convinced themselves Strumia is a martyr for the cause, and so forth. If I… So Strumia’s point was, roughly speaking, that women are underrepresented in science because women on average don’t have as much talent or interest in doing science as men do, that was his point. Now, why was he even giving a talk about that at a conference on women in science? He wasn’t invited to give the talk, he invited himself. He asked to give that talk and when asked what he was gonna talk about, he lied, he said he was gonna talk about some details of bibliographical statistics, okay. 1:25:35 SC: That was part of his talk, but that was not what his talk was about. What he meant by that was, he basically is ranking the value of individual physicist by how many citations they get, by how often people would cite their papers in other… In their own papers. And basically, it’s almost absurd. You couldn’t… If you wanted to sort of embarrass the people who actually believe that women are not discriminated against, you would come up with a hero like Alessandro Strumia, it turns out in the middle of the talk, you begin to realize his real motivation for giving this talk is that he applied for a job and he didn’t get it and a woman got it, and he became convinced that the forces of political correctness were flooding the market with unqualified women at the expense of much more qualified men. 1:26:23 SC: And there are people who believe this. There are people who believe it at different levels of explicitness. And I just wanna bring up the absurdity of this idea. There’s not a lot of women in physics. Roughly speaking, the number of people who get PhDs who are women is 10%, that seems to be the number that it’s been for a few years now. I was a host for a Physics Colloquium at Caltech recently, and I looked at the audience for the talk, there were about 80 people in the audience, and three of them were women. And on my floor of the building in Caltech where the theoretical physics group is held, theoretical high energy physics group I should say, there’s roughly eight or 10 faculty, 10 or 12 postdocs, 20 or 30 graduate students. And for several years in a row, there were zero women. Zero women among faculty, postdocs, graduate students all in total in the theoretical high energy group at Caltech. So whatever the reason for this is, and Caltech is not completely representative and there are fluctuations, ’cause the numbers are small, but the idea that the forces of political correctness are flooding theoretical physics with unqualified women is absurd on the face of it, ’cause the women just aren’t there, it’s just not working, it’s a terrible way to flood the field, if that’s what you’re trying to do. 1:27:49 SC: If you think about it, the idea that it’s really men who have a bad deal in physics, not women is exactly like global warming denialism, like climate denialism. So what do I mean by that? So, in both cases, in climate denialism and in men are the real victims here denialism in science, there’s a phenomenon that is perfectly obvious. In climate, the perfectly obvious phenomenon is the average temperature of the Earth is increasing. The Earth is getting warmer. In science, it is that most scientists are men, they’re not women, it’s nowhere close to 50/50. And also, then there’s a pretty straightforward explanation for that phenomenon, in the case of the climate, it’s that we are dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is shooting up, and if you look at the curves, it looks just like the curve of temperature shooting up. For women in science, women have been discriminated against. They weren’t allowed to go to college [chuckle] for many years. And those biases and those discriminatory assumptions that lay in the background haven’t completely evaporated. 1:28:53 SC: But in addition to the phenomenon and the obvious explanation, there are two other factors at work. Number one, there are complications in the explanation that there is a simple explanation in both cases, but there’s also complicating factors. Life is hard sometimes, things are rarely very simple. For the atmosphere, sure, we’re putting carbon dioxide into it, but there’s other things going on. There’s ice sheets, and permafrost, and there’s the ocean versus the land, and there’s all sorts of… There’s sun spots, who knows? For women in science, there are forces that are trying to increase the representation of women in science, there’s women’s own interests in being a scientist or not being a scientist, there’s having children, there’s a million other complicating factors. Okay. And number two, there is a political motivation. 1:29:41 SC: There is a reason to resist the obvious explanation. In the case of climate, there is both this entrepreneurial capitalistic motivation to say, “No, I wanna keep burning fossil fuels, ’cause this makes me rich,” and this is complicated for other reasons, if you remember my podcast with Naomi Oreskes, she explained how libertarian politics and the fight against the Soviet Union in the 1980s really led to some people to resist the scientific consensus on global warming. And there’s a political motivation for women in science also, there are men, like Alessandro Strumia, who don’t want to admit that maybe women are discriminated against. They think of themselves as perfectly unbiased, that’s perfectly fair in these things. So the complications, if you look into it, if you dig into the science carefully for global warming or for women in science, the complications of the underlying explanation don’t change the underlying explanations, when you do it a little bit beyond the most naive. It turns out that, sure, there’s a simple explanation for global warming, but there’s also more complicated things you can do and the explanation still works. 1:30:54 SC: The world is still getting warmer, it’s still a bad thing. We should still stop putting greenhouse gases into the environment. For women in science, yes, there’s many complicated factors. They wanna have kids, family leave, maybe at very young ages, they become less interested in science, but the discrimination is still there, and it is keeping women out of science in very, very large numbers. But if you’re ideologically motivated to deny the reality, you can leverage those complications. You can throw up a cloud of disinformation, you can talk about all sorts of other things going on, and this is a well-known technique in propaganda. If you have an audience that is sympathetic to a certain point of view, even if that point of view is not true, you can give them a reason for accepting that point of view just by muddying the waters, just by saying all sorts of different things and giving them sort of a license to say, “Well, we don’t really know.” This is the kind of thing that Jordan Peterson would say about climate change. 