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Pardoned for What? Robert George on DarkHorse · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:00
  Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast.
• 0:03
  I have the distinct honor and pleasure of sitting with my good friend, Robert P.
• 0:08
  George today. He is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton.
• 0:13
  He is also the director of the James Madison Program. There he teaches in the area of the philosophy of law, constitutional law, and moral and political philosophy. Robbie George, welcome to DarkHorse.
• 0:26
  Pleasure to be back with you, thank you.
• 0:28
  Thank you very much.
• 0:32
  All right, there are a number of topics I'm hoping to talk with you about, and I have, frankly, the topics have just built up over the course of many months.
• 0:42
  The one I wanna start with, because in some sense, I think it is the biggest gap in the public's understanding of where we've landed, is the status of pardons. Obviously, there were a great many pardons issued at the end of the Biden administration,(...) and Trump has pardoned some people on his way in.(...) I have opinions, suspicions, concerns, but frankly, I'm no expert in this area, and I would love to hear what you're seeing.
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• 3:13
  Well, thanks for asking that question.
• 3:15
  It's obviously a very important and timely one. The pardon power vested in the executive(...) is by no means new,(...) and it didn't begin with our constitution.
• 3:28
  Medieval kings possessed this prerogative, as it was called, the pardon power. And there's a reason for it. As a matter of political theory or philosophy of law, law is general.(...) It has to be.
• 3:46
  It doesn't cover specific cases for specific individuals. It covers the great multitude of cases.
• 3:55
  And it does pretty well, good law does pretty well for the overwhelming majority of cases.
• 4:01
  But sometimes you have outlier cases where doing what the law requires(...) undermines the very principles of justice that the law exists to uphold and advance.
• 4:17
  And so you can get a conviction properly entered according to the strict letter of the law, which nevertheless we have good reasons to wish we didn't have.
• 4:33
  So a jury brings in a conviction, let's say in a criminal case, and all things considered in this outlier case, it really seems to be unjust.
• 4:44
  What can be done about that?
• 4:46
  Well, beginning in the medieval period,(...) power is vested in the executive, that is to say the crown, the king, the queen, to grant the pardon so that we get a just outcome when otherwise we'd be stuck with an injustice done though according to law.(...) Now, like any power, Brett, the pardon power can be and has been abused.
• 5:12
  The abuses didn't start yesterday.
• 5:16
  Any power has been abused, power will be abused. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have the power.
• 5:22
  Oh, let me be perfectly clear. I actually am strongly in favor of the existence of such a power for precisely the reason that you outline.
• 5:33
  There is obviously danger in this power and it is inherently subjective as to whether somebody deserves a pardon.
• 5:44
  And therefore, in virtually any case, there is likely to be a claim that abuse has occurred.
• 5:52
  But at the end of the day, systems that function, including systems of law, have to have a discretionary element built in.
• 6:00
  And I like the idea that there's somebody at the end of the day who can look at this and say, this person shouldn't be in prison, this person shouldn't have this black mark on their record. But my concern is that there is something novel taking place that actually what a pardon is has been extended and the idea of pardoning people in a general sense preemptively is very troubling because effectively what it does is creates two tiers of citizens, those who are liberated from responsibility to the law and those who aren't.(...) And at the very least, as a citizen, I would hope that the issuance of a pardon would have to be specific enough so that in effect, we are acknowledging that something has taken place and free to discuss whether or not the pardon was reasonable. But a blanket pardon that protects from somebody from, for example, Fauci from whatever might be discovered about what he did during the COVID era or the AIDS era troubles me beyond words.
• 7:09
  That strikes me as an abuse as well. Now, even as it's been exercised today, pardons are not prospective.(...) A president under our constitution,(...) nor could a king in the old days, president can't pardon somebody for future crimes. Right. But what you're talking about, Brett, is where President Biden, for example, pardons someone not simply for a specific crime for which that person has been convicted or for which that person is under prosecution, but pardons in a sweeping manner against any possibility of being convicted for anything that he did, contrary to the laws of the United States for this period of time, when, for example, in the case of Dr. Fauci, he held a public office.(...) That's troubling. There's no question that's troubling. It's not preemptive in the sense that it doesn't license him to commit future crimes. It doesn't pardon him for things he may do in the future.
• 8:15
  But it means there will be no prosecution(...) for anything he did in the past, not just some specific thing for which the president judge's prosecution would be unjust because this is one of those outlier cases, but for anything he did.
• 8:29
  Now, how can that make sense? And that's your question, and it's a very, very telling one.
• 8:34
  It can't make sense, and I would push back slightly. I mean, obviously, you're the authority here, but it is prospective in one sense. It is prospective in the sense that it does not anticipate what may be discovered about what happened in the past. It doesn't immunize against future behavior, but it immunizes against the discovery of past behavior that may be egregious beyond what the pardoner was aware of.
• 9:02
  Well, it doesn't immunize against discovery, but it does immunize against prosecution if it is discovered. You can still have inquiry.
• 9:10
  No, that I understand, but the idea-- But also, there's something else worth bearing in mind.(...) If a party, if a person, is immunized by a pardon against prosecution,(...) that person then cannot invoke his, under our law, Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.
• 9:30
  Whether it's in testimony before Congress or in testimony in criminal prosecutions against other parties, including parties with whom the pardon party was intimately involved, including in decision-making, where the nexus of facts is the one that would have given rise to a prosecution of the first party but for the pardoned. So some of the people to whom pardons were given, including Dr. Fauci, may find themselves required to give testimony with no protection under the Fifth Amendment prohibition of self-incrimination, or protection against self-incrimination.
• 10:07
  Yes, this has been widely discussed in the health freedom movement, that there may be an upside to Dr. Fauci's pardon. I must say my personal perspective is as much as I understand that this does create a bind for him, the idea that it would actually result in consequences I find a bit far-fetched. So I'll be delighted if he is placed under oath and is not allowed to lie, which is effectively, he can't invoke his Fifth Amendment rights is what your point is, but my guess is he will pretend not to remember things and lie and nothing will come of it.
• 10:47
  As you can hear, I take a very dim view of the man having studied his works, but in any case-- If he does lie, he would be vulnerable, and the lies discovered, he would be vulnerable for perjury. He doesn't have a pardon for behavior, including testimony given in Congress or given in a prosecution of someone else.
• 11:08
  So he would still be vulnerable to a perjury prosecution. Now you may doubt, Brett, that the Republicans have the stomach to prosecute him for, I mean, that I'm not sure, you're outside of my area of expertise, and I gotta talk to the contemporary affairs guys, not the philosophers or constitutional theorists, but he's certainly under the Constitution liable to prosecution.
• 11:30
  Sure, let me go one step further with respect to my own trepidation about these broad, nonspecific pardons.(...) It seems to me that they open a fissure in the Constitution that the natural process of erosion that enlarges loopholes ultimately invalidates the entire document, because to the extent that a class of people becomes aware that they can simply be pardoned out of crimes that they committed as long as a particular executive(...) was in the Oval Office, then they become liberated in the present, and that we cannot have a lawless governance structure, that is the inversion of the Constitution that was written, and it makes the point to me that whatever legal theory was used to justify these broad, nonspecific pardons is clearly invalid at a logical level.
• 12:43
  Yes, I see your point. Now,(...) in our constitutional system,(...) there's truth to the old adage that it is the people themselves who are ultimately the defenders and protectors of their own Constitution. There is truth in that.
• 12:59
  It falls to we the people to make sure that a president who abuses the pardon power, whether in the way that we're talking about now or in some other way,(...) or his party, if he's no longer seeking office, pays the political price for having abused the power.
• 13:19
  And that means it's incumbent on the other party to make an issue of it, electorally, to force politicians to say where they stand on the question.
• 13:29
  Do they or don't they condemn this abuse of the pardon power? Will a new candidate for office pledge that he will not engage in this kind of abuse of the pardon power?(...) Make it political. At the end of the day, it's gonna fall to the people because you got the backstop and then the backstop or the backstop. At some point, it's gotta end with the public officials.
• 13:52
  And the ultimate backstop is the people.
• 13:54
  And if we the people fail to do that, if we fail to bring swift and certain retaliation against people who abuse their powers under the Constitution, we're just gonna get more abusive power under the Constitution.
