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Speaker 3: Oh hey, it's a guy at the coffee shop overthinking
Speaker 3: his milk choice. Ali Ward misologies. This is not when
Speaker 3: you start coming, is it, unless you're either a Harvard
Speaker 3: and Princeton trained philosopher and academic. But my guest is
Speaker 3: a Harvard in Princeton trained philosopher and academic. He's a
Speaker 3: member of the Center for brain science and a professor
Speaker 3: of psychology at Harvard. He's dedicated his life and career
Speaker 3: to the psychology in the neuroscience of how the brain
Speaker 3: forms complex ideas and makes choices and uses real, real
Speaker 3: philosophical homdingers in his analyzes, and one of the courses
Speaker 3: he teaches is titled Evolving Morality from Primordial Soup to
Speaker 3: super Intelligent Machines. And he wrote the book Moral Tribes, Emotion, Reason,
Speaker 3: and the Gap between Us and Them. Now, during this interview,
Speaker 3: we chatted via a video call, and I had to
Speaker 3: ask the guests a few times to make sure that
Speaker 3: the collar of his shirt wasn't rubbing on his mic,
Speaker 3: and the best solution was to undo a couple of
Speaker 3: shirt buttons and display his collar out like he was
Speaker 3: gonna saund toronto a dance floor in Miami. And he
Speaker 3: seemed genuinely mortified by it. But I like to think
Speaker 3: that it made for a super casual vibe. This is
Speaker 3: such a fun conversation. Never did you think gruesome philosophy
Speaker 3: could be this engaging and friendly. But the moral thought
Speaker 3: experiment that's now known as the ty problem, it originated
Speaker 3: with this English philosopher, Philippa Foot who wrote on virtue
Speaker 3: ethics like if a streetcar or a trolley is careening
Speaker 3: on a track that splits, is diverting it to kill
Speaker 3: fewer people. Ethical philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson used that example
Speaker 3: in nineteen seventy six after Philippa did and coined it
Speaker 3: the trolley problem. So we're off to these like streetcar
Speaker 3: races and the trolley problem examines morals and ethics and
Speaker 3: utilitarianism and religion and sacrifice and how to look at
Speaker 3: the principles of the greater good. Also looks at neuroscience,
Speaker 3: so we're going to get into that. But first, thank
Speaker 3: you so much to patrons of the show who support
Speaker 3: us for a dollar or more a month and submit
Speaker 3: questions for Theologist before we record. Thank you to everyone
Speaker 3: out there wearing ologies merch from ologiesmerch dot com. And
Speaker 3: thank you to everyone who leaves reviews of the show,
Speaker 3: which keeps it up in the charts. And also I
Speaker 3: read them all, such as this recent one from KWZ,
Speaker 3: New York, whod wrote, come for the science and fun facts,
Speaker 3: but you'll leave with one remarkable example after another of
Speaker 3: human beings who care deeply about the world. So thank
Speaker 3: you kwz and why for caring enough to submit a review.
Speaker 3: I read every single one, so keep them coming and
Speaker 3: know that they make your internet Dad the lady named
Speaker 3: me cry sometimes. Also, if you do need any shorter,
Speaker 3: kid friendly, non swearing episodes, you can find those in
Speaker 3: their own feed wherever you get podcasts, they're called somologies smologies. Okay,
Speaker 3: let's get into what makes you a good person? How
Speaker 3: far would you go to save others? Which charities should
Speaker 3: get your cash? Why are the political divides killing people?
Speaker 3: What is active versus passive harm? What would a monk do?
Speaker 3: How neurodivergence influences moral decisions? Is religion a moral compass?
Speaker 3: How to reason with your relatives who vote in ways
Speaker 3: that make you want to scream into a jar like
Speaker 3: you have somebody sam possibly your new favorite skeleton on
Speaker 3: the planet. And if you'd pull a lever or go
Speaker 3: a step further with philosopher, professor, author, nonprofit champion, and
Speaker 3: official trileologist, it's a real word, Doctor Joshua Green.
Speaker 2: My name is Joshua Green, and I'm a professor in
Speaker 2: the Department of Psychology and Center for Brain Science at
Speaker 2: Harvard University, and I use him pronouns.
Speaker 3: Great. That is quite a bio.
Speaker 4: How long have you been at Harvard Gosh? I got
Speaker 4: here as a professor in two thousand and six, so
Speaker 4: we're coming up on nineteen years. And then I was
Speaker 4: a wee undergrad here in the nineties as mostly a
Speaker 4: philosophy student.
Speaker 3: Take me back to the nineties as a philosophy student,
Speaker 3: long hair, hacky sack buttoned up. What was your vibe?
Speaker 2: Just nerd? You know, I think I was just really
Speaker 2: into it and I never had a sort of form
Speaker 2: of cool that went with being a philosopher.
Speaker 3: What got you into it?
Speaker 2: I mean you could go way way back, asking lots
Speaker 2: and lots of questions As a kid, I remember kind
Speaker 2: of being unsatisfied with a lot of the answers I
Speaker 2: was given in Hebrew School. I was raised in a
Speaker 2: very sort of you know, fairly reformed, secular Jewish family.
Speaker 2: You know. I always used to argue, and someone was like, well,
Speaker 2: we got to put this to good use and suggested
Speaker 2: that I do debate. So I started doing debate when
Speaker 2: I was like twelve, and I was a pretty young
Speaker 2: twelve year old. So I was like this little argumentative
Speaker 2: towerp with my don't ask me, why yellow pants that
Speaker 2: I wore. I think I didn't realize that was funky.
Speaker 2: That was just the pants that I had. And you know,
Speaker 2: someone called me mister banana pants at age twelve as
Speaker 2: a debater, a's harsh, but I got interested in the questions,
Speaker 2: and a lot of the questions were really about sort
Speaker 2: of fundamental social trade offs, you know, the rights of
Speaker 2: the individual versus the greater good kind of came up
Speaker 2: over and over again. And this person said, so, you know,
Speaker 2: like in cross examination that it's very formal. It's like,
Speaker 2: so do you agree that you're saying that it's better
Speaker 2: to always do the thing that will promote the greater good?
Speaker 2: And I'm like, yes, yes, yes, And then she said, okay, Well,
Speaker 2: suppose there was a doctor who had some patients, and
Speaker 2: five of these patients were missing organs of various kinds.
Speaker 2: And then incomes a healthy person with two nice, clean,
Speaker 2: ready to go kidneys and a liver, and you could
Speaker 2: take the organs out of this one person and distribute
Speaker 2: them to these other five people, and assume that you know,
Speaker 2: the operation would work. Would it be okay for the
Speaker 2: doctor to sacrifice that one person to save the other
Speaker 2: five patients, and I was like, you know, and I
Speaker 2: lost that debate round. But even worse, I kind of
Speaker 2: lost my guiding philosophy that was always my go to, right,
Speaker 2: and that really stuck with me. And this introduced me
Speaker 2: to the trolley problem, which was really the underlying sort
Speaker 2: of philosophical exploration of these sacrificial dilemmas where you can
Speaker 2: kill one person to save five people. And what was
Speaker 2: beautiful about that was it had a really nice tight comparison. Right,
Speaker 2: So this is now at the time, no one outside
Speaker 2: of philosophy had heard of these things. So the trolley
Speaker 2: for the people who don't know, like for the eight
Speaker 2: people out there who've never heard of this, the trolley
Speaker 2: is headed towards five people, and you can hit a
Speaker 2: switch and turn it onto another track where it will
Speaker 2: run over one person. Most people say that that's acceptable.
Speaker 3: Okay, so you're at the controls of a trolley and
Speaker 3: you have a track with five people on it about
Speaker 3: to become hamburger meat by fate, or you can switch
Speaker 3: tracks and you can kill one person to save the
Speaker 3: other five. Most people are like, yeah, just let's temper
Speaker 3: with fate. Let's kill the one. Also, that person dies
Speaker 3: a hero and then you get to go to therapy
Speaker 3: every day for the rest of your life. But the
Speaker 3: more complex like leveling up of the trolley problem is
Speaker 3: instead of those two tracks, instead of that four five
Speaker 3: on one, one on the other. Instead you have a
Speaker 3: footbridge or like an overpass right above the tracks. There's
Speaker 3: one track below you. Five people are tied to the track.
Speaker 3: I don't know who did it. That's not part of
Speaker 3: the philosophical equation. But you're on that footbridge overpass, standing
Speaker 3: on it, looking down at this track, five people tied
Speaker 3: to it, and you're standing next to a big, tall
Speaker 3: person with like a heavy backpack enough weight to stop
Speaker 3: the trolley from running over the five people below. Do
Speaker 3: you push that big tall person with a backpack who's
Speaker 3: standing next to you onto the tracks below?
Speaker 2: They get hit by the trolley, but it stops the
Speaker 2: trolley from running over the fire. Is that okay? I felt,
Speaker 2: And most people think that that's wrong. And I thought, ah,
Speaker 2: this is like the perfect fruit fly, because here you've
Speaker 2: got the biggest divide in Western moral philosophies between the
Speaker 2: utilitarians like John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, who are
Speaker 2: saying realities ultimately about producing good consequences.
Speaker 3: So John Stuart Mill was a philosopher and a politician
Speaker 3: in the mid eighteen hundreds who advocated for women's rights
Speaker 3: in social liberalism, and his predecessor was this legendary Jeremy Bentham,
Speaker 3: who was a founding figure of utilitarianism, which steers people
Speaker 3: toward doing walt Wolf results and the greatest good for
Speaker 3: the greatest number of people. Now, people who lean toward
Speaker 3: the ethics of Emmanuel Kant, however, say that happiness can
Speaker 3: be elusive, it's different for different people, and it can
Speaker 3: come and go, and consequences shouldn't determine actions. Rather, morality
Speaker 3: is independent of its effect, and it's guided by these
Speaker 3: universal laws of what is right.
Speaker 2: And the Kantians who say no, morality is fundamentally about
Speaker 2: people's rights and our duties to respect those rights, and
Speaker 2: certain lines that must not be crossed or must be crossed.
Speaker 2: And in the original switch case, where you can turn
Speaker 2: the trolley away from the five and onto the one
Speaker 2: to the extent you agree with most people that it's
Speaker 2: okay to hit the switch, that fits very well with
Speaker 2: the utilitarian perspective. More consequentialist is how philosophers often say it.
Speaker 3: Okay, but remember we take it up a notch, not
Speaker 3: just by like switching a mere lever to save five
Speaker 3: people to kill one, but rather by heaving a bystander
Speaker 3: onto the tracks of an overpass footbridge.
Speaker 2: But the footbridge case, it seems like a real vindication
Speaker 2: for conton the continents. That know, even sometimes when it's
Speaker 2: you can promote the greater good, even if we grant
Speaker 2: that all of this will work, et cetera, it still
Speaker 2: seems wrong, right, Yeah, And I felt that, and I
Speaker 2: was like, what is going on there? And then I
Speaker 2: got more into the psychology and ultimately into the neuroscience
Speaker 2: behind that switch footbridge distinction in our heads, and that
Speaker 2: kind of is what turned me from being just a
Speaker 2: regular philosopher into being a philosopher slash experimental psychologists slash
Speaker 2: cognitive neuroscientist.
Speaker 3: When it comes to philosophy, A lot of us, you know,
Speaker 3: like I asked at the top, like did you have
Speaker 3: long hair in a hackey sack? A lot of us
Speaker 3: don't meet a lot of philosophers, right, especially professional ones,
Speaker 3: And so it's such a niche and esoteric and can
Speaker 3: even fathom what level you're on what is a philosopher
Speaker 3: and what is philosophy and what's the importance of them
Speaker 3: in society? Do they impact the way that laws are enforced,
Speaker 3: to the impact Supreme Court decisions like where where is
Speaker 3: philosophy in our society?
