Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Have We Got Morality Backwards? The Case Against Utilitarianism” with Bo Winegard

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“Have We Got Morality Backwards? The Case Against Utilitarianism” with Bo Winegard · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas one of the most uncomfortable
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  conversations that we tend to have when we're adolescents when we're just forming our
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  view of the world but which we often then shunt aside later on in life is the basic dangerous
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  idea of what does it really mean to do the right thing versus doing the wrong thing and
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  how do we figure out the edge cases when is it okay to lie for example to spare a greater harm
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  is it okay to lavish your children with everything they need at the same time as you know that some
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  of the money that you spend on them could be saving the lives of needier children overseas
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  there are big ethical flare ups in modern culture like is it okay to kill an itsy bitsy teeny
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  winy little pre baby in a mummy's tummy should she have the right to do so this abortion debate has
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  of course royal the United States for decades whether or not gay people should be allowed to marry
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  each other but often we just sort of take as a given our underlying ethical assumptions about
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  the rest of our lives and most of what we believe in Western secular liberal culture is some form
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  of utilitarianism or consequentialism whose most significant advocate in this generation
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  and arguably of the 20th century would have to be pita singer a former guest on this show in fact
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  I moderated pita singers live events when he was in Australia and I hope to have him on the show
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  again soon he literally coined the term animal liberation in his book of the same name in the 1970s
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  and he's had more of an impact than perhaps any other living moral philosopher on the way that both
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  philosophers think and therefore the way that we all think about doing right and doing wrong and
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  his basic position is a utilitarian one is that the greatest good for the greatest number of people
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  should be our moral yardstick rather than some sort of more theological or absolutist moral
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  position that says that there are things that are that are intrinsically right or intrinsically
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  wrong regardless of the impact that they have on people I was very struck then to read a well-thought
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  out essay that challenged my assumptions about this by today's guest bow one guard the essay is
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  entitled against singerism subtitled pita singer is rightly applauded as a philosophical giant
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  he's also spectacularly wrong that's an audacious claim to make and so I wanted to dig into it and
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  say well if we can't base our sense of what's good and what's bad what's right and what's wrong
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  what's immoral and and moral and how we should live on our judgment about whether or not it
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  improves the lot of the largest number of people then what exactly are we doing when we talk about
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  leading a good life this is a fascinating romp through moral philosophy I hope you enjoy it as
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  much as I did bow one guard got his PhD in social psychology from Florida State University he's
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  interested in human evolution and social psychology he has a sub stack which you should definitely also
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  follow I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one and only bow one guard
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  pita singer deserves his reputation as an intellectual giant because he's wrong spectacularly
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  and extravagantly wrong and that you believe that singarism is not just wrong but pernicious
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  that he's mistaken about the nature of reality so when you come at the king you best not miss
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  what's your case very big question you go backward I would say also so that's I think I
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  those were the first couple of sentences of the piece of which you know you had kind of
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  attempt to grab attention obviously with your first few sentences I should say I think
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  singer is spectacularly wrong but I think he deserves his reputation as an intellectual
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  colossus not just because he's wrong as I sort of suggested in that first paragraph but also because
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  he's obviously a very intelligent interesting thinker who champions priest beach in debate he does
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  things the right way so my disagreement with singer is not a disagree about how he goes about
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  doing philosophy it's a disagreement with this conclusion I think more people should actually
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  attempt to behave the way singer dollars okay so my case it was a long case so maybe we should
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  break it off but what I would say this so there's singers thought and then there's singer is
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  I think singerism is sort of like Marxism or Freudianism in which it's sort of a degenerate
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  clone of the genius so like whatever one thinks about Marxism Marx was undoubtedly a genius Marxism
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  becomes much more accrued inevitably of sending with Freudianism sending with singer so singers
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  more sophisticated thinker than people I put into the category I would call singer as sort of
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  singerism I would contend that singer is committed to his three important premises all of which I
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  think are dubious one utilitarianism two cosmopolitanism and three ethical rationalism so I spend my
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  peace attempting to cast out on all three of those premises and if all three of those are wrong
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  than singer as peculiarly wrong since she subscribed to all three of those and for people who aren't
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  sort of wonks of moral philosophy but what how would you summarize the worldview of singerism
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  and the role that like what does it claim how does it differ from other moral claims and how much
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  influence does it have over the way that lay people think about ethics in the West yeah yeah
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  so to start before getting into that worldview in more detail we should say singer is is one of
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  probably the most popular moral philosopher and one of the towering moral philosophers in all of
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  history I think legitimately now I don't know if his position there will hold off over time if
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  you'll take his place with hot and Aristotle but he's very popular right now very influential I've
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  known people for my whole life who were incredibly influenced by a singer often because of his what I
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  do is a lot of attempt to mainstream animal right it's a well maybe you wouldn't call it an animal
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  right it's a duplicated one but the way we treat animals drawing attention to that he also if
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  you've seen I don't know here familiar way dog talk to you I forget is it is it called the good
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  place with yeah that terrific sitcom yeah yeah yeah so I haven't I think I watched an episode or two I
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  wasn't drawn into it but oh you have to watch the first season but you have to get to the end of
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  the first season it's really there's a twist that I won't give it give up at the end of the first
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  season but it's a clever it is cleverly done the way they extract humor from pretty profound
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  moral questions yeah yeah so that yeah I should give it more time so I don't want to cast
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  this version it's not in the show because I only watched a couple of episodes but the show was
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  influenced by singer and intact um the name escapes me tax shepherds white that sounds
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  misogynistic like I know Kristen
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  Stuart Bell yeah there are too many Christian
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  Kristen Bell she reads
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  this is the way a couple of moral philosophy wonks understand the pop culture universe there's a
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  bunch of people who are probably blonde named Kristen or custom something and one of them was in
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  this show well and she read one of singers books for books for honorable but anyway um the singer
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  worldview it really and some ways he would claim that singer himself is not forwarding a new moral
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  philosophy because he subscribes to utilitarianism you what is utilitarianism the simplest way to
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  put utilitarianism I think it's that it contends the only thing of intrinsic moral value
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  is pleasure in pain or subjective mental states if you want to go a little bit more broad
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  and that the goal of morality in the moral philosophy should be to encourage people to increase
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  pleasures and decrease pain to maximize overall utility now that gets that right there there's
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  a lot of problems already um are we matrimizing aggregate utility or average utility for example
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  we can get into those weeds but let's just sit there okay so singer for most of his career
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  was not uh he was a different kind of utilitarian he was what is called the preference utility I
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  hope this does not uh bore the listeners because these details can be important preference utilitarian
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  thinks that you should maximize people's preferences not necessarily their mental states happiness
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  sadness whatever that you should maximize happiness but rather their preferences so if I want to
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  be a poet but my path to becoming a poet is rather tortured maybe Lord Byron's on here and I think
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  you have to live a dangerous life suffer to create great art a preference utilitarian would suggest
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  that you should attempt to maximize a preference or maximize as many preferences we can regardless of
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  wait if it increases happiness right I like that you've gone for an example of a poet leading a
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  tortured life rather than the more obvious but gutter example of someone who's into BDSM or
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  something like that like you know people there they can there could be a person who likes pain
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  and the singer version of utilitarianism would be that's okay you don't have to narrowly maximize
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  pleasure and minimize pain as long as it's what their preference is and people have the capacity
