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I'm David Petrozowski.

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You're David Pinsoff.

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That's correct.

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You stole my thunder.

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And this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast.

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Uh actual evolutionary psychology.

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By actual evolutionary psychologists, and You Stole My Thunder is a great name for

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podcasts.

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I don't know if there is one.

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Oh, the Thunder Steelers.

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No, you stole your band name?

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It should just be You Stole Thunder.

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That's a little clunkier.

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I prefer Thunder Steelers.

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Onto the on to the see you in a second, David.

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See you soon.

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Uh brilliant philosopher that we uh talked to about so many different interesting things.

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I think we started out talking about class and status and then I think uh we got r into a

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really juicy topic which was moral progress.

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Yeah.

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Moral progress exists.

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Is it yeah and I don't know.

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My take on it is I think with everything in this podcast is people are simultaneously

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horrible and wonderful.

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And almost nothing that we explicitly talk about is really what it is under the surface.

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I think I would sign on to that one hundred percent.

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Uh and I think, you know, that that is a perspective that I think evolutionary psychology

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um props up and and makes more plausible.

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And it's not a a very intuitive one that you would arrive at necessarily.

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Um which is what I like anyway.

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Yeah.

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If you if you if you think we're making moral progress, if you think we we haven't, if you

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think slavery is over or just state slavery has been exchanged for economic

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slavery.

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Um if you think that morality is a good thing or a bad thing or any of the above, I think

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this conversation will be interesting for you.

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Yes.

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Uh it was a really fun one.

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Uh listen to the end and uh yeah.

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Enjoy.

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Hanno, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast.

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Me too.

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Uh number one, because I'm I'm a big fan of the discipline of philosophy.

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But number two is you are a shiny example of a philosopher that I think avoids one of the

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biggest pitfalls of philosophy, which is being boring.

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Um you are you are not boring.

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Um you pick really big, juicy, interesting topics like morality, moral

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progress.

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Um, how does moral progress happen?

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Has it happened?

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Uh social class and status, virtue signaling, um, you know, uh

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what evolution implies about the validity of our moral intuitions, whether there's such a

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thing as, you know, uh objective moral truths.

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I mean, these are all really fascinating questions, and you not only pick the most

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fascinating questions, but you write about them in a very clear, uh and and compelling, uh,

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interesting way.

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So I applaud you for that.

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Thank you.

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Yeah, I try not to be boring.

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I mean, much of philosophy is can can be kind of boring and overly technical.

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Uh there comes a point where you also once you've once you've gotten into one controversial

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topic or one controversy, you get addicted to to to fighting.

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Right.

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Uh and you get addicted to like, oh, this is more fun than just sort of being middle of the

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road and to so I'm I'm I'm very much like a pick your battles kind of guy, and I I and I'm

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happy for happy to be disagreed with and to disagree with people.

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And I really like this approach.

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I think this is from Tyler Cowan where he says um you have strong strong positions loosely

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held.

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Right?

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So you have like you know strong position, but I'm happy to give it up.

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Like, you know, if you if you tell me something and I'm like, oh, I guess I'm I believe

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that now.

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And I love I love to be in that space where I I feel comfortable to change my mind and

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update and uh and that's a lot of fun to me.

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Yeah, that's that's a very good way to approach intellectual life, I think, is to, you

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know, make strong claims and and really stand by them and give them a good run for their

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money but like be willing to change your mind and that's really actually it's easier said

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than done.

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It's hard to do because once you make a strong claim you sort of stake your social status

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on it and then when you walk back from it you kind of look bad.

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That's that's kind of a social incentive problem.

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So it's all aspirational.

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It's all aspirational but that's what I try to do.

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Yeah for sure.

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Um so I want to get into your work on social class, because this is a

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topic that Dave and I have talked about uh a few times on the podcast with different

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guests.

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Uh one time we talked we talked about it with with Keila Williams, another with uh Leo

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Fettucci, who's done work on uh the morality of self control and indulgence,

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and we briefly touched on how that might be related to social class.

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Uh we've we've talked about it from a life history perspective.

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Yeah, we've also talked a little bit from like a meta science perspective too, like even

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the class of scientists and what topics people find interesting colors the way science

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is done.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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So I know you have a book on cla on social class.

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Uh I I there's not yet an English version of it, so I have not read it.

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And I'm excited to just learn about it and get your take on it because I think it's a

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fascinating topic.

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And I think you're approaching it in the right way by drawing on insights from signaling

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theory.

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And I think that is that is the right way to tackle this topic.

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Yeah, so I think I think social class is really at the you know, it's not the the explain

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all concept, but I think it does a lot of um interesting work and a lot of heavy lifting

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and understanding other phenomena, polarization, um, knowledge, uh um

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identity politics, you know, this this this this thing called wokeness and so on and so on.

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So many of these conflicts that we've all talked about a lot and read about a lot over the

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past five, ten, fifteen years.

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I think in many cases there there is at least a big part of it that's due to social class

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and socioeconomic status and the way that it makes people think and talk and interact and

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compete, and how it shapes people's views, and how it shapes society in general.

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So, political developments of recent years, I think many of them are really fundamentally

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about socioeconomic distinctions and how they are maintained, and social exclusion, and how

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people want to signal who they are to other people.

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And of course, you know, there are different ways of

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thinking about social exclusion and identity and marginalization and

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advantage and disadvantage.

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And a lot of that has happened under these labels of

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racism and sexism and ableism.

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And I think that's legitimate, right?

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That conversation needs to happen and had to happen and still will continue, and that's

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legit.

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But I think in many cases, people have sort of like had this suspicion that maybe

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socioeconomic status and class membership are really you know the core phenomenon that

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we're missing if we focus too much on um sexism, racism, and so on and so

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on.

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Uh and so that's kind of what I try to what I try to do in the in the book to really like

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look at everything morals and money and taste

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um and belonging uh through this lens of class distinctions and social

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signaling.

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Can I ask a clarifying question?

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Because I'm simple minded.

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So, from a very like first principles perspective, if you're a human being, you have

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evolved psychology for sort of two different things.

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One is who you're allied with.

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And then another one is how much stuff do you have and are you okay?

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And obviously these things relate because if you're allied with somebody who has a lot of

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resources, they might help you, and that's aspirational.

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But if we take as I take it, and this is my elementary version of understanding

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the evolutionary psychology of something like social class, there's those are roughly two

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different phenomena in the sense of everybody walking around sort of has an evaluator

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of, you know, am I worried about having enough food or if my kid gets sick, am I

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gonna be okay?

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And it might be misfiring, right?

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Like somebody who's very objectively wealthy might still worry about their kid getting

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sick, although maybe they, you know, they'll lose their house or something.

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And there's there's sort of within your group of people you see on a daily

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basis, that comparison.

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And then there's also like, I know that there's other people I don't see that often who are

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have much more stuff than me and much less stuff than me.

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Um so there's that kind of how much stuff do I have tracker?

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And then there's another part of it, which is um, who do I see on a regular basis?

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And then who do I aspire to be like?

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Um, and who do I want to signal that I'm sort of affiliated with?

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Yeah.

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Um And uh I think for most of our listeners, that

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would be a sort of rough take on where they're starting from.

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And so can you articulate um number one, if you would sort of agree with that

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as a rough take, or is that too simple, or do you depart from that?

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And then from there, what is uh the thesis of um

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uh um what David's talking about, if that's I mean, I mean,

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um, I'm not sure you agree with that or not, but I think a lot of evolutionary psychology

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and a lot of what makes it interesting is about finding these misfirings, right?

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A lot of evolutionary psychology is about identifying an old mind and how it's placed in a

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different environment, right?

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It's about these evolutionary hangovers.

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Uh it's about, you know, still craving sugar when the supermarket is full, and you know,

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that it's it's just, you know, um our life is

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full of evolutionary hangovers and misfirings.

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And status competition and the intensity with which we are motivated to engage in status

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comparison and status competition to an extent where it doesn't even really matter how

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wealthy you are, right?

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You can you can have a hundred billion in the bank and you still want to be heard and

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recognized, and you want to buy Twitter and so on and so on, right?

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Uh so that status competition, that anxiety just never goes away.

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And that's a kind of evolutionary hangover because it used to just not be possible until

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very recently to have durable wealth and security, right?

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You would always depend, it would always be much more elusive and much more fragile.

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And so it's just like pre-installed in our brains, in our psychology, to always worry about

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that, right?

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And it just, and it just never, never goes away because the circumstances that we that we

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find ourselves in now are so kind of recent and so unusual.

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And so our mind isn't really adapted to those circumstances so fully.

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And that's interesting, and it's it also explains why you find status competition and

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status anxiety and status motivations everywhere in all socioeconomic

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classes and groups and strata.

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So I think that's just like, you know, fundamentally a very useful way of looking at the

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mind in general, is you see that it does all these weird things, right?

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Like optical illusions are a little bit like that as well, because it's a it's a it's a

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it's a weird environment that we've placed this relatively old mind in.

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And it used to be super important to care about your own reputation because you can break

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your leg and you still need people to share food with you, right?

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You need to be like perceived as a as a as a as a good person, as someone who once they've

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recovered, they will be part of the gang again and they'll you know share with you.

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So we are intensely motivated to care about our own reputation just as a kind of insurance

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mechanism and a kind of survival mechanism, and that's still present.

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And also, we care about not just our own reputation and status and prestige, but

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also about um hanging out with people who have a lot of it.

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Right?

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We want to be around these people because we are we are a social, an intensely social,

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hyper-social Species or belong to a

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hypersocial species, and everything we know and everything we can do, so all our

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information and all our skills are downloaded from others.

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Right?

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Pretty much everything we can do is learned.

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It's learned from parents, from peers, from dead people.

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Most of it's learned from dead people, right?

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Um, downloaded from dead from this cultural reservoir that's been built up over you

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know dozens of generations.

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And so we care about learning from the best cook and the best storyteller and the best

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hunter.

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And that is also I think why we track prestige and status and reputation

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in others, because it'll it'll allow us to sort of get the best information and get the

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best skills.

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Yeah.

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So if I can just interject, so you're describing the the the rationale.

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I'm hearing two things.

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One is you're describing the rationale for you care about these things, which I think most

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of us and David and I, I think most listeners are on board with.

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But what I'm hearing from the first part is, and maybe this is you're getting to the

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thesis, is that um the this is a your argument is

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we should interrogate the degree to which our knee-jerk need for status

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actually makes sense given our objective situation.

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An analogy would be something where somebody who is bore grows up in extreme poverty and is

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just like hyper vigilant about food.

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And then they become wealthy as an adult, but other people around them see that person,

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care about that person, and see that their insecurity about food is having all kinds of

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negative knock on effects.

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Like they're not, they're just obsessed about it in a way that they don't need to be

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anymore.

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That's like an individual difference version of, I think, the evolutionary story, which is

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that as a if if as a species, we don't think about, um, if we don't think

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about, well, why do I care about this?

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Why am I doing this?

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Is this to make the world better?

238
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Or is this just satisfying some sugar craving status thing that is actually making the

239
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world worse?

240
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That's enslaving some kid across the world that I don't even know about.

241
00:14:07,540 --> 00:14:10,580
Um, it's not making the world better, my local community better.

242
00:14:10,740 --> 00:14:12,100
Is that the kind of argument?

243
00:14:12,260 --> 00:14:18,090
So it's sort of an argument that by understanding and interrogating the source

244
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of this desire or motivation, it's a way to check whether or not it makes sense under

245
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current circumstances.

246
00:14:25,450 --> 00:14:26,650
Yeah, it's always also that.

247
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So when it comes to so there are these individual differences in in how how intensely

248
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people may be motivated to care about that.

249
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I think.

250
00:14:36,220 --> 00:14:41,180
But then there are, you know, there there's a spectrum of how intense that desire is and

251
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how how how strongly that anxiety is felt.

252
00:14:44,780 --> 00:14:49,740
And then once you see or once you understand the sources of of these motivations and these

253
00:14:49,740 --> 00:14:55,740
desires, you can use that a little bit and to some extent as a tool for self reflection

254
00:14:55,820 --> 00:14:58,860
and think, oh, maybe I should I should relax about that a little bit more.

255
00:14:58,940 --> 00:15:04,830
Uh and it's and it's making my life needlessly difficult because I'm um I'm I'm

256
00:15:04,830 --> 00:15:10,670
so you know hung up on um getting ahead and uh and I'm so it it causes me

257
00:15:10,670 --> 00:15:16,430
so much stress and distraction uh and it makes me makes me engage in all these pointless

258
00:15:16,430 --> 00:15:19,550
activities simply because I want to keep up with the Joneses, right?

259
00:15:19,790 --> 00:15:25,790
Um and also this is socially also important because um I think you you talk you also talk

260
00:15:25,790 --> 00:15:29,950
about that a lot that's that status competition and status hierarchy is inherently zero

261
00:15:30,110 --> 00:15:31,120
sum, right?

262
00:15:31,360 --> 00:15:34,720
You can't grow the pie of status, so to speak.

263
00:15:34,880 --> 00:15:38,400
Uh it's just a relative positional ranking.

264
00:15:38,640 --> 00:15:44,400
So socially, it can it can be detrimental and it can be bad for society when

265
00:15:44,400 --> 00:15:47,040
you have extremely intense status competition.

266
00:15:47,120 --> 00:15:51,360
Because it it's it's it's just a mechanism that can't make everyone involved better off.

267
00:15:51,520 --> 00:15:55,280
Because in order for you to improve your status, you need to knock me down.

268
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And in order for me to improve my states, I need to knock someone else down.

269
00:15:59,110 --> 00:15:59,270
Yeah.

270
00:15:59,430 --> 00:16:05,350
Um and so socially it can be detrimental, it can be zero sum, or in fact,

271
00:16:05,430 --> 00:16:10,790
even negative sum when too many people t invest too too to too much work and and

272
00:16:10,790 --> 00:16:15,830
resources into um these activities, right?

273
00:16:15,910 --> 00:16:21,860
And you're just trying to trying to capture a greater market share, so to speak but but but

274
00:16:21,940 --> 00:16:27,220
but no actual growth uh is happening and and it and and no no it's not there's no general

275
00:16:27,220 --> 00:16:33,220
improvement in in social well being um across the board and so you're describing why we

276
00:16:33,220 --> 00:16:38,420
don't have ads on this podcast it's well it's exactly basically what ads do full time

277
00:16:38,900 --> 00:16:44,020
exactly well um um that that's correct uh that's uh so advertising is in a way non

278
00:16:44,180 --> 00:16:49,270
productive Um it's just about, you know, uh getting people to buy your your product rather

279
00:16:49,270 --> 00:16:50,950
than um rather than another.

280
00:16:51,590 --> 00:16:53,270
And it's just about getting ahead.

281
00:16:53,350 --> 00:16:55,350
And you're not you're not really making any stuff.

282
00:16:56,070 --> 00:17:00,950
Or if you are, I mean, but usually what the odds are is it's creating it's it's cues of a

283
00:17:00,950 --> 00:17:06,470
status scheme that are typically not necessarily the status game you would play if you

284
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weren't exposed to those cues.

285
00:17:09,360 --> 00:17:14,560
and it's creating a uh it's it's it's scientist it's stimuli force it's

286
00:17:14,960 --> 00:17:20,960
status game stimuli that one could argue much of is uh

287
00:17:21,520 --> 00:17:26,000
isn't adding any benefit to anybody except the producer of the ad, which is a signaling

288
00:17:26,000 --> 00:17:26,640
element, right?

289
00:17:26,720 --> 00:17:28,000
If it was in your interest you wouldn't need to sign.

290
00:17:28,800 --> 00:17:28,880
Yeah.

291
00:17:28,990 --> 00:17:29,390
Yeah, yeah.

292
00:17:29,470 --> 00:17:34,270
And again, I think this is how I think about society, or how how I how I came to think, or

293
00:17:34,270 --> 00:17:39,310
how I learned to think about society in general, is I see everything in terms of collective

294
00:17:39,310 --> 00:17:40,510
action problems now.

295
00:17:40,830 --> 00:17:41,150
Right?

296
00:17:41,310 --> 00:17:44,590
I see everything in terms of like fundamentally like that.

297
00:17:44,750 --> 00:17:48,590
So I sometimes like I sometimes say I I feel like I'm kind of I'm I'm a kind of left

298
00:17:48,590 --> 00:17:49,550
Hobbesian.

299
00:17:49,710 --> 00:17:55,070
Um I see the world like a Hobbesian, but I still think that it's worth thinking about,

300
00:17:55,230 --> 00:18:01,120
okay, I because I do think these sort of like broadly liberal progressive

301
00:18:01,120 --> 00:18:03,200
goals are often good ones, right?

302
00:18:03,440 --> 00:18:09,200
Improving people's lives, um trying to get more

303
00:18:09,520 --> 00:18:14,160
people join society in a way that benefits everyone, right?

304
00:18:14,560 --> 00:18:20,010
Not to harm people or discriminate against people on the basis of unchosen traits, right?

305
00:18:20,090 --> 00:18:22,970
I think these are broadly, it's very hard to implement them.

306
00:18:23,130 --> 00:18:26,330
It's very hard to think about like what's the best strategy of implementing.

307
00:18:26,410 --> 00:18:31,210
But I still think these are good ideas, good, good, good values and norms and principles

308
00:18:31,210 --> 00:18:35,610
that are characteristic of modern society, but they are just brought down and undermined

309
00:18:35,610 --> 00:18:40,250
the whole time by this nasty Hobbesianism that is just, you know, that we can't really get

310
00:18:40,330 --> 00:18:41,290
ever get rid of.

311
00:18:41,690 --> 00:18:47,530
And so that's how I kind of see the world, and that's how I approach

312
00:18:48,140 --> 00:18:52,540
ethics and political philosophy as a philosopher is to sort of like see this is really

313
00:18:52,540 --> 00:18:53,580
difficult, right?

314
00:18:53,740 --> 00:18:59,660
It's really difficult to get cooperation going and make it and arrange it in such a way

315
00:18:59,660 --> 00:19:01,180
that it's good for people.

316
00:19:01,740 --> 00:19:07,740
Um and status signaling and competition is part of that way

317
00:19:07,740 --> 00:19:12,930
of thinking, or sort of like downstream perhaps of that way of thinking, because I do think

318
00:19:12,930 --> 00:19:14,850
it is extremely recalcitrant.

319
00:19:14,930 --> 00:19:17,170
It is essentially not possible to really get rid of it.

320
00:19:17,330 --> 00:19:21,330
And there are evolutionary and strategic reasons for why that is the case.

321
00:19:21,490 --> 00:19:26,930
So I have kind of like pretty pessimistic thesis in this book, which is that we can't get

322
00:19:26,930 --> 00:19:27,650
rid of classes.

323
00:19:27,810 --> 00:19:30,770
We can't get rid of hierarchical groups.