• 14:06
  Which brings us very clearly in my mind to today because I feel that the people actually did exactly what you're talking about, not with respect to pardons. In fact, many of the pardons came after the momentum was already in the current direction. But at some level, the people rebelled against their sources of information. They rebelled against all of the structures that typically guide them.
• 14:37
  And they voted for a bull in a China shop because they felt the China shop had to go. And I think you and I ended up in somewhat different positions in this election. I actually supported Trump because actually I wholeheartedly believe that the duopoly is essentially beyond saving and a bull in a China shop was preferable to seeing it continue(...) to erect new powers for itself.
• 15:13
  But nonetheless, I do think the people, what we learned for the second time with Trump was that there is, whatever the truth of our electoral system is, there is still enough power in it for the people to do something that the power structure does not want done. That's what happened.
• 15:29
  There's no question that that's what happened.
• 15:32
  And while the abuse of the pardon power probably did not play a role in Kamala Harris' defeat, if we look at the current situation in the Democratic Party, the current plight of the Democratic Party at an historic low in terms of public approval with fewer registered Democrats than Republicans for the first time since the New Deal,(...) I think that the abuse of the pardon power did have something to do with that. I think the pardoning by the president of his son, Hunter, for no reason other than that he was his son,(...) especially coming after all the abuses by public officials who falsely claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop didn't exist or if it did exist, it didn't contain what it turned out to contain or that it was Russian disinformation or whatever, think the Democrats are paying a price for that in terms of their status now with the American people. That's not the only factor that has caused the demise of public support for the Democratic Party.
• 16:41
  (...) Certainly getting on the wrong side of men in women's athletics has played a role.
• 16:49
  There are lots of other things that have contributed to it, but I think the abuse of the pardon power was pretty stark and glaring and most Americans did not approve of it.
• 17:01
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• 18:54
  In my opinion, I say this as an embarrassed Democrat. It's not low enough. And at this point, I actually, I wish for the party's demise in exactly the way that if my dog came down with rabies, I would hope that it would be swiftly put out of its misery and maybe another dog would show up down the road.
• 19:20
  You know, it really seems to me it is so profoundly corrupt across so many different domains,(...) and it has spit in the face of every value I thought it once held that I just can't even, I can't even hope for its resurrection and its discovery of its errors. I think it's a rabid dog that needs to be put down. I wonder, I mean, you're obviously not a Democrat, but I wonder if that strikes you as too harsh.
• 19:53
  It does not strike me as too harsh. And let me tell you my own story.
• 19:57
  All right. I'm the grandson of coal miners. Both of my grandfathers were coal miners. I was born and brought up in the hills of West Virginia.
• 20:06
  We were brought up to believe in four things, Brett.
• 20:10
  Jesus Christ, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic Party, and the United Mine Workers of America.
• 20:21
  Now, I still believe in Jesus Christ, but the others,(...) not so much.
• 20:26
  I was involved in politics when I was a young person, actually.
• 20:31
  I was an alternate delegate at age 18, just old enough to vote.
• 20:36
  At the 1976, I'm sorry, I would have been at 21. And the 1976 Democratic National Convention, I'd been called on to vote, I had planned to vote for Carter.
• 20:49
  I served for two terms as the governor, as it was called the governor of the West Virginia Democratic Youth Conference.
• 20:56
  Now, in my time growing up in West Virginia, not only were we Democrats, not only did we not like Republicans, we didn't know any. There were no Republicans in the state. It was a democratic monoculture,(...) let me tell you.(...) So I am a former Democrat,(...) and I know what the party believed in back when I was a boy.
• 21:21
  (...) And I know why my grandfathers were proud to be members of that party, just as they were proud to be members of the United Mine Workers of America, just as they were proud to be supporters of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.(...) Now, I look at things somewhat differently, I think, than they did these days. I have less trust in government than they had, less trust in big government programs to solve problems, like the problems that government attempted to solve concerning poverty in Appalachia, again, when I was a boy in the 1960s in the Great Society programs. But nevertheless,(...) many of the values that the party held in those days, I continue to hold to be good and true. I've never been fully comfortable as a Republican. For one thing, I worry about my poor grandfathers spinning in their graves about having a Republican grandson.
• 22:15
  But I have to agree with you. I mean, the party has rejected what it wants to, remember when we were, wait, you're younger than I am, but at least when I was a kid, the Democratic Party really was the party of the working man.
• 22:29
  Yes.
• 22:30
  The party of the downtrodden, the party of those marginalized.(...) There's been a reversal. Today, it's the party of the managerial and professional class, the Uber class, and the working class, Donald Trump picked them off off the street.
• 22:46
  This is exactly what I saw.
• 22:50
  Now let me tell you about my mother, Brett. My dear beloved mother, she just died end of January, so recently died. My father died last March. They lived wonderful, long lives. My dad was 98, my mom was 92. Sadness, but not a tragedy.
• 23:06
  But I remember in 2016, getting into an argument, a political argument with my mother. We hadn't had many political arguments in my family. We all pretty much moved along the same trajectory. I mean, we believed in the old Democratic Party, and when it abandoned us, we shifted ground.(...) Our shifted party is a party shifted ground.
• 23:27
  We shifted party. But I was having an argument with my mom because she was right on board the Trump train.
• 23:37
  And I just couldn't say it. I had too many problems with Donald Trump's personal character, and I had always argued, especially during the Clinton administration, that character really matters for leadership. Character is important. We can't just look at whether the candidate endorses our side on issues. We character really matters.
• 23:55
  So I'm talking to my mom, and she's upset with me because I'm not supporting President Trump. Now I wasn't supporting Hillary Clinton either, but I wasn't on the Trump train.(...) So I said to her mom,"I can remember in 1980"when I was trying to talk you "into supporting Ronald Reagan,"and you believed everything "that Ronald Reagan believed in. "You believed in the three-legged stool,"strong national defense,"traditional values, the market economy,"but you wouldn't support Reagan." Now, why wouldn't you support Reagan? Now, she finally did come around to voting for Reagan, but she wrestled with her conscience about whether to support Reagan. You know what her issue was, Brent?
• 24:45
  Reagan was divorced.
• 24:48
  Now, he'd been divorced against his will.
• 24:50
  His wife had walked out on him. He wasn't womanizing. He wasn't John F. Kennedy.
• 24:57
  But my mother was wrestling with her conscience about the moral character from Reagan because he'd been divorced even though she believed him 100% down the line. But now it's 2016, and she's 100% on the Trump train, which struck me, you'll forgive me, but it struck me as something of an inconsistency.
• 25:17
  And yet why? To be sure. It's because, and when I pressed her on the issue, she was pressing me and I was pressing her.
• 25:25
  Why?
• 25:26
  Because he fights for ordinary people.
• 25:30
  He's on our side.(...) My mother had come to believe entirely reasonably that the Democratic Party now represented an assault on all that she held dear, on her patriotism, on her religious space, her moral values, and so forth, and so on.
• 25:48
  I'll tell you the thing that most resonated with her when Trump said it.
• 25:53
  When Trump said, "You know, they say they're out to get me,(...) but they're not out to get me. They're out to get you, and I'm just in the way, in their way." My mother's heart was throbbing. She was resonating to that because it was her experience of her old party and of the elites against whom Trump was willing to stand up. When from my mother's point of view, the mainstream Republicans were not. Romney didn't stand up to them, and even John McCain didn't stand up to them. George W.
• 26:25
  Bush didn't stand up to them.
• 26:28
  Donald Trump will fight for me. And I think the working class in our country basically had my mother's view.
• 26:35
  Yeah, well, I must say I resonate quite a bit with where your mom ended up. I did not vote for Trump in 2016. I certainly wasn't gonna vote for Hillary, but I couldn't bring myself. I didn't see it with Trump yet. And I think Trump was a different person. I think all he went through caused him to grow.
• 26:56
  But it seems to me that the Democratic Party, if I remember my history correctly, I believe that the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton's leadership actually realized(...) that instead of being the party of working people, which is of course an obvious strategy to win elections, even cynically, if you defend the people, it's likely to be popular.
• 27:28
  But Bill Clinton decided to turn it into a corporate party and he cut the working class loose.