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  to articulate their preferences in the world successfully yeah that's a good salacious example I like
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  that yeah so you could use that now no this is where it gets tricky though because singer
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  more recently actually uh converted to egonic utilitarian and so on so now he thinks it is
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  amount of mental states and that what you should maximize is happiness or flourishing that gets
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  problematic trying to define happiness but some sort of mental state of well-being and he's also
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  and this is another important distinction he's an act utilitarian the utilitarianism there's a lot
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  of conflicts in this long umbrella and one of the major conflicts is should you be an act-based
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  utilitarian or a rule based utilitarian and after base thinks the moral question should be
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  about each behavior or rule based utilitarian says we should figure out the rules that on average
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  lead to the most well-being and sometimes you will follow the rule and maybe it won't lead to
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  the most well-being in that particular case but on average these rules would lead to the most well-being
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  it turns out that that can be an important distinction if we as we get into what some of my
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  disagreements with utilitarianism I think rule based utilitarianism is actually a more
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  plausible moral view than at base for various reasons do you want to just tease that out with an
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  example of an instance in which rule based utilitarian would utilitarianism would overcome
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  some kind of obviously undesirable outcome of act utilitarianism yeah yeah so I think
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  it's been a long time since I wrote the piece I didn't I'm not even I'm not referring to a
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  thing in the piece I could make one up you could make one up a person a person who's a famous
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  person who's wrongly convicted of a crime for example yeah there's like a imagine that a very
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  popular celebrity actually beats his girlfriend let's say and let's say that he is adored by hundreds
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  of millions of people around the world and if they found out that he would smack around this
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  girlfriend they would be horrified and it would decrease their mental states they call these
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  hedons if you measure that so let's say a hedon a hedon is a unit of pleasure
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  so let's say that this would decrease their hedon and we're talking about hundreds of millions of
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  people so this is hundreds of millions even if it's only point I P not we're talking about a
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  lot a huge decrease in overall hedonic state of the earth and let's say that if the police
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  didn't intervene the woman would suffer a lot so she loses a lot of hedons but it's nowhere near
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  the overall hedons that the more global loses finding out that there's pop stars of fraud and
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  a violent spousal of views or let's say it seems to me an apt utilitarian to be completely
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  consistent would have to accept that perhaps we shouldn't connect this person right
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  pretty much that we shouldn't intervene because that would actually decrease the overall hedonics
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  state of the planet a rule based utilitarian would say no no on average if we intervene and enforce
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  a consistent rule of law regardless of the specifics of each individual pace it would increase
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  overall hedonic overall hedonics state of the earth and therefore rule based utilitarianism
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  is more plausible and more consistent I think with moral intuitions that we have right because
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  you're likely to enhance pleasure more on a global scale if there's a universal rule against
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  beating your domestic partner than in the short term instance of saying that we should exonerate
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  this particular guy because ultimately and I should also we should also point out if people
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  are thinking well hang on I mean would it really make hundreds of millions of people that much
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  sadder just because a pop star was revealed to be maybe maybe they'd get some kind of salacious
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  joy out of the gossip or something that's not the point right you can find and you can always
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  find an example like imagine that it's a that the person is a holy person who gives enormous
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  meaning I mean you can even think about the this is probably the Catholic Church I was just
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  going to say this was this was this was probably going on in the heads of a lot of the senior
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  clergy who were covering up child abuse by thinking right we know that the this is wrong if you
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  look at it in isolation as an act but think about the long term consequences and the greater good
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  of people losing their faith in the church and how much comfort the Catholic Church gives to
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  hundreds of millions of people around the world or more than a billion people around the world
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  you can imagine that kind of a rationale operating where they go to be yeah the rule utilitarianism
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  over the act yeah and as you say you know like one can always be skeptical about any particular
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  thought experiment here but the point still stands that there's a difference an important
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  difference right between the rule based utilitarian and the act based utilitarian now singer is an
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  act based utilitarian and he has some pretty sophisticated arguments defending that in I think
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  it's in the point of view of the universe with his co-author I won't go into those because those
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  get like various groups but surprise if you say he's an act based utilitarian I think utilitarian
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  is um I I shouldn't say um I think in my first year of grad school or so I was a committed utilitarian
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  so I comment this from I'm a lapse utilitarian as it were a fall in utilitarian um I think utilitarian
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  ism is it's untanable I think there are too many problems with it to sustain
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  uh and therefore I think of course singers wrong just because of that if nothing else but I also
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  think the other parts of his thought are wrong perhaps one could say that those flow naturally
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  from utilitarianism that is to say cosmopolitanism is a natural consequence of
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  the utilitarian maybe I just separated down for ease of acquisition and I think it's useful
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  to make these distinct shares yeah so staying on utilitarianism I think the I think it would be
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  true to say that most people intuitively in the West if they're not religious if they're secular
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  and generally utilitarians they may not go as far as singer but the general idea
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  they're probably rule utilitarians with a preference for the preference version meaning that
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  they might think it's too narrow to say that every single act should be judged on whether or not
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  it increases pleasure or you know reduces pain but they'd probably agree that the way that we
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  should structure things should be aimed towards principles and rules that increase the capacity
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  of people to flourish yeah and decrease impediments to people's preferences being
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  sought and realized right I think you I think you are right that I'm not sure if they would be
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  rule based preference utilitarians you might be right on that but I do think some kind of vague
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  utilitarianism is widespread among atheist intellectuals and educated like people align I agree
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  with that I think this is where it gets difficult because if you were to say to me it importantly
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  singer is not this but if you said I am a rule based preference utilitarian I think we have a lot
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  of common ground I think when you you did that version of utilitarianism I think is is quite
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  plausible I might find some problems with it I think most of the issues though with singer's dog
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  come precisely from rejecting that version of utilitarianism I should say and looking more narrowly
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  with a specific acts increase happiness and decrease on happiness yeah right sorry what we're
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  just going to say oh this is more speculative but I do think it's perhaps worth noting I think one
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  of the things that's appealing about utilitarianism especially for people who are not believers
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  is that it gives in my view the illusion of some kind of objective moral framework and some kind
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  of way to debate moral issues by appeal to apparently cure a reason right so it used to be at one
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  time if we got into a moral tussle let's say you and I I would cite scripture because that was
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  that was the sort of culturally accepted authority on moral issues and then maybe you would cite
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  a different passage of scripture and say no no no this and then here's it well we can't do that
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  in public discourse anymore if you're in the Catholic church you can do that but not in our western
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  like you know secular the public discourse therefore utilitarianism's appealing because you
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  can say no this is rational I'm appealing to you know the subjective mental states and the
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  maximization of overall happiness or he got he don't or what not really right so I do think that's
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  something appealing about it and just before we go into the criticism of your criticisms maybe
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  the it's also worth just briefly outlining what an alternative to utilitarianism is because it's
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  so deeply embedded I think in our common sense norms about morality today especially on the
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  secular side of the aisle that like people might sort of be saying well of course it should have
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  of course our of course our behavior should have something to do with what the consequences of
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  those that that behavior is and the its impact on other sentient creatures and humans like on
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  what other foundation that isn't biblical would you base right and wrong yeah so there's a
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  one of the fundamental sort of dichotomies thinkers love dichotomies so I like it makes things simple