Speaker 2: So there are some philosophers whose ideas really matter a lot.
Speaker 2: And the living philosopher who's been most important to me
Speaker 2: is the philosopher Peter Singer, who kind of blew my
Speaker 2: mind back in those early days when I was thinking
Speaker 2: about these types of moral dilemmas.
Speaker 3: Just a quick background, So Peter Singer, still very much
Speaker 3: alive seventy nine years old, is a moral philosopher and
Speaker 3: a bioethics professor from Australia, and his angle is how
Speaker 3: do we apply ethics to get the greatest amount of
Speaker 3: happiness for the greatest number of people or living things.
Speaker 3: He's come under fire for applying these principles to issues
Speaker 3: of eugenics, and in a twenty twenty one paper can
Speaker 3: Eugenics Be Defended, he and co authors address the intersections
Speaker 3: of genetic screening, abortion, genetic enhancements, eradicationism, and even some
Speaker 3: simple prenatal care, and the boundary between the kinds of
Speaker 3: eugenic practices we allow, but many have said that he's
Speaker 3: been on the wrong side of that boundary in terms
Speaker 3: of ableism. And there is a reason that the trolley
Speaker 3: problem has vexed people and philosophers for decades since it
Speaker 3: was coined. These are very tough issues and there is
Speaker 3: a lot of disagreement for very good reason. But back
Speaker 3: to why some people sing Peter Singer's praises in the
Speaker 3: philosophy world and in the ethics world. He was into
Speaker 3: animal welfare before it was cool, and he's also spent
Speaker 3: decades saying like, hey, rich people, how about helping others hmm.
Speaker 2: Hm, and his ideas have literally saved millions of people's lives.
Speaker 2: So philosophy is kind of a It's a high stakes
Speaker 2: hit or miss. The people who make a difference make
Speaker 2: an enormous difference. And part of why I expanded into
Speaker 2: science is I felt like if I had any shot
Speaker 2: at making a difference as a philosopher, I'm in a
Speaker 2: better position to do it as a philosopher scientist who
Speaker 2: can look at what's going on in our heads and
Speaker 2: say this is what's happening. And when you understand that,
Speaker 2: does that change our thinking about what's really right or wrong?
Speaker 3: Yeah, and what was his study? Can you explain that?
Speaker 2: Well? So, Peter Singer is known for many a few things.
Speaker 2: I mean, one of them is essentially being the philosophical
Speaker 2: grandfather of the animal rights movement. So he wrote a
Speaker 2: book called Animal Liberation that came out in the seventies
Speaker 2: and it starts out in an interesting way. He says,
Speaker 2: you know, people say, oh, you're writing a book about
Speaker 2: animal rights, you must really love animals, And he says, no,
Speaker 2: it's not about what I love or don't love, or
Speaker 2: want to cuddle up with or play fetch with. It's
Speaker 2: about whether or not animals suffer, which is a point
Speaker 2: that Jeremy Bentham, the original utilitarian in the eighteenth century, made,
Speaker 2: and he sort of made the case that our practices,
Speaker 2: especially with factory farming, which just can't be morally justified.
Speaker 2: The other big thing that he did, and this is
Speaker 2: the thing that is probably had the most direct influence
Speaker 2: on my work, is his famous drowning child argument. So
Speaker 2: you may have heard some version of this. You're walking
Speaker 2: along and there's a pond, and there is a child
Speaker 2: who is drowning in the pond, and you can wade
Speaker 2: in and save this child, but you're going to ruin
Speaker 2: your fancy new shoes or suit or whatever it is,
Speaker 2: and it will cost you some amount of money to
Speaker 2: replace them. And if you ask people, is it okay
Speaker 2: to let the child drown because you don't want to
Speaker 2: ruin your clothes, most people would say no, that's terrible,
Speaker 2: that's monstrous, okay, And Peter Singer says good. I agree,
Speaker 2: And then he says, but there are children on the
Speaker 2: other side of the world who are drowning in poverty,
Speaker 2: who are badly in need of food and medicine. And
Speaker 2: for the price of the clothes that you're wearing, you
Speaker 2: or you, combined with a small number of other people,
Speaker 2: can save someone's life.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 2: Shit, So if you have an obligation to wade into
Speaker 2: the pond and save the child at some expense to yourself,
Speaker 2: why don't you have a comparable obligation to save people
Speaker 2: nearby or on the other side of the world whose
Speaker 2: lives are in grave danger due to their circumstances. And
Speaker 2: a lot of people spent a lot of time trying
Speaker 2: to argue why Singer was wrong, but I was convinced
Speaker 2: that he was right. Even if it goes against the
Speaker 2: grain of human nature. So Singer essentially made the argument
Speaker 2: that we in the affluent world should be doing much
Speaker 2: more for people in desperate need. And typically your money
Speaker 2: goes farthest overseas. You can provide a treatment that rids
Speaker 2: a child of devastating parasitic intestinal worms for less than
Speaker 2: a dollar, right, and for one hundred dollars you can
Speaker 2: do it one hundred times. There's effectively no limit, right,
Speaker 2: And that argument really stuck with me and has motivated
Speaker 2: a lot of the other work.
Speaker 3: And you know, you've been in the game for thirty years. Now,
Speaker 3: do you see any changes that happen as the world changes?
Speaker 3: As human beings who have been around for three hundred
Speaker 3: thousand years, we didn't always know about someone who was
Speaker 3: suffering on the other side of the world. We didn't
Speaker 3: know about a lot of things that weren't local to us.
Speaker 3: We didn't have factory farming. So do you feel like
Speaker 3: these philosophical problems are kind of a moving target as
Speaker 3: our way of life changes?
Speaker 2: Absolutely? I mean take the case of animal rights. I mean,
Speaker 2: when Singer wrote animal liberation, is that just a tiny
Speaker 2: fraction of the population that was vegetarian or vegan for
Speaker 2: moral reasons right, especially in the West, or people who
Speaker 2: didn't weren't already part of a religious tradition. Let's say
Speaker 2: that had that kind of norm. Now there's nothing remarkable
Speaker 2: at all about meeting someone who's the vegetarian or these
Speaker 2: days even a vegan because they don't want to participate
Speaker 2: in killing animals and making them suffer. And then the
Speaker 2: other thing is in terms of people in the affluent
Speaker 2: world using their money effectively to alleviate as much suffering
Speaker 2: as possible, which mostly means overseas. That movement really took
Speaker 2: off and billions have been raised very explicitly under this
Speaker 2: philosophical banner. It's been a little complicated recently. So this
Speaker 2: is what I'm referring to as the effective altruism movement.
Speaker 3: Okay, so effective altruism. It's been in the headlines for
Speaker 3: a lot of good reasons a little bit of bad reasons.
Speaker 3: So on one hand, it's saved countless lives, it's raised
Speaker 3: billions of dollars from wealthy, wealthy donors. Some billionaires pledge
Speaker 3: a percentage of their annual income to the most effective
Speaker 3: charities on the globe. On the other hand, there was
Speaker 3: this young cryptocurrency billionaire who was like a staunch advocate
Speaker 3: publicly of effective altruism and is now serving twenty five
Speaker 3: years in prison for defrauding his investors and being on
Speaker 3: record saying that he used effective altruism to just bolster
Speaker 3: his platform and his image is a good guy. So
Speaker 3: billionaire downfalls, philosophy gossip. It's got it all, including accidental
Speaker 3: dad jokes. Because the incarcerated finance guy's name is Samuel
Speaker 3: Bankman Freed, and unfortunately he is no longer a bankman,
Speaker 3: nor is he free. But back to trolleology and what
Speaker 3: about the experimental psychology side of it and the neuroscience
Speaker 3: side of it. When you're looking at something like the
Speaker 3: trolley problem, can you take one life to spare five?
Speaker 3: Are you putting people in fMRI machines? Are you having
Speaker 3: them fill out questionnaires? Are you mostly talking to students
Speaker 3: or are you going out man on the street style,
Speaker 3: like how are how do you collect data on these kind.
Speaker 2: Of moral dilemmas? So all of the above, Okay, the
Speaker 2: sort of breakthrough experiment that I did while I was
Speaker 2: a philosophy PhD student, and this was done with my
Speaker 2: mentor then Jonathan Cohen, who's still at Princeton, I had
Speaker 2: the thought that what's going on in the footbridge case
Speaker 2: is there's a kind of an emotional response to the
Speaker 2: thought of sort of pushing this person and harming them
Speaker 2: in this very sort of direct and intentional way.
Speaker 3: So remember in the footbridge case, it's not just this
Speaker 3: switch lever. In the footbridge scenario, you are laying hands
Speaker 3: on a person to geet them onto the tracks to
Speaker 3: save five people? Is it rude? Deeply? Is it morally sound?
Speaker 2: And that you could see that response in the brain.
Speaker 2: So if you put people in the scanner and you
Speaker 2: have them consider dilemmas like the switch case and dilemmas
Speaker 2: like the footbridge case, you'd see more activity related to
Speaker 2: a kind of emotional response. In the footbridge case. The
Speaker 2: stronger that response, the more people would say, no, you
Speaker 2: can't push the guy off the footbridge or whatever it is.
Speaker 2: And we found something broadly consistent with that in that
Speaker 2: first neuroimaging study, which was published in two thousand and one.
Speaker 3: That two thousand and one first neuroimaging study was this
Speaker 3: breakthrough paper titled an Integrative Theory of Prefrontal cortex function,
Speaker 3: which proposed that cognitive control stems from the active maintenance
Speaker 3: of patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex that represents
Speaker 3: goals and the means to achieve them. When people talk
Speaker 3: about the prefrontal cortex, this is the paper they're talking about.
Speaker 3: It's been cited in twelve three hundred and ninety other papers.
Speaker 3: That's what a lot of academics consider a shitload.
Speaker 2: The cool thing about brain imaging is that you can
Speaker 2: look and see what's going on, but it's a very
Speaker 2: noisy signal, and you don't have experimental control. Right. You
Speaker 2: can change what people are reading or are asked to
Speaker 2: think about, but you can't turn on or off some
Speaker 2: part of the brain.
Speaker 3: So these imaging studies, and some that came after his
Speaker 3: first work was published, included volunteers who had sustained brain injury.
Speaker 2: Whereas a brain lesion that part of the brain is
Speaker 2: permanently turned off. Right, And so the actual studies or
Speaker 2: the work that made me think to make that prediction
Speaker 2: about brain imaging was work with patients like the famous
Speaker 2: case of Phineas Gauge. To this, so, Phineas Gauge is
Speaker 2: the nineteenth century railroad foreman who was working on the
Speaker 2: railroad all the livelong day in Vermont and got an
Speaker 2: iron spike through the front of his head, and as
Speaker 2: a result, was fundamentally changed. I mean, you might think
Speaker 2: that someone who had that kind of injury, they wouldn't
Speaker 2: be able to speak, They wouldn't been able to ever
Speaker 2: do another math problem. His sort of rational faculties and
Speaker 2: language faculties and just general sort of thinking ability remained intact,
Speaker 2: but his emotions and his decision making were very much damaged.