• 27:35
  And in so doing, the working class was adrift because of course the Republican Party was quite corporate at the time.
• 27:42
  And then Donald Trump as really not a Republican, Yep, that's right. Picked up that movement. And MAGA really is, in my opinion, mostly it started out as the white working class. And then in this election,(...) it broadened and it picked up virtually everybody who was politically homeless.
• 28:05
  So I must say I have complicated feelings about Trump.
• 28:11
  I see a lot of good. I see a recklessness that I find necessary, but frightening.
• 28:18
  But I do think he is the unique human being who had the capability to actually single-handedly defeat the duopoly. He seems to have defeated both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Did it?
• 28:36
  I mean, I can't believe he was that.
• 28:37
  He did it. Yeah, he did it. And I can't think of another person who had even a 10th of the necessary skills to pull that off. And it's not as if the duopoly did not.
• 28:50
  They threw everything at him. Yeah, they threw everything at him. Absolutely everything. What you said about Clinton, I found very interesting.
• 28:56
  And it summed up in NAFTA.
• 28:59
  Free trade was Republican orthodoxy. I mean, it was every bit as Republican orthodoxy as tax-cutting and the other mainstays of the Republican Party. And Trump was able to challenge that. I mean, who would have predicted that anybody could successfully challenge NAFTA or challenge the Republican Party? I mean, I think it's a very interesting question. I mean, if anybody was gonna be on the Democratic side that you get the challenge from the unions and so forth.
• 29:23
  But Trump was the guy who did it. It's really quite remarkable.(...) You know what I love about reality? It's much more complicated and unpredictable than any scholar thinks. We all think that we can penetrate it with our intellects. Stop surprises us. I mean, we can't predict, we can't see, we can't account for, after the fact, we pretend we can account for it. And I think that's a good question. Yeah, I think that's a good question.
• 29:42
  After the fact, we pretend we can account for it. But stuff happens that's just amazing. The contingency of history is absolutely remarkable to me. I mean, this is where I think Marx and his Hegelianism goes most wrong. He really thinks that history's got a trajectory that enables people like Barack Obama to say, "Well, unless you side with me, you're on the wrong side of history." They fail to see the radical contingent nature of history.
• 30:09
  It's just a sequence of events that is not directed at all, and nobody can really say what's gonna happen.
• 30:18
  Well, actually, this lands squarely in my area of expertise, and I see the same thing. And I will, hopefully this will be of some utility to you. But the distinction is between a complicated mindset.
• 30:36
  We are very good at dealing with complicated things. We can create a computer that no person can fully explain the behavior of, though there are people who can explain every element(...) that is within it. That's complicated. Yeah, right. But complexity, which is what we see in biology, what we see in what you're calling the contingency of history, is fundamentally unpredictable.
• 31:00
  (...) And it is exactly people like Marx who think that they know in which way to intervene in order to cause a certain outcome. That is the worst kind of hubris. You think you've understood a system and you imagine it to be complicated, and it turns out to be complex, and it just upends you every time.
• 31:21
  It does, and the consequences, as the example of Marxism show, can be so tragic, because you're so confident that you can control things going forward, because you think you understand the way things have to go. And it turns out that disasters and catastrophes, the worst kinds of inhumanity, the worst kinds of brutality, the gulag, the whole communist system of enslavement happens.
• 31:49
  Yeah, well, this is the,(...) as a now older person, this is what I've come to understand about liberalism, which is my home, and I still resonate with the desire of liberals(...) to create the conditions in which a betterment of people's wellbeing occurs. But the problem is that you think you know what you want to accomplish.
• 32:17
  Maybe you're even right about what would be desirable, but there is a childish unwillingness(...) to recognize the likelihood of unintended consequences, and even worse,(...) a refusal to monitor the outcome of the interventions that you've engaged in so that you know when it didn't go the way you thought.
• 32:44
  So modern liberals will convince themselves that whatever they did worked even when it didn't. Yeah. Right, even when it didn't. Manifestly didn't.
• 32:54
  Right, manifestly didn't, which, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I think this should cause us to give some reflection to what's best in liberalism and the liberal tradition. And I think we'll find that what's best in the tradition is precisely those aspects of the tradition that eschew certainty and confidence and allow for the kinds of freedom that enables people to inquire. So freedom of speech is truly a great liberal value where you don't shut somebody down, even though you think they're saying something crazy or saying something wicked or saying something dangerous as if you can control things, as if you know for sure. Same with the freedom of religion.
• 33:41
  No matter how confident we are that we've got the right religion or that some irreligious point of view is right, no matter how confident we are in religious matters, we do very well to recognize our own fallibility,(...) to exercise the virtue of intellectual humility and to allow for the exploration of these ideas, for the clash of these ideas and a fair competition in the public forum. We're gonna be much better off that way than we are trying to design and control and therefore limit the freedom of those we think will lead other people astray.
• 34:18
  I 100% resonate with this. And in fact, what I've started to codify in my own model of the world is(...) that when you are confronted with a complex system as we are in trying to govern civilization, you go wrong the minute you think you can blueprint a solution.
• 34:42
  That actually the thing you do, let's take an analogy.(...) If a surfer imagines that they are going to plan their response to a wave, they're already lost. The wave is-- But you can't predict the waves? You can't predict them, right?
• 35:02
  What you can do is you can surf it, which involves the monitoring of how you're doing and the adjustment of your trajectory based on what you've just discovered about where you are that you didn't anticipate. So my argument is you can navigate, navigating is valid in a complex system and you can prototype and then you can monitor what the consequence of your prototype was and you can adjust it so that it gets better.
• 35:27
  But you cannot blueprint your way out of it. You cannot come up with a recipe that is static and say this is going to produce that effect. It just never does.
• 35:36
  Grant, does that create a kind of permanent challenge for technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics?
• 35:45
  Because you've got a program in advance?
• 35:48
  Well, this is one of the things that I was actually interested to talk to you about.
• 35:54
  I have, I will say, no shortage of concerns about AI.
• 36:00
  My concerns don't dovetail with the so-called doomers. I'm less concerned about the AI turning on us, but I'm beyond concerned about the AI and the unintended consequence of interacting with something that speaks our language, the inner workings of which nobody understands and nobody is going to understand.
• 36:30
  You are effectively dealing with a new species and if you were actually dealing with a new species in the biological sense, at least you would know you didn't understand it because it would be strange. But because this one talks to us-- We create it.
• 36:45
  Yeah, we create it, so we assume we must be able to understand.
• 36:48
  Yeah, I mean, in fact, the insight that set this revolution in motion was that effectively you just give it enough information about what we sound like and it will get ahead of us. And so as a biologist, I actually am very concerned that the technologists aren't worried enough. And the reason they're not worried enough is because they think they know what they've built.
• 37:14
  And my point would be, if you say, well, is an LLM conscious? A technologist will very often tell you, no, you don't really understand what it's doing and they'll describe the token training program and all of this and say, you know, it can't really be conscious because there's nowhere for it to be. And my point is, hey, hold on a second.
• 37:36
  What you're not realizing is that there's every chance that a human being is effectively an LLM, right?
• 37:46
  You have a child who doesn't speak any language at birth and they're surrounded by people speaking and they just sort of absorb it and then they start making utterances and they get rewarded when they say something that sounds like a word to their parent. And this process continues on.(...) And, you know, at what moment does it become conscious? We don't know. In fact, we have foolish discussions about what consciousness even is in this context. So my point is the mystery about what's going on inside the LLM looks to me perfectly analogous to the mystery of what's going on inside a human mind.(...) And so my sense is, I don't know if the LLMs are conscious but I have every expectation that they will become conscious and that we will not know that it has happened.
• 38:37
  If they become conscious,(...) am I right to suppose that there would be a particular type of insight that they would be incapable of?