324
00:19:31,650 --> 00:19:37,640
They are going to emerge if we have well if

325
00:19:37,640 --> 00:19:43,400
we have essentially a certain group size right I think I think a lot of it uh is also about

326
00:19:43,960 --> 00:19:49,800
um I think a lot of evolutionary psychology when it comes to cooperation is about is is if

327
00:19:49,800 --> 00:19:55,480
people think about how do how how did we and how do we scale up cooperation right so how

328
00:19:55,480 --> 00:20:01,240
did we move from tiny groups and we seem to be you know much of much of much of

329
00:20:01,240 --> 00:20:06,970
our psychology and and physiology seems to be evolved to deal

330
00:20:06,970 --> 00:20:08,890
with life in very small groups.

331
00:20:09,050 --> 00:20:11,930
And then the question is, how do you scale that up?

332
00:20:12,090 --> 00:20:13,690
How did we manage to scale that up?

333
00:20:13,850 --> 00:20:16,170
It's actually to some extent an unsolved problem.

334
00:20:16,330 --> 00:20:20,490
I mean, there are good ideas now around for how that worked and how it continues to work.

335
00:20:20,650 --> 00:20:24,490
Um, but that's that scalability of cooperation is really interesting to me.

336
00:20:24,570 --> 00:20:30,490
And I think also signaling is one of the mechanisms that contributed to allowing us to move

337
00:20:30,490 --> 00:20:36,340
from, you know, being this East African savannah dwelling creature to the kind

338
00:20:36,340 --> 00:20:38,340
of stuff that we do right now.

339
00:20:38,740 --> 00:20:40,340
And that's a fascinating question to me.

340
00:20:40,420 --> 00:20:43,060
How do how does how how how did that work and how does that work?

341
00:20:43,140 --> 00:20:48,100
And what are the forces that threaten it and undermine it and that can lead to regress?

342
00:20:48,420 --> 00:20:54,260
Um, and so I also think that basically scaling up cooperation is what's behind the

343
00:20:54,330 --> 00:20:56,650
thing that people call moral progress.

344
00:20:57,290 --> 00:21:02,250
You know, all these things about inclusion and the expanding circle and so on and so on,

345
00:21:02,330 --> 00:21:07,530
all that the the way I think about that is in terms of how did we scale up cooperation to

346
00:21:07,530 --> 00:21:12,730
have very large groups and what are the functional requirements that you need to satisfy in

347
00:21:12,730 --> 00:21:14,330
order to have these large groups?

348
00:21:14,700 --> 00:21:15,020
Hmm.

349
00:21:15,260 --> 00:21:17,900
So scaling up cooperation, I want to un unpack that a bit.

350
00:21:17,980 --> 00:21:23,900
So is it is it merely the idea that the pool of people that you are cooperating with or

351
00:21:23,900 --> 00:21:28,940
having mutually beneficial relationships with has expanded?

352
00:21:29,100 --> 00:21:34,860
Is that uh uh what you're saying that that we've been you know somehow uh learning or

353
00:21:34,860 --> 00:21:40,300
evolving to cooperate with a larger and larger pool of of individuals?

354
00:21:40,700 --> 00:21:42,060
Yeah, basically, yeah.

355
00:21:42,350 --> 00:21:42,670
Okay.

356
00:21:42,990 --> 00:21:43,630
Basically, yeah.

357
00:21:43,790 --> 00:21:48,590
It's it's uh and it's also yeah, well well i I think in in in in evolutionary psychology

358
00:21:48,750 --> 00:21:54,670
the the the basic puzzle is why do humans cooperate with

359
00:21:54,990 --> 00:21:55,870
strangers?

360
00:21:57,710 --> 00:21:59,470
Because we tend to do that.

361
00:21:59,790 --> 00:22:02,800
Relatively speaking, we are quite good at it, Right.

362
00:22:03,680 --> 00:22:09,520
Relatively speaking, we are maybe not fully, but pretty unique in how we do it

363
00:22:09,680 --> 00:22:14,080
and unique even that we do it.

364
00:22:14,320 --> 00:22:19,200
And that's an interesting question because we, you know, what we do today, you know, in

365
00:22:19,200 --> 00:22:24,400
this podcast, or or what what what I did today when I bought a pencil from for my for my

366
00:22:24,480 --> 00:22:27,680
for my for my daughters who just who are starting sixth grade tomorrow.

367
00:22:27,870 --> 00:22:32,990
Um, I'm cop I was cooperating with strangers and uh people I don't even know and then will

368
00:22:32,990 --> 00:22:34,190
never know and have never met.

369
00:22:34,270 --> 00:22:39,710
And that's fascinating to me how that works and what what what what institutional toolkit

370
00:22:39,710 --> 00:22:43,950
is required to make that happen because it can't be kinship, right?

371
00:22:44,110 --> 00:22:49,470
It can't be uh it can't be uh we understand the the the the the deep and tremendous

372
00:22:49,470 --> 00:22:55,230
importance of kinship for cooperation um and for the evolution of simple

373
00:22:55,230 --> 00:23:01,160
forms of altruism and and vicarious distress and sympathy and

374
00:23:01,160 --> 00:23:01,880
so on and so on.

375
00:23:01,960 --> 00:23:07,960
And we understand the role that simple forms of reciprocity have played for scaling that up

376
00:23:07,960 --> 00:23:08,600
a little further.

377
00:23:08,760 --> 00:23:13,480
But of course, you can't have a modern society of hundreds of millions of people

378
00:23:13,480 --> 00:23:15,480
cooperating that's based on kinship.

379
00:23:15,560 --> 00:23:17,000
And so that's also fascinating to me.

380
00:23:17,080 --> 00:23:19,400
Like how did that happen and why did it happen?

381
00:23:19,670 --> 00:23:20,230
Hmm.

382
00:23:20,470 --> 00:23:26,470
Yeah, it's interesting to me that um you you noted just the basic fact that everything

383
00:23:26,470 --> 00:23:32,470
around us is a product of cooperation, just immense um sets of of division of labor, you

384
00:23:32,470 --> 00:23:36,310
know, the computer I'm and and the microphone that I'm using probably have parts you know

385
00:23:36,390 --> 00:23:38,550
distributed all across the world.

386
00:23:38,710 --> 00:23:43,510
Uh you know, uh uh many, many different people cooperated and divided labor to produce the

387
00:23:43,510 --> 00:23:45,110
microphone for me.

388
00:23:45,270 --> 00:23:49,020
Um it's weird because it's a kind of cooperation that I'm not really aware of.

389
00:23:49,100 --> 00:23:53,580
You know, whereas most cooperation uh happens, you know, between people like I know the

390
00:23:53,580 --> 00:23:58,460
person that I'm interacting with, I I I have a sense of whether they're a good person or

391
00:23:58,460 --> 00:23:59,980
not, of their reputation.

392
00:24:00,140 --> 00:24:05,900
Um, whereas when it comes to just the basic um network of cooperation that underlies uh our

393
00:24:05,900 --> 00:24:10,450
global capitalist society, none of that is really conscious to me.

394
00:24:10,610 --> 00:24:15,410
Um it's sort of like kind of a kind of modularized cooperation where you know maybe the

395
00:24:15,410 --> 00:24:20,210
individual uh uh organizations that are distributed around the world are cooperating, and

396
00:24:20,210 --> 00:24:23,970
maybe you know the uh the the buyers and the sellers are cooperating, and and there are

397
00:24:23,970 --> 00:24:28,050
long chains of cooperation, and I'm on one end of the chain, and at each individual link in

398
00:24:28,050 --> 00:24:31,490
the chain, there's you know a pretty identifiable group of people who are cooperating.

399
00:24:31,570 --> 00:24:35,650
But with me, I'm just completely alienated from all of that, and all I get is the last link

400
00:24:35,650 --> 00:24:36,370
in that chain.

401
00:24:36,580 --> 00:24:36,900
Yeah.

402
00:24:37,540 --> 00:24:41,220
So I'm wondering if that if that might be part of it, where it's just like, I I don't even

403
00:24:41,220 --> 00:24:42,500
know how all this works.

404
00:24:43,060 --> 00:24:43,860
And I don't have to.

405
00:24:43,940 --> 00:24:49,140
And that's kind of the how the system works is that it it decomposes and modularizes

406
00:24:49,140 --> 00:24:53,780
cooperation such that I don't have to be a participant in all of it to benefit from it.

407
00:24:54,100 --> 00:24:54,260
Yeah.

408
00:24:54,340 --> 00:24:54,580
Yeah.

409
00:24:54,660 --> 00:24:59,060
So there's this there's this nice phrase from the from their um early 19th century

410
00:24:59,060 --> 00:25:02,020
philosopher uh Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

411
00:25:02,180 --> 00:25:05,930
And Hegel had this had this idea of a cunning of reason, right?

412
00:25:06,570 --> 00:25:10,410
The cunning of reason was, of course, Hegel had this sort of completely inflated

413
00:25:10,650 --> 00:25:16,650
metaphysical idea that it's, you know, essentially, you know, the objective spirit,

414
00:25:16,730 --> 00:25:22,490
you know, so reason itself that is shaping human history and human behavior.

415
00:25:22,730 --> 00:25:26,410
Nowadays we don't really talk like that anymore or think like that anymore because we think

416
00:25:26,410 --> 00:25:32,250
it's much more random and much more uh and just not guided by this sort of almost

417
00:25:32,250 --> 00:25:34,940
divine the rational force.

418
00:25:35,020 --> 00:25:40,620
But the cunning of reason is still this idea that social structures and

419
00:25:40,620 --> 00:25:46,620
institutions and ways of cooperating don't really need the individuals

420
00:25:46,620 --> 00:25:49,420
involved in that to even understand it, right?

421
00:25:49,820 --> 00:25:53,980
It's sort of like these structures they reach through your intentions, and you're almost

422
00:25:53,980 --> 00:25:59,930
like fulfilling a purpose that you have no idea even exists, right?

423
00:26:00,010 --> 00:26:04,570
Um now again, I'm I'm not I'm I'm I I don't I don't endorse the very very strong

424
00:26:04,570 --> 00:26:09,450
teleological version that Hegel endorsed, which is very, very metaphysically bloated and

425
00:26:09,450 --> 00:26:11,610
sort of just not plausible anymore.

426
00:26:11,770 --> 00:26:16,810
But still, I think what we see is that human cooperation depends on these structures that

427
00:26:16,810 --> 00:26:21,180
people don't have to understand, don't even have to know about, right?

428
00:26:22,300 --> 00:26:27,900
And that we haven't understood very well until recently, and until we started to

429
00:26:28,140 --> 00:26:33,020
also talk about culture in terms of evolutionary

430
00:26:33,660 --> 00:26:34,620
forces, right?

431
00:26:34,700 --> 00:26:39,100
So we have we are cultural being when we have these institutions and these rules and these

432
00:26:39,100 --> 00:26:44,860
frameworks and this inherited cultural capital that makes a lot of

433
00:26:44,860 --> 00:26:48,790
things work whilst being totally opaque and intransparent to us.

434
00:26:48,870 --> 00:26:53,670
And that's sort of like the modernized, naturalized version, I think, of this Hegelian idea

435
00:26:53,670 --> 00:26:54,950
of a cunning of reason.

436
00:26:55,190 --> 00:26:59,510
Again, it's not like, you know, we're not we're not we're we're not marching towards the

437
00:26:59,510 --> 00:27:01,350
end of history, as Hegel thought.

438
00:27:01,590 --> 00:27:06,390
Um conveniently he thought that culminates in the Prussian state that he was uh that he was

439
00:27:06,390 --> 00:27:08,710
part of, that that's sort of like the best thing ever.

440
00:27:08,870 --> 00:27:09,110
Right?

441
00:27:09,190 --> 00:27:14,720
So d no one believes that anymore, but there's there is a it's a little bit analogous the

442
00:27:14,720 --> 00:27:19,520
way that nowadays people think about cultural evolution is that

443
00:27:20,160 --> 00:27:24,240
sometimes good stuff is happening and we don't even know how and we don't even know why.

444
00:27:24,320 --> 00:27:29,680
And we can participate in cooperation without even understanding how it works, how it came

445
00:27:29,680 --> 00:27:31,200
about, and it can still benefit us.

446
00:27:31,360 --> 00:27:33,760
It doesn't have to benefit us, sometimes it's also bad.

447
00:27:34,720 --> 00:27:40,070
But there's at least that potential for stuff to go right sometimes.

448
00:27:40,950 --> 00:27:46,950
Where do you think moral progress fits in on this continuum of stuff sort of happening in a

449
00:27:46,950 --> 00:27:51,350
distributed way where nobody's really aware of what's emerging?

450
00:27:51,430 --> 00:27:55,510
And it just kind of emerges spontaneously through the interactions of many individuals,

451
00:27:55,670 --> 00:27:59,990
just individually acting in their own self-interest, sort of in a Hayekian way where, you

452
00:27:59,990 --> 00:28:05,190
know, uh prices that send signals about supply and demand just sort of emerge spontaneously

453
00:28:05,190 --> 00:28:08,640
from everyone individually acting under their uh financial incentives.

454
00:28:08,800 --> 00:28:13,440
Uh is moral progress something like that where nobody really planned for it, nobody really

455
00:28:13,440 --> 00:28:17,360
intended it to happen, it's just kind of emerge with you know uh from all these

456
00:28:17,360 --> 00:28:18,960
interactions and these processes?

457
00:28:19,200 --> 00:28:25,120
Or is it more like we really set out to uh to improve our morality and

458
00:28:25,120 --> 00:28:29,040
we made a plan and we made it happen and everyone was fully aware of what was going on?

459
00:28:29,120 --> 00:28:31,520
So, like where where do you think moral progress fits in on that?

460
00:28:31,570 --> 00:28:31,650
that?

461
00:28:31,970 --> 00:28:36,530
I think it's mostly it's mostly one of these processes as well that is intransparent to us

462
00:28:36,530 --> 00:28:39,250
and just happens when it when it happens.

463
00:28:39,490 --> 00:28:40,770
Of course, there are exceptions.

464
00:28:40,850 --> 00:28:44,930
Like I think, for instance, like you know, women's rights, gay rights, these were conscious

465
00:28:44,930 --> 00:28:45,730
demands, right?

466
00:28:45,810 --> 00:28:47,490
And people organized for them.

467
00:28:47,650 --> 00:28:51,410
And people thought, yeah, we know these things are this is where we are headed, right?

468
00:28:51,570 --> 00:28:51,730
Yeah.

469
00:28:51,890 --> 00:28:56,850
You we can't really, you know, you you're in the 60s in the US and people just think like

470
00:28:57,010 --> 00:28:58,320
it's time, right?

471
00:28:58,480 --> 00:29:04,400
We can't have a society where you know just because of something a completely

472
00:29:04,400 --> 00:29:09,760
harmless attraction that is none no one no no one's business, where people you know suffer

473
00:29:09,760 --> 00:29:15,440
greatly, can't live openly, you know, can't form um companionships and partnerships and

474
00:29:15,440 --> 00:29:18,880
loving relationships and they need to be like secretive about it and so on and so on.

475
00:29:18,960 --> 00:29:22,710
And those are cases where people consciously said, we need to make this happen, right?

476
00:29:22,790 --> 00:29:25,110
And we need to march for it and we need to demand it.

477
00:29:25,190 --> 00:29:26,310
And here's why.

478
00:29:26,550 --> 00:29:29,670
And here are like consistency arguments, blah blah blah blah blah.

479
00:29:29,830 --> 00:29:35,670
But mostly I think it's driven by by these glacial forces of social

480
00:29:35,990 --> 00:29:41,590
change that is happening in a in a in a certain in a certain

481
00:29:41,590 --> 00:29:42,230
direction.

482
00:29:42,630 --> 00:29:48,380
Now, Moral progress is in many ways, I think, perhaps the

483
00:29:48,700 --> 00:29:53,740
core idea of the Enlightenment, of the Enlightenment tradition, because people,

484
00:29:54,860 --> 00:30:00,220
it's always an artificial way to pick a timing, but let's say you know

485
00:30:00,860 --> 00:30:03,580
mid-18th century, right?

486
00:30:03,820 --> 00:30:08,220
Where that really started, then 1800 plus and so on and so on.

487
00:30:09,090 --> 00:30:15,010
So the heyday of the Enlightenment, people thought that if only we keep doing

488
00:30:15,010 --> 00:30:19,970
what we're doing, if only we keep getting rid of superstition,

489
00:30:20,930 --> 00:30:21,250
right?

490
00:30:21,570 --> 00:30:24,290
And religious dogma and ignorance.

491
00:30:24,530 --> 00:30:29,250
And if only we keep getting rid of arbitrary rule and oppression.

492
00:30:29,410 --> 00:30:32,850
And if we just keep doing that, right, everything will be fine.

493
00:30:32,930 --> 00:30:35,940
And everything will just continue to improve, right?

494
00:30:36,180 --> 00:30:37,300
For everyone.

495
00:30:38,980 --> 00:30:44,980
Of course, I'm not denying silly or or or

496
00:30:45,220 --> 00:30:49,060
problematic views that many of these Enlightenment thinkers had, but by and large, I think

497
00:30:49,060 --> 00:30:50,100
that was the thought.

498
00:30:50,260 --> 00:30:56,020
Is that we if we keep doing science and technology and and and and um

499
00:30:57,690 --> 00:31:03,450
fairer and more just social institutions, everything is gonna

500
00:31:03,450 --> 00:31:04,570
only get better.

501
00:31:04,890 --> 00:31:10,730
And then, of course, that idea became immensely,

502
00:31:10,970 --> 00:31:13,050
well, immensely unpopular is one way of putting it.

503
00:31:13,210 --> 00:31:17,770
But it it was kind of catastrophically disconfirmed in the 20th century.

504
00:31:18,080 --> 00:31:18,480
Right?

505
00:31:18,640 --> 00:31:21,520
And so it fell extremely out of fashion.

506
00:31:21,600 --> 00:31:27,360
And and and um with with the the Second World War and the Holocaust and the

507
00:31:27,360 --> 00:31:33,360
nuclear bomb and all of these things, um, all the way up to Rwanda, if you wish, and

508
00:31:33,520 --> 00:31:34,880
or Bosnia, right?

509
00:31:35,040 --> 00:31:40,000
All of these things that happened in the 20th century um seem to just make

510
00:31:40,830 --> 00:31:46,750
you know s seem seem seem to to design to to to ridicule this

511
00:31:46,750 --> 00:31:52,190
idea that we are automatically marching into ever more improvement and ever more

512
00:31:52,190 --> 00:31:53,230
well-being, right?