Speaker 3: By his emotions and decision making being very much damaged,
Speaker 3: Josh means that, Yeah, when this young rail worker was
Speaker 3: penetrated by a forty three inch iron bar that exited
Speaker 3: his skull and then clattered to the ground eighty feet away,
Speaker 3: he survived. He lived for twelve more years. But yeah,
Speaker 3: his social inhibitions vanished. He developed what people said was
Speaker 3: a very surly and sometimes violent disposition. He took to
Speaker 3: some heavy drinking. I'm willing to bet he did quite
Speaker 3: a bit of honkey talking with the ladies. That is
Speaker 3: to say, he went a little off the rails. And
Speaker 3: his skull and the tamping iron that blew through it,
Speaker 3: they're both at Harvard University School of Medicine, and I
Speaker 3: can tell you I have been looking at pictures of them,
Speaker 3: some sultry looking dageratypes, holding his railroad spike like a staff,
Speaker 3: and he may have had a rod plow through him,
Speaker 3: but his face card survived intact. Ten out of ten wood,
Speaker 3: honkey Ton. He was a babe. He was a babe.
Speaker 2: And the way researchers who studied people like this in particular,
Speaker 2: this is reported in a book called Descartes Error by
Speaker 2: Antonio Damasia, which I read as an undergrad, said, these
Speaker 2: people they know the words, but they don't hear the music,
Speaker 2: they don't feel the music, that they don't have the
Speaker 2: emotional response. When I read that book, like, I literally
Speaker 2: jumped up and down on my bed when I got
Speaker 2: to that passage, I was like, this is what's going
Speaker 2: on in the footbridge case.
Speaker 3: And in a typical volunteer, their reaction to pushing someone
Speaker 3: off a footbridge instead of just pulling a lever is like, dude,
Speaker 3: hell no, I'm not going to be pushing anyone onto
Speaker 3: any tracks. But in volunteers with a typical brain anatomy is.
Speaker 2: What's missing in these patients that have damage to the
Speaker 2: venturemedial prefrontal cortex, sort of if this is the part
Speaker 2: of your brain above your eyes, in the middle of
Speaker 2: your forehead. But eventually, people including Demasio's group, tested patients
Speaker 2: like that and it was exactly as our results predicted.
Speaker 2: That is, the patients with this kind of brain damage
Speaker 2: were much more likely to say that it's okay to
Speaker 2: push the guy off the footbridge. And then people studied
Speaker 2: other types of patients. So you have patients with damage
Speaker 2: to a part of the brain called the bezolateral amignolo,
Speaker 2: which is involved in goal directed planning, and those people
Speaker 2: will never say that it's okay or very very rarely
Speaker 2: stated it's okay to push the guy off the footbridge.
Speaker 2: And you see similar responses in patients who have damage
Speaker 2: to a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which
Speaker 2: is involved in kind of envisioning a scenario and deciding
Speaker 2: how to act on it based on the details of
Speaker 2: what's going on. People found that different types of drugs
Speaker 2: you can give people. You give people an anti anxiety
Speaker 2: drug and they've become more okay with the utilitarian.
Speaker 3: Response utilitarian response and pushed the guy.
Speaker 2: And you give people a drug that it's a depression drug,
Speaker 2: but has a sort of reverse effect early on, so
Speaker 2: that it actually heightens the emotional response and those people
Speaker 2: are more likely to say that it's wrong. And we've
Speaker 2: done further studies that have sort of teased apart the
Speaker 2: different circuits. So now we have a decent kind of
Speaker 2: understanding of the basic neural circuitry involved in the sort
Speaker 2: of yes response and the no response to cases like
Speaker 2: the footbridge case. Okay, well, then what is it exactly
Speaker 2: about the footbridge case? And years ago we did it
Speaker 2: studies that suggested they were kind of two different things
Speaker 2: going on. One is what you might call the pushing
Speaker 2: so personal force. So if you ask people, is it
Speaker 2: okay to push somebody off the footbridge, like thirty percent
Speaker 2: of people will say yes. And then you can do
Speaker 2: a version and say is it okay to let's say
Speaker 2: the person is standing over a trap door and you
Speaker 2: can hit a switch that will drop them through the
Speaker 2: footbridge onto the tracks. Right, they're like, you know, in
Speaker 2: that initial study, like sixty percent of people said that
Speaker 2: was okay. Right, So something about pushing, and it doesn't
Speaker 2: matter if you push with your hands or push with pull,
Speaker 2: so it's not about the touching, it's about the pushing, right,
Speaker 2: that's part of it. And then the other part of
Speaker 2: it is this distinction between harming intentionally versus as a
Speaker 2: side effect. And this is something that goes all the
Speaker 2: way back to like this theological doctrine from Saint Thomas Aquinas,
Speaker 2: and that's been used like in the Catholic Church, for example,
Speaker 2: to distinguish between a surgical procedure that's an abortion versus
Speaker 2: that's designed to save the life of the mother but
Speaker 2: then would end up terminating the fetus's life, Like are
Speaker 2: you trying to do the thing that's harmful? So basically
Speaker 2: is it a side effect or not? And we find
Speaker 2: that that matters also, for example, if you're running across
Speaker 2: a narrow footbridge to get to a switch that's gonna
Speaker 2: you know, you can hit it and save the people,
Speaker 2: and you're gonna incidentally bump somebody off of that footbridge
Speaker 2: to their death. More people will say that's okay, and
Speaker 2: that's a direct personal bump, but it's it's incidental. The
Speaker 2: harm is a side effect.
Speaker 3: So Josh says that he and his colleagues worked this
Speaker 3: out preliminarily in a two thousand and nine paper titled
Speaker 3: Pushing Moral Buttons. The interaction between personal force and intention
Speaker 3: in Moral Judgment. This was in the journal Cognition, and
Speaker 3: it examined personal force defined as force generated by the
Speaker 3: agent's muscles that directly impacts the victim, and people get
Speaker 3: squeamish about that.
Speaker 2: That is the personal actually the personal force effect, the
Speaker 2: pushing versus hitting a switch that was found everywhere in
Speaker 2: the world really, so basically it tells us, really what
Speaker 2: is violence in our conception? Right? A violent action is
Speaker 2: really an action that has three things. It causes harm,
Speaker 2: that's in the background. It is something I didn't mention before.
Speaker 2: Active as opposed to passive. So this would be the
Speaker 2: difference between someone you make them go over the footbridge
Speaker 2: versus they're about to fall and you don't stop it. Right,
Speaker 2: uh huh. So active, intentional, not a side effect, and
Speaker 2: fairly direct. Like those three things, that's kind of what
Speaker 2: makes up the core of our sense of this is
Speaker 2: a violent action.
Speaker 3: So again, a violent action is one active and intentional
Speaker 3: to it causes harm, and three that victim does not
Speaker 3: want the harm.
Speaker 2: And bringing this back to Peter Singer, part of why
Speaker 2: you know we're letting people die all the time people
Speaker 2: whose lives we could save. It doesn't feel like an
Speaker 2: active violence because we're not going in there and killing them.
Speaker 2: We're allowing circumstances to kill them. So it's passive rather
Speaker 2: than active. It's not our intention. We're not achieving some
Speaker 2: goal by doing this, or some specific goal, and there's
Speaker 2: no like physical directness there. So it kind of explains
Speaker 2: why things that can be incredibly damaging don't set off
Speaker 2: all our alarm bells. They don't have that paradigmatic feeling
Speaker 2: of like punching somebody in the face or pushing somebody
Speaker 2: off of a footbridge.
Speaker 3: And this of course is a big topic in say
Speaker 3: a famine versus a genocide, and one might argue that
Speaker 3: the former is passive and the latter is active, but
Speaker 3: often in the cases of famine in genocide, they are
Speaker 3: both active. For more on that and humanitarian law, crimes
Speaker 3: of atrocity and what many humanitarian law experts consider a
Speaker 3: textbook Genocide in Gaza, will link the genocidology episode in
Speaker 3: the show notes and your other books Moral Tribes and
Speaker 3: you talk about features and bugs, Can you explain a
Speaker 3: little bit about what those features and bugs are and
Speaker 3: what those tribes are.
Speaker 2: You know, often when I tell people like if you
Speaker 2: push with your hands, then it seems wrong. But if
Speaker 2: you drop somebody through a trapped over the switch and
Speaker 2: people kind of laugh, right, and that is a normative
Speaker 2: philosophical laugh. What you're laughing at is that you're thinking
Speaker 2: that doesn't make a lot of sense. Right. The way
Speaker 2: I nice put it is if someone called you from
Speaker 2: a footbridge and was like, Ali, there's a train and
Speaker 2: it's coming there five people and I might be able
Speaker 2: to save them. Should I do it, I'd have to
Speaker 2: kill someone. And then you wouldn't say, well that depends
Speaker 2: would you have to push this person with your hands
Speaker 2: or could you do it more indirectly? That shouldn't matter. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So that's a kind of bug.
Speaker 3: In that it's like a hiccup of physics. Our brains
Speaker 3: should not have to waste time mulling over.
Speaker 2: And likewise, when it comes to something that's maybe easier
Speaker 2: to defend, like you know, caring about the people who
Speaker 2: are immediately in front of us, like the child who's
Speaker 2: drowning in front of us, or even more so people
Speaker 2: with whom we have a personal relationship, we can understand
Speaker 2: that in more evolutionary terms, right, we evolve to be
Speaker 2: cooperative creatures. The group that is willing to pull its
Speaker 2: you know, fellow tribe mates out of the raging river,
Speaker 2: that group's going to survive much better. Our moral emotional
Speaker 2: dispositions are designed for this group teamwork, but they're not
Speaker 2: designed to save the lives of strangers on the other
Speaker 2: side of the world. Wasn't even possible for most of
Speaker 2: human history. And the goal from an evolutionary point of
Speaker 2: view is for you and the members of that group
Speaker 2: to survive and spread your genes. Right, It's not about
Speaker 2: making the world better in some objective sense. So the
Speaker 2: thought is that we can understand and what we react
Speaker 2: to and what we don't, and from at least a
Speaker 2: certain detached perspective, we can say, you know, it seems
Speaker 2: like we might overreact to certain types of harms, like
Speaker 2: let's say a physician assisted suicide where someone is in
Speaker 2: miserable shape and they're never going to recover and they're
Speaker 2: just in a lot of pain and they feel like
Speaker 2: their life has no dignity and they feel like it's
Speaker 2: time to go right And interestingly, recently it was revealed
Speaker 2: that Daniel Kahneman, the father of sort of heuristics and
Speaker 2: biases and behavioral decision making chose to go to Switzerland
Speaker 2: to end his life. And I think it's not an
Speaker 2: accident that someone who studies decision making would make that
Speaker 2: kind of choice, because he understands is what he'd call
Speaker 2: system one sort of intuitions and his system to reasoning
Speaker 2: and is generally a system to kind of guy. And
Speaker 2: then perhaps I think even more importantly, the fact that
Speaker 2: we are not moved by the suffering of people on
Speaker 2: the other side of the world in the same way
Speaker 2: that we're moved by someone who's drowning right in front
Speaker 2: of us, we should view that as under alarming. And then,
Speaker 2: of course there are things like racism and tribalism more generally,
Speaker 2: and speciesism where we don't care as much about people
Speaker 2: who we think of as different from us, as not
Speaker 2: part of our us, right, or we don't trust them
Speaker 2: as much, or we're ready to believe lies about them
Speaker 2: much more easily. Right. And this is related to my
Speaker 2: main project these days, which is about bridging divides.
Speaker 3: So we're going to touch on that in a bit,
Speaker 3: but it's about stark political divides that are ruining the
Speaker 3: world it's also about tango dancing.
Speaker 2: But I think understanding where are moral feelings come from
Speaker 2: can give us insight. But to me, you can't understand
Speaker 2: the origins of all of this and the way they
Speaker 2: work and think, oh, we should just follow our intuitions.
Speaker 2: They're always right. Yeah, it's a direct line to the
Speaker 2: moral truth. Instead, we need to step back and think.