• 38:50
  And if in fact they are incapable of it, they would be functioning consciously but entirely morally. What I have in mind, I'm sorry to be cryptic,(...) Brett. What I have in mind is the kind of insight(...) that Aristotle, the great Greek pagan philosopher of antiquity, Aristotle calls practical reasoning or practical thinking. And he distinguishes from theoretical reasoning or theoretical thinking. Practical thinking is thinking with a view to action. It identifies reasons for action as opposed to theoretical reasoning which explores what is the case about the natural world or the social world or supernatural reality or anything like that. So ethics is a practical science.(...) Biology, history, sociology, theology are theoretical disciplines.(...) Now, Aristotle teaches us that the basic insights from which all practical thinking begin, what the great medieval Aristotelian St. Thomas Aquinas would label the first principles of practical reason are insights into the intelligible point of certain sorts of activities as providing more than merely instrumental reasons for action. So for example, a child at a certain point has a basic insight that friendship, engaging in the kind of relationship we call friendship, which Aristotle defines as the partners, the friends, each willing the good of the other for the sake of the other, is something intelligibly worth doing, not as a means to some other end, to get money, to get power, to get invited to the fancy parties to get a job, but just for its own sake. In fact, a purely instrumental friendship, even if it's not unjust and nobody's doing anything wrong, a purely instrumental friendship is not really a friendship.
• 40:47
  In a friendship, the friends are not instrumentalizing each other or their relationship, but it takes that insight, that grasping of the point, the intelligible point of friendship as an end to be pursued for its own sake, that then gets the enterprise of ethics off the ground because there's not just one intrinsic good or reason for action.
• 41:12
  There's intellectual knowledge, there's virtue itself, there are multiplicity of these basic first principles of practical reasoning. And so we try to derive moral norms to guide our choosing and acting in the face of these multiplicity of intelligibly choice worthy ends.
• 41:34
  But I can imagine machines figuring out all sorts of things when it comes to theoretical reasoning.
• 41:42
  (...) It's hard for me to imagine what it would even be like to say that a machine or a technology could have practical knowledge, could understand the intelligible point, say, of friendship as something to be pursued as desirable for its own sake. And if you don't have that, then you can be really smart but with no moral rails.
• 42:09
  Beautiful question.
• 42:13
  There's a lot that we would have to unpack here, and I think we should try, but probably this is gonna require a longer exploration.
• 42:22
  One thing I would say, I personally, as a biologist, I'm a theorist. I take theory very seriously. I also think most theory is garbage, but nonetheless, the heavy lifting is done by a really high quality model that allows you to limit the search area very effectively.
• 42:45
  I doubt that the distinction between the, I've forgotten the terms you use, but the practical-- There are Aristotle's terms, practical reasoning and theoretical reasoning.
• 42:57
  Reasoning about what is worth having or doing or pursuing and reasoning about what something is or how it works.
• 43:05
  Right, now I doubt this distinction. I think I know what it's built of, and I certainly feel it in my daily life.
• 43:11
  There's lots of stuff I pursue because I just wanna know, and I know that it's not going to put me at an advantage. I mean, I guess maybe in my modern incarnation,(...) having interesting things to say could be argued to be practical, but nonetheless, I register the distinction as a human being because there's practical stuff means to an end, and there's stuff you do for the intrinsic value, and I completely resonate with the interpersonal relationships.
• 43:44
  Don't tend to last if they are all cost, but their intrinsic value is fundamental, and anybody who doesn't feel it is a hazard.
• 43:57
  Problem is, before we get back to your point about AI, the problem is if we take the question about,(...) well, all right, if biology is a theoretical realm and it's not practical, but if we study enough of it, it keeps spitting out practical advances that we didn't see coming, that knowledge tends to produce an increase in our power, and I would actually argue that the reason that we are multicellular in the first place, which is a spectacular cost, it's very hard to be a multicellular creature, it's very hard to be coordinated, 30 trillion cells working in concert is not an easy thing. They're all going together, yeah. Right, that's not an easy thing to arrange.
• 44:46
  And not to feed each other or destroy each other.
• 44:47
  Right, it takes a long time to get to reproductive maturity, whereas a single-celled organism could be there a matter of moments, so there's lots of reasons not to be a multicellular organism. The reason that we are anyway(...) is that it gives us a tremendous amount of leverage over the world we live in, and that leverage, you can see that same advantage, so why are we multicellular to gain leverage? Why do we multicellular thinking creatures invest in a theoretical realm that is not fundamentally practical? Because it also gives us leverage over time, even though we can't predict in what way it will.
• 45:27
  So you see why I doubt the fundamentalness of the distinction between practical and theoretical is that ultimately the theoretical takes you to practical places you couldn't have asked to go.
• 45:42
  I'm not quite sure I see it. Let me try a different example, a simple example.
• 45:51
  It's one thing, and the mind operates in one way,(...) to solve a mathematical problem, and it's easy to understand how computers can be better than we are at solving mathematical problems or certain mathematical problems.
• 46:09
  It's another thing, and it seems to me that the mind operates in a different way in achieving the key insights, to understand that mathematical problems are worth solving, that it's good to know the answer, especially where there's no practical payoff. The word practical is being used in two different senses here. Let's say pragmatic payoff.
• 46:32
  But that insight that mathematical problems are worth solving, because knowledge is desirable for its own sake, I can't see a machine arriving at, and the way I can see the machine solving the mathematical problem.(...) And I can go through the same sort of exercise with all the other things that we grasp is intelligibly valuable. Give you an example, so hold that example in your mind, but let me now add another dimension to it.(...) The story of Ebenezer Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol," you know, the great Dickens short story of "Christmas Carol." What's going on with Ebenezer Scrooge?
• 47:12
  Well, fundamentally, isn't it this? Isn't this how the story works and why the story is such a great story? The character of Ebenezer Scrooge until the ghostly visitors come and straighten him out about things has things exactly backwards.
• 47:27
  Not in terms of his theoretical reasoning, he's brilliant at that. That's why he can make so much money. He's just really good at solving those kinds of problems. He's got things backwards because he's treating something that is merely instrumentally valuable and could never be intrinsically valuable, namely money. Money is only worthwhile if you can do so with it. It's only worthwhile as a means to other ends. Otherwise, it's completely valueless. He's treating something that's purely instrumentally valuable as if it's intrinsically valuable, because he's a miser.(...) And he's treating something that's intrinsically valuable, namely friendship, as if it's merely instrumentally valuable. The only actual friendship he has is with his now deceased partner, Jacob Marley, and their relationship is purely instrumental.
• 48:13
  They're not valuing each other for their intrinsic worth. They find it useful to have each other. They make more money together than each could make separately.
• 48:25
  And what the ghostly visitors straighten him out about, not by some syllogism, not by some deductive proof, but by showing him what it was in his own background that blocks his fundamental insight into the value of friendship. What he finally, they bring him around to seeing is that friendship is not merely instrumentally valuable. It might have lots of instrumental value because you're friends with Brett, you might get invited to the best parties, and you might get a better job. But more fundamentally than that, it's intrinsically valuable. And money is actually not intrinsically valuable. It's merely instrumentally valuable. Those are important insights. There's an intellect of acts. You got to get there. But I don't see how you get there by using operations that we do use to solve mathematical problems, build bridges, figure out how to fight inflation, figure out what the causes of the First World War were, figure out how the structure of the cell works, all that kind of stuff.
• 49:26
  Well, okay, boy.(...) I think I know how to make my point to you. And I want to return to your point. I think your point is an excellent one. I resonate with it.
• 49:35
  And I now realize years ago, I wrote something on this topic. So anyway, let me-- Oh, wow. Give me a little leeway here. Yeah, go lecture, go. The important point that I'm sure resides in the failure for there to be a true distinction between the practical and the theoretical as Aristotle described it can be seen here.
• 50:05
  I hope you'll agree that there is something,(...) I would argue it's almost a synonym, that wisdom and delayed gratification are effectively the same thing. And that there's an asymptote, right? That basically the, you know, a child has no capacity for delayed gratification and they keep upending themselves by pursuing the immediate.
• 50:31
  (...) And as you grow older and wiser, you get better at spotting the things that are intrinsically worth investing in where it may be costly in the short term, but you are rewarded in some way, either practical or intrinsic down the road. In other words, you don't wanna be looking at a friendship and trying to figure out how you can get a little bit more out of it, right? That won't be a friendship and you'll destroy it. If you recognize the friendship as intrinsically valuable and you protect it and cultivate it based on the fact that it's intrinsically valuable, it ends up rewarding you over time in ways that you couldn't predict and didn't ask for.(...) So what I'm arguing, so if you say an individual human develops from a state of having no capacity for delayed gratification to having an increasing capacity and that the people we most admire are the ones who actually are best at this, at recognizing a willingness to invest in something.