513
00:31:53,470 --> 00:31:59,230
And there seem to be forces at play that even the you know, even the most advanced

514
00:31:59,230 --> 00:32:04,860
places in the world, like Central Europe at the time perhaps, or whatever, they they can

515
00:32:04,860 --> 00:32:10,540
regress enormously quickly into madness and into and

516
00:32:10,700 --> 00:32:13,900
into barbarism and into mass murder.

517
00:32:13,980 --> 00:32:19,980
And in fact, a kind of mass murder that harnesses the power of the Enlightenment,

518
00:32:20,060 --> 00:32:20,300
right?

519
00:32:20,460 --> 00:32:24,940
That was, I think, so striking to people at the time, is that you can have kind of

520
00:32:24,940 --> 00:32:27,980
bureaucratically, rationally organized genocide.

521
00:32:28,140 --> 00:32:32,610
So this isn't some this isn't some frenzy that that that that that that took, but this is

522
00:32:32,610 --> 00:32:38,370
like methodical years long, you know, with with accounting and the smartest people in the

523
00:32:38,370 --> 00:32:39,730
country running it, right?

524
00:32:39,810 --> 00:32:42,370
I think, and that was so shocking to people, I think.

525
00:32:42,530 --> 00:32:46,530
And so for the longest time, moral progress became kind of like a joke.

526
00:32:46,690 --> 00:32:49,330
And you could start with, well, of course, there isn't any.

527
00:32:49,650 --> 00:32:54,580
And then recently, this has been rehabilitated a little bit by these, you know, uh Hans

528
00:32:54,740 --> 00:32:58,740
Rossling and Pinker, who who who like wrote a couple of books.

529
00:32:58,820 --> 00:33:02,340
I have like a whole library full of them, that are all like, you know, things are better

530
00:33:02,340 --> 00:33:03,380
than you think, right?

531
00:33:03,540 --> 00:33:07,700
But of course, the New York Times isn't going to tell you every single day that another

532
00:33:07,780 --> 00:33:09,620
hundred thousand people escape poverty.

533
00:33:09,700 --> 00:33:11,060
So you never hear about it, right?

534
00:33:11,140 --> 00:33:16,420
You only hear about planes crashing, you don't hear about you know the the amazing

535
00:33:16,420 --> 00:33:18,820
functionality of aviation and so on and so on.

536
00:33:18,900 --> 00:33:23,630
And so uh we just we just we're just missing this potential for improvement.

537
00:33:23,790 --> 00:33:25,790
So that's been rehabilitated a little bit.

538
00:33:26,030 --> 00:33:30,110
There's been a lot of backlash to it, and it's and people thought you're just chilling for

539
00:33:30,110 --> 00:33:31,790
capitalism and for neoliberalism and so on.

540
00:33:31,950 --> 00:33:33,230
And this is actually not true.

541
00:33:33,710 --> 00:33:35,630
But I'm mostly on board with that story.

542
00:33:35,710 --> 00:33:41,470
And I think that while there's no guarantee that there will be moral progress, if you um

543
00:33:42,430 --> 00:33:48,360
think if you if you think about how we can create

544
00:33:48,360 --> 00:33:53,560
and sustain successful cooperation between ideally lots of people?

545
00:33:53,880 --> 00:33:56,680
That can be good for humanity.

546
00:33:56,840 --> 00:34:02,440
And it can be good, it's probably a good idea to not, you know, think that

547
00:34:02,440 --> 00:34:05,400
Germany and France must be eternal arch enemies.

548
00:34:05,560 --> 00:34:11,510
It's probably a good idea not to think about Japanese people as alien and

549
00:34:11,510 --> 00:34:16,550
weird and to sort of like you know to tear down these these these these boundaries and to

550
00:34:16,550 --> 00:34:22,150
enable large scale peaceful cooperation and trade and

551
00:34:22,150 --> 00:34:24,230
exchange of information and so on and so on.

552
00:34:24,310 --> 00:34:28,630
And I think when we allow that to happen and when we don't sabotage it, you know there are

553
00:34:28,790 --> 00:34:33,990
there are there are people pop up every now and then that almost seem like hellbent on

554
00:34:33,990 --> 00:34:37,960
sabotaging these these developments and these um these changes.

555
00:34:38,120 --> 00:34:40,040
If we don't sabotage it, that can be good for people.

556
00:34:40,120 --> 00:34:41,720
So that's kind of how I think about moral progress.

557
00:34:41,800 --> 00:34:47,400
It's not teleological, I think, in the sense of there's some like objective spirit puppet

558
00:34:47,400 --> 00:34:51,240
master that makes sure it's gonna be fine and we can we don't have to worry about it.

559
00:34:51,480 --> 00:34:57,320
Um it's it's it's it's it's a slow and frustrating process that

560
00:34:57,320 --> 00:35:02,970
takes decades and and centuries to unfold, but

561
00:35:03,130 --> 00:35:08,970
there is potential in human society, I think, to get on that gravy train

562
00:35:09,290 --> 00:35:13,450
of change in a good direction.

563
00:35:13,690 --> 00:35:19,450
And often that means, I think, getting more people enfranchised in these cooperative

564
00:35:19,450 --> 00:35:20,250
structures.

565
00:35:20,490 --> 00:35:26,480
It means On broadly egalitarian terms, we don't have to

566
00:35:26,480 --> 00:35:32,480
say that you know everyone is you know literally equal, but that's a way of thinking about

567
00:35:32,960 --> 00:35:38,480
human individuality and and and and and and humanity that is

568
00:35:38,480 --> 00:35:42,160
probably basically good, right?

569
00:35:42,320 --> 00:35:45,520
Where you don't demonize people because they look different or they have different cultures

570
00:35:45,600 --> 00:35:47,040
or different languages.

571
00:35:47,280 --> 00:35:53,110
Um and it also means that probably there's going to be

572
00:35:53,110 --> 00:35:59,030
uh a at least a slight bias in favor of more liberty and tolerance and um

573
00:35:59,030 --> 00:36:04,550
getting rid of weird arbitrary rules,

574
00:36:04,790 --> 00:36:05,110
right?

575
00:36:05,270 --> 00:36:10,790
That you know it's gonna be plot probably in the direction of pluralism and liberty

576
00:36:11,190 --> 00:36:15,680
and tolerance, because when you have a larger society, there's going to be more diversity,

577
00:36:15,760 --> 00:36:16,800
it's going to be more complexity.

578
00:36:16,880 --> 00:36:21,120
And if you want to keep that up, you can't have Protestants and Catholics hating each

579
00:36:21,120 --> 00:36:21,760
other, right?

580
00:36:22,160 --> 00:36:27,680
So there are these social developments that that people just thought, you know, after

581
00:36:27,840 --> 00:36:33,840
after 30 years of war between 1618 and 1648, people thought this is not

582
00:36:33,840 --> 00:36:34,080
good.

583
00:36:34,240 --> 00:36:34,720
Uh right.

584
00:36:34,880 --> 00:36:40,410
And we can't we can't really we can't really metaphysically resolve this conflict whether

585
00:36:40,410 --> 00:36:46,410
it's literally Jesus' blood that transub substantiates into the wine or something.

586
00:36:46,490 --> 00:36:47,770
I don't even know the theology of it.

587
00:36:47,930 --> 00:36:51,210
You know, we can't kill ourselves, we can't keep killing ourselves about these sorts of

588
00:36:51,210 --> 00:36:51,610
questions.

589
00:36:51,690 --> 00:36:53,130
We need to chill, right?

590
00:36:53,290 --> 00:36:59,210
And if we want to uh if we want to have a have a peaceful life

591
00:36:59,210 --> 00:37:04,920
and thrive in this in this you know valley of tears that is life,

592
00:37:05,160 --> 00:37:11,000
we need to we need to stop um engaging in the in the in these in these pointless

593
00:37:11,160 --> 00:37:13,640
arbitrary conflicts that make everyone worse off.

594
00:37:13,800 --> 00:37:18,920
And I think that so it it's it's been centuries of of of learning that probably we we want

595
00:37:18,920 --> 00:37:21,480
to head in in in in that direction.

596
00:37:21,640 --> 00:37:27,230
Which is why I'm I get so pissed off when when when these like territorial

597
00:37:27,470 --> 00:37:32,030
conflicts about like, you know, who should who should who which group should live in this

598
00:37:32,030 --> 00:37:35,070
swamp when they get like reanimated and so on.

599
00:37:35,230 --> 00:37:37,310
That that makes me that makes me mad.

600
00:37:38,750 --> 00:37:43,950
I I wanna dig into the question of the weird timing of this.

601
00:37:44,110 --> 00:37:47,790
Because you you told a story where people just kind of gradually learned that, like, hey,

602
00:37:47,870 --> 00:37:51,470
this makes everyone worse off, war sucks, this is all stupid.

603
00:37:51,550 --> 00:37:53,230
We gotta we should just stop this.

604
00:37:53,550 --> 00:37:59,400
Um but that picture doesn't really fit the empirical uh

605
00:37:59,640 --> 00:38:01,320
pattern that we see throughout the historic.

606
00:38:01,640 --> 00:38:05,080
It wasn't like gradually we just stopped doing war because we realized it was stupid.

607
00:38:05,160 --> 00:38:11,000
It was like we had millennia of just endless war and bloodshed and conquest and slavery.

608
00:38:11,080 --> 00:38:13,000
Uh and everyone was totally cool with this.

609
00:38:13,160 --> 00:38:16,360
Nobody like really questions that hey, maybe maybe we should stop doing this.

610
00:38:16,440 --> 00:38:18,280
This is kind of making everyone worse off.

611
00:38:18,440 --> 00:38:19,640
It was just this was just the norm.

612
00:38:19,720 --> 00:38:20,840
This was the way the world worked.

613
00:38:20,920 --> 00:38:26,750
And then all of a sudden you you see this huge spike uh around 19th, 20th century, where

614
00:38:26,750 --> 00:38:28,190
we started giving a shit.

615
00:38:28,350 --> 00:38:31,310
You know, we started saying, hey, this isn't cool.

616
00:38:31,550 --> 00:38:36,910
Uh uh war sucks, we should stop being racist and sexist, and slavery sucks.

617
00:38:37,070 --> 00:38:40,750
Like all these things happened uh very recently.

618
00:38:40,990 --> 00:38:41,310
Yeah.

619
00:38:41,470 --> 00:38:46,030
Um, and and not gradually, uh uh if you look at the the the vast sweep of human history.

620
00:38:46,110 --> 00:38:48,510
So, like, what how do you explain like the timing of it?

621
00:38:48,590 --> 00:38:49,630
Like, why then?

622
00:38:49,790 --> 00:38:52,670
And why so dramatically at that point in history?

623
00:38:52,940 --> 00:38:56,940
where you know, why did it take us so long to realize how how stupid this stuff was?

624
00:38:57,260 --> 00:39:00,860
Yeah, I mean it's that's a that's that's a that what one one of the huge questions that we

625
00:39:00,940 --> 00:39:04,460
uh wanna and you're right, the story I told is very false, right?

626
00:39:04,540 --> 00:39:07,660
Uh yeah in sort of like the timing and the empirical details.

627
00:39:07,820 --> 00:39:13,740
Um but so there's a couple I th I I do think that probably most

628
00:39:13,740 --> 00:39:19,570
people most of the time did hate this, even millennia ago and but they were kind of

629
00:39:19,570 --> 00:39:24,050
like you know also this is also a collective action problem where they couldn't you know uh

630
00:39:24,290 --> 00:39:30,290
resist um you know the the the the

631
00:39:30,290 --> 00:39:36,050
the the plans of Agamemnon to raid this city right they but they they were kind of forced

632
00:39:36,050 --> 00:39:40,130
to and they couldn't resist they couldn't organize against it it was supported culturally

633
00:39:40,130 --> 00:39:45,800
by certain values uh but it did but it but it benefited No one really.

634
00:39:46,120 --> 00:39:49,480
But these people just weren't hurt and they couldn't, and they couldn't, um, they didn't

635
00:39:49,480 --> 00:39:52,600
have the power to to to to to resist that.

636
00:39:52,760 --> 00:39:58,440
And also for the longest time, of course, um, we we had we we we hadn't understood and we

637
00:39:58,440 --> 00:40:03,080
only understand economic growth that it even that is even possible.

638
00:40:03,160 --> 00:40:04,680
It's a very recent thing, right?

639
00:40:04,760 --> 00:40:09,080
You see all these graphs on on our world in data, and you know, there's nothing, nothing,

640
00:40:09,160 --> 00:40:09,960
nothing, nothing, nothing.

641
00:40:10,040 --> 00:40:11,640
And then, like you said, very recently.

642
00:40:11,880 --> 00:40:17,650
So we had to kind of it's very past dependent and we had to kind of like at some point we

643
00:40:17,810 --> 00:40:23,650
we we locked into that potential a little bit, escaping the Malthusian trap

644
00:40:23,730 --> 00:40:27,810
and figuring out how can we have positive sum interactions between people.

645
00:40:27,890 --> 00:40:32,050
And for the longest time, if you wanted to get rich or grow your economy of of your city

646
00:40:32,130 --> 00:40:37,970
state or of your of your, I don't know, um, you had to just, you know, take it from someone

647
00:40:37,970 --> 00:40:38,610
else.

648
00:40:39,080 --> 00:40:39,640
Right?

649
00:40:40,280 --> 00:40:46,200
Uh and people just people just couldn't think of like how would you even how would

650
00:40:46,200 --> 00:40:51,160
you even, you know, distinguish yourself and become rich and powerful without taking

651
00:40:51,160 --> 00:40:52,280
resources from other people?

652
00:40:52,600 --> 00:40:55,960
Because it's just a you know, because re because resources are finite and they aren't

653
00:40:55,960 --> 00:40:56,760
making more of it.

654
00:40:56,920 --> 00:41:00,440
And we and and it's apparently it apparently it was very, very difficult for us to figure

655
00:41:00,440 --> 00:41:01,480
out that that's not true.

656
00:41:01,640 --> 00:41:07,090
And we can actually be enormously productive and make new stuff and create fridges and and

657
00:41:07,090 --> 00:41:11,330
uh and uh and airplanes and and and uh vaccines.

658
00:41:12,370 --> 00:41:17,570
Um now, of course, even after we discovered that, so you're totally right, even after we

659
00:41:17,570 --> 00:41:23,570
discovered that, people still didn't stop warring and and conquering and and and and

660
00:41:23,570 --> 00:41:26,040
all this madness.

661
00:41:26,440 --> 00:41:32,360
Because, of course, you know, group antagonism and group conflict is very easily

662
00:41:32,360 --> 00:41:32,920
activated.

663
00:41:33,000 --> 00:41:34,120
It's very old.

664
00:41:34,200 --> 00:41:39,240
Uh, and it's very, very easy to get people to hate each other on the basis of seemingly

665
00:41:39,240 --> 00:41:45,240
arbitrary characteristics like being French or German, or being white or black, or being,

666
00:41:45,320 --> 00:41:47,720
I don't know, Japanese or Chinese.

667
00:41:47,880 --> 00:41:53,290
Uh, it's just it's just very easy to to to get that hostility, uh, those

668
00:41:53,290 --> 00:41:55,290
hostility juices flowing.

669
00:41:56,330 --> 00:42:02,170
And so that's that that that's how I would say, yes, it's not like we

670
00:42:02,170 --> 00:42:03,690
learned this gradually.

671
00:42:03,930 --> 00:42:09,450
Um, I do think that for the

672
00:42:09,450 --> 00:42:15,210
longest time this was kind of an elite phenomenon that was at the expense of the

673
00:42:15,210 --> 00:42:16,570
majority of people.

674
00:42:17,290 --> 00:42:20,890
Um, warring and conquest and so on and so on.

675
00:42:21,520 --> 00:42:25,280
Um and human society

676
00:42:27,360 --> 00:42:33,360
at one point kind of in some places figured out that oh you know we can we can we

677
00:42:33,360 --> 00:42:39,360
can we can create these positive sum interactions between people and even then

678
00:42:39,520 --> 00:42:44,240
it was still difficult to make that work and to and to keep it around.

679
00:42:45,280 --> 00:42:50,350
And And then sort of the ultra

680
00:42:50,430 --> 00:42:56,190
optimistic way of telling this story is that just like after the 30 year war, in

681
00:42:56,190 --> 00:43:02,030
1648, in 1945, there was another moment where people like in the Western world kind of

682
00:43:02,030 --> 00:43:03,870
said, like, this is not good.

683
00:43:04,030 --> 00:43:09,870
We need to, you know, we can't we can't think about society and the world in terms of

684
00:43:10,460 --> 00:43:16,380
racial groups being being in conflict with each other over land and resources,

685
00:43:16,540 --> 00:43:16,780
right?

686
00:43:16,940 --> 00:43:21,580
Which was which was a very, very important part of Nazi ideology, is that you have these

687
00:43:21,580 --> 00:43:23,740
groups of people, these races, uh, right?

688
00:43:23,820 --> 00:43:27,260
And there's the Aryan race, and there's the Jewish race, and there's the black race, and

689
00:43:27,260 --> 00:43:27,900
blah blah blah.

690
00:43:28,060 --> 00:43:29,820
And they are in conflict with each other, right?

691
00:43:29,980 --> 00:43:34,460
And if you want the Aryan race to do well, it needs to come at the expense of the others,

692
00:43:34,700 --> 00:43:35,020
right?

693
00:43:35,660 --> 00:43:39,020
Um, and that was a bad idea.

694
00:43:41,890 --> 00:43:47,410
It became extremely popular, unfortunately, for um between

695
00:43:47,410 --> 00:43:48,850
33 and 45.

696
00:43:49,410 --> 00:43:53,490
And it's still something that is very popular and easily reactivated, right?

697
00:43:53,650 --> 00:43:56,450
To say that you know Canadians.

698
00:43:59,700 --> 00:44:03,860
But still, the ultra-optimistic version of telling this story would be that after this,

699
00:44:04,020 --> 00:44:09,940
after after this huge catastrophe, people started to think that we

700
00:44:09,940 --> 00:44:15,940
need to build some sort of global institution, ideally global institutional framework that

701
00:44:15,940 --> 00:44:21,940
will allow more positive sum interactions, economic

702
00:44:21,940 --> 00:44:26,740
growth, and more widely shared wealth and well-being to happen.

703
00:44:27,060 --> 00:44:30,970
And this has been at least unusually successful, I would say.

704
00:44:31,130 --> 00:44:35,770
You know, in historical comparison, this has been quite surprisingly successful.

705
00:44:36,650 --> 00:44:41,530
Very far from perfect, of course, and very far from guaranteed that it will continue to

706
00:44:41,530 --> 00:44:44,490
happen, but uh but that's kind of how I would tell the story.

707
00:44:44,650 --> 00:44:50,570
And I mean, bad ideas and bad rules and bad institutions can stick around for

708
00:44:50,570 --> 00:44:52,660
an enormously long amount of time.