Speaker 2: And maybe where that puts us is a world in
Speaker 2: which we care more about other people, care more about
Speaker 2: other species, are willing to make certain sacrifices when necessary,
Speaker 2: but also listen to our hearts when they tell us
Speaker 2: that we're possibly doing something wrong. Yeah, but I think
Speaker 2: that self knowledge is incredibly useful.
Speaker 3: You're talking about how we can help people on the
Speaker 3: other side of the world, and we actually we're going
Speaker 3: to get to listener questions. But we give to a
Speaker 3: charity every week of your choosing. So when it comes
Speaker 3: to charities, how do you decide.
Speaker 2: Well, we've created a donation platform that's supposed to help
Speaker 2: with this, So okay. With the trolley problem. The trolley
Speaker 2: problem feels like an impossible dilemma. There is no happy
Speaker 2: solution to the footbridge case. Either, you're letting more people
Speaker 2: die you know, for people more dead than is necessary,
Speaker 2: or you're committing what feels like an active murder, and
Speaker 2: unless you sort of change the situation, you're stuck with that.
Speaker 2: There is a similar kind of dilemma getting more into
Speaker 2: Peter Singer's zone, which is about where you give and
Speaker 2: how you give. Most people, myself included, I want to
Speaker 2: give the heart, and they want to give to things
Speaker 2: that they feel personally connected to. And if you love animals,
Speaker 2: that might mean giving to the local animal shelter, or
Speaker 2: if your grandmother died of breast cancer, you might want
Speaker 2: to give to a breast cancer charity whatever, And that
Speaker 2: makes sense, right, And I want to support my local
Speaker 2: schools and food bank and things like this. But the
Speaker 2: charities that actually do the most good are almost always
Speaker 2: not the ones that are closest to.
Speaker 3: Our heart, at least if we're in the developed world,
Speaker 3: where there is more infrastructure and say, fewer intestinal parasites
Speaker 3: and mosquitoes, or in the case of the US, for example,
Speaker 3: no horrors of wars waged in our backyards or buildings
Speaker 3: blown to dust.
Speaker 2: And the difference between a typical charity, a typical good charity,
Speaker 2: and the charities that are most effective is enormous. The
Speaker 2: difference between a really effective charity and a typical charity.
Speaker 2: It's like a redwood versus a shrub. It's like a
Speaker 2: hundred times or in some cases like a thousand times. Okay,
Speaker 2: like in a developed country like the US, US paying
Speaker 2: to train a guide dog for someone who's blind or
Speaker 2: visually impaired and calls like fifty thousand dollars. A surgery
Speaker 2: in other parts of the world that can prevent people
Speaker 2: from going blind due to a disease called trachoma could
Speaker 2: cost less than one hundred dollars. So that can be
Speaker 2: something like five hundred to one thousand times difference in
Speaker 2: what you get from your money. Now, this is not
Speaker 2: to say that we shouldn't support and care about mind
Speaker 2: people here, but surely we should take advantage of that opportunity.
Speaker 2: If you know, for the cost of training one guide dog,
Speaker 2: we can prevent five hundred people or a thousand people
Speaker 2: from going blind in the first place. So huge differences.
Speaker 3: H This is so hard?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well so no, it hurts to think about. We
Speaker 2: have the solution because this is what I do. My
Speaker 2: wife and I we give to local charities and things
Speaker 2: like that that just we feel a personal connection to it,
Speaker 2: and then we do things like deworming treatments and vaccinating
Speaker 2: newborns in Nigeria and things like that. And so I said,
Speaker 2: why don't we just ask people instead of saying you
Speaker 2: should be giving to more effective charities instead of what
Speaker 2: you do, why don't you do both? Right, So we
Speaker 2: started running these experiments and so the basic setup for
Speaker 2: our first experiment is in one condition, it's the typical choice.
Speaker 2: That is, you can pick your favorite charity or this
Speaker 2: charity that's recommended by experts. So let's say it's a
Speaker 2: deworm the World initiative, where you know, for a dollar
Speaker 2: you can give a kid a deworming treatment, right, And
Speaker 2: what we found is that, you know, most people, like
Speaker 2: eighty percent of people or more, would choose their personal
Speaker 2: favorite over the expert effectiveness recommendation. That's the control condition.
Speaker 2: And then in the experimental condition, we give people three choices.
Speaker 2: You can give it all to your personal favorite, you
Speaker 2: can give it all to the deworming charity that the
Speaker 2: expert recommend or do a fifty to fifty split. And
Speaker 2: what we found was that over half the people did
Speaker 2: the fifty to fifty split, So more money ended up
Speaker 2: going to the highly effective charity when you gave people
Speaker 2: the option to split than when you force them to choose.
Speaker 2: And we did a bunch of experiments to try to
Speaker 2: understand the psychology of it, and the gist of it
Speaker 2: is that when you give from the heart, it's not
Speaker 2: about how much you give. The difference between giving fifty
Speaker 2: dollars to the local animal shelter one hundred dollars it
Speaker 2: feels more or less the same. So if you give
Speaker 2: fifty dollars instead of one hundred, then you've got another
Speaker 2: fifty bucks. And what you can do with that fifty
Speaker 2: bucks is scratch a different itch, which is the itch
Speaker 2: to give smart and impactfully rather than you know, only
Speaker 2: doing the thing you have the personal connection with. So
Speaker 2: that's sort of like the hearthead psychology there. And then
Speaker 2: we said, okay, well what if we offer people an
Speaker 2: incentive and you know, add money on top. And unsurprisingly
Speaker 2: people did this even more. It was like another seventy
Speaker 2: five or fifty five percent boost when we added money
Speaker 2: on top. And then there's the question of okay, where's
Speaker 2: that money that to come from. So then we said, well,
Speaker 2: what if after people have made their choices. We say, hey,
Speaker 2: would you take the money that you were gonna give
Speaker 2: to that super effective charity that you had just learned
Speaker 2: about and instead put it into a matching fund for
Speaker 2: other people? We found that a lot of people would
Speaker 2: do that, so we're like, huh, the math seems to
Speaker 2: add up. Let's give this a try.
Speaker 3: So you give to your favorite charity, any US registered nonprofit,
Speaker 3: and you have the choice to divide it with a
Speaker 3: super effective charity. And then there's this extra secret sauce
Speaker 3: and it's that because others have donated to a matching fund,
Speaker 3: you can up your donation a wee bit knowing that
Speaker 3: it will be matched and everyone wins a little more. Now,
Speaker 3: if you want to opt to be a matching fund donor,
Speaker 3: you can do that instead or an addition. So how
Speaker 3: and where do you get in on this this hot benevolence.
Speaker 2: So Lucius and his developer friend Fabio Kuhn create this
Speaker 2: website called Giving Multiplier. And you know, if you're home,
Speaker 2: you can google giving Multiplier. You'll see it come up
Speaker 2: and it allows you to do what we do in
Speaker 2: this experiment. But the gist is you pick your favorite
Speaker 2: charity any registered five oh one C three in the US.
Speaker 2: There's a little search field there and you say, okay,
Speaker 2: I'm going to give to you know whatever, it is
Speaker 2: my local animal shelter which I know the name of,
Speaker 2: right And then you say, okay, here are the ten
Speaker 2: charities that we are supporting that are super effective. And
Speaker 2: it's things like distributing malaria nets or other malaria treatments,
Speaker 2: or the deworming charity that I mentioned and other things.
Speaker 2: And then we have this cool little slider thing and
Speaker 2: depending on how you allocate your money between the one
Speaker 2: that you chose and the one that's from our list,
Speaker 2: we add money on top, and we add more money
Speaker 2: on top the more you give to the highly effective charity,
Speaker 2: and if you have a code for that, then you
Speaker 2: get a little bit higher matching funds. And I will
Speaker 2: shamelessly say that for listeners of this podcast, if you
Speaker 2: put in ologies as your code, then you get a
Speaker 2: higher matching rate. So we launched this in twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: and you know, we would have been happy if we,
Speaker 2: you know, raised a little bit better than bakesale, but
Speaker 2: it went really well, and long short of it, as
Speaker 2: we've been doing this for four years we've raised over
Speaker 2: four million dollars, oh my god, and over two million
Speaker 2: of that has gone to super duper effective charity. So
Speaker 2: we're talking about just from Laria that's alone saving dozens
Speaker 2: of people's lives, thousands of children who've gotten deworming treatments
Speaker 2: as a result of this, hundreds of thousands of dollars
Speaker 2: in direct cash transfers that people in poor countries can
Speaker 2: use to put a better roof over their head or
Speaker 2: start a business and things like that. And this like
Speaker 2: cycle has been going now for four years and you know,
Speaker 2: save lots of lives and raised millions of dollars. And
Speaker 2: it started with that little experiment and really started with
Speaker 2: kind of the inspiration from Peter Singer, the philosopher whose
Speaker 2: ideas really matter.
Speaker 3: So we can in your name, we can donate to
Speaker 3: the Matching Fund to help other people.
Speaker 2: I would not complain if that's not too self serving. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that would be great. If you want to put money
Speaker 2: in the Matching Fund, that would be awesome.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's so great. That's amazing. And then also if
Speaker 3: people want to go check it out, they could use
Speaker 3: the codeologies and they'll match a little more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can do is like make a tiny
Speaker 2: donation now, like put in like ten bucks, try it out,
Speaker 2: see how it works. And then when it's holiday time
Speaker 2: and you're ready to like really do your good deeds
Speaker 2: for the year, we'll get back in touch with you
Speaker 2: and we'll have some good offers.
Speaker 3: Ah, that's so great. I want to ask you some
Speaker 3: questions too from listeners who were excited that you're coming on.
Speaker 3: If I may please so, yes, Josh's charity of choice
Speaker 3: this week is the matching Fund at giving multiplier dot org,
Speaker 3: and that matching donation will help incentivize more folks to
Speaker 3: give just a little bit more to their charity of
Speaker 3: choice and a super effective one. Now, to get a
Speaker 3: little bit of a boost in the matching fund percentage,
Speaker 3: you can go to giving multiplier dot org slash ologies
Speaker 3: and that link is in our show notes or on
Speaker 3: our website for the Trolleyology episode. So that is a
Speaker 3: wonderful resource for people who are looking to give and
Speaker 3: have it go a little further. So thank you Josh
Speaker 3: for the research that went into that and the option
Speaker 3: again that's giving multiplier dot org slash ologies, and thank
Speaker 3: you sponsors of the show for making our weekly donations possible.
Speaker 1: So you want to go open this road here and
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Speaker 3: Okay. This next question asked by Lilly Brick Klein, Belodi Sandwich,
Speaker 3: Earl of Gramulcan hand the b al Ham, Lindsay Mixer,
Speaker 3: Kira Black, Jacob Morvey, Karen Digger and Quinn may make
Speaker 3: you think, oh my god, let's talk a little bit
Speaker 3: about culture and religion. A bunch of people wanted to know,
Speaker 3: in Andy Pepper's words, is religion a thing? Because it's
Speaker 3: easier for animal brains to outsource morality and spirituality to
Speaker 3: an institution, even if that means doing things that are
Speaker 3: clearly a moral like every Holy war. Ever, Meghan Ratcliffe
Speaker 3: wanted to know how does religion influence these moral quandaries?
Speaker 3: And also Chris f wanted to say, anecdotally, I found
Speaker 3: that folks that received a highly religious upbringing but left
Speaker 3: their faith as adults often have stronger moral compass than
Speaker 3: those who continued following religion into adulthood. So modern religion
Speaker 3: in terms of moral character versus in innate desire to
Speaker 3: do good? What's up with that?