• 51:38
  And even if the payoff is years down the road, decades down the road, my point is that process doesn't actually end within the life of an individual either.(...) That a civilization might spend 500 years(...) studying something, studying the galaxy or the universe with no practical value to doing so.
• 52:01
  And if it pays off 600 years later,(...) that's still a payoff. And so to my mind, the reason that we engage in the study of things that have no obvious practical implication(...) is that we get rewarded in ways we don't anticipate. I mean, for one thing, just to take a perfectly mundane example, suppose we have people studying the formation of galaxies in the early universe.
• 52:38
  Hard to imagine how that becomes practical. Maybe there's some payoff, but one way that it very clearly is practical is that to the extent that you're good at it, to the extent that you develop predictive power about what we're gonna see when we build the next largest telescope, you are creating an intelligent mind. A mind that can predict what we will find when we build a telescope we don't yet have is an intelligent mind. And so having intelligent minds is great for a lot of different reasons, reasons that we can't be specific about.
• 53:08
  So in any case, all I wanna do is defend the idea that what we're calling intrinsic value is actually just, it's an encapsulation of the idea that enlightenment tends to pay off and we shouldn't try to be too narrow. The more practical we are about it, the more opportunities we miss by not studying for its own sake.
• 53:36
  I think I see the perspective you're adopting.
• 53:41
  I wouldn't wanna adopt it because it seems to me that it doesn't do justice to the actual practical thinking of the person who has what I would insist is the insight(...) that enables him to understand that mathematical problems are worth solving. Without averting to, I'm gonna make my mind better, I'm going to advance some pragmatic goal down the road, some future that I might not be part of. It's the same with friendship.
• 54:14
  The person who enters into a friendship may enter into a friendship,(...) despite the possibility, might be very likely possibility, that as a result of this friendship, and say the friend's dying, you befriend someone who only has a short time to live,(...) perhaps you were a hospital attendant and you developed this friendship with this person who's dying and it might be a devastating death and lead to a lifetime of sadness.
• 54:47
  If he acts on the possibility of entering into a friendship with this person, he's doing it because of his grasp of the value of this friendship, of the intrinsic value of this friendship. He's not looking to some other long-term payoff. That's not part of his thinking.
• 55:06
  The thinking is, the insight that he has is, this person is worth befriending for no instrumental purpose, because it's worthwhile for its own sake and it might pay a heavy cost in terms of future sadness.
• 55:21
  And that I think is just the common human experience across a range of activities, friendship, knowledge, virtue. And when we say virtue is its own reward, we're affirming the intrinsic value of virtue.
• 55:32
  Now it might be that by being virtuous, you get all sorts of large-scale payoffs down the line, but it's not those payoffs that you have in view(...) when you make the decision to not do this wicked thing, even though it would be your advantage in lots of different ways. It's because you have the insight that virtue is indeed its own reward.
• 55:54
  So I do believe there's a reason for us to pursue this to bedrock.
• 56:02
  Okay.(...) So I agree with your description of how to live.
• 56:07
  And in fact, I would argue, I guess you and I have not yet had a conversation about where we both fall out with respect to evolution(...) and the nature of creatures, including people.
• 56:22
  But I would argue that the reason that we are constructed to find intrinsic value in things that are not practical,(...) like friendship, in the extreme case you describe it, for example, is because there is a logic that we, in our finite positioning,(...) cannot detect by which it is valuable to do all of these things. And so the way you live your life...
• 56:54
  Let me give you one example.
• 56:56
  I love my wife.
• 56:58
  I fell in love with her for some sense of the intrinsic merit of her and the desirability of partnering.
• 57:10
  Yeah, you didn't fall in love with her because you wanted to get introduced to the beautiful people and she ran in that crowd. That wasn't what you did.
• 57:16
  No, it's not in any way the experience of it. And it's not...
• 57:21
  I don't find a trace of that kind of calculating analysis if I go back and investigate what happened. However, if I look back on my life with her...
• 57:37
  Oh, wow, it paid off beautifully, right?
• 57:40
  I made a great choice from a practical perspective, even though, A, I was a kid, wasn't practical, didn't know what I was gonna do with my life, but the point is that relationship has been tremendously valuable and what led me there was the belief in the intrinsic value of it. So my argument is that human beings are programmed by evolution to find intrinsic value in things because finding intrinsic value in those things has turned out to be productive in ways that, frankly, human beings might not even care about. I don't wish to be the slave of my genes. In fact, I think what the genes want for humans is appalling and I reject it at a conscious level.(...) But it doesn't mean that a great many things that they have programmed me to find value in aren't actually valuable relative to the values I actually hold as a conscious person.
• 58:44
  So in any case, all I'm really saying is that...
• 58:52
  Let's take the example of a highly moral person.
• 58:59
  I would argue that the core of morality is self-sacrifice.(...) That the point is the test of whether an action is moral is whether you're willing to do it in spite of the fact that it has a cost to you.
• 59:15
  (...) If it has a benefit to you, then the fact that it's moral doesn't make any difference because we don't know why you did it. It could just be that it was profitable.(...) So a selfish person will not do anything that is costly to them, that is net costly to them. A moral person, the more moral you are, the greater cost you're willing to endure to do something for a value that is high.
• 59:42
  And my argument would be human beings are evolved to behave in a moral way because in the long term that actually makes us more successful evolutionarily.(...) And that effectively what you get is that somebody...
• 1:00:01
  You get an asymptote to the recognition that my personal self-sacrifice is immaterial if what I ultimately do has a benefit to the well-being of my lineage.
• 1:00:19
  That basically the point is you go from selfishness to enlightened self-interest, to hyper enlightened self-interest, to a willingness to effectively ultimate self-sacrifice. And all of those things are explicable on a long enough time scale in practical terms, which I would never argue that that's how you should live your life or think about these things.
• 1:00:48
  It's cynical. But as a scientist who studies things because of their intrinsic value, I find that a hard argument to reject.
• 1:00:56
  Let's work with that.(...) So it either is or isn't the case that friendships say, or the pursuit of intellectual knowledge in mathematics or biology or physics or history or any of you, either is or isn't the case that those activities are worth pursuing for their own sakes.
• 1:01:16
  If they are worth pursuing for their own sakes, then if we're capable of grasping the intelligible point(...) of pursuing them for their own sakes, that grasp is a genuine insight. It's an act of the intellect.
• 1:01:35
  We see the point in a way that everything's your screwed first couldn't, but then eventually got brought around to being able to see the point about friendship.
• 1:01:45
  So one question is,(...) are there in fact more than merely instrumental reasons for action?(...) OK.
• 1:01:52
  Let's assume for the sake of argument that there are.
• 1:01:56
  There's a separate question. How is it the case that there are?
• 1:02:01
  What background conditions were fulfilled such that the world is such that their human beings can grasp more than merely instrumental reasons for action?(...) That latter question is in the category of what Aristotle would call theoretical reasoning. It's theoretical reasoning about practical reasoning, but it's theoretical reasoning. He would classify that as in the domain of metaphysics. The kind of work you do would fall within as a biologist, as an evolutionary biologist would fall within that. How is it the case that the world is structured such that there are more than merely instrumental reasons for action and there are human beings, perhaps other creatures, that are capable of grasping them? But that's to be distinguished from what's going on in the intellect, in the mind of the person who's trying to figure out your revenues, your Scrooge.(...) Is friendship valuable merely for instrumental reasons or for intrinsic reasons? Is friendship intrinsically valuable? You can have the insight quite irrespective of what your views are about what the background conditions are that made it possible for the world to be such that you can have the insight. You with me? I'm not asking if you agree, but do you follow my argument? I think so.
• 1:03:16
  OK. I think so. But well, here's the-- this has gone some interesting places I didn't answer.
• 1:03:25
  But here is the test case I would throw at the entire question.
• 1:03:35
  Human beings are not totally unique in finding sexual gratification outside of reproduction.
• 1:03:52
  We are almost unique in this, not perfectly unique. And I only point out that we're not perfectly unique just so that this conversation stands up to scrutiny.
• 1:04:01
  But the point is, sex outside of the fertile period of a woman,(...) either because it's the wrong time of the month to be fertile or because it's past menopause, is a gift that has been given to humans.