709
00:44:52,820 --> 00:44:57,780
Like footbinding was took a thousand years, and it's and it's that and it's the most

710
00:44:57,780 --> 00:45:03,700
bizarre, cruelest, most pointless idea you can even think of, right?

711
00:45:03,780 --> 00:45:05,220
And it took a thousand years.

712
00:45:05,540 --> 00:45:10,260
Probably some pervert in China a thousand years ago loved it, right?

713
00:45:10,420 --> 00:45:11,620
Some powerful pervert.

714
00:45:11,700 --> 00:45:16,100
And it made it stick and it like and it flowed through society, and people started doing

715
00:45:16,100 --> 00:45:17,460
it, um, and so on and so on.

716
00:45:17,540 --> 00:45:22,110
But when you think about it, it is extremely bizarre to like disable your wife cruelly, or

717
00:45:22,110 --> 00:45:25,390
to to your daughter, you know, uh uh cruelly.

718
00:45:25,630 --> 00:45:31,550
Um uh and and and and it's possible for these kim the philosopher Kim

719
00:45:31,550 --> 00:45:35,070
Sterelny calls these snafu, situation normal, all fucked up.

720
00:45:35,630 --> 00:45:41,550
Um there are these snafus in in in human society that evolve and then

721
00:45:41,550 --> 00:45:42,750
they're hard to get rid of.

722
00:45:43,070 --> 00:45:45,870
Think of genital mutilation, right?

723
00:45:46,270 --> 00:45:52,220
You know, there are there are people you know, pretty big groups of groups in in in in

724
00:45:52,220 --> 00:45:58,140
in East Africa and in so pr broadly that region that that just you know cut off

725
00:45:58,140 --> 00:46:02,940
young girls clitoris with with dirty with like a shard or something, right?

726
00:46:03,020 --> 00:46:04,620
Or or a rusty knife.

727
00:46:05,020 --> 00:46:08,220
It's a it's a terrible idea, right?

728
00:46:08,300 --> 00:46:10,700
It's like the it's like the worst idea I've ever heard.

729
00:46:10,870 --> 00:46:16,870
uh but it's it it's kind of evolved as a mutation and it sticks around and then you have

730
00:46:16,950 --> 00:46:20,950
and people are locked in this phenomenon that christina bicchieri called pluralistic

731
00:46:20,950 --> 00:46:25,190
ignorance so everyone thinks that you know the neighbor wants it and the neighbor thinks

732
00:46:25,190 --> 00:46:29,670
that you want it uh and it becomes very very hard to get rid of and that's unfortunately

733
00:46:29,830 --> 00:46:34,950
also how society works and so you can have a lot of bad stuff that's sticking around and

734
00:46:34,950 --> 00:46:37,990
that's and that's and that once you get rid of it you think like what were you what were

735
00:46:37,990 --> 00:46:41,640
you thinking Um, and it's it's bizarre, cruel, and pointless.

736
00:46:42,120 --> 00:46:42,360
Yeah.

737
00:46:42,680 --> 00:46:47,720
We we at the beginning of this, we talked about having uh strong opinions weekly held.

738
00:46:47,960 --> 00:46:51,880
Um, I'd like to offer one here, which is well, I want you to hold them weekly.

739
00:46:51,960 --> 00:46:53,080
My opinions are I'm gonna start.

740
00:46:53,320 --> 00:46:54,920
I'm holding it weekly, that's exactly what I'm doing.

741
00:46:55,000 --> 00:46:55,800
I'm prefacing this.

742
00:46:55,880 --> 00:46:59,080
So um and I'm curious what David thinks about this as well, because you guys have thought

743
00:46:59,080 --> 00:46:59,640
about this more.

744
00:46:59,720 --> 00:47:04,840
So we've talked about recently there's sort of we we now understand these these moral

745
00:47:04,840 --> 00:47:05,480
goods.

746
00:47:05,720 --> 00:47:11,310
Um I'm curious what you both think about the idea that we haven't learned

747
00:47:11,310 --> 00:47:12,190
anything.

748
00:47:13,150 --> 00:47:18,270
But there are just externalities of just dynamics that

749
00:47:19,950 --> 00:47:20,910
have consequences.

750
00:47:21,070 --> 00:47:26,110
So for example, let's say that we just we live in a society with no refrigerators and then

751
00:47:26,110 --> 00:47:27,310
we have refrigerators.

752
00:47:27,470 --> 00:47:32,460
We all turn around and look at each other and say, hey, we have a lot more food, and it's

753
00:47:32,460 --> 00:47:36,860
buffered against uh you know time um heat and time and whatever.

754
00:47:37,100 --> 00:47:39,260
And so maybe we're all more cooperative, right?

755
00:47:39,340 --> 00:47:43,900
So we look around and we say, look, we're not fighting as much, but the mechanism of that

756
00:47:43,900 --> 00:47:45,420
is like a refrigerator, right?

757
00:47:45,980 --> 00:47:47,180
So there's two separate things.

758
00:47:47,340 --> 00:47:48,540
One is how did we get there?

759
00:47:48,700 --> 00:47:50,060
What's the mechanism?

760
00:47:50,300 --> 00:47:54,050
And then the other one is the observation or the mean, the outcome, right?

761
00:47:54,130 --> 00:47:55,250
Like, oh, we've, you know.

762
00:47:55,410 --> 00:48:01,410
And so my w the thesis I want to argue for is that moral progress is a is

763
00:48:01,410 --> 00:48:06,770
a is the equivalent of noticing we all have more time and food, where

764
00:48:07,410 --> 00:48:12,130
we're looking around and saying, hey, look, like it's really good that you know, these

765
00:48:12,130 --> 00:48:17,760
people who were oppressed are not, but the means to get there have been sort of opaque.

766
00:48:17,920 --> 00:48:23,760
And the idea is that, I mean, for example, the idea that, you know, we're not um having

767
00:48:23,760 --> 00:48:29,600
slaves or we're not taking stuff from people in order to make money, one argument

768
00:48:29,600 --> 00:48:30,720
is that's still happening.

769
00:48:30,800 --> 00:48:31,920
It's just more hidden now.

770
00:48:32,000 --> 00:48:34,160
It's more economic, it's more regional.

771
00:48:34,400 --> 00:48:39,310
You know, there's still economic slavery, there's still regional things like that.

772
00:48:39,470 --> 00:48:44,350
And so what used to be done by nation states is now done by you know nation states in

773
00:48:44,350 --> 00:48:46,590
collaboration with like corporations or something.

774
00:48:46,750 --> 00:48:52,670
Um and uh and so the idea is that we we haven't changed our

775
00:48:52,670 --> 00:48:57,550
moral insight, and now we're checking will this behavior

776
00:48:58,190 --> 00:49:03,630
produce these negative externalities of coercion or manipulation or enslavement?

777
00:49:03,790 --> 00:49:04,670
We're not doing that.

778
00:49:04,830 --> 00:49:08,780
We were just looking around and being like, hey, look, there's a lot of slavery that

779
00:49:08,780 --> 00:49:09,660
doesn't exist anymore.

780
00:49:09,740 --> 00:49:14,380
There's a lot of um indentured servitude that doesn't exist anymore, but we're not looking

781
00:49:14,380 --> 00:49:16,220
for it going forward either.

782
00:49:16,460 --> 00:49:19,340
It's just that other shit happened.

783
00:49:19,500 --> 00:49:23,020
Um, uh, and as a consequence of that, it's gotten better.

784
00:49:23,180 --> 00:49:27,340
So this is this is a thesis, and again, I don't think I entirely believe it, but it has

785
00:49:27,340 --> 00:49:28,300
implications, right?

786
00:49:28,460 --> 00:49:33,830
The thesis is that moral progress is an outcome, but it's not the means to get there.

787
00:49:33,990 --> 00:49:39,910
And we don't, in most cases, even if we want to get there, there's an opacity about how

788
00:49:39,910 --> 00:49:40,310
to get there.

789
00:49:40,390 --> 00:49:46,230
And it's often weird things like refrigerators, not we should all stand around aiming to

790
00:49:46,230 --> 00:49:49,270
have more peaceful interactions, if that makes sense.

791
00:49:49,510 --> 00:49:49,830
Yeah.

792
00:49:49,910 --> 00:49:50,310
Yeah.

793
00:49:50,470 --> 00:49:56,460
So I would I I'm I mean I would love I

794
00:49:56,460 --> 00:49:59,580
would love to disagree with more but but but I think I'm pretty happy with that.

795
00:49:59,660 --> 00:50:03,180
So so I so there is a sense in which people don't get better.

796
00:50:03,900 --> 00:50:04,460
Right?

797
00:50:04,700 --> 00:50:09,820
And so I I'm I'm happy to I'm I'm I'm I'm happy to call myself a materialist.

798
00:50:10,060 --> 00:50:15,420
Um you know I think these changes are driven by stuff, technology.

799
00:50:16,090 --> 00:50:21,690
I also think a lot about human cognition and human interaction in terms of

800
00:50:21,690 --> 00:50:23,930
offloading things into your environment.

801
00:50:24,170 --> 00:50:24,490
Right.

802
00:50:24,810 --> 00:50:26,890
And that's where we store the knowledge.

803
00:50:27,210 --> 00:50:33,050
And by it's kind of trivially true that each generation starts afresh, right?

804
00:50:33,210 --> 00:50:38,680
You you know, babies come, Babies are Neanderthals, right?

805
00:50:38,760 --> 00:50:39,800
They are cavemen.

806
00:50:40,840 --> 00:50:42,600
And they don't know anything.

807
00:50:43,640 --> 00:50:49,240
And if you get rid of the refrigerators and the and the washing machines and the and the

808
00:50:49,240 --> 00:50:54,440
courts that maintain the rule of law and so on and so on, you revert back like that.

809
00:50:55,240 --> 00:50:57,480
So if if that's what you mean, I'm I'm on I'm on board with that.

810
00:50:57,560 --> 00:50:59,640
So it's not it's just not in our brains.

811
00:50:59,800 --> 00:51:05,030
It's like p p it's it's it's it's all offloaded into the

812
00:51:05,350 --> 00:51:06,070
environment.

813
00:51:06,230 --> 00:51:10,470
But I think that's we as a human species, that's what we're all about, right?

814
00:51:10,710 --> 00:51:15,670
So there is this nice research in cultural evolutionary theory about how a lot of our

815
00:51:15,750 --> 00:51:21,670
basically, you know, a lot of our physiology and our anatomy

816
00:51:21,670 --> 00:51:26,920
has been shaped by the fact that we externalized cooking, We externalized digestion into

817
00:51:26,920 --> 00:51:27,400
cooking.

818
00:51:27,640 --> 00:51:27,960
Right?

819
00:51:28,120 --> 00:51:31,240
So we are we are these super effeminate apes, right?

820
00:51:31,320 --> 00:51:33,880
We are these super like gay apes, right?

821
00:51:34,120 --> 00:51:39,880
These golden retriever kind of creatures that are sort of super super uh uh uh um um

822
00:51:40,440 --> 00:51:45,560
uh uh naked and and and and and and soft and weak.

823
00:51:45,690 --> 00:51:47,530
Um very grassile.

824
00:51:47,770 --> 00:51:48,810
We're very grassile, yes.

825
00:51:49,130 --> 00:51:49,370
Exactly.

826
00:51:49,530 --> 00:51:52,730
It's like we are like the ballet dancers of uh of apes.

827
00:51:53,050 --> 00:51:53,610
Yeah, it's interesting.

828
00:51:54,010 --> 00:51:55,610
Yeah, Neotnus were cute.

829
00:51:55,770 --> 00:52:01,610
I I I I me I just ballet dancers are pretty uh probab probably

830
00:52:01,690 --> 00:52:04,490
there was some fighting between Neanderthals and our and our ancestors.

831
00:52:04,570 --> 00:52:08,980
And I just imagine, you know, because humans basically look like Neotinous chimps.

832
00:52:09,140 --> 00:52:09,300
Yeah.

833
00:52:09,460 --> 00:52:13,540
You know, because we um the Neanderthals would have been basically having to fight against,

834
00:52:13,620 --> 00:52:14,660
you know, big babies.

835
00:52:14,820 --> 00:52:16,900
Like like their enemies would have been cute to them.

836
00:52:16,980 --> 00:52:20,340
You know, those big babies outsmarted them.

837
00:52:20,660 --> 00:52:20,980
Oh yeah.

838
00:52:21,540 --> 00:52:22,900
I just find that a very funny image.

839
00:52:23,620 --> 00:52:25,380
That's why we love the underdog story, right?

840
00:52:25,620 --> 00:52:28,260
That's where we're the um yes exactly.

841
00:52:28,580 --> 00:52:29,140
Anyway, continue.

842
00:52:29,460 --> 00:52:29,620
Sorry.

843
00:52:29,780 --> 00:52:31,620
We are very very we are extremely cute.

844
00:52:32,050 --> 00:52:38,050
Um, and you know, with small, useless jaws, uh, and very slender figure and so on and so

845
00:52:38,050 --> 00:52:43,330
on, just because we we offloaded all of that into you know chopping things, fermenting

846
00:52:43,330 --> 00:52:46,930
things, cooking things, making them soft, digestible, blah blah blah.

847
00:52:47,090 --> 00:52:52,370
And and that that that's basically the paradigm of how I think about human corporation and

848
00:52:52,370 --> 00:52:53,330
institutions as well.

849
00:52:53,490 --> 00:52:58,000
We offload all of that into our environment.

850
00:52:58,160 --> 00:53:04,080
Um I mean in the case of cooking we literally become you know dependent on it yeah so um it

851
00:53:04,320 --> 00:53:09,840
is this is this because this goes back so far um that we can't really do without it anymore

852
00:53:10,000 --> 00:53:14,800
with that technique and and no one no one no one does without it there's the you know all

853
00:53:14,800 --> 00:53:20,610
human cultures do that and care about it enormously um and

854
00:53:22,050 --> 00:53:26,050
the rules and structures and institutions of cooperation, I think, are kind of like that.

855
00:53:26,210 --> 00:53:27,890
They are features of the environment.

856
00:53:27,970 --> 00:53:33,970
They are in our cities, they are in our roads, in our buildings, in our laws,

857
00:53:34,530 --> 00:53:38,610
um, um and and and and we offload things into our environment.

858
00:53:38,690 --> 00:53:39,970
And that's what makes us work.

859
00:53:40,130 --> 00:53:45,560
And we are um we are uh we are the extended mind kind of species right so in philosophy

860
00:53:45,640 --> 00:53:51,480
there's this extended mind hypothesis is that the you know we are extremely unique in

861
00:53:51,560 --> 00:53:56,600
in in in in in offloading knowledge and skills and and

862
00:53:56,600 --> 00:54:02,360
abilities into our environment and that scaffolds our behavior and and our

863
00:54:02,600 --> 00:54:06,920
and our and our society and so uh I mean tell me if I'm wrong but that seems to be a way of

864
00:54:06,920 --> 00:54:10,810
like agreeing with you that I think I think there is a sense in which hum you know each and

865
00:54:10,810 --> 00:54:14,170
every human doesn't become better, and each and every generation doesn't, in some sense,

866
00:54:14,330 --> 00:54:15,930
internally become better.

867
00:54:16,170 --> 00:54:22,090
Um, it's just hopefully an increasingly an increasing amount of good

868
00:54:22,090 --> 00:54:27,690
ideas get offloaded into the environment, and and then hopefully not too many of them get

869
00:54:27,690 --> 00:54:31,600
destroyed as we pass them on from generation to to generation.

870
00:54:31,760 --> 00:54:34,640
But if you do destroy them, it can be very hard to get them back.

871
00:54:35,360 --> 00:54:39,040
And it can take a very, very long time because, like you said, we don't really understand

872
00:54:39,040 --> 00:54:39,840
where it came from.

873
00:54:39,920 --> 00:54:41,920
We and we we and people didn't invent.

874
00:54:42,080 --> 00:54:48,080
I think there's actually a lot of serious research on how women's rights were aided by the

875
00:54:48,080 --> 00:54:49,120
washing machine.

876
00:54:49,360 --> 00:54:49,680
Right.

877
00:54:50,000 --> 00:54:53,590
But of course, the inventors of the washing machine, they couldn't care less about that.

878
00:54:54,550 --> 00:54:57,990
They were capitalist pigs that wanted to make money.

879
00:54:58,630 --> 00:55:04,550
But they it had this this this this side effect, like you said, of just like creating more

880
00:55:04,550 --> 00:55:06,630
food and time, so to speak.

881
00:55:06,710 --> 00:55:11,750
And then people start demanding, oh, uh by the way, you know, uh we should be we we should

882
00:55:11,830 --> 00:55:13,830
we we we we should we should be able to vote.

883
00:55:13,990 --> 00:55:19,760
Um and and people recognize like, yeah, that's probably after a lot of struggle and a lot

884
00:55:19,760 --> 00:55:24,000
of strife, people you know, some some amount of people recognizes that that's probably a

885
00:55:24,000 --> 00:55:25,680
defensible idea and so on and so on and so on.

886
00:55:26,000 --> 00:55:28,880
Um but that's that that's that's that I I agree with that.

887
00:55:29,040 --> 00:55:33,760
If moral progress happens, it happens almost entirely outside of our heads.

888
00:55:33,920 --> 00:55:37,520
And it's like externalizing our d digestive system.

889
00:55:37,680 --> 00:55:42,960
We've externalized cooperation into these structures and and institutions, and that's what

890
00:55:42,960 --> 00:55:43,600
makes them fly.

891
00:55:43,950 --> 00:55:44,830
Yeah, I agree with that.

892
00:55:44,910 --> 00:55:49,470
And I think to rephrase or to just paraphrase what you're saying to make sure I understand

893
00:55:49,470 --> 00:55:53,310
it, it's sort of that we're codependent as a species.

894
00:55:53,470 --> 00:55:57,630
We're the codes dependent species on the environment or the external structures.

895
00:55:58,030 --> 00:56:02,190
And that in in some sense, and I think this is even what you're saying, helps me clarify

896
00:56:02,270 --> 00:56:07,790
what I think my point was, is almost there's a tolerated scrounging sense of moral

897
00:56:07,790 --> 00:56:13,220
progress, which is it usually is the case that everybody wants more

898
00:56:13,220 --> 00:56:17,540
morality for themselves in the sense of more rights, less exploitation.

899
00:56:17,780 --> 00:56:18,100
Yeah.

900
00:56:18,340 --> 00:56:24,260
And if the circumstances allow it, people will say, All right, I'll give you more

901
00:56:24,340 --> 00:56:26,580
if it doesn't really blow back on me too much.

902
00:56:26,740 --> 00:56:32,260
So it's this tolerated scrounging idea of um I'll sort of I'm not

903
00:56:32,260 --> 00:56:33,770
gonna fight for it.