Speaker 2: So let's talk about what is religion? Why does it
Speaker 2: even exist? Yeah, and the earliest things that we might
Speaker 2: recognize as religions, what they did was they often provided
Speaker 2: explanations for things that we didn't understand. Why does this
Speaker 2: bright ball of fire go around the world once every
Speaker 2: twenty four hours and things like that, and also kind
Speaker 2: of answered questions like what happens to people when they die?
Speaker 2: And sometimes I hear voices? Is that people talking to
Speaker 2: me from some other realm? And it's kind of explaining
Speaker 2: the unexplainable. And then there was this kind of transition
Speaker 2: and the story I'm telling here, I should say, comes
Speaker 2: from sort of brilliant analysis by researchers like Ura Nor
Speaker 2: and Zion and Joe Henrick and others. So this is
Speaker 2: not just coming from me. There is this kind of
Speaker 2: invention of big gods, right, And what they mean by
Speaker 2: big gods is gods that know everything about what people
Speaker 2: do and what they're really thinking, why they do it,
Speaker 2: and care that humans treat each other well. And what
Speaker 2: that combination does is it provides a kind of guarantee
Speaker 2: of cooperation because if I'm a Muslim and you're a Muslim,
Speaker 2: even if we've never met before, if we both know
Speaker 2: that we are faithful, then I know that I can
Speaker 2: trust you and you can trust me because we both
Speaker 2: know what will happen to us if we disappoint God
Speaker 2: in the way that we behave. And so religion has
Speaker 2: been a way to scale up cooperation and build trust
Speaker 2: among strangers, right. And this had an enormous effect on
Speaker 2: people's ability to trade with other people and exchange technology.
Speaker 2: So it is a social time technology, right, And what
Speaker 2: religions do it's a double edged story. It makes people
Speaker 2: more cooperative within the group, but the religion is out
Speaker 2: there competing for resources and souls or whatever it is
Speaker 2: with other groups that are either religious or not, And
Speaker 2: so religion can bind people together, but it can also
Speaker 2: divide people at the level of groups. Now, there are
Speaker 2: some religions that have tried to move towards a more
Speaker 2: universalist perspective, the most sort of straightforwardly so being the
Speaker 2: Unitarian Universalist movement, which to a lot of people doesn't
Speaker 2: even feel like a quote real religion because it doesn't
Speaker 2: have that kind of strong sort of metaphysics and ussiness
Speaker 2: of other religions.
Speaker 3: Right, Okay, up into this moment, I had never heard
Speaker 3: of the Unitarian universalism movement. But it's apparently inclusive of
Speaker 3: a bunch of religions but adheres to none of them,
Speaker 3: and it's rather founded on a commitment to theological diversity, inclusivity,
Speaker 3: and social justice. And their values are just like love
Speaker 3: and fairness, and they say you are welcome no matter
Speaker 3: where you are from, who you love, or what higher
Speaker 3: power you believe in, which is very different than the
Speaker 3: Catholic masses that I used to attend. Staring up at
Speaker 3: a bleeding dead man and worrying about going to hell
Speaker 3: if I said a rosary out of order. Now. For
Speaker 3: more on that, you can see our recent OCD episode Yay.
Speaker 2: So, religion is I think fundamentally about cooperation within its scope,
Speaker 2: which can be either very narrow or fairly big, and
Speaker 2: in some cases even cover the whole world. So it's
Speaker 2: a cultural invention, and it's a set of things that
Speaker 2: influence us emotionally. All of those rituals, all of those prayers,
Speaker 2: all of those parties, all of those dances, all of
Speaker 2: that stuff binds people together and makes them feel like
Speaker 2: a cohesive, cooperative unit, but often at the cost of
Speaker 2: making other people feel more distant. Right, So for those
Speaker 2: of us who want to see a sort of maximumly widened,
Speaker 2: inclusive world, then religion is both an opportunity and a challenge.
Speaker 3: So yes to community and doing good with it, know
Speaker 3: to starting wars about who is the most moral. Now
Speaker 3: on the topic tangentially of original sin, Daniel Shmanuel said,
Speaker 3: I saw study showing babies under two years old showed
Speaker 3: signs of understanding right from wrong. What's the explanation? Is
Speaker 3: there a genetic component to morality and patrons Rachel May,
Speaker 3: Sarah King, and Hannah Bonanas all asked about nature versus
Speaker 3: nurture generally. Hannah Bonanas added that, having left a fundamentalist cult,
Speaker 3: I'm often trying to figure out for myself what makes
Speaker 3: a good person other than just trying not to hurt people.
Speaker 3: Chryslas Ashton said, what a great topic. I'm taking an
Speaker 3: ethics class right now and we've talked about this. My
Speaker 3: question is what part of morality is innate and what
Speaker 3: part is learned? And do we even know?
Speaker 2: So what I would say is morality first is not
Speaker 2: like a thing in the brain like on Star Trek
Speaker 2: the Next Generation. I'm showing my age here, but maybe
Speaker 2: I love Oh my gosh, it's the best. During the pandemic,
Speaker 2: my family we watched all seven seasons just straight through.
Speaker 2: It was like the great that was our religion basically.
Speaker 2: And so you have Commander Data and he has his
Speaker 2: like ethics module that was like added to him so
Speaker 2: that he wouldn't be like his evil twin brother laur Captain.
Speaker 1: Although the result of my actions proved positive, the ends
Speaker 1: cannot justify the means.
Speaker 2: But morality for humans is not a module, right, It's
Speaker 2: really our sort of whole social emotional intelligence complex. What
Speaker 2: you see as kind of naturally arising out of human
Speaker 2: experience is certain basic cooperative tendencies. That's a lesson you
Speaker 2: probably learn as a toddler, if you don't turn out
Speaker 2: to be a psychopath, right that, Like toddlers are pretty violent,
Speaker 2: Like if they were eight feet tall, we'd be in trouble.
Speaker 2: Then then you learn like you're not allowed to behave
Speaker 2: that way and you internalize that. Right, So certain basic
Speaker 2: feelings about physical violence, lying, stealing the stuff that, like,
Speaker 2: this group ain't gonna work unless we have certain boundaries
Speaker 2: that we've emotionally internalized. And then a sense of who's
Speaker 2: in and who's out with varying degrees. Who do you
Speaker 2: owe things to? You know, when you have food, who
Speaker 2: do you have to share it with? Is it no one?
Speaker 2: Is it just your immediate family? Is it everyone in
Speaker 2: the village?
Speaker 3: Right? So innate or not? What do we think?
Speaker 2: So it's more like language in a sense, like is
Speaker 2: language innate or not? Well, no one comes out of
Speaker 2: the womb speaking Mandarin Chinese in the way that a
Speaker 2: gazelle might come out of the woman be able to
Speaker 2: walk pretty soon, right, you have to be exposed to
Speaker 2: Mandarin in order to learn it. But you can speak
Speaker 2: Mandarin to a chimp all day long and they're not
Speaker 2: going to learn it. Right, So what we have is
Speaker 2: an innate capacity to acquire morality. But you don't just
Speaker 2: acquire morality like it's one thing. You acquire different flavors,
Speaker 2: different versions of it. In the same way that humans
Speaker 2: have genetic adaptations that enable us to acquire language. But
Speaker 2: language is not innate in the sense that we pop
Speaker 2: out talk and we have to be exposed to it.
Speaker 2: So it's a genetic predisposition to learn.
Speaker 3: And Josh says, there is no nature versus nurture. Some
Speaker 3: things are pure nature, like your physicality, your anatomy, but
Speaker 3: all nurture relies on the nature that you have. You
Speaker 3: have to have the software to be able to run
Speaker 3: whatever is next. Okay, yes, you mentioned data and a
Speaker 3: lot of people Polycontra, Mark Rubin, redheaded scientist, Janettasaur, Biscuits,
Speaker 3: and Gravy all wanted to know about AI. Paul asked,
Speaker 3: given the continuing emergence of AI, what would an autonomous
Speaker 3: artificial and intelligence agents do? Mark Rubin wanted to know,
Speaker 3: has there been much work regarding moral dilemmas and AI
Speaker 3: would a self driving car swerve into and kill a
Speaker 3: small child to avoid hitting a family? What happens if
Speaker 3: you've got a wago that's got to make a quick decision.
Speaker 3: What's it gonna do?
Speaker 2: Right? This has been a hot topic for a while,
Speaker 2: and there different versions of this because like people first
Speaker 2: went to trolleology when they started thinking about self driving cars,
Speaker 2: Oh okay, And then there are people who kind of said,
Speaker 2: that's never going to happen. When are you ever headed
Speaker 2: towards five people and then you can turn it onto
Speaker 2: one person? Right? And I think people were sort of
Speaker 2: taking the problem a little literally. But the more realistic
Speaker 2: version of this are things like this. So you're driving
Speaker 2: along on a two lane road and there's a cyclist
Speaker 2: in front of you, going, you know, pretty slow by
Speaker 2: car driving standards, right, yeah, and you could maybe swerve
Speaker 2: around them, but there's traffic coming in the other direction.
Speaker 2: When is it okay to swerve? How close can you
Speaker 2: get to that cyclist? How much time do you feel
Speaker 2: like you have to give yourself? How far away does
Speaker 2: that oncoming truck have to be? Right? We all, like
Speaker 2: everyone who drives you can drive nicely, you can drive
Speaker 2: like an aggressive jerk. No one can avoid that question, right,
Speaker 2: And what it really means to drive like a jerk
Speaker 2: is you are taking too many risks, especially with other
Speaker 2: people's well being, but maybe also with yourself. So autonomous
Speaker 2: driving trolley problems are not these stark choices where there
Speaker 2: are exactly two options, So it's a more fluid kind
Speaker 2: of thing, but it's the same underlying tensions, right, And
Speaker 2: one of the key tensions here is between the well
Speaker 2: being of the individuals in the car versus those who
Speaker 2: might be outside the car. There was this kind of
Speaker 2: now infamous episode where a Mercedes Benz executive was asked,
Speaker 2: will these new autonomous Mercedes that you're developing, will they
Speaker 2: privilege the riders? And the executive said, well, yes, because
Speaker 2: you know, at least you know you can save the
Speaker 2: people in the cars. You should save the people in
Speaker 2: the car, right. But then people pushed back and was like, oh,
Speaker 2: so you've got these, you know, basically like bigoted cars
Speaker 2: that are going to only care about the people inside them,
Speaker 2: And then Mercedes said no, no, no, no, no, that's
Speaker 2: not what we mean. No car should ever make any
Speaker 2: value judgments at all, which of course is actually impossible.
Speaker 2: But you know, good pr right, but critically, like you know,
Speaker 2: someone who's inside the car might be much more projected
Speaker 2: than a pedestrian or a cyclist. So cars have to
Speaker 2: deal with this stuff. Now it's pretty clear that we're
Speaker 2: not going to be able to solve these problems with
Speaker 2: a hard and fast set of rules. So like if
Speaker 2: you're giving the car, let's say simulations and it does
Speaker 2: different things. Let's say it swerves around that cyclist and
Speaker 2: it doesn't hit the cyclist but almost does. Is that
Speaker 2: our win or lose? Is that something you want to
Speaker 2: reinforce with your machine learning algorithm or is that something
Speaker 2: you want to dissuade? So there are value judgments that
Speaker 2: are made in training.