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  so we have consequentialism on one side in deontological ethics on another consequentialists say
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  ethics are about the consequences deontologists would say and this is a different framework
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  or morality which is an alternative to utilitarianism they would say some things are just
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  intrinsically good or bad that are not related to mental states necessarily like that act itself
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  can be good or bad accounting it for example after Immanuel Kant who forwarded famous
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  categorical imperative it was called the notion that you should act in such a way that you could
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  will everybody act that way and it would be consisting or the social contract or the social world
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  would work so he said for example lying would violate the categorical imperative because
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  if I lie I'm in a sense saying everybody can lie and if everybody lies society just falls to
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  pieces it breaks apart so the very act of lying is antifetical to moral reason and therefore long
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  in fact in and I think modern modern listeners will find this a bit repel and
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  ha actually argue perversely that if you were hiding somebody what's take well it's basically
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  a conspiracy I'm gonna change it just slightly essentially if you're hiding somebody from the Nazis
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  Nazis can't after time but it doesn't matter it fits with his argument and somebody asks you a
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  direct question are you hiding this person and you know that they will take the person and kill
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  the person lying is still wrong now cut legitimately argue that he argued it was still wrong
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  actively too long now he did make a distinction between not answering and saying something that
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  was false but that's how strongly committed he was to this neontological argument that the
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  certain behaviors can just be wrong regardless of the consequences and this is because of what you
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  just said about his worldview of what the categorical imperative I think is the nerd's turn for it
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  right which is your act as if your behavior was gonna become a general rule yeah so if you don't
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  want to live in a world in which everybody lies then don't lie the problem is the problem with
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  the ontology from the consequentialist's point of view is that they will always say well okay but
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  the only reason why you don't want to live in a world in which everybody lies is because it has
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  bad consequences if it didn't have bad consequences on any human beings if there were no human
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  if you were the only person in the world and there were no human beings and there was no
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  measure of pleasure or pain or preferences being fulfilled or not you're you're just sort of
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  smuggling into your Kantian deontology consequentialism in other words a consideration of what the
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  consequences of these acts are gonna be without acknowledging it yeah that's like I think that's
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  a great point and if you look at Kant's response to the person who made this challenge you have
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  he specifically appeals to consequences ultimately because he says well look if people start
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  lying in these situations then you have these exceptions and then anybody can lie and nobody
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  can trust anybody you're done and it breaks apart and you're right ultimately that's a kind of
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  appeal to the consequences I think Kant would say well really what it's an appeal to is just
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  reason if we just think about is this consistent with reason and I guess you can never separate
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  that entire read from the consequences I completely agree with you and I think that's a
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  a fair argument for a consequentialist to make so I would say the difference is they're on a
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  continual the question is how far away are the consequences in your moral assessment so for a
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  Kantian the consequences are maybe far too away like you're like okay yes ultimately this would
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  lead to the ruin of society and you can say that that's a consequence but we're not looking at the
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  sort of narrow consequences of each specific act we're looking at the act itself and they're saying
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  that's wrong whereas what singer would say is look that's absurd if you're in that context
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  clearly you care more about the immediate consequences namely somebody might get killed by
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  the Nazis and therefore it would be morally repognit to tell the person yeah I'm hiding the person
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  or to tell you but I mean I'm not sure that that sort of Kantian defense of saying well at the end
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  of the day after you follow the yellow brick road far enough sure you get to consequences is very
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  robust because then that's just basically rule consequentialism slightly distended right it's
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  basically saying like we've got this rule which is don't lie ultimately the reason why it's a
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  rule is because it has bad consequences but those bad consequences don't worry they're so far
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  away that we're going to ignore them they're so abstracted you know and we're going to pretend
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  we've got some rationalistic foundation for the claim that lying is wrong in the absence of any
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  impact that might have on anybody sounds like a fudge to me okay so without getting without
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  claiming that I'm defending Kant here what I would say is just from my own point of view I think
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  I think your arguments correct and actually I think the line between rule based utilitarianism
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  and some kind of deontology is very thin right because almost everybody I don't care how deontology
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  like how strident in your deontology you are you're going to care about consequences at some point
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  right that's right if what suppose that we cook this question is like if you don't lie the human
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  species will die the earth will be blown to smithony let's say it's like we're we have the death
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  star either we lie or we tell the truth that our plan is is obliterated by the death so I can't
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  imagine a day of how to say I don't care you still have to tell the truth I mean they'd have to
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  wouldn't they that's just the same version as the Anne Frank example but bigger yeah no I know
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  you're right it gets tricky now I don't know I wish we could I wish we could somehow resurrect
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  Kant and we could ask I'm sure they're I'm sure they're enthusiastic Kant scholars who
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  there are the cool a yes but I should be cautious here because I haven't read that literature in a
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  long time that the Kantian literature I do remember many of the modern Kantians were a little
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  uncomfortable with how enthusiastic he enthusiastically he embraced this and I think many of them
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  did make qualifications for certain consequences um and as you say again the light is thin it's not
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  clear what the distinction would be between a rule based utilitarian and somebody who's mostly
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  de apple article so yeah these things get messy they're attempts as with almost any conceptual
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  like framework they're just attempts to pick out viewpoints in their kind of thoughts
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  right okay and so if we've established sort of deontology and Kant as the main alternative to
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  consequentialism in that they were yeah I'm sorry I'm interrupted but I do I because this is what I
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  will defend at the end of this if we get to my own positive I'm sorry we'll run out of time
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  before we get to any of your actual substantive points we get to that after the criticism of
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  Singer what I would say is that there's kind of a pragmatic alternative to which is what I
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  subscribe to my view is there's no entirely coherent consistent moral philosophy or what you
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  might call a meta meta philosophy or whatever rather I care about human flourishing specifically
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  the flourishing of the communities in which I dwell and I think other people should care about
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  the flourishing of their communities and that means I care about mental states to some degree but
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  it also means I subscribe to some down political commitments because I think rules are often
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  important and it's important to deter people from making exception tools right because everybody
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  thinks they're the exception oh yeah I'm gonna cheat here or cheat there or whatever but it's
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  actually for the greater good because right and that's why we just need you to say no it's just
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  small so I would say perhaps some kind of pragmaties of is it also is also an alternative
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  or less saxophone out there right well it's it's it's it's it's more it's easier to embody because
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  it's slippery right and that's the criticism that would come of your morality from either deontologists
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  or consequentialists which is correct all you're doing is following your whims and your likes
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  and your preferences and and you're cherry picking from deontology and consequentialism
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  in order to retroactively reinforce what you feel in your gut but it there's no clear or consistent
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  or coherent philosophical or moral framework for your positions you're just trying to have a
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  bob each way yes but those are fair criticism of what I would say I will defend the pragmatistic
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  against those in the future here but not quite yeah I'll get to sing their first because I think
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  people are more interested in singer than my own world position well I think we're all interested
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  in trying to figure out what's right and wrong and how to live a good life so both are probably
• 32:17
  relevant so and just before we I know this is a long preface but you you jumped from utilitarian
• 32:25
  to consequentialist without commenting on the difference what's the difference between consequentialism
• 32:31
  and utilitarianism good good good point yeah the chat company okay so consequentialism
• 32:40
  contends that morality should care about consequences but it doesn't necessarily
• 32:47
  contend that those consequences must be mental states or he gone or whatever we like all of