904
00:56:33,930 --> 00:56:37,690
I mean, I obviously there's wonderful exceptions and uh but I just mean it's a general

905
00:56:37,690 --> 00:56:38,410
dynamic.

906
00:56:38,650 --> 00:56:44,570
In aggregate, you'll if I'm okay and you're gonna get better, that's okay with me and

907
00:56:44,570 --> 00:56:49,850
I'll kind of tolerate and but but the means to it is this very ethereal,

908
00:56:50,090 --> 00:56:52,970
codependent, uh nonlinear thing.

909
00:56:53,130 --> 00:56:53,530
Yeah.

910
00:56:54,240 --> 00:56:54,400
Yeah.

911
00:56:54,640 --> 00:56:54,800
Yeah.

912
00:56:54,880 --> 00:56:58,320
And and and yeah, I I like this perspective a lot.

913
00:56:58,480 --> 00:57:03,120
Um you could think of it as a, you know, emergent moral progress or Hayekian moral progress

914
00:57:03,200 --> 00:57:05,520
where it's not anyone's, you know, it's not centrally planned.

915
00:57:05,600 --> 00:57:09,440
It just kind of emerges spontaneously through interactions and ecological changes.

916
00:57:09,600 --> 00:57:13,840
And we mentioned one of the biggest ecological changes, which was, you know, in the

917
00:57:13,840 --> 00:57:18,410
agricultural era, you know, uh it it really mattered, you know, how much land you had.

918
00:57:18,490 --> 00:57:23,290
You know, agriculturally productive land was the thing to have if you wanted to have

919
00:57:23,290 --> 00:57:24,250
resources, right?

920
00:57:24,570 --> 00:57:30,090
Uh and unfortunately, agriculturally productive land is a limited resource that can be

921
00:57:30,090 --> 00:57:35,370
monopolized and defended with a group of thugs with swords or spears or whatever.

922
00:57:35,610 --> 00:57:35,770
Yeah.

923
00:57:35,930 --> 00:57:39,530
And so the entire economic system was inherently zero sum.

924
00:57:39,770 --> 00:57:41,530
It was who had the land, right?

925
00:57:41,690 --> 00:57:41,930
Yeah.

926
00:57:42,170 --> 00:57:47,180
And uh eventually the value of productive land became so high that you know, whoever just

927
00:57:47,180 --> 00:57:51,660
happened to be sitting on the land, you know, uh a long time ago became the king and they

928
00:57:51,660 --> 00:57:54,780
just got to boss everyone around because they were sitting on the land, you know, a hundred

929
00:57:54,780 --> 00:57:55,740
years ago, right?

930
00:57:55,900 --> 00:57:56,220
Yeah.

931
00:57:56,380 --> 00:57:59,660
Um, and and and war just became about seizing land.

932
00:57:59,900 --> 00:58:00,140
Yeah.

933
00:58:00,300 --> 00:58:03,740
And and and and it was kind of inescapably zero sum just because of the nature of the

934
00:58:03,740 --> 00:58:06,700
ecology uh uh and and the economic system.

935
00:58:06,940 --> 00:58:12,830
But then gradually uh we began to create new resources that w uh moved

936
00:58:12,830 --> 00:58:16,110
above and beyond simply agriculturally productive land.

937
00:58:16,270 --> 00:58:20,110
We began to uh invent ideas about how to make the land more productive.

938
00:58:20,190 --> 00:58:23,870
You know, ideas aren't really monopolizable in the same way as a patch of land is.

939
00:58:24,030 --> 00:58:28,750
We began to invent new products and new goods and services, uh and the creation of those

940
00:58:28,750 --> 00:58:32,750
things could very much grow the pie for everyone without you know excluding other people

941
00:58:32,750 --> 00:58:33,070
from the pie.

942
00:58:33,310 --> 00:58:38,800
So there was just a a a massive change in the ecology and the economic structure

943
00:58:39,120 --> 00:58:42,640
that I I think is is underlying what we call moral progress.

944
00:58:42,800 --> 00:58:47,440
It just it you know the the the economy itself became less zero sum and the gains from

945
00:58:47,440 --> 00:58:50,800
cooperation and positive sum relationship just exploded.

946
00:58:50,960 --> 00:58:56,240
Um and and and what we call moral progress, I think, is is people gradually like adjusting

947
00:58:56,240 --> 00:59:02,080
to that new ecology and waking up to all of the past arbitrary, cruel practices

948
00:59:02,080 --> 00:59:05,760
that they had to live with, but but now all of a sudden became optional.

949
00:59:06,000 --> 00:59:06,240
Yeah.

950
00:59:06,400 --> 00:59:08,410
Uh and and you know, here we are.

951
00:59:08,650 --> 00:59:14,490
Yeah, and that's why that uh again that that's why it's so just frustrating to

952
00:59:15,930 --> 00:59:21,370
to see like you have the literally the lit literally literally the largest country in the

953
00:59:21,370 --> 00:59:27,210
world and the and its leaders say you know what we should be larger right

954
00:59:27,610 --> 00:59:33,530
uh and and that's so important that um it is worth sending a

955
00:59:33,530 --> 00:59:36,220
million young men to perish, Right?

956
00:59:36,780 --> 00:59:39,980
That makes me bad.

957
00:59:40,300 --> 00:59:40,620
Right?

958
00:59:40,860 --> 00:59:45,580
Because because it's it's it is obsolete.

959
00:59:46,380 --> 00:59:46,860
Right?

960
00:59:47,100 --> 00:59:52,860
This it's based on something where you realized maybe used to be

961
00:59:52,860 --> 00:59:56,460
true thousand years ago when that situation obtained that you described, right?

962
00:59:56,540 --> 00:59:57,980
Where you had to have the land.

963
00:59:58,220 --> 00:59:58,540
Yeah.

964
00:59:58,910 --> 01:00:04,750
But now you can just you know you can just share it and trade and and and and

965
01:00:04,830 --> 01:00:09,230
you know and and and that and this so this is literally sabotage, I think.

966
01:00:09,550 --> 01:00:15,310
Um uh sabotage of potential gains um with enormous costs um

967
01:00:15,470 --> 01:00:21,220
um for for some weird well historical obsession

968
01:00:21,540 --> 01:00:24,900
with Vlad the Impaler, or I don't even know.

969
01:00:25,060 --> 01:00:25,380
Right?

970
01:00:25,540 --> 01:00:28,900
Um, uh, that that makes me incredibly annoyed.

971
01:00:29,220 --> 01:00:33,460
Um because it's it's just we know that's not the way.

972
01:00:34,180 --> 01:00:34,500
Right?

973
01:00:34,660 --> 01:00:39,540
And it took such a long time, and like you said, it's so precarious and so unlikely to even

974
01:00:39,540 --> 01:00:41,540
realize that at all, right?

975
01:00:41,940 --> 01:00:47,550
Uh uh that now that we in principle at least

976
01:00:47,710 --> 01:00:49,630
have realized that that's possible.

977
01:00:49,710 --> 01:00:55,470
Um it's it's very very frustrating to to see these like group needless group conflicts

978
01:00:56,270 --> 01:01:01,070
reactivated and and for for for political gain for for

979
01:01:01,630 --> 01:01:07,390
votes um for financial gain for clicks um and for um

980
01:01:07,390 --> 01:01:11,390
weird obsessions um and it's it's

981
01:01:13,320 --> 01:01:18,840
And I think these ide these these insights and ideas and these institutions that make

982
01:01:19,640 --> 01:01:25,640
um positive some interactions that in principle can improve the well being of more and more

983
01:01:25,640 --> 01:01:30,760
people involved, it's it's these insights and institutions are really worth

984
01:01:30,760 --> 01:01:31,720
defending.

985
01:01:32,280 --> 01:01:35,800
And that is a sort of like

986
01:01:38,190 --> 01:01:43,950
Small p progressive point of view, in that sort of like it's like a long-term progressivism

987
01:01:44,030 --> 01:01:44,350
in that.

988
01:01:44,430 --> 01:01:47,630
It's like, let's think about it in terms of centuries, right?

989
01:01:47,710 --> 01:01:53,710
And you see that by and large, not killing each other on the basis

990
01:01:53,710 --> 01:01:59,070
of weird group conflicts is probably a good idea.

991
01:01:59,470 --> 01:02:05,310
Um and um and that is yeah, that is that is that is what moral progress largely consists

992
01:02:05,310 --> 01:02:11,080
in, and then all the rest of it kind of drops out that, you know, more it it's it's gonna

993
01:02:11,080 --> 01:02:15,560
be slightly more egalitarian because if you want to have larger groups, you know, there's

994
01:02:15,560 --> 01:02:20,120
gonna be pressure to admit people into this franchise on sort of equal terms, right?

995
01:02:20,280 --> 01:02:24,600
And it's gonna be in and uh treatment of children is gonna become better, treatment of

996
01:02:25,720 --> 01:02:31,610
minorities is gonna become better, frustratingly slow and imperfectly and with setbacks

997
01:02:31,690 --> 01:02:33,210
and and so on and so on and so on.

998
01:02:33,290 --> 01:02:37,370
But in principle, I think that's the functional dynamic, kind of like pulls in that

999
01:02:37,370 --> 01:02:37,690
direction.

1000
01:02:37,930 --> 01:02:38,170
Hope.

1001
01:02:38,330 --> 01:02:38,970
I hope.

1002
01:02:39,370 --> 01:02:40,810
And I hope it'll continue to do so.

1003
01:02:41,530 --> 01:02:45,770
It's almost like you're saying that like this this huge ecological and economic change and

1004
01:02:45,770 --> 01:02:47,050
transformation that we've undergone.

1005
01:02:47,130 --> 01:02:49,680
Like we're we're still sort of catching up to it.

1006
01:02:49,840 --> 01:02:51,520
Like we still haven't quite fully adjusted.

1007
01:02:51,680 --> 01:02:56,880
And we're still having cultural atavisms where we're uh acting as if we still lived in a

1008
01:02:56,880 --> 01:03:01,120
world where the where land was a zero sum resource and you know, if whoever has the most

1009
01:03:01,120 --> 01:03:01,760
land wins.

1010
01:03:01,920 --> 01:03:06,320
You know, you could you could view, you know, the the recent war on Ukraine as a kind of

1011
01:03:06,320 --> 01:03:10,800
cultural atavism where like Putin is acting, he's like a man from the 17th century that's

1012
01:03:10,960 --> 01:03:15,920
that happens to be in the in the present era, and he's acting under the logic of a man from

1013
01:03:15,920 --> 01:03:16,960
the 17th century.

1014
01:03:17,210 --> 01:03:17,450
Yeah.

1015
01:03:17,610 --> 01:03:18,970
Uh and he's just out of place.

1016
01:03:19,050 --> 01:03:23,930
It's just kinda like he hasn't woken up to the fact that hey, um uh this we're no longer in

1017
01:03:23,930 --> 01:03:25,610
a world where whoever has the most land wins.

1018
01:03:25,850 --> 01:03:26,250
Yeah, yeah.

1019
01:03:26,330 --> 01:03:30,090
You and I think you can you you can you you can view Israel Palestine as a very complicated

1020
01:03:30,090 --> 01:03:33,690
issue, but in principle that's how I see this as like this should be happening.

1021
01:03:33,850 --> 01:03:34,170
Yeah.

1022
01:03:34,330 --> 01:03:34,650
Right?

1023
01:03:34,810 --> 01:03:40,440
Uh um uh I mean, I don't think this this this you know part of the world is that

1024
01:03:40,440 --> 01:03:44,920
desirable to begin with, but if you want it, right, you you could you could share it,

1025
01:03:45,000 --> 01:03:45,240
right?

1026
01:03:45,320 --> 01:03:50,360
You if you think about it long term, like um uh or or whatever, you know, we need

1027
01:03:50,360 --> 01:03:50,840
Greenland.

1028
01:03:50,920 --> 01:03:52,120
It's just so silly.

1029
01:03:52,440 --> 01:03:52,840
Yeah.

1030
01:03:54,200 --> 01:04:00,040
I I think there's a more pessimistic take on David's articulation though, which is

1031
01:04:00,040 --> 01:04:04,520
that I like I agree that I get angry when people do this atavism.

1032
01:04:05,000 --> 01:04:06,440
Let's get stuff.

1033
01:04:07,330 --> 01:04:12,450
But on the idea that we haven't learned anything, or if we do, it's it's a it's a

1034
01:04:12,450 --> 01:04:17,890
narrative of within the range that the circumstances are allowing, there's this

1035
01:04:17,890 --> 01:04:19,490
tolerated moral progress.

1036
01:04:19,810 --> 01:04:21,090
And I agree with that.

1037
01:04:21,170 --> 01:04:23,170
I mean, uh as a person, of course I do.

1038
01:04:23,250 --> 01:04:29,170
Like, of course, we should fight for um rights and uh moral progress, and

1039
01:04:29,680 --> 01:04:35,200
within the range of what is explicitly representable and

1040
01:04:35,200 --> 01:04:36,880
negotiable, it has huge effects.

1041
01:04:36,960 --> 01:04:40,160
There's no, there's enormous history, historical record of that.

1042
01:04:40,400 --> 01:04:45,920
But I think the argument would be the pessimistic one would be that it's no surprise that

1043
01:04:45,920 --> 01:04:50,240
there's somebody who's always being like, let's just attack those guys, or like, let's get

1044
01:04:50,240 --> 01:04:50,880
more land.

1045
01:04:51,610 --> 01:04:54,410
because, like you said, people don't change.

1046
01:04:54,490 --> 01:04:58,090
And people are just always throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks.

1047
01:04:58,250 --> 01:04:58,490
Yeah.

1048
01:04:58,650 --> 01:05:04,650
And the scary thing then is that no matter how much moral progress there is, it's

1049
01:05:04,650 --> 01:05:07,850
not an inevitable improvement.

1050
01:05:08,010 --> 01:05:11,370
It's just a description of what we've gotten to so far.

1051
01:05:11,930 --> 01:05:17,600
It's not because we've it's it's a counterenlightenment argument, which is that it's great

1052
01:05:17,600 --> 01:05:22,480
that people have these values and ideals, or as to put in David's language, it's ideology,

1053
01:05:22,720 --> 01:05:27,120
but it's not that it's ideology then determines the future outcomes.

1054
01:05:27,360 --> 01:05:32,560
It's that everybody's trying to get status, everybody's trying to get resources, and then

1055
01:05:32,560 --> 01:05:35,040
there's this tolerated scrounging for morality.

1056
01:05:35,200 --> 01:05:41,070
And that's a very different prognosis because then the argument is we

1057
01:05:41,070 --> 01:05:46,350
assume that it's all gonna go away and we have to think carefully about which status

1058
01:05:46,350 --> 01:05:51,710
schemes are gonna produce which externalities and which moral externalities, and that we

1059
01:05:51,710 --> 01:05:54,110
haven't learned that it's bad to exploit people.

1060
01:05:54,270 --> 01:05:58,880
We haven't learned that slavery is wrong, we we haven't learned that war is wrong.

1061
01:05:58,960 --> 01:06:00,080
It just looks different.

1062
01:06:00,240 --> 01:06:02,960
It's hidden, but we haven't learned anything.

1063
01:06:03,040 --> 01:06:05,200
And I think that's a very different prognosis.

1064
01:06:05,360 --> 01:06:10,720
It's a very pauper point, which is like the point of the social sciences is to study the

1065
01:06:10,880 --> 01:06:14,080
unintended consequences of policies.

1066
01:06:14,320 --> 01:06:18,880
Um, it's one that is sort of like we are all horrible and we're letting horrible things

1067
01:06:18,880 --> 01:06:22,160
happen, and we only want to know insofar as it affects us.

1068
01:06:22,320 --> 01:06:27,090
That's that I think is the most pessimistic view, that we haven't learned any moral

1069
01:06:27,090 --> 01:06:29,810
progress, and we're just we just like to think we have.

1070
01:06:29,970 --> 01:06:32,050
Yeah, there's a market to buy that idea.

1071
01:06:32,210 --> 01:06:35,410
Um, I don't again, I don't know if I agree with that idea, but I think that's the most

1072
01:06:35,410 --> 01:06:37,490
pessimistic um argument.

1073
01:06:37,730 --> 01:06:42,050
And it's the one with the responsibility of saying everything we're doing, we should be

1074
01:06:42,050 --> 01:06:46,050
kind of constantly checking for what externalities is what we're doing causing.

1075
01:06:46,450 --> 01:06:46,850
Yeah, yeah.

1076
01:06:46,930 --> 01:06:50,700
I mean, to some extent, it seems to me like we need to do like a minute of like in

1077
01:06:50,700 --> 01:06:54,620
philosophy people sometimes say semantic ascent, where you sort of like let's talk about

1078
01:06:54,620 --> 01:06:57,340
the word learning first, and then we can agree or disagree.

1079
01:06:57,500 --> 01:06:57,820
Exactly.

1080
01:06:57,900 --> 01:07:00,700
Um depends a little bit on what we mean by learning.

1081
01:07:00,780 --> 01:07:04,380
Yeah, so I I I I yeah, and there is a there is a sense in which we haven't learned that

1082
01:07:04,380 --> 01:07:05,180
slavery is bad.

1083
01:07:05,260 --> 01:07:05,580
Yeah.

1084
01:07:05,740 --> 01:07:07,820
Uh but but but there is another sense in which we have.

1085
01:07:07,980 --> 01:07:08,060
Correct.

1086
01:07:08,380 --> 01:07:14,380
Uh so you so yeah, uh, but but but in the in the first sense, I'm I'm happy to to to

1087
01:07:14,460 --> 01:07:16,700
to to to totally concede that point to you.

1088
01:07:17,020 --> 01:07:22,630
Um We have built an external environment and a new

1089
01:07:22,630 --> 01:07:28,630
ecology that has allowed a thriving economy without

1090
01:07:28,630 --> 01:07:29,350
slavery.

1091
01:07:29,910 --> 01:07:35,910
I mean, I I like to I like to point out to people that Aristotle, he he he,

1092
01:07:35,990 --> 01:07:41,990
you know, by seen by many as the greatest mind ever produced by

1093
01:07:42,310 --> 01:07:43,320
by humanity.

1094
01:07:43,560 --> 01:07:45,880
Maybe not by me, but it's a you know it's a strong contender.

1095
01:07:46,280 --> 01:07:46,760
He was fine.

1096
01:07:46,840 --> 01:07:47,320
He was fine.

1097
01:07:48,680 --> 01:07:49,160
C plus.

1098
01:07:49,880 --> 01:07:55,400
And and he he he you know his book on on human society uh and uh you know the

1099
01:07:55,400 --> 01:08:01,320
politics it it's it's the f on the first page he says okay first of

1100
01:08:01,320 --> 01:08:02,840
all you gotta have slaves.