Speaker 3: And for more on this, we have a recent AI
Speaker 3: ethics episode with doctor Abebe Burhane and I find it scary,
Speaker 3: but and AI obviously not our brains, but based on
Speaker 3: what our brains might do. And we had doctor Lina
Speaker 3: Carpenter who said, oh boy, oh boy, o boy. As
Speaker 3: someone who researches moral development and altruism, I am thrilled
Speaker 3: to see this ology. And in their research they look
Speaker 3: at motivations behind prosocial behaviors, and Zoe Schultz asked, I
Speaker 3: wonder how neurodivergence has influence on dilemmas. They say, I'm
Speaker 3: autistic and have quite a black and white right and
Speaker 3: wrong way of thinking, and for them, they can easily
Speaker 3: pick a side in these moral dilemmas, But when I
Speaker 3: hear friends debating, they can't easily choose. And want us
Speaker 3: to know do neurodivergent people see or solve moral dilemmas
Speaker 3: in a different way. Grace Roboshow asked about moral OCD,
Speaker 3: also known as moral scrupulosity, and wondering if there's any
Speaker 3: sort of research on maybe on one side psychopathy and
Speaker 3: then on the other side of the spectrum neurodivergence, it
Speaker 3: has this very sometimes this really moral bent. Do you
Speaker 3: look at those kind of factors that might be innate
Speaker 3: in terms of how certain brains work. You're asking a
Speaker 3: lot of questions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is not research that I've done, but
Speaker 2: I can tell you people have looked at lots of
Speaker 2: different neurodivergent conditions, right, some of which would go into
Speaker 2: the heading of psychopathology and others not you mentioned psychopathy.
Speaker 2: This is something that's been studied, and what you find
Speaker 2: is that people who have diagnosed with side kopay are
Speaker 2: more likely to say that it's okay to push the
Speaker 2: guy off the footbridge, that they are more likely to
Speaker 2: give those sort of utilitarian response. But we don't think
Speaker 2: it's because they care more about the greater good. I
Speaker 2: think it's because they don't have that emotional response that goes, ah,
Speaker 2: don't push, you know, don't hurt people, don't commit acts
Speaker 2: of violence. Right. As a parallel to that, this is
Speaker 2: work that was done as an undergrad thesis, done by
Speaker 2: a student named Shin Chang who was interested in this stuff.
Speaker 2: And she thought, hm, I wonder how Buddhist monks would respond,
Speaker 2: because there were sort of some teachings that would suggest
Speaker 2: that Buddhist monks might actually kind of make more of
Speaker 2: a utilitarian response. But if you ask most people, would
Speaker 2: a Buddhist monk push someone off the footbridge and say no?
Speaker 2: Of course not. Buddhist monks are very pious, good people, right.
Speaker 2: So she went to the mountain city of Lasa and
Speaker 2: interviewed I think forty eight Buddhist monks, and something over
Speaker 2: eighty percent of them said that it would be okay
Speaker 2: to push the guy off the footbridge.
Speaker 3: Eighty percent of the monks were like, push off the overpass,
Speaker 3: offio sucker.
Speaker 2: And when you ask them why, many of them cited
Speaker 2: this sutra, this teaching, which describes a sort of advanced
Speaker 2: sort of you know, almost enlightened being who was in
Speaker 2: a situation where there was a murderer was going to
Speaker 2: cause a lot of harm and the only way to
Speaker 2: stop them was to kill them. And the person killed
Speaker 2: them not out of malice or hatred, but to prevent
Speaker 2: this harm, and actually with the expectation that it would
Speaker 2: be karmically harmful for he himself, but because he did
Speaker 2: it with that pure intention of promoting the greater good
Speaker 2: than that was sort of part of his path to
Speaker 2: being a bodhisatfa and enlightened being on earth. And that's
Speaker 2: what we found with Buddhist monks. You have got psychopaths
Speaker 2: and Buddhist monks both giving the utilitarian judgment. And what
Speaker 2: that tells you is that the same response can be
Speaker 2: given for very different reasons. For the psychopaths, it's because
Speaker 2: they didn't have the emotional voice in their heads saying
Speaker 2: don't do that. And for the Buddhist monks, they have
Speaker 2: that voice, but they can also cultivate a kind of passion.
Speaker 2: They say, well, what about the other five people? And
Speaker 2: you know, I hear both voices, but at least you're
Speaker 2: saving more lives, and so they would say it's acceptable.
Speaker 2: They did say about this sutra that this sutra is
Speaker 2: like not for the little kids. Like, you don't want
Speaker 2: people going around thinking that, you know, they can commit
Speaker 2: murder if they think it's for the greater goods, So
Speaker 2: you need to kind of have those guardrails. Other people
Speaker 2: have studied other types of conditions. So there's a condition
Speaker 2: called alexithymia, which involves people not having good access to
Speaker 2: their own emotional states, and those people are more likely
Speaker 2: to give a utilitarian response. I mentioned earlier patients with
Speaker 2: different types of brain damage, So patients with damage to
Speaker 2: the basilateral amigal lower the hippocampus are more likely to
Speaker 2: say that it's wrong to push the guy off the footbridge,
Speaker 2: et cetera. I will say anecdotally that a lot of
Speaker 2: people who take a strong utilitarian stance in their own lives,
Speaker 2: that there's a higher incidence of people who are autism spectrum,
Speaker 2: and some people have sort of posthumously diagnosed Jeremy Bentham,
Speaker 2: the founder of utilitarianisms, have autism, spectrum disorder or being
Speaker 2: neurodivergent in that way, as you say, and the thought
Speaker 2: is that you know, the utilitarian calculation is available sort
Speaker 2: of to reasoning. So one notable thing about Bentham he
Speaker 2: was one of the first people sort of in the
Speaker 2: philosophical Western philosophical tradition to advocate for what we now
Speaker 2: call gay rights. So he wrote a paper in the
Speaker 2: late eighteenth century, so late seventeen hundreds arguing that you know,
Speaker 2: from the principle of utility, from the idea that like
Speaker 2: is this actually causing any harm, that maybe there's nothing
Speaker 2: wrong with two men, you know, having a sexual relationship.
Speaker 3: So a Guardian article reviewing Bentham's writing is titled of
Speaker 3: Sexual Irregularities, notes that Bentham was a big fan, big
Speaker 3: fan of consensual sexual expression, said it's one of life's
Speaker 3: greatest pleasures, and that as a utilitarian, no action should
Speaker 3: be illegal unless it causes harm to others, and the
Speaker 3: Guardian adds that in one surviving letter to a friend,
Speaker 3: the philosopher joked that his rereading of the Bible had
Speaker 3: finally revealed that the sin for which God had punished
Speaker 3: the inhabitants of Sodom, and Gomorrah was not in fact
Speaker 3: anal intercourse but the taking of snuff. So he and
Speaker 3: his secretary had consequently taken a solemn oath to hide
Speaker 3: their snuff pouches, but in grave seriousness in a time
Speaker 3: when same sex relations were punishable by execution in England,
Speaker 3: which is obviously doing a lot of harm, and currently,
Speaker 3: at least domestically for me, we're seeing much more overt
Speaker 3: racist policies in recent years, lack of due process and deportations,
Speaker 3: key political figures convicted of fraud and in many cases violence,
Speaker 3: sexual crimes. And yet there is increasing trans and homophobia,
Speaker 3: with the US Supreme Court looking to overturn the constitutional
Speaker 3: right to same sex marriage just this week. So it's
Speaker 3: shocking and gutting to go so far backwards.
Speaker 2: So fast, like insane, you know, culturally at his time, right,
Speaker 2: but he applied his principle in an impartial way and
Speaker 2: in my view sort of jumped ahead two centuries in
Speaker 2: moral thinking. Let's suppose he was neurodiversion. I would imagine
Speaker 2: that that would contribute to his capacity to see that,
Speaker 2: because if you're very tuned into the social world, then
Speaker 2: what other people will think of you. You might be
Speaker 2: less willing to reach that conclusion and put pen to
Speaker 2: paper with that, Whereas if you're a bit sort of
Speaker 2: socially detached, but you're you've got a good thinking, reasoning brain,
Speaker 2: then you might get there. So it's a nice case
Speaker 2: where at least it's possible that that his neurodiversiens, if
Speaker 2: that's in fact what he had was a kind of
Speaker 2: philosophical strength.
Speaker 3: Is there a right answer? Is utilitarian answer? The right
Speaker 3: answer where you push the guy?
Speaker 2: Well, so, I mean there's no agreement about this. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I know, but I don't like the word utilitarian. I
Speaker 2: prefer to call myself a deep pragmatist, which I think
Speaker 2: better capture sort of my philosophical orientation. But no, this
Speaker 2: is highly controversial, and in fact, part of the reason
Speaker 2: why I and other people will spent so much time
Speaker 2: on these trolley dilemmas is because these are objections to utilitarianism.
Speaker 2: Right that, I kind of have the thought, yeah, greater good,
Speaker 2: that makes sense. But then you know, you have the
Speaker 2: debater asking me, is that okay to kill one person
Speaker 2: and give their organs to five other people? Yeah? Those
Speaker 2: are very salient objections, and I wanted to understand the objections.
Speaker 2: A kind of unfortunate side effect of all of this
Speaker 2: is that, you know, I was studying the footbridge case
Speaker 2: because it's utilitarianism at its least appealing, right, And then
Speaker 2: this work really took off, and then people started associating
Speaker 2: utilitarianism with pushing people off of footbridges, which is really
Speaker 2: kind of like addressing the most salient objections to it,
Speaker 2: but not the heart of it. Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So no, this is not about trolleys or trains
Speaker 3: or overpasses or footbridges. It's like a metaphor.
Speaker 2: So I want people to associate utilitarianism with providing opportunities
Speaker 2: in healthcare to pour people around the world and making
Speaker 2: sure that we're not you know, torturing animals unnecessarily and
Speaker 2: things like that. To me into Peter Singer, that's what
Speaker 2: it's really about. But so much focus, partly due to me,
Speaker 2: has been on these kind of horror cases. But it
Speaker 2: was done out of a kind of intellectual integrity. That is,
Speaker 2: if this is going to be your philosophy, you need
Speaker 2: to defend it at its least appealing, uh huh. And
Speaker 2: so that's how we got there right, So an unfortunate
Speaker 2: sort of cultural narrative side effect of doing all of this,
Speaker 2: But I hope at least your listeners will understand that
Speaker 2: it really is about making the world better and not
Speaker 2: about shoving people in front of speeding trolleys.
Speaker 3: Of course, speaking of culture and pop culture, twenty three
Speaker 3: Scudo wanted to know if you've played the trial by
Speaker 3: trolley game? Have you heard of this?
Speaker 2: I've played. In fact, we have a copy of it
Speaker 2: in my lab where I'm sinning. Yeah, we've done this
Speaker 2: at lab parties and other things. It's better than you'd think. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's pretty fun.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we have it too. As soon as we booked
Speaker 3: you to do this, my husband and I got it,
Speaker 3: and yeah, yeah it's a blast. But pop culturally also,
Speaker 3: Tommy McElrath, first time question asker, wanted to know if
Speaker 3: you've seen the Good Place and so how much did
Speaker 3: you enjoy the Trolley Problem episode?
Speaker 2: Oh god, Michael, what did you do? I made the
Speaker 2: Trolley Problem real so we can see how the ethics
Speaker 2: would actually play out.
Speaker 5: The thing is, I mean, ethically speaking out it's drinky.
Speaker 2: I mean, on the one hand, have you ascribed to
Speaker 2: a ferly you tell.
Speaker 1: It's Harry and wrong too.
Speaker 2: I thought it was great. They did an brilliant, amazing
Speaker 2: job with you know, just demonstrate and I actually did
Speaker 2: a little bit of consulting for them for a later season,
Speaker 2: but not for the original Trolley episode. Now, I love
Speaker 2: the way that they dramatized it. Although it's interesting, and
Speaker 2: this is sort of part of the pop culture meme
Speaker 2: of Trolley is really just the switch case, and it's
Speaker 2: often just kind of a platform for like in the
Speaker 2: like it's just you care more about this or more
Speaker 2: about that? Would you kill your dog in order to
Speaker 2: save ten people? What about Hitler bub you know those right?