1:31:55 SC: “Well, we don’t really know. There’s a lot of complicated things, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.” And you see this kind of thing at work in Strumia’s talk, you can see the slides for his talk online. There’s one that is especially hilarious where he is comparing the career number of citations from women physicists and men physicists. And so he plots a number of citations you have per year, five years after your PhD, 10 years after your PhD, 15 years, etcetera. And you can see very clearly that men just keep going up and up and up, and the women sort of go up at a much lower rate. They seem to be accumulating fewer citations over time. 1:32:33 SC: Now, there’s a [chuckle] very good argument to be made that total number of citations is not an un-mediated measure of scientific quality. It begs the question of whether or not the women are being discriminated against by getting less citations, but let’s put that aside. The hilarious thing is that he completely ignored the fact that women leave science. He was comparing men who stayed in physics for 50 years to women who had done physics for five or 10 years and then left the field. It is completely unsurprising that their total number of those citations over time are very different, ’cause they spend a lot of very different time writing papers. 1:33:13 SC: That’s not to say that the underlying conclusion is not true, but the analysis is woefully, hilariously inadequate. And it comes about because he knew what answer he wanted to get, and he got it and then he stopped thinking about it. That’s the kind of thing that can happen when you’re not an intellectual, when you’re not devoted to the truth, when you have an answer you want to get, you sort of get there and then you stop thinking anymore. The reality is that discrimination is real, against women, against blacks, in a million different ways. There’s discrimination in Physics, as well as elsewhere in the world. That’s what you can test for, and every test reveals the same basic answer, that biases are real, they exist. This is why concert musicians have developed a system where if you wanna audition for the orchestra you do so behind a curtain, so the people who are listening to you are listening to your music, not looking to see whether you are male or female. Because the test show that there was a huge bias in favor of male musicians. 1:34:15 SC: There are obviously examples of harassment within Physics, and harassment is sort of an extreme example of something that happens all over the place, right? Professors commenting on women’s appearance, students and as well as other faculty colleagues. I personally see this all the time. I cannot possibly imagine how someone could be in the physics community, have their eyes even slightly open, and not see all of the million ways in which women’s worth is questioned as a scientist. It is just a constant stream of very, very subtle questioning like, “Do you really belong here?” kinds of things. And you can say, “Well, if you wanna be a scientist you should suck it up, you should put up with all those little people questioning your worth,” but it’s unbalanced. If people need to suck it up, that’s fine, but there’s no reason why women need to suck it up more than men. That’s exactly the example of discrimination, it’s death by 1000 cuts, not necessarily actively being pushed out. 1:35:21 SC: And it’s not because… It’s not a simple relationship between math ability and whether you become a physics professor, there are more women in mathematics than there are in theoretical physics. Girls get better grades in math classes than boys do, okay. Girls don’t do as well on standardized tests of mathematics as boys do, past a certain age, very early age it’s similar, later on it becomes different. So the question is, is doing math in the real world more like getting a grade in a class or more like taking a multiple choice test? I think you could make a case that it’s more like getting a grade in a class. All of this influence, all of this questioning that women really don’t belong in this field, it starts very, very young. My niece, once we went to Christmas, we gave my niece and my nephew both Christmas presents, my niece who was like, I don’t know, eight years old, 10 years old at the time, she opens her Christmas presents, and it was a little Erector set to build an electric car. Just a tiny little thing, you built an electric car, there’s little battery in it, and you made it go. And she opens and she looks at it, she’s very young, and she looks at us and says, “Oh, I think there was a mistake. This is for my brother.” 1:36:38 SC: And we said, “No, no, it’s really not for your brother, it’s for you,” and you could see her struggling with this idea, “I don’t get presents like this,” right? And it’s not because she’s actively discriminated against, it’s not because my brother and his family were trying to steer her away from science or engineering or anything like that, it’s just ’cause there are supposition about what girls want versus what boys want. And the hilarious upshot of this story is that half an hour later, she had built that car and it was zooming around the floor and she was loving it. She had never been able to play with something like this before. We just sort of start when children are born, assuming that they like certain things, don’t like other things. And for some girls it wouldn’t work, some girls would be completely not interested in cars, and that’s perfectly okay. But if we don’t give them the chance, we’ll never know. So what I’m doing here in this discussion, I know that I went on extra long about that, because it is very close to my heart. And I’m focusing on the existence of the discrimination. The existence of these thousand mild ways, ways both mild and strong, that women are nudged out of science and the effect that it has on them. 1:37:49 SC: And I’m not having a discussion about what the inherent abilities are, given to us by biology whether we are men or women. That is the subject that the people who don’t believe in discrimination tend to prefer to focus on. And the reason why I’m not focusing on it is ’cause who cares? I really, it’s… So there’s this idea that if I don’t want there to be discrimination I must be denying the reality of biological differences. That’s not it. It’s that I don’t care about biological differences. It is certainly true to anyone who has actually met both men and women, that the women who are good at math and physics are better at it than the average man at math and physics, right? Therefore, knowing that someone is male or female, should have absolutely no influence on how you judge them as a mathematician or physicist or other forms of scientist, you should judge how they actually are as an individual. It may be the case that there is a difference between girls and boys, intrinsically in different kinds of ability. 1:38:57 SC: It may be that t