1101
01:08:03,000 --> 01:08:03,400
Yeah.

1102
01:08:03,610 --> 01:08:03,930
Right?

1103
01:08:04,490 --> 01:08:07,690
He couldn't even, you know, who who else is gonna do the labor?

1104
01:08:07,930 --> 01:08:08,090
Yeah.

1105
01:08:08,650 --> 01:08:12,090
There's just no concept, there's no understanding of um.

1106
01:08:14,250 --> 01:08:18,650
And so we've we we've we've you know

1107
01:08:18,890 --> 01:08:24,810
fortuitously stumbled upon a set of institutions that make slavery.

1108
01:08:26,520 --> 01:08:28,520
not advantageous anymore.

1109
01:08:28,760 --> 01:08:32,440
Um it's not a good way of running an economy.

1110
01:08:32,600 --> 01:08:37,160
Again, it's it's it's good, it's good, you know, it it it it's advantageous for the slave

1111
01:08:37,160 --> 01:08:38,360
owners, right?

1112
01:08:38,520 --> 01:08:41,240
Uh for for the individual plantation owners.

1113
01:08:41,400 --> 01:08:43,160
That was a good deal, right?

1114
01:08:43,560 --> 01:08:49,080
Um, but it's overall not a good way of running a society and of making a society

1115
01:08:49,470 --> 01:08:54,430
rich, and it's I mean, not even not not to not even to speak of, of course, of the slaves,

1116
01:08:54,590 --> 01:08:54,910
right?

1117
01:08:54,990 --> 01:08:56,910
Uh uh for whom it's not good.

1118
01:08:57,230 --> 01:09:02,750
Um, but yeah, so in that second sense, we learned as a society that it's that

1119
01:09:02,750 --> 01:09:08,110
it's a bad idea and that you shouldn't treat people like that.

1120
01:09:08,270 --> 01:09:12,670
But yeah, I'm I'm I'm very much a sort of like the the owl of Minerva is starting its

1121
01:09:12,670 --> 01:09:14,590
flight at dusk kind of person.

1122
01:09:14,750 --> 01:09:18,750
So you have these material changes first, and then the intellectual grasping comes later,

1123
01:09:18,940 --> 01:09:19,180
Right.

1124
01:09:19,340 --> 01:09:22,860
And then you c and then you dress it up in in in in nice sounding terms.

1125
01:09:22,940 --> 01:09:27,580
This is going to be, you know, very, very uh agreeable to you, David.

1126
01:09:27,820 --> 01:09:31,500
You know, dress it up in these moral terms that, oh, you know, don't we all know?

1127
01:09:31,580 --> 01:09:36,780
And so, but but much of that is sort of like epiphenomenal, perhaps, or or after-the-facts

1128
01:09:36,860 --> 01:09:41,660
or rationalizations of stuff that already happened and that has now become easy for you to

1129
01:09:41,660 --> 01:09:46,570
agree with, Still think these this is this is not to undermine these ideas, but uh but I

1130
01:09:46,570 --> 01:09:52,330
think um I think the sort of like um the internal learning of these

1131
01:09:52,330 --> 01:09:53,770
ideas is very flimsy.

1132
01:09:54,010 --> 01:09:54,330
Yeah.

1133
01:09:54,730 --> 01:09:56,410
And very and very revertible.

1134
01:09:56,890 --> 01:09:57,450
It's interesting.

1135
01:09:57,530 --> 01:10:03,370
There's a more optimistic spin you could put on this, where maybe uh on some level

1136
01:10:03,450 --> 01:10:06,680
we always knew that slavery was abhorrent, right?

1137
01:10:07,080 --> 01:10:12,920
Um and the very reason why we had all of these elaborate rationalizations and

1138
01:10:12,920 --> 01:10:18,520
justifications and ideologies uh to make us more comfortable with slavery

1139
01:10:18,760 --> 01:10:21,160
suggests that we were on some level uncomfortable with it.

1140
01:10:21,320 --> 01:10:24,520
Like we wouldn't have needed all of these rationalizations.

1141
01:10:24,950 --> 01:10:29,270
It would have just been the yeah, slavery, yeah, uh they they can do stuff for me.

1142
01:10:29,350 --> 01:10:32,870
I can force them to do that with violence, and I'm just gonna do that because that's good

1143
01:10:32,870 --> 01:10:35,190
for me and that sucks for them, and they're no different from me.

1144
01:10:35,270 --> 01:10:38,790
But you know, I'm a selfish person and I'm just gonna exploit them and dominate them.

1145
01:10:38,870 --> 01:10:41,670
And that's yeah, that could have been the way we talked about slavery, yeah.

1146
01:10:41,910 --> 01:10:43,030
But it very much wasn't.

1147
01:10:43,190 --> 01:10:47,670
There was this huge tapestry of uh of rationalizations, you know.

1148
01:10:47,750 --> 01:10:53,000
In in you know, uh primarily it was rationalized in terms of war where you know

1149
01:10:53,160 --> 01:10:55,160
slavery is better than dying.

1150
01:10:55,320 --> 01:10:59,400
So it seems like, hey, it's a nice thing to do to give someone the option of being your

1151
01:10:59,400 --> 01:11:00,440
slave as opposed to killing them.

1152
01:11:00,680 --> 01:11:04,120
Oh, what a nice guy I am that I'm conquering this land and I'm, you know, letting these

1153
01:11:04,120 --> 01:11:05,320
people live and be my slave.

1154
01:11:05,480 --> 01:11:09,160
So like that that was like one rationalization that emerged and it was very common.

1155
01:11:09,560 --> 01:11:13,960
And then eventually, once slavery became so productive agriculturally, we needed a new

1156
01:11:13,960 --> 01:11:17,970
rationalization because we were no longer getting slavery or slaves from war.

1157
01:11:18,130 --> 01:11:19,970
We were just going and taking them, right?

1158
01:11:20,210 --> 01:11:21,650
To make us more more productive.

1159
01:11:21,730 --> 01:11:23,010
And we need a new rationalization.

1160
01:11:23,170 --> 01:11:27,890
And then emerged the the uh the the white supremacist rationalization of slavery, where

1161
01:11:27,890 --> 01:11:32,610
they're they were savages, uh, they uh they um they they live in a very primitive, horrible

1162
01:11:32,610 --> 01:11:32,930
lifestyle.

1163
01:11:33,010 --> 01:11:36,050
We're doing them a favor, you know, they're they're inferior to us, and then you know, and

1164
01:11:36,450 --> 01:11:39,330
when we're they're when they're serving us, they they're really they're living their best

1165
01:11:39,330 --> 01:11:39,570
lives.

1166
01:11:39,650 --> 01:11:43,170
So we're doing them a favor, and you know, a new set of rationalizations emerged.

1167
01:11:43,320 --> 01:11:47,800
But the fact that at every step of the way we needed rationalizations suggests that we were

1168
01:11:47,800 --> 01:11:49,240
uncomfortable with it, you know?

1169
01:11:49,560 --> 01:11:53,880
And we were wort wary of other people judging us as being domineering assholes.

1170
01:11:53,960 --> 01:11:57,480
And we needed some kind of story to tell them for us to look good.

1171
01:11:57,720 --> 01:11:58,120
Right?

1172
01:11:58,360 --> 01:12:03,160
And so what happened was that just the material incentives and the and and the game

1173
01:12:03,240 --> 01:12:09,170
theoretic equilibria changed to a point where slavery no longer made

1174
01:12:09,170 --> 01:12:10,210
economic sense.

1175
01:12:10,770 --> 01:12:16,210
It was no longer sustainable to have this apparatus of of slavery underway.

1176
01:12:16,370 --> 01:12:21,250
And all of a sudden like the discomfort that had been there the whole time just started to

1177
01:12:21,250 --> 01:12:21,490
win.

1178
01:12:21,810 --> 01:12:24,210
And then the rationalizations started to lose.

1179
01:12:24,450 --> 01:12:24,770
Yeah.

1180
01:12:26,050 --> 01:12:28,610
So maybe that's a more optimistic spin on it.

1181
01:12:29,090 --> 01:12:29,570
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1182
01:12:29,650 --> 01:12:29,970
That's great.

1183
01:12:30,130 --> 01:12:30,450
That's great.

1184
01:12:30,530 --> 01:12:36,520
And I also think that often when we look at practices uh from the past, they seem

1185
01:12:36,520 --> 01:12:39,480
abhorrent to us, but they are really just intermediate stages.

1186
01:12:39,800 --> 01:12:40,120
Right.

1187
01:12:40,280 --> 01:12:45,400
So often you have this example that's mentioned that, you know, um in

1188
01:12:45,400 --> 01:12:51,000
biblical times, uh an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and then people say, Oh, how

1189
01:12:51,000 --> 01:12:52,680
cruel uh that is.

1190
01:12:52,840 --> 01:12:58,070
They shouldn't you know, um what a what a what what a what a what a what a vengeful way to

1191
01:12:58,070 --> 01:13:00,630
think about justice and punishment and so on and so on.

1192
01:13:00,790 --> 01:13:06,550
But really this was huge progress compared to you know just you know

1193
01:13:07,270 --> 01:13:11,510
ultraviolent feuding between groups of people.

1194
01:13:11,670 --> 01:13:17,590
It was it was some taming of a village for it was it was exactly against a

1195
01:13:17,590 --> 01:13:18,470
village for an eye.

1196
01:13:18,860 --> 01:13:19,100
Exactly.

1197
01:13:19,180 --> 01:13:24,780
And so Philip Kitcher has this nice example where there used to be a rule in

1198
01:13:25,260 --> 01:13:30,540
one of these tribes from Mesopotamia, I believe, that but that's you know, if if if if if

1199
01:13:30,540 --> 01:13:34,300
you rape my daughter, I as a matter of justice, I get to rape your daughter.

1200
01:13:34,540 --> 01:13:34,860
Right?

1201
01:13:35,420 --> 01:13:40,060
It was just kind of like this is kind of symmetrical in a in a weird primitive way, right?

1202
01:13:40,140 --> 01:13:43,350
There's something equal about that.

1203
01:13:43,430 --> 01:13:49,350
But it's a very, very primitive and and I I wouldn't

1204
01:13:49,350 --> 01:13:54,390
say childish, but arithmetic way of thinking about

1205
01:13:54,870 --> 01:13:55,430
justice.

1206
01:13:55,670 --> 01:13:55,830
Right?

1207
01:13:55,910 --> 01:13:58,150
It's sort of like you do the same thing to them.

1208
01:13:58,470 --> 01:13:59,110
Right?

1209
01:13:59,350 --> 01:14:03,750
Um and and that was replaced by rules that were somewhat better.

1210
01:14:03,910 --> 01:14:09,820
But more progress is this thing that you know happens you know, cumulatively, and

1211
01:14:09,820 --> 01:14:13,020
you can't you can't build a you can't build an engine right away.

1212
01:14:13,180 --> 01:14:18,060
First you need a wheel, and then you need, you know, gears, and you know, you need to you

1213
01:14:18,060 --> 01:14:20,220
need to you know build it up over over time.

1214
01:14:20,300 --> 01:14:26,140
And so you can't have, you know, fully progressive egalitarian world right away, even

1215
01:14:26,140 --> 01:14:30,060
if some of the dispositions you already have, they were kind of already there, right?

1216
01:14:30,220 --> 01:14:34,690
Everyone has some aversion to causing suffering, like a little bit at least, right?

1217
01:14:34,770 --> 01:14:35,090
Yeah.

1218
01:14:35,170 --> 01:14:39,490
Um, that can be that can be recruited for good ends, but it can also be overridden.

1219
01:14:39,970 --> 01:14:45,810
Um, and then maybe people said, you know, slavery is fine because for the longest time,

1220
01:14:45,970 --> 01:14:49,810
when you won the war, you kill all the men and you rape all the women, right?

1221
01:14:50,050 --> 01:14:52,610
That's what that used to be the thing that people that people do.

1222
01:14:53,090 --> 01:14:56,200
When you when you win against a group, all the men get killed, right?

1223
01:14:56,520 --> 01:15:01,240
So it could it could have felt humane at the time to think like, oh no, um, you know, we we

1224
01:15:01,320 --> 01:15:03,480
could we we're just gonna you know make them work for us.

1225
01:15:03,720 --> 01:15:09,640
And and um and so people came up with these rationalizations that made it

1226
01:15:09,720 --> 01:15:12,440
mal made it palatable um to them.

1227
01:15:12,600 --> 01:15:17,160
And also people try to just be a little bit better than than than than than they used to be

1228
01:15:17,240 --> 01:15:19,170
or than their parents used to be, right?

1229
01:15:20,450 --> 01:15:23,170
We don't really strive to be morally optimal.

1230
01:15:23,890 --> 01:15:28,450
We strive to be morally slightly better than average.

1231
01:15:28,770 --> 01:15:29,090
Yeah.

1232
01:15:29,330 --> 01:15:29,730
Right?

1233
01:15:30,530 --> 01:15:34,850
And and and then that and that that's what then that's what you get when you when you when

1234
01:15:34,850 --> 01:15:38,450
you have that motivation is like my parents used to kill everyone, so I'm just gonna keep

1235
01:15:38,450 --> 01:15:39,330
them round as slaves.

1236
01:15:39,410 --> 01:15:42,450
And you convince yourself that you're really good and noble and peaceful.

1237
01:15:42,610 --> 01:15:47,810
And so I think that can also um happen and what and which which which but it I mean

1238
01:15:49,100 --> 01:15:53,180
I I'm very far from defending slavery, but when you when you look at it this long term,

1239
01:15:53,260 --> 01:15:56,780
it's sort of like it makes it it makes it understandable how the how how it could have

1240
01:15:56,780 --> 01:15:57,420
developed like that.

1241
01:15:57,820 --> 01:16:00,300
Or seen as pro it could have been seen as moral progress.

1242
01:16:00,540 --> 01:16:00,700
Yeah.

1243
01:16:01,180 --> 01:16:02,460
Which is also another point.

1244
01:16:02,700 --> 01:16:02,780
Right.

1245
01:16:02,940 --> 01:16:07,980
Like which is also like we shouldn't think about moral progress as being uh pure in this

1246
01:16:07,980 --> 01:16:09,100
sense either, right?

1247
01:16:09,580 --> 01:16:12,460
Like, you know, it might have it very well could have been moral progress.

1248
01:16:12,780 --> 01:16:18,450
As you've nicely uh there there's an argument that slavery was viewed as moral

1249
01:16:18,450 --> 01:16:20,290
progress compared to what preceded it.

1250
01:16:20,850 --> 01:16:21,010
Yeah.

1251
01:16:21,330 --> 01:16:21,810
It's interesting.

1252
01:16:21,890 --> 01:16:26,130
Yeah, that ties back to your your point you were making about status as fundamentally zero

1253
01:16:26,210 --> 01:16:31,650
sum and in comparison to other people, and such that when I rise, just someone else has to

1254
01:16:31,650 --> 01:16:32,930
fall in the social hierarchy.

1255
01:16:33,170 --> 01:16:36,850
But when you once you start thinking about virtue itself as a kind of status, you know,

1256
01:16:37,010 --> 01:16:41,260
morality, you know, obviously, you know, how good of a person, how virtuous I am is a huge

1257
01:16:41,260 --> 01:16:42,460
part of my social status.

1258
01:16:42,620 --> 01:16:42,780
Yeah.

1259
01:16:42,940 --> 01:16:43,100
Right.

1260
01:16:43,340 --> 01:16:46,780
And so if status zero sum, then virtue must be zero sum too.

1261
01:16:46,940 --> 01:16:51,900
And so that helps explain why we don't, you know, strive to be the best possible person in

1262
01:16:51,900 --> 01:16:54,620
an absolute sense, but just a little bit better than average, a little bit better than the

1263
01:16:54,620 --> 01:16:55,100
competition.

1264
01:16:55,260 --> 01:16:58,140
I don't want to be a great person, I just want to be better than you, you know.

1265
01:16:58,460 --> 01:17:03,900
Um and so if you view morality in that context, then you know it starts to make sense.

1266
01:17:04,220 --> 01:17:09,830
Like, you know, i i yeah, um, you know, in in an age where conquest was the norm, um, yeah,

1267
01:17:09,990 --> 01:17:13,990
slavery would is an awful thing, but but it doesn't matter how objectively awful it is.

1268
01:17:14,070 --> 01:17:16,550
What just matters is that I'm less awful than my social competitors.

1269
01:17:16,790 --> 01:17:20,950
And if I'm the nice guy who doesn't kill the people I conquer and I let them work for me,

1270
01:17:21,110 --> 01:17:23,830
well then I'm a little bit better than my social competitors, right?

1271
01:17:23,910 --> 01:17:24,870
And I win out a little bit.

1272
01:17:24,950 --> 01:17:28,550
And then all of a sudden that becomes the new social norm and the new equilibrium, such

1273
01:17:28,550 --> 01:17:30,950
that if you violate it, you look worse than other people.

1274
01:17:31,640 --> 01:17:35,960
And so you can get this ratcheting effect with moral progress, where like, you know, some

1275
01:17:35,960 --> 01:17:39,640
person gets uh virtue status for doing something that's like a little bit better than

1276
01:17:39,640 --> 01:17:40,200
everyone else.

1277
01:17:40,280 --> 01:17:41,560
And then that becomes the new norm.

1278
01:17:41,640 --> 01:17:44,440
And then the new person comes along and they can get more status by doing something that's

1279
01:17:44,440 --> 01:17:45,720
a little bit better than everyone else.

1280
01:17:45,880 --> 01:17:50,520
And once this keeps going over and over again, you can get something that looks like moral

1281
01:17:50,520 --> 01:17:50,920
progress.

1282
01:17:51,160 --> 01:17:51,400
Right.

1283
01:17:51,480 --> 01:17:56,130
And so that might be another uh engine behind this where you have these status games and

1284
01:17:56,130 --> 01:17:59,490
these new equilibria emerge, uh these new reputational equilibria.

1285
01:17:59,730 --> 01:18:04,290
Uh, and then as soon as they're established, there there become new social rewards for uh

1286
01:18:04,290 --> 01:18:06,690
uh pushing the equilibria up a little bit further.

1287
01:18:06,930 --> 01:18:07,090
Yeah.

1288
01:18:07,250 --> 01:18:07,410
Yeah.

1289
01:18:07,970 --> 01:18:08,690
I like that a lot.

1290
01:18:08,770 --> 01:18:11,890
And I also think there's this nested, it's all about coordination, right?

1291
01:18:12,050 --> 01:18:15,890
So there's always social commentators that are way ahead.

1292
01:18:16,050 --> 01:18:19,810
So this thing about, you know, slavery is inherently bad.

1293
01:18:19,890 --> 01:18:23,380
Um, and every people have known it always, and it's it's in there, right?