Speaker 2: But yes, as a cognitive scientist, the neuroscientists, the really
Speaker 2: interesting thing is the contrast between the switchcase and the
Speaker 2: Footbridge case. Okay, okay, I can do this. I am
Speaker 2: choosing to switch tracks so that way I only kill
Speaker 2: one person. But they kind of managed to make the
Speaker 2: switch case very Footbridge ye by kind of really sort
Speaker 2: of dramatizing the horror of running somebody over. And then
Speaker 2: my other favorite thing about that is like there's a
Speaker 2: movie theater in the background on the street, and the
Speaker 2: movie that's showing is called Benett like Bentham, which I
Speaker 2: thought was was absolutely brilliant.
Speaker 3: Oh my god. Jeremy Bentham, of course, the founder of
Speaker 3: utilitarianism philosophy, and the aforementioned og LGBTQ ally also side
Speaker 3: note went down a hole on this. But he asked
Speaker 3: that after his death his body be dissected in front
Speaker 3: of an audience for medical research. Then he wanted it
Speaker 3: preserved to be shown sitting upright, as if he were
Speaker 3: just hanging out in the living room. And if you
Speaker 3: were to enter the student center today at University College London,
Speaker 3: you would run into a glass case with what looks
Speaker 3: like a wax figure of Ben Franklin. But no, that's
Speaker 3: Jeremy Benton's skeleton, dressed in his usual like mid seventeen
Speaker 3: hundreds frilled shirt and nice dark jacket. His head is
Speaker 3: wax though, because they mummified his actual head and then
Speaker 3: they put glass eyeballs that he had selected before death.
Speaker 3: But people thought it was like a little much, so
Speaker 3: then they decapitated it and they put his real head
Speaker 3: in a box between his feet. But then sometimes little
Speaker 3: collegiate rascals would steal the head and they'd hold it
Speaker 3: for ransom until a fee was paid to their charity
Speaker 3: of choice. Honestly, I think Bentham would have liked that.
Speaker 3: But yeah, currently his corpse is in a lifelike seated
Speaker 3: position bent like Bentham.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 3: Last listener question, which I thought was such a good one,
Speaker 3: Aaron Burbridge on the bead Ninja Squirrel and Sarah King,
Speaker 3: and Ninja's words asked, how do do you see a
Speaker 3: common connection to someone's identified political party and how they
Speaker 3: answer these moral dilemmas. You know, you mentioned abortion for
Speaker 3: the life of the mother and LGBTQ rights things like that,
Speaker 3: but also in our country, the right tends to be
Speaker 3: much more religious, specifically Christian. So how are morals and
Speaker 3: greater good looked at, you know, through the lens of
Speaker 3: political parties.
Speaker 2: So people have looked at this with the trolley stuff,
Speaker 2: and my recollection is that there's a trend where like
Speaker 2: people who are more politically conservative are more likely to
Speaker 2: say that is wrong to push the guy off the footbridge,
Speaker 2: et cetera. But it's not a very strong case. I
Speaker 2: think the much more salient thing is that there's much
Speaker 2: more here that we have in common. That that divide
Speaker 2: is that your typical conservative and your typical liberal are
Speaker 2: going to be feeling the same internal tension about these things,
Speaker 2: thinking it's better for five people to be alive and
Speaker 2: one dead than the reverse. And it sure does feel
Speaker 2: wrong to push somebody off of a footbridge like that.
Speaker 2: That's universal, right, And then there's like a little tendency
Speaker 2: of a trend. And maybe it's because people who are
Speaker 2: more conservative or more religious, they're more likely to trust
Speaker 2: their intuitions and less likely to kind of question it.
Speaker 2: Although I do love the story about the monks.
Speaker 3: What about some of your recent research about getting people
Speaker 3: to maybe understand each other a little bit more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is the big one. And we've got
Speaker 2: the paper we've been working out for five years that's
Speaker 2: just coming out in Nature Human Behavior. We're very excited
Speaker 2: about this and really sort of building this stuff out.
Speaker 3: Okay, and this is a paper that Josh just published
Speaker 3: in June. It's titled Diffusing Political Animosity in the United
Speaker 3: States with a cooperative online quiz Game. So where do
Speaker 3: I start in this? I'm going to let him start.
Speaker 2: So we got to back up a little bit. You
Speaker 2: mentioned my book Moral Tribes that came out of it
Speaker 2: ten years ago, and this was me trying to put
Speaker 2: together all the philosophy that I've been thinking about and
Speaker 2: all the science. It was a success full book, but
Speaker 2: like it didn't spark a global philosophical revolution, and I
Speaker 2: was like, well, what maybe I have the wrong theory
Speaker 2: of change? And so I started asking myself, instead of
Speaker 2: trying to unite the world's tribes or reduce tensions between
Speaker 2: different peoples by getting everybody to agree on a philosophical outlook,
Speaker 2: maybe we can work on people's thoughts and feelings in
Speaker 2: a more direct kind of way. On the biological side,
Speaker 2: everything around us is ultimately about mutually beneficial cooperation. I mean,
Speaker 2: like molecules come together to form cells, cells come together
Speaker 2: to form colonies, and multicellular organisms and organisms have organs
Speaker 2: that cooperate, and individuals cooperate with each other in small groups,
Speaker 2: in tribes, in chiefdoms, in nations, occasionally in United Nations.
Speaker 2: Every level, from molecules up to nations in the un
Speaker 2: it's about parts coming together that can accomplish more together
Speaker 2: than they can accomplish separately. And that's why they work. Now.
Speaker 2: It's not all like you know, unicorns and rainbows, that
Speaker 2: the units are competing with each other at each level
Speaker 2: so it's cooperation and competition at increasing levels of complexity that,
Speaker 2: in a nutshell is the story of life on earth.
Speaker 2: And so from a biological point of view, the way
Speaker 2: to bring people together is to have them be on
Speaker 2: the same team. Social scientists, and I'm partly a social
Speaker 2: scientist in addition to being a philosopher, reached the same conclusion,
Speaker 2: and this goes back to Gordon Alport, who sat in
Speaker 2: the building that I sit in now in the nineteen
Speaker 2: fifties and developed what's called the contact hypothesis, which is
Speaker 2: the idea that if you want to break down barriers
Speaker 2: between races, between people of different religions, they need to
Speaker 2: be in touch with each other and it needs to
Speaker 2: be a kind of in a cooperative sort of way.
Speaker 2: That's not exactly how he put it. His contemporaries Sharif
Speaker 2: and Sharif explicitly talked about you know, kids at a
Speaker 2: summer camp who are either put on separate teams and
Speaker 2: made to fight with each other or they had to
Speaker 2: team up to pull the truck out of the mud,
Speaker 2: and you know, came to the same conclusion. They're sort
Speaker 2: of compatible with this idea.
Speaker 3: So this was the Robbers Cave experiment in the early
Speaker 3: nineteen fifties which shipped a group of pretty homogeneous waspy
Speaker 3: boys like around the age of eleven to a fake
Speaker 3: summer camp that their parents knew really was a psychological experiment,
Speaker 3: And there were two groups of campers and they hated
Speaker 3: each other until they had to help fix the common
Speaker 3: water supply or yeah, tug that truck bearing their food
Speaker 3: rations from a rut, which was all set up ahead
Speaker 3: of time like a reality show. But then they all
Speaker 3: became buddies. But the overarching idea being that cooperation toward
Speaker 3: a common goal increases respect, it reduces tension, and it
Speaker 3: builds bridges, probably literally because bridges are really large.
Speaker 2: So I was like, Okay, if the biologists and the
Speaker 2: social scientists have all known that cooperation, the teamwork like
Speaker 2: this is the heart of it, why haven't we solved
Speaker 2: this yet? And there have been lots of historical cases
Speaker 2: where this point has been made. So when people were
Speaker 2: first in World War Two, we're first talking about integrating
Speaker 2: the US military, a lot of people you will never
Speaker 2: get white people and black people to fight in the
Speaker 2: same unit, and they had people making these dire predictions
Speaker 2: of like people turning on each other in the ranks, right,
Speaker 2: and instead what they found is that these integrated units
Speaker 2: work great, and it really changed people's racial attitudes because
Speaker 2: when you put people on the same team and their
Speaker 2: lives are at stake and there's a job to get done,
Speaker 2: they not only do the job, but they've become like brothers, right,
Speaker 2: or sisters as the case.
Speaker 3: May be, or non binary buds. I gotcha.
Speaker 2: And in sports and things like that, and in some sense,
Speaker 2: every modern city where people from different religions and backgrounds
Speaker 2: and races come together and work together is testament to
Speaker 2: this idea that people's attitudes shift through working together through cooperation,
Speaker 2: either sort of tacitly or very directly, like in the
Speaker 2: same job. So it's like, okay, so why haven't we
Speaker 2: solved this in some more systematic way. So we got
Speaker 2: to thinking, like, what do you have to do when
Speaker 2: you need something that works? And we think, you know,
Speaker 2: mutually beneficial cooperation teamwork is the key. It's got to
Speaker 2: be done in a way that's scalable, and today that
Speaker 2: really means digital, right, And it needs to be something
Speaker 2: that people are motivated to do, which you can think
Speaker 2: of as fun, right M M. And we said, okay,
Speaker 2: to me, the center of that ven diagram is a
Speaker 2: quiz game, and so we created this quiz game. Our
Speaker 2: first work was on Republicans and Democrats, where we would say, okay,
Speaker 2: we're going to pair up a Republican and Democrat together.
Speaker 2: We have them answer these quiz questions and they are
Speaker 2: connected by chat and they're in the same boat, they
Speaker 2: have the same score. They both win money together or
Speaker 2: lose money together depending on their answers. They have to
Speaker 2: agree on an answer and submit it right, and they
Speaker 2: get the money if they're right, and they lose it
Speaker 2: if they're wrong, and if they give different answers then
Speaker 2: they're automatically wrong. And so we wanted questions that would
Speaker 2: really promote TeamWorks. So we had some two types of
Speaker 2: questions like this. So one are kind of cultural questions
Speaker 2: where one side is more likely to know the answer
Speaker 2: than the other. Right. So, I don't know, I'll try you, Ali,
Speaker 2: what's the name of the family on the show Duck Dynasty?
Speaker 2: Do you know?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: Oh, I know that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't think of it.
Speaker 3: I can't think of it. Oh my god, the Duggers.
Speaker 2: It's Robertson, not the douggers, not the douggers. Yeah, do
Speaker 2: you mean to jump the gun there? But you know,
Speaker 2: a lot of Republicans are more they're more likely to
Speaker 2: know the answer to that question. Yeah, we sort of
Speaker 2: figured out, like what are the foods in movies and
Speaker 2: TV shows that Republicans are more likely to watch or
Speaker 2: know about? In liberals right questions like.
Speaker 3: That, but ask democrats who leslie nobiz or if there're
Speaker 3: a miranda, and answers just flow much faster. But yeah,
Speaker 3: then of course there are questions about some political myths,
Speaker 3: like many people that are left leaning think that assault
Speaker 3: weapon deaths outnumber handgun deaths, but handgun deaths are more
Speaker 3: common in the US many people die by suicide by them.
Speaker 3: We cover that in the Suicideology episode with doctor Quincy
Speaker 3: Mayfrid Lazine. So from pop culture to the most serious
Speaker 3: of social and economic issues, and.