• 32:52
  utility so for example G more was a consequentialist of sorts but he thought there were
• 32:59
  sort of the intrinsic bullets like beauty true it's friendship let's say but he would say rather
• 33:05
  than a company to maximize key downs or try to do some hedonic hell he was we should maximize
• 33:14
  the amount of beauty and truth in the world the amount of friendship so there are multiple
• 33:19
  or plural bullets rather than just want right because you could say you utilitarian is modest
• 33:26
  or it's it believes in one measure right someone unit of good it's mental states go all they can
• 33:36
  go do let's say we'll just pretend they can go to 100 or they can be at zero that's the
• 33:40
  nature uh somebody else might a plural as might say no they're like 10 different things let's say
• 33:48
  you know you can have great friendships you can have a lot of truth you can have beauty in your
• 33:53
  life you can have adventures whatever nature right be a good yeah so there are different
• 34:00
  varieties of consequentialism and ex-utilitarianism is probably the most popular uh form of it but it's
• 34:10
  not the only one okay and the greatest advocate of that way of thinking is pita singer so we've
• 34:16
  talked about so let's start stick with utilitarianism and your critique of that we've talked about
• 34:21
  the question of whether or not you assess individual acts or general rules uh to determine whether
• 34:26
  an act is right or wrong uh also whether or not you're just looking at pleasure and pain in the
• 34:33
  sort of abacus telling sense or something like the satisfaction of people's preferences um yeah
• 34:41
  is so the question of whether it's okay to inflict pain on rapists or terrorists
• 34:48
  yeah might be a place to stop okay yeah here i i think that is really important because i see
• 34:55
  what attracted me to utilitarianism early on was i thought that they were correct that the only
• 35:03
  thing that been transit value in the universe was pleasure in pain like pleasure is good
• 35:08
  it doesn't it doesn't need anything else it's good in and of itself and pain is bad in and of
• 35:15
  itself and i thought okay well if you start with that you get utilitarianism i'd come to believe
• 35:22
  that that's a flawed view i don't think pleasure and pain are intrinsically good or bad they're
• 35:28
  intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant right if you prick me with a pen that's unpleasant of course
• 35:35
  you want some of that's the case right and that's what's happening complication uh and if i eat
• 35:40
  cheesecake that's that's good it's perfect but we can think of all kinds of examples where
• 35:46
  pleasure is actually bad in pain is actually perhaps good what start with pleasure first because
• 35:53
  i think the pain one is like more persuasive but the pleasure ones interest me so i'm a former
• 35:59
  smoker i tried to quit smoking and it's brutal absolutely incredibly difficult and every once in
• 36:06
  a while you cheat a cigarette and when you cheat a cigarette it feels really good but you don't
• 36:13
  want it to feel good in some sense you actually hate that it makes you feel good you almost wish
• 36:19
  you smoke the cigarette and then you vomit it and we're sick for day so you would never be tempted
• 36:27
  the siren song of the cigarette i got so that's a case where i think actually you could make
• 36:33
  the argument pleasure is bad and of course we can think of more consequential examples of
• 36:40
  heroin and so forth i did the example in the article which i thought was interesting work
• 36:49
  you know provoking moral intuition since suppose that a person they walk around a playground
• 36:57
  is they just wanted to watch kids fall and cry now they didn't do anything so they weren't
• 37:03
  actively causing harm but if they saw a kid crying it gave them pleasure i think we would say
• 37:10
  there's something morally wrong about that no as utilitarian it seems would have to say well
• 37:17
  if the person's not harbing anybody they're just observing the world this was going to happen
• 37:23
  the fact that they feel pleasure must be a good it's a good thing it's good to feel pleasure
• 37:29
  is intrinsically good i think that's wrong i think it's clearly wrong and that we actually judge
• 37:35
  people's behaviors and their pleasures and pleasures can be bad further more pain can be good
• 37:41
  and this gets too punishment so if we inflict pain upon a serial rapance or a terrorist i think
• 37:50
  that's a good thing i think they deserve pain and i think it's a proper the universe is better
• 37:58
  as it were if heinous criminals suffer pain a utilitarian why is that though i don't think that's
• 38:06
  morally obvious to people why do you think it is okay so if that's not morally obvious to people
• 38:14
  then i i don't like it just to clarify what i'm what just to clarify what i'm saying i think it's
• 38:18
  morally obvious that those people should be prevented from doing what they're doing so you want
• 38:21
  to lock them up i think it's morally obvious to people that you should provide some kind of a
• 38:25
  deterrent effect that would have a consequential impact on other people's behavior and discourage
• 38:30
  them so if there's a rationale that you want to punish them but then you could also just pretend
• 38:36
  to be punishing them right you could say in order to cause the deterrent effect if we know that
• 38:42
  for example torturing terrorists to get information out of them doesn't work let's assume that
• 38:47
  we know that i don't even if i don't know that we do know that in that universe i'm not
• 38:52
  sure that i understand and if we also are ambivalent about free will and don't know whether or not
• 38:58
  these people have the capacity to do otherwise right it strikes me like why is it why is it good
• 39:05
  to inflict pain on a shark after a shark kills a person why is it good to inflict pain on a
• 39:11
  you know rape serial rapists because they're a serial rapist like just get them the hell away from
• 39:16
  women and you know provide some kind of deterrent to other would be rapists and that's that i think
• 39:23
  further pain in inflection that doesn't strike me as moral okay that's interesting so we we have
• 39:29
  competing intuitions there and i i suppose your intuition would be closer to singers intuition
• 39:35
  or perhaps singular arrived at it through you know launch anchor he's the need about moral issues
• 39:42
  uh my intuition my strong intuition is that if somebody does something hang us to a person in my
• 39:51
  community or to my sister or whatever i walk that person to suffer now i want that to be proportionate
• 39:58
  suffering but what hang on sorry i also just don't want to be misunderstood i'm talking about
• 40:03
  what i think is moral i'm not talking about what my animal gut reptilian brain makes me want to do
• 40:09
  of course if someone rapes my sister i'm gonna want to cut them cut their head off you know kick
• 40:15
  their balls out of their skull and dump them in a river that doesn't mean that that is the way that
• 40:21
  i believe that society should treat you know as a general principle people who do bad things i
• 40:26
  think that of course i have immoral instincts but it doesn't strike me as obviously the correct
• 40:33
  thing to do to inflict pain beyond what's necessary right okay very fair qualification
• 40:38
  i i didn't mean to suggest that the alternative was you didn't feel like this passion
• 40:43
  but desire to inflict pain on these people i guess what we rephrase my intuition that the
• 40:49
  intuition that i have is that it's actually moral to inflict some kind of pain on these people now
• 40:57
  i think it needs to be a well-regulated kind of inflection of pain that is to say
• 41:04
  typically what we do now is it's a deprivation of freedom which is undoubtedly painful i mean
• 41:08
  people don't want to go to jail it's generally not much of her prison it's unpleasant um i guess
• 41:16
  so you you were making more or less the utilitarian case for punishment which is like of course we
• 41:22
  want deterrence and we want these people to be sequestered from society if they're going to
• 41:27
  cause harm etc but do we need any you know is it just to cause any pain beyond that right
• 41:35
  i guess my strong intuition is that it is morally jobs and that the suffering of the wicked
• 41:43
  is actually a moral goal and i i guess i'm not sure that i can make an argument a rational argument
• 41:52
  and this isn't fitting with my pragmatism i don't really think there is one i think we're using
• 41:57
  human intuitions and we're the kinds of creatures who think the wicked should suffer
• 42:04
  now if you say to me you don't think that or you don't have that feeling i would say okay
• 42:13
  i don't know that i'm going to persuade you but what i would argue and you would agree with this
• 42:18
  is that the desire to cause suffering and perpetrators of pain as crimes
• 42:27
  probably walled to create a deterrent of that and therefore i would be a little bit
• 42:35
  cautious about trying to eradicate that impulse from humans or arguing that there's something
• 42:41
  immoral or amoral about it if that makes sense it sort of does but it does again feel a little
• 42:48
  bit like cherry picking in the sense that there are deep primal motivations in the human species
• 42:55
  not merely to punish rapists but also to rape and also to kill and exclude other
• 43:02
  communities who aren't like ours and to excommunicate heretics and to burn witches at the stake and
• 43:08
  to do all kinds of terrible things that we are all sort of natively hardwired to do the rates of
• 43:14
  male violence among young males are off the charts so i don't know why you couldn't apply
• 43:22
  your rationale to instances of violence that you presumably don't condone if the rationale is
• 43:29
  this is the way humans are hardwired there are probably good evolutionary reasons for males to be
• 43:33
  so violent for us to have these instincts that just strikes me as a slippery slope where
• 43:39
  i don't know what the what what ground you're standing on to say that the retributive violence
• 43:47
  is good because it's an innate urge but other forms of blood lust aren't
• 43:54
  that's a very fair criticism so i will say uh first yes i you're right no the appeal my appeal is not
• 44:04
  only to human nature i do think human nature is relevant obviously or any kind of moral question
• 44:12
  because we're talking about morals among human swirls would have a very different morality presumably
• 44:18
  don't steal my knots exactly so so uh but bought your point is wealthy so what i would say is
• 44:29
  i care about community flourishing i i think that is a little bit more objective it's not
• 44:35
  just an appeal to human nature i mean of course communities flourish when they have policies that
• 44:41
  are congruent with human nature i mean communism failed precisely because it's in brutal with
• 44:47
  human nature but you're right we have all kinds of innate impulses and loss that we attempt to
• 44:54
  discourage and i'm generally a conservative on the social conservative and we're especially
• 45:02
  scouting or human nature so you're right i shouldn't say well a human nature i guess what i would
• 45:07
  say on top of the fact that i i think it's uh it's a just impulse that human that is also
• 45:15
  uh cute flourishing communities likely flourish precisely because they threaten serious punishment
• 45:26
  to malefactors and wrongdoers you might say and this is where we would just run into like a
• 45:32
  philosophical conundrum and we to talk about it for hours and it's interesting but i don't know
• 45:38
  that there's any solution to it you might say well yes i could agree with that even as an
• 45:44
  utilitarian because i cared about deterrence it's that problem then we'd have to go to thought
• 45:49
  experiment so you get to these thought experiments where you're like well let's say you have this
• 45:54
  heinous rapist you you know we'll see you wait seven people in your community and they take they
• 46:01
  say they're punishing them right the claim is we're putting this person in this
• 46:07
  uncomfortable prison for the rest of his life the cockroaches call around to lapidate it he never
• 46:13
  perceives the sun and sat down but actually they take them to a private island and he lives a
• 46:18
  pretty comfortable life now trim and deterrent perspective deterrence has been satisfied right
• 46:26
  on the other hand i have the feeling that there's something and i can't justify this without
• 46:32
  appeal to some kind of metaphysical but i think there's something metaphysically on drossed about
• 46:39
  right i think that person should be punished i don't care that it wouldn't add to the deterrent
• 46:46
  effect i actually want the person to be punished and i would argue that it would actually make
• 46:52
  the world more chance but there we would run into complication so let me ask you a question and
• 46:59
  step do you think or were you persuaded or are you persuaded that pleasure is not always good
• 47:09
  yeah i'm persuaded by that okay but maybe not that pain is sometimes good yeah no pain is
• 47:17
  sometimes good and pleasure is sometimes bad i think i can get on board with that yeah so we
• 47:21
  can agree on that and then maybe we would get it but just hustle some of the details yeah i mean
• 47:28
  just to get away from just one final point on the on the question of sort of it being good to
• 47:36
  inflict pain on wicked people beyond what's necessary for deterrence i would i would simply note and
• 47:45
  wasn't there a vice presidential debate it like in the 1980s where yeah he was asked by the
• 47:52
  interviewer by the moderator because he was against the death penalty yeah what would you do what
• 47:57
  would you want to happen to someone who raped and killed your wife yes like on stage on live tv
• 48:03
  we're quite a provocative question and he sort of lost the debate by waffling on about how he
• 48:09
  doesn't believe in the death penalty when of course what you should have said was the distinction that
• 48:13