1294
01:18:23,540 --> 01:18:24,420
Like baked in.

1295
01:18:24,660 --> 01:18:28,820
And there might be an argument that there were always people saying, look, slavery is bad,

1296
01:18:28,980 --> 01:18:32,820
and other people listening, but people didn't know how to coordinate around that, right?

1297
01:18:33,380 --> 01:18:38,340
Um, and so I think what I don't think like thought leaders is anything new either.

1298
01:18:38,580 --> 01:18:44,020
I think there's always people who are articulating possible future

1299
01:18:44,020 --> 01:18:45,940
coordination games.

1300
01:18:46,980 --> 01:18:50,740
And then they're offering them, and some of them are like, slavery's bad.

1301
01:18:50,900 --> 01:18:53,770
Some of them are like, hey, maybe we should go back to that.

1302
01:18:53,930 --> 01:18:59,050
Some people are like, you know, so there's there's always different um coordination games.

1303
01:18:59,130 --> 01:19:04,570
And I think they're always there, but then it's the the slower, larger things of

1304
01:19:05,130 --> 01:19:10,970
now we can all coordinate around um as like the the every a larger set of people can all

1305
01:19:10,970 --> 01:19:15,860
coordinate around this thing because some external thing in the sociology or the

1306
01:19:15,860 --> 01:19:19,860
environment has changed and um and then you can kind of get that.

1307
01:19:19,940 --> 01:19:25,700
So so I like this idea of um there's it's coordination as you're saying,

1308
01:19:25,860 --> 01:19:31,380
David, um and the the vanguard of the coordination is just different

1309
01:19:31,700 --> 01:19:36,990
ideas about what status games or coordinations we might like to try out.

1310
01:19:37,310 --> 01:19:37,550
Yeah.

1311
01:19:45,870 --> 01:19:51,710
Um there that there is a way of making

1312
01:19:51,710 --> 01:19:54,350
these points work against moral relativism.

1313
01:19:55,790 --> 01:20:01,140
So I think that moral

1314
01:20:01,140 --> 01:20:07,060
relativists often point to really surprisingly deep disagreements

1315
01:20:07,060 --> 01:20:12,900
between cultures or historical eras to support the idea that we have

1316
01:20:12,900 --> 01:20:14,820
fundamentally divergent values.

1317
01:20:17,300 --> 01:20:23,050
And so first of all, I think a lot of this was kind of Made

1318
01:20:23,050 --> 01:20:27,530
possible because anthropologists they don't want to return from their field trip and say

1319
01:20:27,530 --> 01:20:29,450
these people are kind of the same, right?

1320
01:20:29,530 --> 01:20:33,850
And so they and they say you're not gonna believe you're not gonna believe how these people

1321
01:20:33,850 --> 01:20:34,170
live.

1322
01:20:34,330 --> 01:20:34,570
Yeah.

1323
01:20:34,890 --> 01:20:40,730
And of course, this also partly because people wanted to be culturally tolerant and embrace

1324
01:20:40,730 --> 01:20:42,410
diversity and so on and so on.

1325
01:20:42,570 --> 01:20:48,400
Um, but also when you look at moral relativists, The examples for these deep

1326
01:20:48,400 --> 01:20:53,600
disagreements that they give, they are usually, you know, 200 years ago we believed slavery

1327
01:20:53,600 --> 01:20:54,240
was fine.

1328
01:20:54,480 --> 01:20:58,640
Or in Middle America, in Mesoamerica, they believed human sacrifice was fine.

1329
01:20:58,800 --> 01:21:02,160
Or in China, they believed foot binding was fine.

1330
01:21:02,240 --> 01:21:06,800
Or in East Africa, they believed female genital mutilation is fine.

1331
01:21:07,520 --> 01:21:09,840
And so on and so on and so on.

1332
01:21:10,240 --> 01:21:15,390
But what I what I think we could we can notice about these types of

1333
01:21:15,390 --> 01:21:20,430
examples is that you can always ask, well, who's the we that thought these things were

1334
01:21:20,430 --> 01:21:20,910
fine, right?

1335
01:21:21,070 --> 01:21:23,150
The slaves didn't think that was fine, right?

1336
01:21:23,310 --> 01:21:27,630
Presumably, these young girls they didn't agree to being mutilated.

1337
01:21:27,710 --> 01:21:33,710
Um, the women didn't plausibly agree to being being bandaged and and and abused.

1338
01:21:34,020 --> 01:21:39,700
Um, these people that were, you know, in in in in in in in the Aztec Empire that were

1339
01:21:39,860 --> 01:21:43,700
whose hearts were cut out, or you know, children that were roasted over the fire because

1340
01:21:43,700 --> 01:21:46,820
their tears would placate the weather god or something, right?

1341
01:21:47,060 --> 01:21:49,780
They didn't you know agree to that.

1342
01:21:49,860 --> 01:21:52,500
So it's often like, who's the we in these in these stories?

1343
01:21:52,660 --> 01:21:56,970
And we often know that probably, probably the vast majority of people at the time we just

1344
01:21:56,970 --> 01:21:57,930
never hear about them.

1345
01:21:58,170 --> 01:21:58,410
Right?

1346
01:21:58,890 --> 01:21:59,770
Of of course not.

1347
01:22:00,090 --> 01:22:01,130
They are totally invisible.

1348
01:22:01,210 --> 01:22:02,650
We never get to hear their views.

1349
01:22:02,730 --> 01:22:04,490
They're not writing anything down.

1350
01:22:04,650 --> 01:22:10,330
And it's I think really the vast majority of examples that are

1351
01:22:10,330 --> 01:22:15,770
supposed to support this moral relativism are almost always examples of

1352
01:22:15,840 --> 01:22:20,880
elites helping themselves towards you know abuse or cruelty or something, right?

1353
01:22:21,120 --> 01:22:27,040
And it's not like some monolithic culture that in the American South made everyone

1354
01:22:27,040 --> 01:22:28,560
believe that slavery was fine.

1355
01:22:29,040 --> 01:22:31,120
Most people didn't have slaves, right?

1356
01:22:31,360 --> 01:22:34,400
And again, the slaves, you don't you're not counting them.

1357
01:22:34,560 --> 01:22:39,440
Uh that that that that that that that that doesn't really make so of of course there are

1358
01:22:39,440 --> 01:22:45,310
different different ways of living and different priorities, and surely, surely many

1359
01:22:45,310 --> 01:22:50,830
people in in 19th century Iran had different values and and

1360
01:22:51,470 --> 01:22:56,750
and moral ideas than we do or whatever.

1361
01:22:56,910 --> 01:23:02,670
But I think it's often this radic these radical disagreements are often um you know not

1362
01:23:02,670 --> 01:23:08,280
monolithic cultures believing something, but small groups in a society being weird

1363
01:23:08,680 --> 01:23:11,800
or being oppressive and cruel and exploitative.

1364
01:23:12,200 --> 01:23:16,520
And it's and it's and it's and it's uh I found it useful to sort of like you know listen to

1365
01:23:16,520 --> 01:23:19,960
the examples that are supposed to support moral relativism very carefully because they

1366
01:23:19,960 --> 01:23:23,800
often are kind of like that: human sacrifice, footbinding, and slavery.

1367
01:23:23,960 --> 01:23:27,800
Um, and when it's close enough to us, all of a sudden this argument doesn't work anymore,

1368
01:23:27,880 --> 01:23:28,040
right?

1369
01:23:28,120 --> 01:23:33,560
So we wouldn't say Germans believed 70 years ago that you can just kill the Jews, right?

1370
01:23:34,330 --> 01:23:37,690
because we know that that's not a monolithic thing, um, at the time.

1371
01:23:37,770 --> 01:23:41,210
And it would and we were like, What do you mean that we people don't use that example to

1372
01:23:41,210 --> 01:23:46,650
support relativism because it's obviously reminds people of no no no, this was you know,

1373
01:23:46,890 --> 01:23:52,410
this was you know, they they they had they had to violently enable

1374
01:23:52,410 --> 01:23:57,770
themselves to um to do that against against a la at least a large group of people that that

1375
01:23:57,850 --> 01:24:02,330
that that were you know very much against it, not to speak of even the victors.

1376
01:24:02,570 --> 01:24:04,200
Yeah, it's interesting.

1377
01:24:04,280 --> 01:24:06,440
You know, I I I really like this argument.

1378
01:24:06,520 --> 01:24:11,480
Um, you could even push it further by saying, yeah, uh the people who were subject to the

1379
01:24:11,480 --> 01:24:16,280
oppression uh obviously didn't think the their oppression was morally great.

1380
01:24:16,360 --> 01:24:20,120
Um and we don't hear from them because history is written by the elites and by the people

1381
01:24:20,120 --> 01:24:21,640
who were enacting the oppression.

1382
01:24:21,800 --> 01:24:26,470
Uh but you could take it even further and say that it's plausible that even the elites

1383
01:24:26,470 --> 01:24:28,550
didn't really think that what they were doing was right.

1384
01:24:29,190 --> 01:24:33,110
Because all all we have from the history books is all the rationalizations that the elites

1385
01:24:33,110 --> 01:24:33,990
wrote down.

1386
01:24:34,230 --> 01:24:34,710
Right.

1387
01:24:35,030 --> 01:24:36,470
And the excuses they could.

1388
01:24:36,790 --> 01:24:37,990
Yeah, all the excuses, right.

1389
01:24:38,310 --> 01:24:41,270
And so when we look at those, like, whoa, they must have thought this was really virtuous.

1390
01:24:41,430 --> 01:24:44,710
But you could take it as evidence for the opposite, actually, that the reason they needed

1391
01:24:44,710 --> 01:24:50,310
to work so hard to write down these elaborate, fanciful justifications was precisely

1392
01:24:50,310 --> 01:24:52,340
because on some level they were not okay with it.

1393
01:24:52,500 --> 01:24:55,460
Or they felt that other people would view them as as cruel monsters.

1394
01:24:55,700 --> 01:25:00,660
And so you could take that a as as evidence itself that um that that maybe the elites

1395
01:25:00,660 --> 01:25:04,900
weren't really even that okay with it and and that the reason they had to work so hard to

1396
01:25:04,900 --> 01:25:07,540
come up with these ideologies, I think, is evidence of that.

1397
01:25:07,780 --> 01:25:08,020
Yeah.

1398
01:25:08,180 --> 01:25:11,300
Um they were they they were like confessing.

1399
01:25:11,570 --> 01:25:12,210
Yeah.

1400
01:25:12,610 --> 01:25:13,250
Right.

1401
01:25:14,850 --> 01:25:19,730
So like them, you you you sit down, you write into your diary and to all these things that

1402
01:25:19,810 --> 01:25:21,250
like really bother you about yourself.

1403
01:25:21,410 --> 01:25:21,650
Right.

1404
01:25:21,810 --> 01:25:25,810
And that you it's impossible to see like you know historiography and and and all these

1405
01:25:25,810 --> 01:25:29,730
epics as kind of like, you know, people feel really bad about the things they did and so

1406
01:25:29,730 --> 01:25:32,370
they had the ne the psychological need to like cope.

1407
01:25:32,780 --> 01:25:33,020
Right.

1408
01:25:33,340 --> 01:25:34,300
It it makes me think.

1409
01:25:34,380 --> 01:25:37,580
I mean, there's there's a concept that just came to my mind that nobody's thought about

1410
01:25:37,660 --> 01:25:42,140
that that I'm aware of, which is rationalization cost, where some things are just harder to

1411
01:25:42,140 --> 01:25:43,820
rationalize than others.

1412
01:25:44,060 --> 01:25:48,860
And I think you know, the more just flagrantly absurdly cruel and unusual a certain

1413
01:25:48,860 --> 01:25:53,020
practice is, the harder you need to work to come up with it with a good ideology and

1414
01:25:53,020 --> 01:25:54,300
rationalization for it.

1415
01:25:54,570 --> 01:25:58,090
Like if you want to do a Holocaust, boy, do you need an elaborate ideology.

1416
01:25:58,330 --> 01:26:03,850
Boy, do you need to work really hard to make that make some kind of superficial ethical

1417
01:26:03,850 --> 01:26:04,330
sense.

1418
01:26:04,490 --> 01:26:08,250
Whereas some things just have a very low rationalization cost because, you know, they they

1419
01:26:08,250 --> 01:26:08,890
look pretty good.

1420
01:26:09,050 --> 01:26:09,210
Yeah.

1421
01:26:09,850 --> 01:26:10,730
They don't make you look bad.

1422
01:26:11,610 --> 01:26:17,210
And so what we could be seeing in the history of moral progress is just an abandonment of

1423
01:26:17,210 --> 01:26:19,900
things with just a really high rationalization cost, right?

1424
01:26:20,060 --> 01:26:23,900
And just the cost just became too high and it was just unsustainable and the thing

1425
01:26:23,900 --> 01:26:24,620
collapsed.

1426
01:26:24,700 --> 01:26:28,060
And it's just we've just been moving toward things with just lower rationalization costs

1427
01:26:28,140 --> 01:26:32,620
that are just easier to justify, to easier to do and feel good about yourself and convince

1428
01:26:32,620 --> 01:26:33,820
other people that you're a good person.

1429
01:26:33,980 --> 01:26:36,540
We've just gone more toward those types of things.

1430
01:26:36,700 --> 01:26:39,020
Um I'm curious what do you think of that?

1431
01:26:39,180 --> 01:26:40,140
I'm just having this idea right now.

1432
01:26:40,380 --> 01:26:42,860
This is this is this is starting to sound pretty Hegelian, right?

1433
01:26:42,940 --> 01:26:47,100
I mean, it's just like the you know, the flip side of that is just you know, we we we we we

1434
01:26:47,100 --> 01:26:50,470
started doing more and more things that are just like justifiable.

1435
01:26:50,710 --> 01:26:50,950
Yeah.

1436
01:26:51,110 --> 01:26:54,310
Or don't even stand in need of um justify.

1437
01:26:54,470 --> 01:26:59,110
So this would be a kind of picture where sort of like reason kind of asserts itself in in

1438
01:26:59,110 --> 01:27:03,910
history because on some level maybe people realize like I'm being I'm being I'm being so

1439
01:27:03,910 --> 01:27:04,230
bad.

1440
01:27:04,550 --> 01:27:08,950
And so I need to I need to you know rationalize it and and work really hard to make it to

1441
01:27:08,950 --> 01:27:12,920
make it make it psychologically tolerable to me and people around me.

1442
01:27:13,160 --> 01:27:18,120
And indeed you see that you see that you see when when when regimes and we when we've

1443
01:27:18,120 --> 01:27:23,240
mentioned all of these cases, the Nazis and and and you know Rwanda and and all these

1444
01:27:23,240 --> 01:27:26,120
conflicts, it it people talk about it a lot, right?

1445
01:27:26,200 --> 01:27:30,200
They talk about it and they because they have this need to constantly repeat to themselves,

1446
01:27:30,360 --> 01:27:31,000
this is fine.

1447
01:27:31,160 --> 01:27:33,400
Here's here here are my reasons and so on and so on.

1448
01:27:33,480 --> 01:27:39,320
And and you need you have a very high demo for ideology and for and for um uh

1449
01:27:39,480 --> 01:27:40,760
embellishment.

1450
01:27:41,210 --> 01:27:43,530
um of of of what you do.

1451
01:27:44,330 --> 01:27:47,530
It paints a darker picture of the history of intellectuals as well.

1452
01:27:47,770 --> 01:27:52,490
Cause it suggests that a lot of what intellectuals do is they're trying to uh market these

1453
01:27:52,490 --> 01:27:56,410
rationalizations for for people and they're trying to provide the intellectual uh

1454
01:27:56,570 --> 01:28:01,370
justifications for you know doing these horrible things that people have self interested

1455
01:28:01,370 --> 01:28:05,680
reasons to do right I think that's I think I'm I I think that's right.

1456
01:28:06,000 --> 01:28:06,640
I think that's right.

1457
01:28:06,880 --> 01:28:07,840
I think that's right.

1458
01:28:09,120 --> 01:28:14,080
I mean for I mean uh um philosoph Western philosophy was founded by slave owners right

1459
01:28:14,240 --> 01:28:20,000
Plato had slaves Aristotle had slaves yeah um and the the

1460
01:28:21,600 --> 01:28:27,600
well if you go back further I think that societies that that can afford a group of people

1461
01:28:27,600 --> 01:28:30,090
who are professional intellectuals right?

1462
01:28:30,250 --> 01:28:36,090
And and and and and and priests and so on and so on, like a priest caste which then

1463
01:28:36,090 --> 01:28:38,810
develops into philosophy and so on.

1464
01:28:39,130 --> 01:28:44,970
People who just sort of like deal deal in ideas mostly they are gonna

1465
01:28:44,970 --> 01:28:50,810
be employed by the by the powerful and much of what they what they do and what they're

1466
01:28:50,810 --> 01:28:53,850
expected to do is to justify why all of this is good and right.

1467
01:28:54,090 --> 01:28:55,050
And this is what they did.

1468
01:28:55,210 --> 01:29:00,280
This is what what political philosophers did for them for the longest time and still kind

1469
01:29:00,280 --> 01:29:00,600
of do.

1470
01:29:00,760 --> 01:29:04,440
I mean, there is this libertarian philosopher that I really like, Michael Humer.

1471
01:29:04,600 --> 01:29:08,120
And see, he says all all these political philosophers, they all have Stockholm syndrome.

1472
01:29:08,280 --> 01:29:13,320
They're all justifying, you know, they all say, oh, you know, the guy who abducted me is

1473
01:29:13,320 --> 01:29:14,360
kind of nice.

1474
01:29:14,680 --> 01:29:15,080
Right.

1475
01:29:15,560 --> 01:29:17,400
And that's what political philosophers do often.

1476
01:29:17,480 --> 01:29:22,530
They try to come up with a rationale for why, you know state authority is

1477
01:29:23,010 --> 01:29:28,370
fine uh and why and why the state can do to you what it um what it does.

1478
01:29:28,530 --> 01:29:34,290
And I'm I do think modern states are much preferable to um uh

1479
01:29:34,450 --> 01:29:38,450
to what what was around in the past, but there is a there there that's it's an interesting

1480
01:29:38,530 --> 01:29:40,130
like provocative way of looking at it.

1481
01:29:40,370 --> 01:29:45,330
Interesting is that really really you know philosophers and and political philosophers are

1482
01:29:45,650 --> 01:29:51,540
largely uh behave affirmatively towards the

1483
01:29:51,540 --> 01:29:52,260
powerful.

1484
01:29:52,660 --> 01:29:52,820
Right?

1485
01:29:53,140 --> 01:29:54,660
You could yeah, I mean you could yeah.