Speaker 2: Then we have questions that are kind of more political
Speaker 2: in nature. You ask about things like rates of crime
Speaker 2: among immigrants. Conservatives are more likely to think that it's
Speaker 2: very high. Democrats are more likely to think or liberals
Speaker 2: are more likely to think it is low. And in
Speaker 2: that case the liberals are right. And so we have
Speaker 2: these questions where everybody gets to be right and everybody
Speaker 2: gets to be wrong, and not everybody answers always like
Speaker 2: in keeping with their stereotypes. But on average people play,
Speaker 2: they have the experience of I know some things and
Speaker 2: there are some things I don't know, and my partner
Speaker 2: knows some things that I don't know. They report having
Speaker 2: higher levels of respect for the other side. They say,
Speaker 2: you know, those liberals and conservatives can make valid points
Speaker 2: more open to leaders who support kind of political compromise.
Speaker 2: And some of these effects we test people the next day,
Speaker 2: the next week, the next month, four months later. Some
Speaker 2: of these effects we see lasting four months from playing
Speaker 2: the game once.
Speaker 3: Wow. So the papers abstract reports that yes, gameplay of
Speaker 3: Let's Tango dot org improves democracy related attitudes, and it
Speaker 3: also receives high enjoyability ratings, which may increase motivation to
Speaker 3: engage with this intervention, they say, And.
Speaker 2: Then all the ones we've done so far, we find
Speaker 2: that when people do this, even for twenty minutes, first
Speaker 2: of all, people enjoy it, and we see positive effects
Speaker 2: at least immediately. And we're starting to do work with
Speaker 2: employees at businesses. We're starting to do work with Jews
Speaker 2: and Arabs in Israel. We're building a game for Hindu
Speaker 2: and Muslims in India, or people of Catholic and Protestant
Speaker 2: descent in Northern Ireland. Wherever there's an US versus them
Speaker 2: kind of conflict or tension, put people on the same
Speaker 2: team and let them have that cooperative experience. And we
Speaker 2: are now working on bringing this out into the world.
Speaker 2: So if you go to let's tango dot org, you
Speaker 2: can sign up, you can put your email in there
Speaker 2: and we'll let you know when there's a game that
Speaker 2: you can join. And I hope we'll get to the
Speaker 2: point where we can have games going on all the time.
Speaker 2: You know, the research suggests that this is a way
Speaker 2: to bring people together and there's no limit. I hope
Speaker 2: that a year or two from now will have had
Speaker 2: millions of people had this positive experience of cooperating with
Speaker 2: people with whom they disagree politically. And also anyone who
Speaker 2: wants to throw money at this, please let me know.
Speaker 2: We need to build this out. I think it would
Speaker 2: be a huge change in our politics. There will be
Speaker 2: people who have conservative worldviews and liberal world views, and
Speaker 2: people who are religious and people who are not. That's
Speaker 2: always going to be there. But what doesn't have to
Speaker 2: be there is the sense that those other people are
Speaker 2: untrustworthy and unworthy of respect, and that we can't share
Speaker 2: power with them because of the terrible things they'll do
Speaker 2: if they're given the chance, right, And it's that conspiratorial
Speaker 2: sense that they are an untrustworthy other undermining me and
Speaker 2: my people and what this country is supposed to be.
Speaker 2: That's what's so toxic. And we can have our disagreements
Speaker 2: about policy issues, deep important, powerful disagreements, but not have
Speaker 2: that toxicity. And that's what I hope that the game,
Speaker 2: when it gets out there, will do.
Speaker 3: And I know you've been working on this research for
Speaker 3: five years on or off the record, anything change after
Speaker 3: January twentieth where you're like, oh shit, it's worse than
Speaker 3: I thought.
Speaker 2: Strangely, not that much changed after January sixth or January
Speaker 2: twentieth of this year. We've been a divided country for
Speaker 2: a while. I mean, this is this is not new,
Speaker 2: this sense that we have different conceptions of who counts
Speaker 2: as us. So what's happened in recent years is different,
Speaker 2: and you do see it in the numbers like polarization
Speaker 2: and distrust. It it's up. And the good news is
Speaker 2: that the game it's not an overnight fix, but it
Speaker 2: moves the needle. People play the game once, we see
Speaker 2: effects four months later, and there's no reason why you
Speaker 2: can't play it lots.
Speaker 3: So to try that, Gather up your liberal and your
Speaker 3: conservative associates to sign up at let's tango dot org
Speaker 3: for science and I don't know, maybe to prevent a
Speaker 3: civil war and the collapse of democracy and the crumbling
Speaker 3: of the constitution. Speaking of horrors, What is the most
Speaker 3: frustrating thing about being a social scientist and a neuroscientist
Speaker 3: and a philosopher. What's the most frustrating thing about this
Speaker 3: trolley problem and about examining ethics? What sucks the most.
Speaker 2: In patience? You know?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 2: I feel like it just takes so long to learn
Speaker 2: things and to solve problems. Academics are great at slowing
Speaker 2: things down. I mean, we have the internal review boards,
Speaker 2: we might have the answers, not me personally, but collectively,
Speaker 2: we might have the answers. And what if we don't
Speaker 2: get there in time? You know, what if you know,
Speaker 2: the complete collapse of American democracy or the nuclear war
Speaker 2: or whatever it is, like comms before we figure out
Speaker 2: not just the basic science, but I said, it's an
Speaker 2: engineering problem, like we have to figure out how to
Speaker 2: build these things. I feel like, to me, it's just gosh,
Speaker 2: how can we solve these problems as fast as possible?
Speaker 2: That's what kind of just drives me nuts.
Speaker 3: What about the best thing? As long as we're doing superlatives?
Speaker 2: I mean, it's just just an unbelievable privilege to work
Speaker 2: with the people that I work with. You know, the
Speaker 2: paper that we're about to publish this is with gradual
Speaker 2: student named Lucas Woodley who's next door, who's just is
Speaker 2: just a joy working with him. And Evan d. Philippus
Speaker 2: was the grad student who started this work. He's amazing.
Speaker 2: And shankar Ravi is our tech guy on this and
Speaker 2: he's been great, you know, so working with these people
Speaker 2: and the people the Global Development Incubator, I don't listen.
Speaker 2: Andrew Stern is the head of it, and three Simplesmith
Speaker 2: has been working on this for a long time. And
Speaker 2: I don't want to go down the whole list, but
Speaker 2: like it's great, and I also just like the privilege
Speaker 2: of being able to spend my life, like what I
Speaker 2: get to do for my job is to try to
Speaker 2: as a scientist that have unlocked the mysteries of the mind,
Speaker 2: and then as a kind of applied scientist, try to
Speaker 2: bring those lessons out of the world. I mean, I
Speaker 2: just feel so lucky that I get to do this,
Speaker 2: and I just like, I just don't want to miss
Speaker 2: any any opportunity, you know, so that so I'm just
Speaker 2: incredibly lucky that way.
Speaker 3: When I heard that trilleology was a thing, which the
Speaker 3: fact that it's an ology works so well for me, yeah,
Speaker 3: I was like, yes, but I heard about it from
Speaker 3: my nephew from mister Bernardi's class in Eastern Connecticut. So
Speaker 3: he's my nephew's twelve, and so they're using your work
Speaker 3: and trilleology to talk about morals and ethics at that age.
Speaker 2: So if people are interested in this stuff, if you
Speaker 2: want to give in a way that you support your
Speaker 2: favorite charities but also can have like huge impact, then
Speaker 2: go to Giving Multiplier and use ologies as your code
Speaker 2: and you get extra matching funds. And if you want
Speaker 2: to participate in helping unite the United States and sort
Speaker 2: of foster mutual trust and respect, then please go to
Speaker 2: let's tango dot org. You can sign up games and
Speaker 2: try to bring along people who are different from you
Speaker 2: so that we get all of America playing this game.
Speaker 3: I'll send it to all my friends in California and
Speaker 3: my relatives in Montana.
Speaker 2: That's perfect.
Speaker 3: That's perfect and equal number.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this has been great. Thank you so much, thank you,
Speaker 2: thank you.
Speaker 3: Okay, so ask academic people ethical questions and steer yourself
Speaker 3: down the tracks to let's tango dot org to sign
Speaker 3: up for some across the aisle quiz gaming and giving
Speaker 3: multiplier dot org slash ologies to donate to your cause
Speaker 3: of choice and one that you may never have heard of,
Speaker 3: and you can get some matching funds at a special
Speaker 3: higher rate for ologites at giving multiplier dot org slash ologies.
Speaker 3: So thank you so much, doctor Joshua Green for setting
Speaker 3: that up and for this chat, and for all the
Speaker 3: work you do to make this play a better one.
Speaker 3: You can find links in the show notes to his work,
Speaker 3: and you can tell everyone you know to sign up
Speaker 3: for let's tango dot org. You can find links to
Speaker 3: the things we discuss at aliward dot com, slash ologies
Speaker 3: slash trolleyology. We are at ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky.
Speaker 3: I'm at Ali Ward on both with one l again.
Speaker 3: If you need any kid friendly episodes, you can check
Speaker 3: out Smologies anywhere you get podcasts. Ologies Merch is available
Speaker 3: at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you patrons of the show
Speaker 3: for all your great questions that you submitted via patreon
Speaker 3: dot com, slash ologies, and for supporting the show since
Speaker 3: before day one. Aaron Talbert admin's our Ologies podcast Facebook group.
Speaker 3: Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts. Kelly ar Dwyer does
Speaker 3: the website. Noelle Dilworth greases our lovers as scheduling producer.
Speaker 3: Susan Hale is our managing director who keeps us on
Speaker 3: track surviving our barreling toward the publish button every week.
Speaker 3: Our brave editors Jake Chafe and lead editor Mercedes Maitland
Speaker 3: of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn is the whistler who made
Speaker 3: the theme music. And if you stick around to the
Speaker 3: very very end of the episode, I tell you a
Speaker 3: secret that you or may not want to hear. So
Speaker 3: last night I got home from a trip in Chicago
Speaker 3: to go to a lovely wedding and we were so tired.
Speaker 3: Your pod mother, Jarrett wanted to rewatch a movie, so
Speaker 3: we put on Fight Club, which I hadn't seen in years.
Speaker 3: It came out in nineteen ninety nine, and two things
Speaker 3: struck me. Not literally, they didn't strike me that way.
Speaker 3: But in this episode we talk about the three factors
Speaker 3: of violence, right, and the third is that the victim
Speaker 3: does not want the harm. So I was like, huh, weird.
Speaker 3: You know, I guess despite watching teeth tinkle around on
Speaker 3: the concrete and like clots of blood sliding out of lips,
Speaker 3: is that not violence? Interesting? Someone has probably written a
Speaker 3: whole dissertation on that. But speaking of ethical quandaries and
Speaker 3: impacting the earth and billionaires who could save it? But nah,
Speaker 3: there's a scene in Fight Club where a character played
Speaker 3: by Jared Lado is leering at this newscaster on TV,
Speaker 3: and I was like, Wow, Lauren Sanchez former newscaster for
Speaker 3: Real on TV. But now Jeff Bezos's new wife in
Speaker 3: Fight Club be uncalled hot by Jared Lado, And that
Speaker 3: is a whole other origin story and dissertation for you.
Speaker 3: But here we are twenty twenty.
Speaker 5: Five okay byvide Pacadermatology, homeology or do zoology, lithology, yeaology, meteorology, paratology, tethnology, seriology, selenology.
Speaker 2: Why don't you just tell me the right answer.
Speaker 4: Well, that's what's so great about the trolley problem is
Speaker 4: that there is no right answer.
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