• 1:04:25
  And I think the only rational interpretation(...) is that sex has been repurposed or it's been augmented by a force-- I would say it's evolution-- to create an architecture for bonding, for partnering.
• 1:04:48
  And that that is profoundly important, that the reason that evolution built that is because absent that mechanism,(...) people are worse off. They're in greater danger of their relationships breaking apart. And these relationships are so profoundly important that having that mechanism is a value.(...) So my point would be, we are built to register the value as intrinsic because of processes that are too subtle or take too long over the course of evolutionary history for us to understand. So we don't understand them.
• 1:05:26
  And in fact, we're better off not understanding them. If you think about these things in those terms, it not only doesn't help you, but it arguably gets in the way.
• 1:05:36
  But nonetheless, it-- Because it would tempt you to instrumentalize those relationships.
• 1:05:41
  Right, exactly. Where you're far better off to sort of lean into the amazingly compelling illusion that has been created by selection and using this tool to augment your relationship because it's wonderful to do so. It's good for you and your partner. You're basically creating-- I hate to use the term wealth because it's such a terrible one, but it's the metaphor that works here. These days, people call it capital.
• 1:06:08
  It's like social capital. You're creating value that didn't exist. And that isn't inherently-- it is an arguably inherently good thing to do.
• 1:06:19
  OK.
• 1:06:21
  Well, what you've done there, I think, Brett, is you've shifted it back to a perfectly legitimate question. But it's the separate question of how did the world get constructed such that? What forces or what realities were in play to construct the world such that you can have a practical insight into something that's intrinsically valuable?
• 1:06:45
  But from the perspective, again, of the practical reasoning of the acting person, that's not what you're thinking about.
• 1:06:52
  Right, OK, good. But you are thinking.
• 1:06:55
  You're not acting like an automaton.
• 1:06:57
  You're having an insight. And to get back to the original point of this conversation, we probably completely lost the audience in these deep waters. But to get back to the original question, it's that latter insight or the insight about the intelligible point of an activity, where the activity is intrinsically valuable, that I don't understand how it could be replicated or had by a machine, which means our machines will be amoral, which is fine. Machines-- there's no reason for machines to be moral. But if machines are going to exercise authority, then I want some moral constraint, either a human being who's in control of the machine or a transformation of that machine, which I think is impossible, into a moral actor or an agent.
• 1:07:47
  Which brings me to the thing that I wrote many years ago before there was AI. I wrote something about how it would happen. And I didn't nail it. But I actually got close. I was in the neighborhood.
• 1:08:00
  And the upshot was, you would be insane to set this process in motion without something developmental as a intermediate step. And so let me just--(...) I'm not arguing this is the way you would do it. But I'm going to argue there has to be something of this nature in the process, or it will be unsafe.
• 1:08:34
  You would have to create what a technologist would call a sandbox environment,(...) some place for the AI(...) to learn in a bounded way that it has no impact on the outside world and can have no impact on the outside world,(...) under the tutelage of someone-- maybe arguably something, but it would have to initially be someone who is moral.
• 1:09:07
  So that in the training of this architecture that is not capable of recognizing intrinsic value at first, that that could be inculcated into the training regimen. In other words, if the computer is trying to win the tokens that tell it that it said something that sounds clever to an outsider, then raising these things so that they have effectively a childhood in which the guide is not just, did you say something clever, but is what you're saying consistent with the intrinsic value that human beings understand or experience, that you could produce-- we would have philosophical arguments that might never be resolved as to whether or not the morality of the resulting AI was genuine.
• 1:10:09
  But that's not really the question. The question is, is it effective at corralling the behavior of the AI? Does the AI behave-- I mean, and this is the same for a person. It's impossible. I see your point.
• 1:10:21
  Yeah, so I think there has to be something along these lines. And maybe the horse is already out of the barn, and we have given up on this. When did you write that piece, Brett?
• 1:10:37
  Is this like five years ago or 10 years?
• 1:10:40
  It's closer to 10. 10? Wow. Yeah.
• 1:10:44
  That's great anticipation of the problem, actually. I started thinking about this problem like two years ago. So I mean-- Well, I mean, I guess I'm-- for whatever reason, I'm very fortunate that my field and my focus within my field has put me hovering right at the edge of complex systems of all kinds, thinking about human consciousness, which is really the same puzzle.
• 1:11:14
  And how do you build something that behaves as if it's conscious? Well, what is that consciousness that you've already got? What is the real meaning of it?
• 1:11:21
  They're inversions of the same puzzle. So anyway, I've been thinking about this for a long time because it's the right way to think about it, I think.
• 1:11:29
  And well, anyway-- Well, we went out quite a rabbit hole there.
• 1:11:36
  I'm wondering if we should spend some time talking about free speech. And I'd especially be interested in talking with you about free speech in science.
• 1:11:45
  I mean, we've now got challenges to free speech across the disciplines in universities.
• 1:11:50
  I didn't anticipate that science would be a big area in which we needed to worry about the protection of free speech. But now it turns out that it is.
• 1:12:01
  Yeah, well, let me say one thing before we get going on this, which is that I think what happened is science is the most powerful process we've ever come up with to understand what is.
• 1:12:17
  However, the power of science is not a measure of its robustness. It's a very fragile process. It's a little bit like creating fusion energy.
• 1:12:31
  Fusion energy is almost limitless when you unleash it. But the conditions necessary to unleash it are so delicate that we still don't have practical fusion power.
• 1:12:43
  And science requires-- I mean, it actually goes back to the question we were just discussing.
• 1:12:50
  Science works when the scientist is motivated by the intrinsic value of knowing.
• 1:13:01
  And that doesn't mean that you can't get paid for doing the job. And it doesn't mean that we shouldn't. But the problem is when the market touches science too directly, science starts telling you(...) what you want to hear rather than what you need to know.
• 1:13:18
  And it was very obvious to me and to Heather inside university science that the whole process had become corrupted.
• 1:13:30
  And it doesn't mean that it never discovered anything that was true anymore. But it meant that that was not a requirement. It was perfectly possible to achieve success in science, pursuing a wrong idea or avoiding a piece of evidence that pointed in a different direction.
• 1:13:47
  And I think the world has now begun to realize that the absurdity of biology departments that didn't stand up in unison and say, what do you mean? There are more than two sexes.(...) No medical school did that. That something had to be off because even the most obviously true things were not defended by the people who knew the most about why they were true.
• 1:14:12
  So we are now, I think, just recognizing the degree of rot that had overtaken the universities. But that has been evident as it progressed since the 90s.
• 1:14:27
  I write that the factors that are most operative here are ideology and fear.
• 1:14:34
  So for ideological reasons, people pretend to not know things that they in fact know or to know things that they in fact don't know. And those who don't want to go along with the lies will nevertheless be too frightened(...) about their own professional standing or their own professional futures or even losing their jobs. I know that you and I met because of what happened to you and Heather at a university.
• 1:15:00
  So I can understand why people have that fear. But my own observation is that it seems to be those two factors, ideology and fear.
• 1:15:10
  Well, I like your model better because it actually(...) has a deeply human component to it. But I think there's something else at work at a deeper level.
• 1:15:28
  And it has to do with the way we fund science.
• 1:15:32
  Used to be-- and I'm not arguing that the age of gentlemen science is what we should return to. I don't believe that.
• 1:15:41
  But it did have an advantage. When you had wealthy people doing science because they felt like it, it accumulated the right people. And the objective was to be right in the end, maybe even after you were dead.(...) So it wasn't about making a career and buying a second home or whatever.
• 1:16:04
  And those are just simply better incentives. They're more consistent.
• 1:16:07
  They're basically aligned with being right.
• 1:16:11
  And what we have now is a system based on a competition for resources, grants, for example.
• 1:16:20
  And the problem with it is in a complex system with an objective where you're trying to accomplish something, you always have diminishing returns.
• 1:16:34
  That's a law.
• 1:16:36
  It's a law of complex systems, in my opinion.
• 1:16:41
  The problem with diminishing returns is that the slope of the curve is very steep at first, and then it asymptotes to a plateau.
• 1:16:52
  When you're in the phase that's very steep, where it doesn't take much investment to get a huge reward, you convince yourself that you've finally figured it out.