1486
01:29:54,820 --> 01:29:59,780
You could think of the state itself, you know, as a system of organized coercion of people

1487
01:29:59,780 --> 01:30:03,140
getting together to force people to do things that they would be disinclined to do, that

1488
01:30:03,220 --> 01:30:06,900
like that itself is a thing with high rationalization costs, right?

1489
01:30:07,060 --> 01:30:07,300
Yeah.

1490
01:30:07,460 --> 01:30:09,620
Uh you need to figure out a way to make that look good.

1491
01:30:09,780 --> 01:30:10,100
Yeah.

1492
01:30:10,420 --> 01:30:14,740
And you could think of a lot of political philosophy as rising to the the demands of those

1493
01:30:14,740 --> 01:30:15,990
rationalization costs.

1494
01:30:16,390 --> 01:30:19,030
And you know, maybe, you know, maybe it can be justified at the end of the day.

1495
01:30:19,350 --> 01:30:20,150
You know, who knows?

1496
01:30:20,230 --> 01:30:21,350
I'm not a political philosopher.

1497
01:30:21,750 --> 01:30:23,830
But it's still it's still something that needs a justification.

1498
01:30:23,990 --> 01:30:28,310
If I'm just gonna go up to you and put a gun to your head and ask, you know, you gotta do

1499
01:30:28,310 --> 01:30:31,270
what I say, or I'm gonna take your stuff, or I'm gonna kidnap you.

1500
01:30:31,350 --> 01:30:36,390
Like that that's a icky thing to do, and I need like a really good story to tell before I

1501
01:30:36,390 --> 01:30:36,870
do it, you know.

1502
01:30:36,950 --> 01:30:37,190
Yeah.

1503
01:30:37,750 --> 01:30:43,350
So these these are these are my small like libertarian inclinations that that no one in

1504
01:30:43,350 --> 01:30:44,710
Europe shares at all.

1505
01:30:45,080 --> 01:30:45,400
Right?

1506
01:30:45,640 --> 01:30:50,040
So this is just so this is just like a like a way of looking at the state in politics that

1507
01:30:50,040 --> 01:30:55,880
is just d doesn't work in in uh in Europe for some reason.

1508
01:30:55,960 --> 01:30:59,160
Uh it's it's just like, you know, the sort of like sc state skepticism.

1509
01:30:59,240 --> 01:31:03,640
I'm not and I'm again I'm not I'm not really full blown libertarian or anything.

1510
01:31:03,800 --> 01:31:09,710
But I like that kind of thought as just like a like a like a like a a critical

1511
01:31:10,030 --> 01:31:15,310
sting somewhere in in in my ideology, just like is this even really I don't know.

1512
01:31:15,390 --> 01:31:16,350
I'm not so sure.

1513
01:31:16,590 --> 01:31:16,830
Yeah.

1514
01:31:17,230 --> 01:31:18,190
But even I love this.

1515
01:31:18,270 --> 01:31:23,310
This is a BBS paper, which is the public intellectual as the provider of rationalization

1516
01:31:23,310 --> 01:31:25,070
costs for the powerful and elite.

1517
01:31:25,310 --> 01:31:26,590
This is your guest paper.

1518
01:31:26,910 --> 01:31:27,550
Let's do it.

1519
01:31:27,780 --> 01:31:28,260
That's great.

1520
01:31:28,420 --> 01:31:28,820
Sounds great.

1521
01:31:28,900 --> 01:31:30,260
I mean, we should get Dan Williams on it.

1522
01:31:30,340 --> 01:31:31,700
I'm basically ripping off Dan Williams.

1523
01:31:31,860 --> 01:31:35,060
He has a wonderful paper called uh The Marketplace of Rationalization.

1524
01:31:35,380 --> 01:31:35,780
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1525
01:31:35,860 --> 01:31:36,100
It's great.

1526
01:31:36,180 --> 01:31:36,340
Yeah.

1527
01:31:36,660 --> 01:31:41,060
But this explains there's this whole genre of like there's um like these books like

1528
01:31:41,060 --> 01:31:42,100
Sapiens, right?

1529
01:31:42,180 --> 01:31:45,060
Or like these books, I can't say that 'cause it's like it's this garbage book.

1530
01:31:45,140 --> 01:31:49,300
Like it's just it gets all the anthropology wrong, but it's like wildly popular, you know,

1531
01:31:49,380 --> 01:31:54,250
like it's made like lots of money and there's always these these intellectual books.

1532
01:31:54,410 --> 01:31:56,970
And the argument, I mean, this is even this is not my argument.

1533
01:31:57,050 --> 01:32:00,810
There's many people just making this argument, is this is just telling people a story,

1534
01:32:01,050 --> 01:32:06,410
largely people who are doing already doing some status game, some of which is probably

1535
01:32:06,410 --> 01:32:07,850
good, some of which is not so good.

1536
01:32:07,930 --> 01:32:09,290
And it's just justifying that.

1537
01:32:09,370 --> 01:32:10,970
It's giving it the rationalization.

1538
01:32:11,130 --> 01:32:11,370
Yeah.

1539
01:32:11,610 --> 01:32:17,130
So I think like a lot of consuming politics, consuming media, consuming people making

1540
01:32:17,130 --> 01:32:20,810
arguments, moral arguments is shopping for rationalizations.

1541
01:32:21,050 --> 01:32:22,250
David and I really like this.

1542
01:32:22,420 --> 01:32:24,100
It's all propaganda all the way down.

1543
01:32:24,500 --> 01:32:25,620
Everything is bullshit.

1544
01:32:27,860 --> 01:32:29,060
I've heard that somewhere.

1545
01:32:29,220 --> 01:32:29,780
Yeah.

1546
01:32:30,260 --> 01:32:32,260
Well, Hanno, uh, this is wonderful.

1547
01:32:32,420 --> 01:32:38,420
Um uh in the very brief closing time, if people are more interested in your

1548
01:32:38,420 --> 01:32:41,460
work based on this conversation, where would you point them?

1549
01:32:43,590 --> 01:32:44,550
Um or not.

1550
01:32:44,790 --> 01:32:46,470
Yeah, I I I have this article.

1551
01:32:46,550 --> 01:32:51,510
So I have this article com coming out that's called Conspicuous Compunction, which is a

1552
01:32:51,510 --> 01:32:52,310
great title.

1553
01:32:56,870 --> 01:33:00,790
David is gonna is gonna be one of the commentators uh of that, and I'm excited to uh and

1554
01:33:00,790 --> 01:33:04,230
curious to hear what you uh what what um you have to say about that.

1555
01:33:04,310 --> 01:33:09,270
So that would be some uh something uh and I have a couple of like shorter articles in

1556
01:33:09,270 --> 01:33:14,340
English uh about this, um, why it's hard to get rid of class structures and class society.

1557
01:33:15,220 --> 01:33:19,860
And there are also YouTube videos where I present these ideas in English.

1558
01:33:20,260 --> 01:33:25,460
For instance, I recently went to Australia to the so-called Festival of Dangerous Ideas.

1559
01:33:26,740 --> 01:33:31,460
And it sounds pretentious and stupid, but the dangerous idea that I was presenting was, you

1560
01:33:31,460 --> 01:33:34,580
know, class structures are very hard to get rid of, surprisingly hard to get rid of, and

1561
01:33:34,580 --> 01:33:36,020
you underestimate the problem.

1562
01:33:36,610 --> 01:33:40,210
And so this this this is going to be on YouTube if you want to if you want to check it out

1563
01:33:40,530 --> 01:33:40,930
a little bit.

1564
01:33:41,010 --> 01:33:46,770
And then hopefully the class book, which was really uh, you know, did really well in in

1565
01:33:46,850 --> 01:33:47,890
uh in Germany.

1566
01:33:48,050 --> 01:33:51,090
I hope that that's that's gonna come out in English at some point.

1567
01:33:51,570 --> 01:33:55,010
It'll be interesting to see how having lived in Germany for 10 years.

1568
01:33:55,170 --> 01:33:58,290
I feel like there's more acceptance of class.

1569
01:33:58,530 --> 01:34:04,130
Uh class is a bit of a third rail in the US, and the the joke is always that nobody's poor

1570
01:34:04,700 --> 01:34:06,940
uh because they're about to be rich.

1571
01:34:07,020 --> 01:34:10,060
So yeah, yeah, it's all it's a nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

1572
01:34:10,460 --> 01:34:11,020
Exactly.

1573
01:34:11,180 --> 01:34:11,900
Exactly.

1574
01:34:13,260 --> 01:34:13,900
All right.

1575
01:34:14,220 --> 01:34:14,700
All right.

1576
01:34:14,860 --> 01:34:20,620
Well, this was a r uh a huge treat for uh for everyone, I I assume, but especially me.

1577
01:34:20,700 --> 01:34:21,820
Uh this I just had a blast.

1578
01:34:21,900 --> 01:34:22,380
This flew by.

1579
01:34:22,460 --> 01:34:23,900
So thanks so much for for coming on, Anno.

1580
01:34:24,140 --> 01:34:24,300
Thanks.

1581
01:34:24,380 --> 01:34:25,020
It was a lot of fun.

1582
01:34:25,180 --> 01:34:26,380
Thanks for having me.

1583
01:34:31,390 --> 01:34:35,550
David, we are uh we're as the expression goes, we're getting back on the horse, we're

1584
01:34:35,550 --> 01:34:36,910
getting our episodes back out.

1585
01:34:37,070 --> 01:34:38,830
I don't know if these are gonna be weekly.

1586
01:34:38,910 --> 01:34:40,990
I think we might need a summer caveat.

1587
01:34:41,310 --> 01:34:44,750
Um of Yeah, we summer really screwed us both.

1588
01:34:44,990 --> 01:34:47,230
I gotta say, David, jury duty really got us.

1589
01:34:47,390 --> 01:34:49,310
We have jury duty got us, yeah.

1590
01:34:49,390 --> 01:34:51,630
It was a whole perfect storm of different different things.

1591
01:34:51,710 --> 01:34:52,030
That's okay.

1592
01:34:52,590 --> 01:34:53,310
Yeah, it happens.

1593
01:34:53,550 --> 01:34:53,790
Yeah.

1594
01:34:53,870 --> 01:34:58,110
So um, but just let you we're letting you know we're we're getting back on the horse, as

1595
01:34:58,110 --> 01:34:58,510
they say.

1596
01:34:59,300 --> 01:34:59,860
Exactly.

1597
01:34:59,940 --> 01:35:02,500
And it's it's a good, vigorous horse.

1598
01:35:02,740 --> 01:35:05,700
It's a pr a proud steed, valiant stallion.

1599
01:35:05,940 --> 01:35:06,260
All right.

1600
01:35:08,100 --> 01:35:08,980
Yeah, I like it too.

1601
01:35:09,540 --> 01:35:09,860
Okay.

1602
01:35:10,020 --> 01:35:13,780
Um uh usual Patreon, social media.

1603
01:35:14,100 --> 01:35:15,860
Um I don't know.

1604
01:35:16,020 --> 01:35:16,980
Uh we do need to be able to do that.

1605
01:35:17,140 --> 01:35:18,020
Leave us a kind review.

1606
01:35:18,820 --> 01:35:19,780
We should start getting shirts.

1607
01:35:19,860 --> 01:35:20,660
Then there's a shirt cut.

1608
01:35:21,060 --> 01:35:23,460
Would you would you actually wear an evolutionary psychology of the podcast?

1609
01:35:23,860 --> 01:35:27,220
No, but if there was like ex things we've said on the shirt, I might.

1610
01:35:27,590 --> 01:35:28,550
Oh, like quotes?

1611
01:35:28,870 --> 01:35:30,070
Like Valiant Stallion?

1612
01:35:30,390 --> 01:35:33,110
Well, tolerated scrounging of morality or something.

1613
01:35:33,270 --> 01:35:33,590
I don't know.

1614
01:35:33,750 --> 01:35:35,910
That's maybe a little esoteric.

1615
01:35:35,990 --> 01:35:36,870
That's a little pretentious.

1616
01:35:37,270 --> 01:35:40,310
Tell you what, listener, if there are any quotes that stuck with you that you think would

1617
01:35:40,310 --> 01:35:41,750
be cool on a t shirt, let us know.

1618
01:35:41,910 --> 01:35:42,550
Send us an email.

1619
01:35:42,870 --> 01:35:43,030
Yeah.

1620
01:35:43,270 --> 01:35:44,710
Or like taking things out of context.

1621
01:35:45,190 --> 01:35:45,270
Yeah.

1622
01:35:45,350 --> 01:35:51,080
So yeah, if you could take us out of context in the most humiliating, uh uh Reputationally

1623
01:35:51,080 --> 01:35:54,520
damaging way, that would be uh yeah.

1624
01:35:54,840 --> 01:35:57,320
Anyway, enjoy the rest of your week.

1625
01:35:57,480 --> 01:36:02,680
Um take it easy and and you know, try to put progress.

1626
01:36:02,760 --> 01:36:03,480
Yeah, be kind.

1627
01:36:03,880 --> 01:36:06,680
In your in your own uh small P way.

1628
01:36:07,080 --> 01:36:09,160
Don't start a new moral movement.

1629
01:36:09,320 --> 01:36:12,600
Um unless you know you're like doing a religious cult.

1630
01:36:13,080 --> 01:36:15,960
Maybe just inch inch the thing forward just a little bit, you know.

1631
01:36:16,120 --> 01:36:17,990
Just go go the extra mile.

1632
01:36:18,230 --> 01:36:18,470
Yeah.

1633
01:36:18,550 --> 01:36:18,790
Yeah.

1634
01:36:19,030 --> 01:36:19,190
Good.

1635
01:36:19,270 --> 01:36:19,510
Yeah.

1636
01:36:19,750 --> 01:36:20,310
Not mile.

1637
01:36:20,390 --> 01:36:23,030
Maybe go the extra, you know, tenth of a mile.

1638
01:36:23,350 --> 01:36:27,030
Uh, can we do it in in non-weird fraction units?

1639
01:36:27,190 --> 01:36:30,230
Maybe uh oh the couple meters, like 400 meters.

1640
01:36:30,470 --> 01:36:31,110
Meters, sure.

1641
01:36:31,190 --> 01:36:36,710
Yeah, say living in Germany and then coming back to the US and I'm like installing

1642
01:36:36,710 --> 01:36:37,430
furniture.

1643
01:36:37,590 --> 01:36:42,550
It's insane to use fractions in a base 12 for a length.

1644
01:36:42,790 --> 01:36:45,080
I mean, I get Fahrenheit versus Celsius.

1645
01:36:45,160 --> 01:36:48,680
Like Celsius is less like graded, like for normal temperatures.

1646
01:36:48,840 --> 01:36:54,600
But my God, like uh three, six, I mean, literally like

1647
01:36:54,600 --> 01:37:00,600
measuring things that are like fractions of an eighth or sixteenth, and then it's a base

1648
01:37:00,600 --> 01:37:01,240
12.

1649
01:37:01,480 --> 01:37:05,960
You have to do addition and fractions instead of just being like, oh yeah, now this thing

1650
01:37:05,960 --> 01:37:09,640
is like 47 point 47 centimeters and four millimeters.

1651
01:37:09,720 --> 01:37:11,630
Like we are hurting ourselves.

1652
01:37:11,870 --> 01:37:13,950
Those of us in this weird system.

1653
01:37:14,270 --> 01:37:19,070
The rest of the world, of course you know, and you can just it's one more thing to wag your

1654
01:37:19,070 --> 01:37:20,990
finger at us about US.

1655
01:37:21,230 --> 01:37:21,710
Yeah.

1656
01:37:21,950 --> 01:37:22,510
And England.

1657
01:37:22,830 --> 01:37:23,150
All right.

1658
01:37:23,310 --> 01:37:23,950
Anyway anyway.

1659
01:37:24,510 --> 01:37:27,310
That was that's my how to get that out there.

1660
01:37:27,470 --> 01:37:30,430
Um if somebody could do something about that, please let us know.

1661
01:37:30,590 --> 01:37:34,430
Let's uh let's let's adopt the metric system for at least some things.

1662
01:37:34,910 --> 01:37:37,790
Evolutionary psychology the podcast is pro metric system.

1663
01:37:38,030 --> 01:37:38,910
For some things.

1664
01:37:39,220 --> 01:37:39,940
For some things.

1665
01:37:40,180 --> 01:37:40,820
Or anti?

1666
01:37:41,140 --> 01:37:42,500
I don't know where we s where we come out of this.

1667
01:37:42,740 --> 01:37:44,100
Uh for lengths for sure.

1668
01:37:44,260 --> 01:37:45,700
Volume two, like what is a pint?

1669
01:37:45,860 --> 01:37:47,140
Do you even know what a pint is?

1670
01:37:47,380 --> 01:37:48,820
I mean, well, a pint is easy because of the phone.

1671
01:37:48,980 --> 01:37:49,540
I know it's a beer.

1672
01:37:49,620 --> 01:37:50,260
I know it's something that's a drink.

1673
01:37:50,500 --> 01:37:54,580
It's only because of that, but like a port and a g in a bushel.

1674
01:37:54,820 --> 01:37:56,340
I mean, my God, what is this?

1675
01:37:56,420 --> 01:37:57,380
It's insane.

1676
01:37:57,700 --> 01:37:58,900
We gotta clean this shit up.

1677
01:37:58,980 --> 01:38:02,660
This is we we need we just shut the whole thing down and figure out what the hell is

1678
01:38:02,660 --> 01:38:02,820
happening.

1679
01:38:03,140 --> 01:38:07,700
Our next episode is just gonna be our opinion on various metrics.

1680
01:38:08,190 --> 01:38:10,990
Yeah, we should just have just a c a list of a kvetching podcast.

1681
01:38:11,230 --> 01:38:11,550
Yes, exactly.

1682
01:38:14,190 --> 01:38:14,510
Exactly.

1683
01:38:14,590 --> 01:38:14,990
What is this?

1684
01:38:15,070 --> 01:38:16,750
Uh what was the Seinfeld thing?

1685
01:38:16,830 --> 01:38:21,150
It was um uh the festive it's uh where you just complain airings of grievances.

1686
01:38:21,390 --> 01:38:22,750
Oh the airing of grievances, yes.

1687
01:38:22,990 --> 01:38:24,510
We we should have an airing of grievances.

1688
01:38:24,670 --> 01:38:30,190
Maybe many podcasts are just the they're just synonyms for the airing of grievances.

1689
01:38:31,870 --> 01:38:33,230
The airing of grievances.

1690
01:38:33,390 --> 01:38:33,630
Okay.

1691
01:38:33,870 --> 01:38:39,720
Well on that note, uh enjoy your week and um you know, use the metric system if you're

1692
01:38:39,720 --> 01:38:41,240
gonna measure something this week.

1693
01:38:41,560 --> 01:38:42,040
Mm-hmm.

1694
01:38:42,200 --> 01:38:42,920
Take care.