  i made earlier which is i would want to murder that person and spread their entrails all over
• 48:20
  my neighborhood and that's precisely why we have laws and systems to prevent me from doing that
• 48:26
  and i think the death penalty is equally barbaric but just on the question of community flourishing
• 48:32
  i don't think it's obvious that communities which are most barbaric in their retribution
• 48:40
  like by cutting the hands off of people who steal are better and more flourishing than ones
• 48:48
  like the Norwegians who send their you know serial killers to basically what you were talking about
• 48:54
  the the luxury the luxury islands and and and and so on so that just point of point of
• 49:01
  difference there but i take your i totally agree with you by the way they're in fact there's
• 49:07
  probably a relation between community flourishing and and uh rather tame partners man
• 49:14
  and i mean this comes to this this this raises one of the common critiques that are leveled at
• 49:21
  people like well i was gonna say people like you but really all people who dabble in moral
• 49:26
  philosophy because it's that the i it's that the examples are so detached from the real world like
• 49:34
  your example of sending the guy sending the serial rapist away a serial murderer to a an island
• 49:41
  you know or even the example of a person who enjoys watching children being harmed
• 49:47
  yeah is there something is there something intrinsically wrong with that well maybe the intrinsically
• 49:52
  wrong thing with that is that we live in a world in which the abstract example of a person of an
• 49:58
  innocent person who is going to do no harm who is a good member of society and psychologically
• 50:05
  stable who also enjoys watching children being harmed is a fiction that it's just that's a unicorn
• 50:12
  that in reality people who enjoy watching children being harmed are likely to be people who will
• 50:17
  harm children or be dysfunctional in other ways yeah so we say as a general rule of thumb
• 50:22
  we should object to that behavior in regard that behavior even though the consequences of the act
• 50:27
  are not immediately and verifiably you know negative in terms of their consequences and
• 50:33
  their inflection of pain it's a fantasy it's a philosophers like fantasy completely unmoored
• 50:41
  from reality to invent these scenarios in which such a person exists what do you make of that
• 50:48
  critique oh I I share now I think that's a very fair germane criticism of
• 50:56
  ethical philosophy it's a criticism I even made it gets singer-stought experiment
• 51:03
  which I will get to in some time and yeah where I think it goes wrong but I think you're right I
• 51:08
  think that is very fair I guess what I would say is if you if you forward a moral philosophy which
• 51:18
  purports to be objectively true and precise then it's fair to criticize it using a fantastical
• 51:27
  thought experiment now you could retort well look in the real world this that this and I would
• 51:34
  say I agree with you but that's why we should just be pragmatists who deal with the real world
• 51:40
  right right these like morally precise philosophy okay so let's continue with your criticisms of
• 51:48
  singers utilitarianism now that we've established that simply looking at pleasure as being good
• 51:54
  and pain as bad is to crude a metric the other one that you come to is whether or not it implies
• 52:02
  that some people who have a greater capacity to spread pain or pleasure matter more than people
• 52:09
  who don't like is it an anti egalitarian philosophy utilitarianism because if you're a if you're
• 52:15
  a brilliant musician or a brilliant doctor do you need to be treated better than you know I don't
• 52:22
  know someone who doesn't have the same capacity to spread pleasure yeah so I'm like middling farmer
• 52:27
  in cancers let's say so to be clear here there's nothing wrong with morally leaders um somebody
• 52:36
  could persuade me of morally leaders um my complaint is rather moralism meaning that some people
• 52:44
  are more deserving of consideration than others because of their influence somebody could make
• 52:51
  this argument to me we could have an argument about it somebody could say well actually the gifted
• 52:56
  neurosurgeon is more valuable and I would be willing to hear that argument I'm not saying I agree
• 53:03
  with it but I'm saying I think there's a moral case there my objection uh this argument is
• 53:10
  designed not to object to that necessarily but rather to to point out that an egalitarian
• 53:18
  utilitarianism a utilitarianism which sets all people shouldn't matter the same actually end up
• 53:25
  undermining itself because people don't matter ultimately what matters is pleasure and pain
• 53:32
  so in some sense the individual becomes dwarfed by utility calculus here and they point that I
• 53:39
  I think the example that I gave is like well let's just take this gifted neurosurgeon so if this
• 53:46
  neurosurgeon can it has like ability to contribute to a community's utility as let's say
• 53:56
  50 times greater than a like a midwit bachelor who smokes a lot of weed and works at Walmart
• 54:06
  nothing wrong with that but that person is like their job is replaceable whereas the gifted neurosurgeon
• 54:14
  is not I think you'd have to argue so long as pleasure and pain motivate people's behavior which
• 54:22
  it clearly does that we should care more about the doctors mental states than about the
• 54:31
  the midwit Walmart workers mental states right because suppose that the doctor the neurosurgeon says
• 54:41
  ah look this is hard right my my job is hard I'm not going to do it unless I'm very well
• 54:48
  recognized and that means I get to have lots of women lots of money anything that causes me
• 54:55
  discomfort I'll quit you know but basically it's somebody like house you watch that show yeah
• 55:03
  you know like this list is containerous genius but everybody bends over backward for
• 55:09
  because he's a freaking genius and he's actually more valuable than the other workers at this hospital
• 55:16
  so the point here is this is Hugh Laurie playing the yeah the sort of medical it's basically a
• 55:23
  detective show but he but about human illness essentially yeah because there's always some really
• 55:29
  mysterious thing that no other doctor can figure out and he's the one who's just to put put the
• 55:34
  pieces together after he fails three times he figures it out and then the pity right up bad yeah
• 55:40
  exactly but isn't this but bow dot bow isn't this also doesn't this risk running into the unicorn
• 55:46
  problem in the sense that there aren't very many houses in the world uh doctor houses that is
• 55:52
  that it's unlikely like it's you said if it's the case that increased pleasure increases the
• 55:58
  productivity of the neurosurgeon right that's a big if I mean it may not be the case that being
• 56:04
  surrounded by hookers and cocaine and what you know is is great for the for the surgeons output
• 56:10
  I mean you know good people do good things because they're doing good things you know causing
• 56:16
  giving talented people more enjoyment probably only works up to a very limited point and then
• 56:23
  a certain amount of stress and pain and self you know regret is probably motivational for them and
• 56:29
  probably helps the consequentialist calculus that that's fair maybe the way I put it was
• 56:36
  rather grass and materialistic hookers and cocaine because I mean the reality is that we already do do
• 56:42
  this yeah we do do this to the to the extent that it yeah to the extent that there is a you know
• 56:49
  a consequentialist utility to making life better for neurosurgeons than for Walmart
• 56:55
  clerks this is what we do this is why we pay neurosurgeons $450,000 a year instead of
• 57:01
  yeah $40,000 a year yeah yeah yeah I totally agree with that but I guess the point there's
• 57:07
  you're right again this is kind of an abstract philosophical argument but the point of it is
• 57:14
  ultimately it undermines any kind of egalitarian individualism because what becomes the supreme
• 57:22
  concern is pleasure in pain it almost doesn't matter in what mind the pleasure in pain is taking
• 57:28
  place I think I for example I have a day ontological commitment to some kind of individual rights
• 57:36
  in a rule and I think that I wouldn't want to negotiate those for pain in pleasure right I would say
• 57:44
  we want those and we want a commitment to them regardless of the facts on one gifted individual
• 57:52
  or not right whereas I think if you're consistent and apt-based utilitarian yeah you you might say
• 57:59
  I'm a rule-based patterns utilitarian in these criticisms wouldn't apply to them but if you're
• 58:05
  an apt-based utilitarian specifically I think you have to bite the bullet on some of these and say
• 58:11
  well yes if if now you might say well most of these are fantastical fair enough but if this were
• 58:18
  true you would have to accept it as an apt-based utilitarian I think that is the undermining of
• 58:25
  the intellectual structure of that form of utilitarianism it still works in the world for the
• 58:33
  most work because you're right like generally speaking these things aren't this extreme but I
• 58:39
  concocting thought experiments that very rarely manifest into the world but I'm just trying to
• 58:46
  point out that there's something intellectually right fair enough but the thing that's intellectually
• 58:51
  wrong is that you can't pair egalitarianism like equality with it because it's not like suppose
• 58:59
  that you've got the neurosurgeon who if they get a blowjob from a hooker every Friday night they
• 59:04
  do a slightly better job let's just stipulate that that's the case then the utilitarian
• 59:10
  then the utilitarian has to say that it is morally better for them to do that than to not if
• 59:20
  they're assuming that there are no other negative consequences involved and also that they're more
• 59:25
  deserving of it than the Walmart employee is there's nothing it strikes me that's inconsistent
• 59:32
  about that within the framework of utilitarianism are you denying that it's not consistent with
• 59:36
  equality because it means that the neurosurgeon is more deserving than the Walmart worker. It's also
• 59:42
  not consistent with a kind of individualism which many modern utilitarian seem to subscribe to
• 59:50
  I don't know I've read I think most of singers books and I've listened to I don't know 25
• 59:58
  interviews written out I don't know if he ever stated this clearly but he at times seems to
• 1:00:07
  embrace a kind of individual egalitarianism like everybody's mental states matter the same it
• 1:00:13
  doesn't matter if you're a king or a lowly vagabond but in fact my point here is just well that's
• 1:00:22
  not actually true you you start with that problem is but if you follow the utilitarian logic
• 1:00:28
  through actually the lowly vagabonds mental states are visually irrelevant because he's irrelevant
• 1:00:35
  to the community or to the overall utility right the president is very important for the overall
• 1:00:43
  utility so his mental states are actually more valuable valuable so the only point is kind of
• 1:00:48
  intellectually undermines itself it contradicts itself if you start from well the great thing about
• 1:00:56
  utilitarianism is like Jesus you know it promotes the golden rule but it actually kind of doesn't
• 1:01:02
  if you follow it through that was the point right right yes I see yeah no that might be a bit
• 1:01:09
  obscure so there are more I think there are more practical and easy to see objections to
• 1:01:16
  utilitarianism can I just pause on this one just before we go over and hold that thought because
• 1:01:21
  it what's interesting about your point there is what I had slightly misunderstood it so I'm
• 1:01:26
  glad you clarified it that actually it's not necessarily the claim is not necessarily that the
• 1:01:33
  pleasure that increasing the pleasure of the influential person is more moral than
• 1:01:40
  than increasing the pleasure of the Walmart worker it's more that whatever you need to do to the
• 1:01:46
  neurosurgeon or the president's mental state in order to increase the wellbeing of other mental
• 1:01:53
  states right is worth doing on balance and that may be that you want to arrange the president
• 1:02:00
  you know that he may work not that this one needs much to ranging but you know this one may
• 1:02:05
  this one may perform better when he's agitated and stressed in which so it's not really so but it's
• 1:02:12
  just that the the individual is being it's a way of dishonoring individual right individual and
• 1:02:20
  making them essentially a tool yeah for greater purposes yeah right and this is why I'm not a
• 1:02:29
  continent I think there are all kinds of problems but I do like the idea of the kingdom of
• 1:02:35
  ants where everybody nobody nobody is a means everybody isn't at I know that's overstated and
• 1:02:41
  there are plenty of problems with that but I find something attractive about that yeah yeah point
• 1:02:46
  that this logic and so it starts it sounds beautiful at first like everybody's mental states matter
• 1:02:54
  equally and this is like this very egalitarian individualist framework doesn't matter if you're
• 1:03:00
  king what could be more in keeping with our democratic impulses these days right or the modern era
• 1:03:08
  but in fact it just ends up turning people into tools or vectors of utility and that yeah and so
• 1:03:16
  I guess that yeah that's the point yeah I like it what were you going to say about a more tactile
• 1:03:23
  okay probably yeah I think when we ask this question what is it that we're actually attempting to
• 1:03:32
  maximize now remember if you're a preference based utilitarian this doesn't really cool but if
• 1:03:38
  you're a heganic utilitarian there's the question are you trying to maximize total utility or
• 1:03:46
  you're trying to maximize average utilitarian and both of these have problems so let's say you
• 1:03:53
  start with average because that seems like the most obvious one right we want people on average to
• 1:03:59
  have a reasonably high sense of well-being like again we'll take our hundred scale economic
• 1:04:06