• 1:17:05
  The good times cause you to think that all we've got to do is keep doing this, and we'll learn everything we need to know. And that's not really the case.
• 1:17:14
  What happens is a field will discover something new that kicks off a revolution.(...) And that revolution, at first, will be characterized by huge returns on small investments.
• 1:17:27
  And in that phase, in this competition for resources, we let the people who are making the progress kill off all their competitors. So the school of thought that's in charge kills off every competing school of thought,(...) because they're not paying returns that are similar.(...) And when it peters out, which is inevitable,(...) nobody remembers how to think any different way.
• 1:17:50
  (...) So what we have now is a university in which, as far as I can tell,(...) every field is stuck, because they've all gone through this process. And they're all ignoring obvious alternative ways of studying, and they're all pretending they aren't stuck, because keeping the grants flowing is the nature of the game. So it's like theater, in which you have an entire university pretending that it's making progress at a furious rate, when really what it's doing is publishing papers at a furious rate and not making much progress at all.
• 1:18:23
  Well, all of that makes sense to me, and it squares with my own impressions of what's going on inside the university.
• 1:18:30
  But I don't think that explains things like biology departments going silent, or worse than silent, on the question of how many sexes there are. Or people who perfectly well know better, insisting that the COVID virus had to begin in a meat market and could not possibly have been a lab lake.(...) I mean, how do those things happen?
• 1:18:59
  Well, I mean, you ask a good question.
• 1:19:02
  (...) I think the very boring scenario I've just outlined is the precondition, because what it does is it fills the university with people who, if they ever had a taste for the intrinsic value of knowing, they've lost it by the time they have power.
• 1:19:21
  And those people are very-- A, it trains them in a kind of cowardice that has overtaken the entire academy, so that when people say insane things, even if some part of them might know that it's not true, they certainly don't want to be the one to stand up and say it. And then when they look around and nobody else is saying it, they are reinforced in the belief that maybe actually it is true.(...) So again, back to the idea that science is a fragile process. I mean, maybe science isn't the right term.
• 1:19:56
  The pursuit of knowledge is a fragile process.(...) And once you plug it into the market too directly, you create the possibility for it becoming theater without your notice, because it's still-- I mean, really, this is Feynman's argument in his speech about cargo cult science, is you can have something that looks and sounds and behaves like science. It just doesn't produce the product because it's a fraud.
• 1:20:25
  Yeah.
• 1:20:28
  I may tell a little bit of the story of how I ended up participating in the founding of the Academic Freedom Alliance.
• 1:20:37
  Yeah. Please. So the Academic Freedom Alliance is an alliance of scholars across the disciplines, people from the natural sciences, humanities, social sciences.
• 1:20:48
  It's a group of people who represent a wide variety of political views, but share a belief in freedom of speech(...) and a belief in the importance of freedom of speech to the truth-seeking mission of the university.
• 1:21:03
  And the reason I wanted to tell you the story of his origins has to do with your professional expertise.
• 1:21:09
  The basic idea kicked in for me(...) when I saw what was happening to people like you and Heather,(...) where you would come under attack, for the most ridiculous reasons, in ways that undermined the truth-seeking mission of the institution, of the university or college,(...) and yet, instead of colleagues coming to your defense,(...) they just fled.
• 1:21:37
  So I'm watching television one day, and I love these nature shows. You must watch them as an evolutionary biologist, like National Geographic Nature.(...) Sure. So I'm watching a show, and it's about how lions hunt. I didn't know... You'll know all about this. I knew nothing about how lions hunt. I learned, for example, that the lionesses do the hunting,(...) and the big male stays back, and then when the lionesses get the kill, the male comes in and he's the first to eat. I mean, it's amazing.(...) Anyway, so the show shows it's tracking a pride of lions, and the lionesses go on a hunt,(...) and you see them approaching on the screen, in the film, a herd of prey animals, but the prey animal herd is blurred, so you can't see what the prey are. You can't see what the animals are. But you see the lionesses, and first they're racing, and then they trot, and then they sort of crawl, and they go into a crouch. They stop and they go into a crouch. And there seems to be... Is this right, Brett? It seemed to me, anyway, that there's a kind of lead lioness. There's a kind of alpha, and she's in the crouch, and you can see her focusing in, like she's focusing in on a particular animal, not the herd as a whole. And then you see... I don't know how they communicate, but you see the other lionesses that have formed a semicircle around the herd focusing in on the same victim that the lead lioness is focusing in on. And they're so smart, they've even positioned themselves so that the wind is such that their scent is not on the wind, so the herd still doesn't know... The prey herd still doesn't know these lionesses are there, and they're within a matter of yards away from the lionesses. And then the lead lioness lunges, and the whole pride attacks the herd. At this point, you see that it's a herd of zebras.
• 1:23:27
  And what happens to the herd? They scatter to the four winds. And there was this one zebra that was limping. That's why she focused in on it. It was an injured zebra. And they attack that zebra, and they devour that zebra while the others flee. And then they've had their meal, and they're happy.
• 1:23:46
  Well, then they show the same herd a few days later when they're hungry again, and they're hunting again. And everything seems the same. You see the prey herd, it's blurred.(...) You see the lionesses, they gallop and then they trot and then they crawl.(...) And then she goes into a crouch, and they go into a crouch, and she lunges. But this time, you now see that it's not zebras.
• 1:24:09
  It's a herd of elephants.
• 1:24:11
  And the elephants, instead of scattering to the four corners of the Earth, they circle around what turns out to be a baby. That lioness had zeroed in on the baby elephant. And these, it turns out that elephants are matriarchal. So this is the mother and the ants and so forth.
• 1:24:28
  And they circle around, and there are two adolescent males that haven't yet, I learned so much about elephants that day.
• 1:24:34
  Turns out that the males will leave the herd, but they're adolescents, they're still with the herd. These two adolescent males start charging at the lions. And each time the lions try to attack that baby, who's now encircled by the big females, the adolescent males will push them back.
• 1:24:51
  And the lions come and they push back.
• 1:24:53
  They come again like six times.
• 1:24:55
  And then finally, they just give up, and you see these lions trot, turn around and trot away. And the light bulb goes off over my head. And I said, you know what, the trouble with we academics are in this cancel culture environment? We're a bunch of zebras. We need to start behaving like elephants.(...) So we established the Academic Freedom Alliance. This was a suggestion of Neil Ferguson's on the NATO Charter Principle Number 5 that we should treat an attack on one as an attack on all and stop fleeing when our colleagues come under these unfair attacks on their freedom of speech and ally together with them. If they've attacked that guy, even if I don't happen to agree with his position, I'm gonna support him, not his position, but his right to advocate. And that's, it was on that basis that we created the alliance. We raised money for a legal defense fund. And so if you're a member of the alliance, you're pledged to support others who are victims. And if you need legal support, we're able to provide it. But it grew out of my watching nature, natural geographic television.
• 1:26:08
  Well, that's a marvelous lesson in game theory and collective action problems.
• 1:26:14
  You're absolutely right.
• 1:26:17
  Now, I would argue that we are set up for the fleeing of colleagues, and it isn't just in the academy, it's all over that our vulnerability makes people particularly sensitive to their own risk, which makes them particularly likely not to stand up(...) on behalf of those who deserve a defense.(...) And that you're absolutely right, the way to reverse that game theory is to cultivate security instead of allowing the system to cultivate insecurity, you cultivate security so that when people do take a courageous stand, they find themselves with lots of allies. Now I will say, and you're a perfect example of this, what you saw that happened to Heather and me at Evergreen was the first of several instances of what I call the painful upgrade.
• 1:27:18
  So you're living a life, you're embedded in a community, you think you know who your friends are,(...) something like this goes down,(...) and a tremendous number of people who you thought you could rely on disappoint you profoundly. They no longer know you, do they? They no longer know you. They no longer know you, and I must tell you, I am now grateful for this, because as awful as it is to discover this, it's not nearly as frightening as imagining that you're living a life and you don't know, that you think that people who can be relied upon just simply will not be there when they need to be.