  advocates if you called it we'll say you know we want people to be an average of like age or
• 1:04:14
  something maybe more than that's impossible but it would be great if we could calculate now here's
• 1:04:19
  the problem let us imagine and I again I'm pulling out a thought experiment but this is an argument
• 1:04:26
  against a moral philosophy and this argument at least I think points out the logical problems
• 1:04:32
  with it if not the real world so let's suppose that the overall average heganic state on planet
• 1:04:41
  Earth is 65 that seems pretty cool right people aren't giving themselves a rating of 65 out of 100
• 1:04:49
  like 65 percent the average person is 65 percent happy where 50 percent is
• 1:04:55
  yeah neutral zero percent is yeah you know suicidal yeah yeah 100 percent is a late elation
• 1:05:02
  well elation yeah absolutely so we're not related people bitch and grown a lot there's a lot
• 1:05:08
  people met about life but we're not offering ourselves an eye number so we're 65 or something
• 1:05:14
  and we find there's another planet was sent here alive that planet has 90
• 1:05:22
  average utility or on this utility calculus right he done it so they're 90 percent happy
• 1:05:32
  yeah they're like 65 yeah they're almost they figured it out yeah they're they've got society down
• 1:05:39
  they're like these miserable old fox on planet f my goodness right they're like the state when
• 1:05:46
  I'm like running and listening to your system will go down and I'm just like I think is pretty good
• 1:05:51
  right now they're like not all the top so they're working out early as you say they're like these
• 1:05:56
  miserable what are they now suppose that the utilitarian blossom percent well this changes
• 1:06:04
  because we're trying to increase average utility and now we've found that there's this planet where
• 1:06:10
  the utility's only 65 but we used to have 90 so now we're at did happy done numbers we're at 70
• 1:06:18
  on let's say and then somebody says we know what if you blew up the earth painlessly just
• 1:06:26
  annihilated it with whatever nuke's this sophisticated happy society has the average would
• 1:06:32
  back off well I don't see how you avoid that if your claim is we should maximize the average I
• 1:06:39
  mean that really would increase the average blow up the earth as the Death Stargate what was
• 1:06:45
  the planet alder on I'm sorry I'm making nerd round princess but princess layers home planet I
• 1:06:51
  think it's all so you just blow it up now that seems to be a problem you can you can think of
• 1:06:58
  the same thing like you're on the Titanic let's say this Titanic didn't hit the iceberg you're
• 1:07:05
  on the Titanic and there's a guy with no family no friend nobody knows them and he's pretty miserable
• 1:07:11
  the philosopher on the Titanic's like you know the average utility would go up we could just get rid
• 1:07:17
  of this one person so you hurl overboard he hits the water you know he doesn't you shock pretty
• 1:07:23
  quickly it's not in that pain for many times average utilities are slightly higher people want
• 1:07:29
  to think I'm being flippant and I am but I do think there's actually a serious moral dilemma which
• 1:07:34
  is if you care about averages often getting rid of those the people who are very good down the
• 1:07:42
  average would increase I think most people think that's wrong so then you might think well maybe
• 1:07:48
  what we should do instead is try to maximize aggregate utility so yeah even though the person is
• 1:07:55
  let's say a 25 on the 100 they're adding to the total and that's good there's more of them but
• 1:08:02
  then the problem is let's say our average is 65 you could promote having more and more and more
• 1:08:09
  kids and let's say that each head it's like a little makes life a little less pleasant for every
• 1:08:18
  but maybe the kid is at 40 and then the kid is at 30 but you're adding to your totals so the
• 1:08:24
  totals getting better yeah chill let's let's say we colonize all their clients are something so
• 1:08:31
  there are trillions of people but now everybody's at 30 instead of at 65 but there's more because
• 1:08:37
  we have so many more people Derek Arfield by the way called this the he called it the
• 1:08:42
  repugnant conclusion just look it seems to follow from this if we're trying to maximize
• 1:08:48
  utility you could always add a person who would make life slightly more miserable for everybody
• 1:08:54
  but would increase the overall utility and you can go on with this do the yeah and turn you
• 1:09:00
  ask them basically right and that seems absurd I mean I think most people would be like if that's
• 1:09:07
  what your moral philosophy recommends then your moral philosophies wrong now I don't see a way out
• 1:09:13
  of either of these and singher to his credit is quite lucid about this and just said it's not
• 1:09:19
  an obvious answer but I think well here's an obvious answer it's a wrong philosophy
• 1:09:29
  there's something about these this argument in particular that I've always found
• 1:09:36
  like a bit of a it makes me feel like when I was studying logic in philosophy at university
• 1:09:43
  which I didn't like because it's so highly mathematical and I liked all the sort of esoteric
• 1:09:47
  wanky you know linguistic philosophies more this this strikes me as something
• 1:09:54
  like it's trying to impose the wrong mode of calculus on the problem like the argument is we
• 1:10:03
  should increase the amount of pleasure and then the the path that sort of a retort is well okay
• 1:10:14
  exactly how are you measuring this with this pleasure because if you measure the pleasure
• 1:10:17
  according to the average then you run to this problem actually if you're recording the aggregate
• 1:10:21
  and you're under this problem so why wouldn't we have a trillion babies who are just marginally
• 1:10:26
  happy and thereby increasing quite a right demonstrandum the you know it's like well hang on okay yeah
• 1:10:31
  if you want to put it into those mathematical terms then the whole thing falls apart but it for
• 1:10:37
  me that doesn't feel I can't this is obviously not a rational argument it doesn't feel to me like a
• 1:10:41
  slam dunk against the basic principle that you should increase the amount of pleasure like
• 1:10:49
  introducing a trillion people whose lives are just marginally worth living
• 1:10:56
  increases the total pleasure but it's maybe maybe I just have a problem with defining the value
• 1:11:03
  of a life and its pleasure and pain and complexity along a metric where it's clean to say that one
• 1:11:09
  is a 65 another is a 90 another is a 30 like it might just be something off about trying to capture
• 1:11:17
  human experience well that way I share that concern I think it obviously I just kind of pretend
• 1:11:27
  these numbers are not meant to be yeah size or or nor am I even claiming that you could capture
• 1:11:33
  if somebody's you know complete mental state or or be with a number and I I do share your concern
• 1:11:41
  there I guess what I would say though it seems to me that your instinct is a more pragmatic one
• 1:11:47
  ultimate you think like okay yes so Parfit is taking this very logic you know he takes that
• 1:11:54
  logic seriously it's like wait a second if we do this let's follow this to its conclusion
• 1:11:59
  oh that seems weird if we go this other way and we follow it to its conclusion well that seems
• 1:12:04
  repot man now he takes that seriously it's singer takes it seriously because their balls like
• 1:12:09
  logically rigorous philosophers who want a completely logical compare it consistent moral system
• 1:12:17
  I don't want that because I don't think it exists and I think you are I think your thought is
• 1:12:21
  basically well look this is a pretty good here instinct for the most part yes of course you
• 1:12:26
  could call up with these absurd examples but it doesn't matter because nobody's going to start
• 1:12:30
  having so many kids that were like basically all miserable but there are trillions of also the
• 1:12:36
  aggregate it is bigger than it is yeah exactly and anytime you tried to impose these things on
• 1:12:42
  to reality comes back to my unicorn argument I guess maybe I'm just gradually drifting over to
• 1:12:47
  your way of thinking about morality and becoming more of a pragmatist over the course of yeah
• 1:12:51
  you called me a cherry picker at the start and now you're like yeah oh don't make the same mistake
• 1:12:57
  as a minority of my listeners do which is to think that the things that I say on this always
• 1:13:01
  reflect what I actually believe strategic attempt to draw someone out so there but yes maybe
• 1:13:09
  because if you just take the utopian planet that has a score of 90% happiness obliterating planet
• 1:13:15
  earth because we're less happy and thereby increasing the average happiness in reality when
• 1:13:22
  you tried to impose that on any real situation for example let's say that a society decided
• 1:13:28
  that it could increase the average happiness of its citizens by quietly and painlessly
• 1:13:34
  euthanizing the unhappiest half of the population or the unhappiest half of the population
• 1:13:38
  obviously that would have other effects which is that it would distress people to live in the
• 1:13:45
  kind of state right disappeared people it would distress them about whether or not they're going
• 1:13:50
  to end up in that situation as well the family members would be mourning and grieving you know even
• 1:13:57
  the suicide even the depressed guy on the cruise ship who gets tossed overboard presumably has
• 1:14:04
  families you know what if it gets out that the cruise liner did this or that this happened and
• 1:14:09
  other people are you know there are we live in an in a complicated and meshed network of social
• 1:14:15
  and moral relationships this was these thought experiments don't factor don't account for this
• 1:14:21
  was the Titanic before cell phone video so I think your point is it's well taken know that you're
• 1:14:32
  right anytime you try to come up with one of these thought experiments there isn't the retort
• 1:14:38
  which is a reasonable report look in the real world this would have other consequences I agree
• 1:14:45
  with that but I would also argue that the recent part of the reason we we find throwing the guy
• 1:14:52
  overboard so Jackson is because we have inculcated a norm that an individual is valuable
• 1:15:01
  regardless that is to say we actually inculcate day on political nor non-utilitarian
• 1:15:08
  yes right individuals matter it doesn't we we don't just care about pleasure and pain we care
• 1:15:14
  about individuals and in some sense in our liberal world those are those who remain small
• 1:15:21
  out of the individual the individual is the the fundamental and most important unit of some kind
• 1:15:28
  of moral or political analysis and I that's a day ontological so yeah right because we do that
• 1:15:36
  that that's why some of these things seem so relevant and with these further consequences yeah
• 1:15:42
  yeah yeah interesting okay the last point that I want you to share with us in your objection to
• 1:15:48
  utilitarianism before we quickly go on to the other two aspects of singers philosophy that you
• 1:15:55
  object to but less less so and they may be sort of subsets of this ultimately cosmopolitanism
• 1:16:00
  and rationalism is how unpredictable and incommensurable our mental states can be yeah
• 1:16:08
  in terms of figuring out what is likely to yield better or worse
• 1:16:14
  utilitarian outcomes for a person's psychology yeah I became quite taken with this notion and
• 1:16:21
  now I always forget the author's name who wrote the book I think the book was called transformative
• 1:16:26
  experiences um and I really wish I could get the author credit I always forget the author but I
• 1:16:33
  I heard about it first from econ talk um you call it the vampire problem and basically the question
• 1:16:41
  goes like this it's supposed that you know you're a human somebody comes up to you to say would
• 1:16:46
  you like to be transported to a vampire and first you're like well that no of course not
• 1:16:52
  why would that want to be a vampire although some people these days gots maybe it would be a
• 1:16:57
  Twilight fans am I going to be a sparkly vampire I think it's L.A. Paul is the
• 1:17:04
  the author of transformative experience of 2014 yeah but the point with it okay so like
• 1:17:12
  let's say at first you're like well it seems I have to drink blood that seems disgusting
• 1:17:17
  because what you're doing is you using your human your current like mental states to
• 1:17:22
  assess your future mental state the point is though some of these things when you're transformed
• 1:17:28
  they so fundamentally alter your mental cash zone as it were that you can't even really compare
• 1:17:36
  your current state to a former state and conversely you can't really from the former state
• 1:17:43
  predict your future state having kids is a good example I don't have kids so I can't really
• 1:17:48
  speak of this subject with any subjective truth but from people who do have kids who I talk to
• 1:17:55
  you know they will say I didn't think I ever wanted to get and when I had a kid after a couple
• 1:18:02
  of months my whole like priority my entire life changed my priority shifted what what causes me
• 1:18:11
  pain what causes me pleasure that change I you know I don't want to go out anymore or I don't really
• 1:18:17
  care about some abstract philosophical argument I'd rather watch my kids smile and
• 1:18:24
  go what up right okay so it fundamentally alters your your mental space as it were and the
• 1:18:32
  question is well okay if that can happen within one individual how do we even if we can't even
• 1:18:39
  compare with one individual if the measuring stick as it were changes and it's maybe even
• 1:18:45
  income measure that is to say there's just no way to compare one mental world to another mental
• 1:18:52
  how can we do that with individuals and what does that say about what we what policies we should
• 1:18:57
  promote it should we promote prunatal policy will people be happy we don't even know because we don't
• 1:19:04
  know how to compare like the life of the parent to the life of the bachelor because your priorities
• 1:19:09
  change so much what you think's important changes and so forth that's interesting does why does
• 1:19:17
  it why is it not the case that that just renders the calculation hard I mean maybe philosophical
• 1:19:24
  and moral frameworks just are very difficult to figure out and there's inherent uncertainty embedded
• 1:19:31
  but like it strikes me that you know the conclusion from this problem could either be we live in
• 1:19:36
  a complex and tricky world or it could be it's meaningless to ever compare pleasure and pain
• 1:19:43
  because who's to say what's pleasurable and painful you know we live in such a topsy turvy upside
• 1:19:48
  down world how could we possibly ever know oh yeah we're through the lurking blasts yeah okay so I
• 1:19:54
  want to reject both of those I think that's a dichotomy we we can reject both so you're the top we
• 1:20:03
  don't want to complete relative because of course like when you're a parent you still know what's
• 1:20:10
  like what feels good and what gives your life meaning and what feels bad and something's
• 1:20:15
  there's still awful we can say you know it would be better if you weren't suffering from cancer or
• 1:20:20
  something on the other hand I don't think there's a way directly to compare these macos case and
• 1:20:29
  I guess what I would say is like okay suppose that we have somebody just take an individual and
• 1:20:34
  they want you know should they be a parent I don't know if we how would we even measure like
• 1:20:43
  what unit would we use like if we could if there were like some calibration where you could put
• 1:20:49
  this on like there were a hedonic thermometer put it in some of these models would you be like
• 1:20:57
  oh this person that 78 when they're doing this or whatever and you took every parents and
• 1:21:02
  theirs was 72 so yours would actually be lower if if that were a thing then we could do this and
• 1:21:09
  we could compare these models day I actually my argument would be the thermometer itself
• 1:21:15
  changes there is no single measuring unit we could use so we actually have to ask a different
• 1:21:23
  question now no I should know preference utilitarianism doesn't have this problem right because
• 1:21:31
  because you don't need to measure these by those days I can just assert my desire to be a parent
• 1:21:36
  and that's sufficient yeah yeah although you still run into the problem should you prefer
• 1:21:43
  something which gets into a all different philosophical kind of words was we won't explore we won't
• 1:21:48
  open that camp but I'm just gonna prefer something yeah yeah all right that's a podcast for another
• 1:21:53
  day isn't it yeah exactly what's the difference between yeah I mean it sounds a little bit like
• 1:21:59
  your smoking analogy that the smoke the smoke yeah exactly the smoke it doesn't want to not smoke
• 1:22:06
  the the smoke is trying to quit doesn't want to not smoke they want to not want to smoke yeah exactly
• 1:22:12
  it's a meta it's a yeah it's a second-order desire rather than a desire yeah and there are
• 1:22:18
  gonna be third-order desires and it gets really tricky but you you can want to not want to want
• 1:22:23
  et cetera yeah I see yeah but on this one I guess my argument would be ultimately if we asked
• 1:22:31
  some of these moral questions I think what we have to use is some kind of aesthetic or
• 1:22:38
  de-automatrical or different kind of criteria from mental state we have to actually just
• 1:22:47
  think about what we value and what we value is not directly related I mean I don't want to
• 1:22:53
  it's not independent of our mental state of course our values are related to our mental state
• 1:22:59
  but is not directly related to you know uh happiness in an obvious way and actually I think I think
• 1:23:08
  Sanders earlier arguments about I think he made maybe he made it about a novelist you know like
• 1:23:16
  if you want to be a novelist if you want to write what nobody cares about like great American
• 1:23:22
  novel anymore I one time that was like the great thing and if you want to do great American novel
• 1:23:30
  I could imagine somebody being so dedicated to that that they actually endured a pretty
• 1:23:36
  miserable life trying to do that but they had a lot of meeting and it's like okay so the mental
• 1:23:42
  states were basically like they had unpleasant mental states but they had this higher order sense
• 1:23:49
  of meaning and fidelity to their art to their country yeah I mean I think this is a bigger
• 1:23:54
  this is a stronger and deeper criticism of the pain and pleasure version of utilitarianism
• 1:24:02
  than merely the claim that our preferences and our pains and pleasures are
• 1:24:08
  incompatible and unpredictable it this is actually saying that I mean it's pointing to a truth
• 1:24:14
  that much of what is worth doing in life is unpleasurable yeah right I mean you know all of the
• 1:24:21
  all of the great things that you could want to do whether that's having a a kid if that's your
• 1:24:27
  bag or writing the great American novel or getting having a great body or becoming a fighter pilot
• 1:24:33
  or you know whatever you is your jam it's gonna be right uh a painful and
• 1:24:40
  arduous road to get there probably which is tricky for the utilitarian yeah and not only that I
• 1:24:48
  would say the things that are the most noble and waterable are often the most arduous they're
• 1:24:56
  incredibly difficult they require an almost acidic commitment right I mean we find that I find
• 1:25:05
  that inspiring but I see it in other people you know that they they're so committed to something
• 1:25:11
  that they actually forego great amounts of pleasure you know like a director or an actor who
• 1:25:20
  really care about their craft and not the life after this yeah for sure we know in the movie
• 1:25:25
  that day and the co-taded the booze and the women they actually are like no I am an actor period
• 1:25:31
  I go alone and I'm dedicated to my craft period I find that noble and inspiring oh sure yeah
• 1:25:38
  right but the but the problem there is that once you once you inject uh nobility and and uh doing good
• 1:25:47
  into the equation then you also introduce the variable of other people's experiences which
• 1:25:52
  the utilitarian can then use to say the reason why the actor you know going on a fast
• 1:25:58
  and starving themselves for six weeks in order to be able to play you know some Daniel Day Lewis
• 1:26:03
  part you know where he has to be a prisoner of the you know you know then then that has a utility
• 1:26:09
  which is not just the payoff is not only in Daniel Day Lewis's subsequent mental states but in
• 1:26:13
  the mental states of all of the people who were touched by that that movie whereas in much more
• 1:26:18
  mundane ways uh you know there are things that we do that even within the silo of our own brain
• 1:26:24
  like having a child for example excluding right well-being of the child from the picture
• 1:26:29
  or even the suppose that it's even more aesthetic than that it is literally just I I want to
• 1:26:35
  build a mural in my basement right is an incredible work of art and I toil away doing it and it's
• 1:26:42
  thankless for writing great American novel in my that could be a great movie right there the man
• 1:26:48
  who lives alone and creates a great work of art that nobody sees right exactly only you
• 1:26:57
  I mean in fact isn't there oh you may know this better than I do isn't there some wasn't there
• 1:27:02
  some test about the happiness of parents that had to do with asking questions on a smartphone
• 1:27:09
  app and getting them to write their happiness several times a day and then they compared that to the
• 1:27:16
  uh to the recollections of happiness from parents with older children I believe right and they
• 1:27:25
  were noticed that yeah they noticed that having children reliably makes you less happy moment by
• 1:27:30
  moment and reliably makes you more happy ultimately in the story that you tell yourself about your life
• 1:27:38
  so there are different versions of pleasure yeah yeah well that's a good point and I'm not
• 1:27:44
  not that that sounds like it was a study and it if not it should have been I'm not
• 1:27:50
  to be with that but what I can say is two things one I remember my advisor used to say one of the
• 1:27:58
  most replicated effects and psychology is that being a parent makes you less happy on a day-to-day basis
• 1:28:04
  right and two this this does match like research by vitamin for example where if you look at what
• 1:28:13
  makes people happy in the moment so if you're just looking at that kind of happiness you know
• 1:28:18
  I think Kahneman inspired this yes he talks about two different kinds of happiness yeah yeah because
• 1:28:23
  you have like you know you're eating Doritos like I know for if I don't like get involved my version
• 1:28:29
  of Devon Curry is pretty came but it's you know eating Doritos and play bullet chess or something
• 1:28:36
  I'm really happy I got my heavy metal music on on waxing fools and bullet chess and I feel
• 1:28:44
  pretty good but afterward I feel quite empty you know I don't I don't really remember my games you
• 1:28:51
  know maybe one great check way I can watch you know it's pretty hollow on the other hand you go
• 1:28:58
  on some adventure you know you climb a mountain or you go biking or you see you have to go through
• 1:29:05
  50 hour car ride to get to Alaska and it's beautiful that's what you'll remember when you're
• 1:29:12
  dying right you won't be like man that one game of bullet chess 10 years ago awesome but I have
• 1:29:20
  those Doritos a lot of that pops it off but we'll be thinking about your trips and you're right
• 1:29:26
  and that gets even more complicated because then maybe the utilitarian can come back and say
• 1:29:32
  well see that's a kind of pleasure what's not thinking narrowly about pleasure when I say
• 1:29:38
  pleasure I don't just mean the pleasure of you know drinking a couple beers I mean this is saying
• 1:29:44
  less a deep yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah so of course yeah that gets more complicated but I think
• 1:29:51
  to me the easier way to deal with this is just to accept that people care about a lot of things
• 1:29:58
  some of them are directly related to immediate mental state you know like I want to have a
• 1:30:04
  burrito because it tastes good and some of them are related to a rather more elevated sense of
• 1:30:11
  one's identity and purpose and I don't think that fits comfortably in the heganic utilitarian
• 1:30:18
  framework right right the preference to yeah yeah okay so um let's just move on to before we
• 1:30:25
  run out of time I want to touch on consequentialism sorry on cosmopolitanism yeah which you say is
• 1:30:32
  sort of the second component of right of singularism of singers worldview in addition to utilitarianism
• 1:30:39
  so far we've just been talking about utilitarianism but what do you mean by cosmopolitanism I mean
• 1:30:47
  now one has to be careful because singers are sophisticated thinkers so I don't want to
• 1:30:52
  caricature have so let's say singularism before the tribute is anger let's do the sort of
• 1:30:58
  dump down version which is the moral claim that all people are equally morally relevant to each
• 1:31:06
  person and not distance is morally irrelevant that is to say somebody in Canada is morally
• 1:31:14
  relevant to me or should be as somebody in my immediate vicinity or my country this would
• 1:31:21
  let's not get carried away I mean Canadians obviously have less moral less moral standing than
• 1:31:26
  the rest of us but yeah this is absurd and insane crazy snow people Australians of course have
• 1:31:34
  more moral standing um the probably the most famous singer um and it thought experiment is along
• 1:31:41
  these lines which you have a problem with which is the the little boy drowning in a in a pool in a
• 1:31:46
  pond yes do you want to just remind people of this moral photo experiment yeah so I think he
• 1:31:52
  a singer originally forwarded this in his article on famine and affluence it's become very famous
• 1:31:59
  the ideas you're you know you're walking it's a nice day you're doing good about yourself you're
• 1:32:04
  in pretty expensive clothes looking good you hear cries turn there's a boy in a pond looks like
• 1:32:11
  he's drowning and you look around he could maybe his parents are there not no no parents no other
• 1:32:17
  adults you realize you're the only person there he's drowning but you could get in and say if you
• 1:32:24
  get in you save him however you also he's almost dying like there's you don't have time to strip
• 1:32:30
  your clothes off you're wearing a beautiful suit and amazing shoes yeah and you it's now
• 1:32:34
  whenever he's in the lake you're gonna go how do you know he's near that don't know but let's just
• 1:32:40
  see his little head is bobbing up and down in the frozen waters he's blue in the face yeah exactly
• 1:32:47
  it's like now or never you're like don't have time to throw your clothes off so if you go in you
• 1:32:53
  can save them away but you're going to ruin your clothes and let's make it I know you didn't make
• 1:32:59
  it this expensive but let's make these really expensive are monic let's make it actually I don't
• 1:33:05
  know anything and I think he said shoes because it's more pleasable that shoes would be permanently
• 1:33:09
  ruined you could always you could always get the suit dry for me yeah sure fair boy okay so
• 1:33:16
  good off like really expensive shoes whatever those would be I don't know uh thousand dollars by
• 1:33:21
  saying most people would think you wear a moral monster if they said you know I was gonna save
• 1:33:28
  the boy but I look at my shoes and I thought man those are nice you guys want to go down there
• 1:33:32
  also they were a thousand dollars I can't buy you one so as they argue it was like okay we all
• 1:33:37
  think that that would be more monstrous but we're actually all in that position all the time
• 1:33:44
  that is to say for a mere couple hundreds of dollars we could save a mind somewhere on the planet
• 1:33:52
  every time we go to Burger King and get that milkshake we're buying something we don't actually