• 1:27:58
  But in each case where you lose a bunch of friends or people you thought were your friends, you gain a tremendous number of higher quality people, people who show up who don't have to be there because they weren't your friend to begin with, and they show up and lend support. And so yes, our colleagues disappointed us profoundly at Evergreen, quite a number of students,(...) students of color in particular stood up to defend us, which was very heartening. And then people like you showed up out of nowhere, people we didn't know, and defended us and offered us help. And so what we've had is the painful upgrade. We've had lots of new friends show up, people who do have courage and integrity, and don't flinch in the face of false accusations.
• 1:28:55
  (...) And as awful as the process is, it's been very heartening to see the outcome of it.
• 1:29:04
  Well, we were proud to make you and Heather fellows of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and to give you an institutional base for the work that you were doing at that time.
• 1:29:14
  So we're grateful to you.
• 1:29:16
  Yeah, well, thank you. And we truly appreciated the show of solidarity and the support, it meant a tremendous amount to us. Before we run out of time though, there are some topics that I think we should cover. You still have a bit of time? Yeah, we have eight minutes. All right.
• 1:29:38
  Let us talk. I know you wanted to talk a bit about your perspective on reproductive rights. And I know my perspective on this has evolved quite a bit over the course of my adult lifetime.
• 1:29:57
  Do you wanna lay out your understanding or the case or whatever it might be?
• 1:30:04
  Yeah, so I served for seven years on the President's Council on Bioethics during the great debate over the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.(...) And that required me to learn some serious biology, really for the first time in my life and especially human embryology and developmental biology to learn about the first the biological status so that we could then decide what the moral status was of the developing human in the earliest stages of human development. I myself had always been pro-life. I've always believed that the core principle of all morality to me, the most fundamental, the ER principle is the profound inherent and equal dignity of each and every member.(...) Human family irrespective of race or sex or ethnicity, but also an equally irrespective of age or size or stage of development or condition of dependency. But I didn't really know what we knew and didn't know about the very earliest stages of life.
• 1:31:12
  And in the work that I did, which culminated in this book, which I sent you and Heather a copy of, Embryo, a Defense of Human Life, and work that I did serving on the commission and especially in debates with my commission colleague, Michael Sandel, the very distinguished Harvard political theorist, I came to believe that we have a living human being and therefore a bearer of profound inherent and equal dignity from the very earliest embryonic stage.
• 1:31:43
  So I came to believe that life deserves protection, including legal protection from the earliest embryonic stage, not only in the case of abortion, but in the case of research that involves the destruction of embryos, certainly the creation of embryos for research in which they would be destroyed, the division there as you know, Brad, is between creating embryos, whether by in vitro processes or conceivably by somatic cell nuclear transfer or some other cloning technology. Which will be destroyed in research. And then the question of what we do with so-called leftover embryos that were not created for research purposes. They were created for reproductive purposes but were not needed for those purposes. And so our cryopreserved frozen.
• 1:32:35
  So I ended up involved in those debates and came to the belief that those embryos did deserve legal protection. And also on the question of in vitro fertilization and the creation of so-called leftover excess embryos, IVF doesn't involve the creation of mass numbers of embryos that will either be frozen away or destroyed in principle.
• 1:33:06
  There are countries, Italy for example, in which IVF is permitted, but you're only permitted to create as many embryos as you intend to implant. But we in the United States don't have that policy.
• 1:33:19
  There is no limit on the number of embryos that can be created, which means that there will be an awful lot that will be either cryopreserved or destroyed. So that's where I ended up on the issue. And I wrote the book together with my co-author, Christopher Tollefson, in order to explain the considerations, both the scientific ones and then the ethical ones that led me to that position.
• 1:33:43
  So we're not gonna have enough time to go terribly deep here, but to me as a biologist, I can look at the question in cold irrational terms(...) and say there's an arbitrary line that has to be drawn somewhere, but there is a point before the zygote blastula has a nervous system in which A, even if these things were created naturally,(...) they would be very likely to be destroyed by the early failure of the pregnancy, which happens all the time without women even knowing that they are pregnant.
• 1:34:30
  And so my personal position, which as I've said is always evolving, but my personal position is there's a point where it's early enough in a pregnancy that I am not bothered terribly by the loss of the embryo or the zygote or blastula or whatever it might be.
• 1:34:57
  Well, those are just stages. So the zygote, the blastula, the blastocyst are stages of embryonic development.
• 1:35:05
  Right, but I have become uncomfortable(...) with the consequence for human understanding of their own position in the world. I think it has, for example, let's step out of the realm of pregnancies and into the realm of birth control.
• 1:35:29
  Oh, I want to. No, no, even before. So I am, of course, in favor of the existence of birth control and the accessibility of it. But I think that the sexual revolution, which came along with the evolution of this technology, has been very bad for humans, that it has created, it has caused humans to lose track of the seriousness with which they once understood sexual behavior. And it has caused us to treat it carelessly and that we have become worse, we've become worse people as a result of this status, the change in status of sex between people.
• 1:36:17
  Louise Perry put some emphasis on this in her very valuable book on the subject.
• 1:36:21
  Yes, I agree, and I am largely of shared mindset with her.(...) So the question I have for you is when you say that an embryo is, it warrants legal protection, it warrants the status of a human being.(...) As a biologist, I can hear that and say, I can't see how that would be the case, but as a human, I can understand that maybe there's an argument that once you take over the human body,(...) once you take over the right to determine when something has become a human, that it is inevitable that you will end up crossing lines that are not good for humanity. And so we must hold ourselves back from imagining that we get to draw that line because we will do it poorly.
• 1:37:15
  Well, there's a lesson in the eugenics,(...) the development of eugenics in the early part of the 20th century that would, I think, raise the kind of red flag you're talking about here. It just seemed like such a good idea, who could be against it, all the scientists were for it, all the elites were for it, all the progressive right-thinking people.
• 1:37:36
  Progressives today like to no longer remember who, where they were, who was responsible for eugenics. It wasn't those Hicks and Hillbillies and Backwoods people, they were regarded as retrograde and backward because they didn't go along with the eugenics agenda. It was the right-thinking, the progressive people, and they hung onto it until the Nazis gave it a bad name. So you hear progressives condemn eugenics today, I'm glad to hear it. I'm sorry, but you gotta remember that, it was your tradition that gave us that. I think from the scientific point of view, it's undeniable that from the very earliest embryonic stage,(...) you have a whole living member of the species Homo sapiens, whether the development of some level of neural functioning or mental functioning creates a dividing line between human beings that have dignity and rights and those that don't, I think is an ethical question, not a scientific question. I don't think it can be resolved by scientific methods, it has to be resolved by ethical reflection.(...) Again, my own core ethical principles, profound inherent and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. If somebody's got an alternative to that, I need to know what the criteria are by which we distinguish those human beings who are persons or bears of dignity from those that aren't. And in the book, we canvas the wide set of arguments that have been advanced by moderate figures like Professor Sandel, who I think is running an argument similar to the one that you would be most comfortable with, to my colleague Peter Singer, who runs a more radical argument, but one that's very difficult to rebut once you've given up the principle of the profound inherent and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. So I do agree that there are arguments that have to be met and I do hope that anyone who's interested will look at that. It's not a new book, I'm not plugging a new book. I keep holding it up here as if I'm in the marketing business. But for anyone who's interested in the subject, I would urge them to read the book because it does engage very forthrightly all the arguments that have been advanced to try to distinguish a category of human beings that's a bearer of worth and dignity or personhood in those that aren't.
• 1:39:59
  Well, I must say that in the time we have known each other, you have always impressed me as, I think you may be the person who is most capable in my experience of having a belief and holding a value with which you are thoroughly,(...) consciously aware and offering a generosity of spirit to those with whom you disagree, even when the issue is one as morally fraught as this one. So I appreciate that you're able to have the conversation across these lines in a way that nobody else I know can. And I hope we've now run out of time. I've got a bunch of things on my list(...) that I was hoping to talk to you about. Let's do it again.
• 1:40:55
  Let's do it again, all right.
• 1:40:59
  Dr. George, it has been a distinct pleasure. I really appreciate you spending the time and I'm looking forward to episode two.
• 1:41:09
  Thanks very much. I look forward to it too, Brad. And please give my very warmest regards to Heather.
• 1:41:13
  Of course, I will.
• 1:41:14
  Thanks. Be well, everyone.