• 1:33:58
  need and we could be giving that money to people in Africa who are dying of preventable diseases
• 1:34:06
  and we could actually there there's a website where you can calculate how much it costs to save
• 1:34:11
  one life let's say it's three thousand dollars or something so I mean it's no way near that I don't
• 1:34:17
  think I think Peter singers I think in the life you can save which is his book about this which is
• 1:34:23
  not that old it's reasonably recent because and it's his response to people saying well I would do
• 1:34:28
  more if I believed that the money was actually gonna do anything you know since I think that all the
• 1:34:32
  charity money is going to corrupt African dictators anyway I might as well just spend it all on
• 1:34:37
  Nintendo and his point is no there are actually very good charities and it costs you know
• 1:34:44
  might cost something like forty dollars or something for mosquito nets for so many mosquito nets
• 1:34:49
  that you're guaranteed that one of them that at least one child is going to not get fatal malaria
• 1:34:54
  on the basis of your forty dollar donation to the mosquito net charity for example so every time
• 1:34:59
  you spend forty dollars on something you don't care about you are basically allowing a child to die
• 1:35:05
  yeah so yeah and I guess the well the price does matter but let's say that it's not as high as
• 1:35:13
  you might it's not like a huge burden on somebody you know so he says we're basically all
• 1:35:21
  the person who it doesn't get into the pond if we're spending our money on these luxury items like
• 1:35:29
  if we're you know getting a house that's four hundred more square feet than we need or if we're
• 1:35:35
  getting a fancy car if we're going out to restaurants and indulging in cocktails or whatever
• 1:35:41
  people I don't go out much so anyway so this is a very thing I mean I've heard some version of
• 1:35:54
  this thought experiment many many many times and also I've heard many people say they were sort
• 1:36:00
  of converted to effective altruisms been probably irredeemably solid by Sam basement
• 1:36:08
  so I don't know how much they call them but some version of effective altruism or this idea of
• 1:36:13
  trying to do the most good for the most people by the spot and using a rational calculus to figure
• 1:36:19
  out the allocation of resources rather than relying on your heart yes right right now this thought
• 1:36:27
  experiments interest because it seems to me you can use the same thought experiment and show
• 1:36:32
  precisely the opposite of what singer thinks it shows to be very to singer again he admits like
• 1:36:39
  this is a thought experiment here's the more rigorous logical argument so grant that but I thought
• 1:36:46
  okay you could do this thought experiment where again this is kind of observed you can say it's
• 1:36:51
  fantastical but it's a thought experiment so you have I mean there are different versions of this
• 1:36:57
  but let's say let's say what you were going to do with those shoes just to take this one let's say
• 1:37:02
  that the like let's take half the hundred dollars to disable not forty not three thousand a hundred
• 1:37:08
  but and you have a thousand dollars and you're going to sell those shoes and then you're going to
• 1:37:12
  donate all of that money to charity and therefore you would say ten lives with that right now let's
• 1:37:21
  say there's a boy there and the choice is do I go in and ruin my shoes in which case I don't get
• 1:37:27
  the thousand dollars I save one person or do I walk on by with my shoes so I'm get the thousand
• 1:37:34
  and let's say ten people in central Africa now now where I think most people would say that the
• 1:37:41
  person who walked out by got the ten you know the thousand dollars and saved the time of life that
• 1:37:48
  is where we have one same broad experiment showing two different exactly two different things which
• 1:37:56
  gets to your point and as a criticism or as a concern that I share the thought experiments are
• 1:38:02
  some somewhere so abstract you can almost show whatever you want because there's sort of good tools
• 1:38:08
  for manipulating people I think that's a reasonable concern and I think my argument here is not
• 1:38:15
  that my thought experiment shows that singers definitely wrong but rather it shows that the thought
• 1:38:22
  experiment itself shouldn't be that compelling well I know I think you're short-changing it I think
• 1:38:28
  it does show more than that I think it shows that there's something else going on in our moral
• 1:38:32
  intuition in the poem example then simply a calculus of life and responsibility and that that
• 1:38:41
  something is your objection to cosmopolitanism is your claim I correct me if I'm wrong but
• 1:38:46
  I don't want to run out of time is your claim that proximity matters that you know whether or not
• 1:38:54
  the kid is right there in front of you and you're the only person who can do something about it
• 1:38:58
  is morally salient yeah he's obviously important yeah not only is it morally salient because I think
• 1:39:05
  singer would admit that but it's morally relevant in an intellectually justifiable way is what I
• 1:39:11
  want to play I think that we have a morally rational rational in the sense that they can be
• 1:39:20
  just are not rational in the sense that we think this through carefully morally justifiable let
• 1:39:26
  me put it that way obligations to people who are closer to us both in can and in procspatial
• 1:39:36
  proximity and we should care more about those people and I don't in fact I would go further and
• 1:39:43
  say I don't even think we have moral obligation positive duties or obligation to people in far
• 1:39:50
  off country now that doesn't mean that you sure meant how people there that's what we would call
• 1:39:56
  super ironsk it where it's something above and beyond it's something you can do and perhaps it's
• 1:40:01
  morally waterable to do so but I don't think we're obligated to do so I do think we're obligated
• 1:40:08
  to our community to our friends and family I think why why are you obligated I mean I would I
• 1:40:15
  could agree semantically that I'm not obligated to help people in far away lands but only if I use
• 1:40:22
  the sense of obligation so narrowly that I could also say that I'm not really obligated to anybody
• 1:40:28
  apart from my kids and my spouse who I made a promise to and maybe my nuclear maybe my brother and
• 1:40:34
  mother but even then I don't have an obligation really to anything but if I do have an obligation to
• 1:40:40
  my suburb my neighborhood my town my kin then any basis on which that obligation would be
• 1:40:50
  founded I think could it could be extended to anyone in the world maybe just in slightly more
• 1:40:55
  attenuated concentric circles of obligation but maybe it's a distraction to call it an obligation
• 1:41:01
  or not it's just like what is the moral what is the moral tug on my you know doing the right thing
• 1:41:10
  by an African child versus by my physical neighbor and they have to be different
• 1:41:19
  yes yeah that's right so what yeah what we can see that the yeah the word obligation
• 1:41:27
  perhaps is too strong or not you know it doesn't bring clarity to you guys I like to point the
• 1:41:33
  concentric circles that's just what I would say I would agree with I would say look we start with
• 1:41:38
  calls family you you have moral duties to your close family that you don't have to even strangers
• 1:41:45
  in your community then you maybe you go to your community and then maybe you go to your state
• 1:41:50
  or in your country and then I think beyond that it gets it's like morality I would say it's
• 1:41:58
  like gravity gravity is actually like a weak force in physics you know and as as distance it becomes
• 1:42:04
  much weaker so I would say like as we go in distance nationally or something our moral obligations
• 1:42:11
  become very very weak to the point where I would not judge you orally if you said go and bring
• 1:42:16
  there are probably lots of bad things happening in these places on the planet I know I can't care
• 1:42:24
  about those things look I'm trying to do a job I want to take care of my kids I want to I want to
• 1:42:29
  live in a flourishing community I would say yeah that's noble I don't think that you should concern
• 1:42:34
  yourself with what's going on in the Balkans necessarily now if you said do me I care about
• 1:42:40
  the Balkans I say fine that's you know that's also noble but if you said I care about the Balkans
• 1:42:48
  as much as I care about my kids and my family I'd be like I think you have your priorities
• 1:42:53
  upside down you know I think you care too much about politics or world affairs or something
• 1:43:01
  yeah you should don't live in your community I guess I would just call myself an anti-cosma
• 1:43:07
  politician I would say I very specifically think we should care more about our community now I
• 1:43:14
  think there are irreconcilable or what let me rephrase that I think there are unsolvable moral
• 1:43:20
  dilemmas that come between conflicting obligations and I think those are interesting and we can
• 1:43:28
  discuss them and they're explored in art very well I think it's interesting how many great works
• 1:43:34
  of art explore these conflicts I can think of one specific we got honored which is one of my favorite
• 1:43:41
  movies in that there's like this conflict between Michael Corleone he has this more abstract
• 1:43:47
  vision he's going to join I can't remember it's the Air Force and the Army or whatever and they're
• 1:43:52
  making fun of them they're like they you're going to die for people who aren't your blood that's
• 1:43:56
  just you're being a sucker but he has like this larger nation if you want it's more expensive
• 1:44:02
  so he's torn between this vision of a more objective abstract morality and family loyalty he
• 1:44:11
  eventually chooses the family and we know how that works out for him or he doesn't work out for
• 1:44:16
  a great picture but there's a real conflict there and we feel that because we do think he
• 1:44:22
  even even though his family is criminal you do think he should care about his family and
• 1:44:28
  his father after the assassination and taken the exploits there are a lot of things anyway it's
• 1:44:35
  ripe for artistic exploration because these are very real conflicts but they all I think
• 1:44:44
  illustrate that most humans are not cosmopolitans and I think a lot of utilitarian some of them
• 1:44:51
  more what would you say strict or stern of the utilitarians almost considered that just a human
• 1:44:58
  failure that we cared more of yes I think this brings us to the yeah I think this brings us to the
• 1:45:04
  crux of where you sort of wrap up your criticism of of the singer in the sense that we've touched on
• 1:45:09
  the problems of utilitarianism especially the of the brand that extreme singerism advocates
• 1:45:16
  you know an act utilitarianism that focuses purely on pet on pleasure and pain
• 1:45:22
  and the problem of cosmopolitanism the problem of try in a practical sense of expecting that
• 1:45:28
  people are going to treat every human being in the planet and maybe every sentient creature with
• 1:45:33
  the same concern as people who are very close to them and we don't have time to go into your
• 1:45:40
  criticism of rationalism but it basically I think it can be summed up very easily because it's
• 1:45:46
  really it really does flow from the other two in the final one of the final lines of your
• 1:45:49
  piece which is when a moral insight yields repugnant conclusions we should generally discard the
• 1:45:57
  insight not our opponents yeah and that is the basic difference I think between your worldview
• 1:46:03
  and the singerist worldview the singerist worldview says when the moral insight yields repugnant
• 1:46:08
  conclusions you should discard you should discard the republicans and just go with the inside and
• 1:46:13
  you'll say no we're humans who have to function in this world and have in instincts
• 1:46:21
  for a reason as well as reason for a reason yeah yeah absolutely you know I would I think that's
• 1:46:28
  very well put and I think that is a good summary of the the conflict but me just add though because
• 1:46:34
  it sounds as though perhaps I'm appealing too much to the gods here okay to the brain okay
• 1:46:41
  yep I there is an intellectual justification for that which is a conservative one and obviously
• 1:46:48
  singer what I find this very appealing I don't think he's attracted to the conservative worldview
• 1:46:53
  but it's the also that things that have what the you in mind spell it's limited so we don't always
• 1:47:02
  know what will work and what won't work you find this out through trial and error and generally
• 1:47:08
  speaking norms moral values and institutions that have survived and that persist in flourishing
• 1:47:17
  or relatively flourishing communities are probably good and probably have a kind of wisdom
• 1:47:23
  of which we might be ignorant so if you know what you mean and you say well look I've thought
• 1:47:29
  about it and there's nothing good about traffic so come on so arbitrary like life three colors maybe
• 1:47:36
  we should have ten colors why not you know I'd say well if you know we've been around for a long time
• 1:47:42
  it seems that everywhere has them they're probably doing a pretty good job oh that that
• 1:47:48
  yeah this is a kind of a sort of a Chesterton's fence yeah principle isn't it like you know don't
• 1:47:54
  get rid of the fence until you're absolutely certain you understand all the reasons why the fence
• 1:47:57
  was erected in the first place I mean the response I'm sure the singerist response would be yes
• 1:48:04
  sometimes these things are there for a reason that has served as well and just as often they're
• 1:48:09
  the eruptions of human irrationalism that are not consistent with how we want to live as our
• 1:48:16
  highest selves but it's a fascinating piece it's fascinating to talk to you and you flesh it out
• 1:48:21
  it was brave and really interesting and thought-provoking so great thanks so much for taking us
• 1:48:26
  for a good talk to you yeah you got you got