Moral Progress with Hanno Sauer
2026-09-29 12:00:00.000 +00:00

I'm David Petrozowski. You're David Pinsoff. That's correct. You stole my thunder. And this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast. Uh actual evolutionary psychology. By actual evolutionary psychologists, and You Stole My Thunder is a great name for podcasts. I don't know if there is one. Oh, the Thunder Steelers. No, you stole your band name? It should just be You Stole Thunder. That's a little clunkier. I prefer Thunder Steelers. Onto the on to the see you in a second, David. See you soon. Uh brilliant philosopher that we uh talked to about so many different interesting things. I think we started out talking about class and status and then I think uh we got r into a really juicy topic which was moral progress.

Yeah. Moral progress exists. Is it yeah and I don't know. My take on it is I think with everything in this podcast is people are simultaneously horrible and wonderful. And almost nothing that we explicitly talk about is really what it is under the surface. I think I would sign on to that one hundred percent. Uh and I think, you know, that that is a perspective that I think evolutionary psychology um props up and and makes more plausible. And it's not a a very intuitive one that you would arrive at necessarily. Um which is what I like anyway. Yeah. If you if you if you think we're making moral progress, if you think we we haven't, if you think slavery is over or just state slavery has been exchanged for economic

slavery. Um if you think that morality is a good thing or a bad thing or any of the above, I think this conversation will be interesting for you. Yes. Uh it was a really fun one. Uh listen to the end and uh yeah. Enjoy. Hanno, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast. Me too. Uh number one, because I'm I'm a big fan of the discipline of philosophy. But number two is you are a shiny example of a philosopher that I think avoids one of the biggest pitfalls of philosophy, which is being boring. Um you are you are not boring. Um you pick really big, juicy, interesting topics like morality, moral progress. Um, how does moral progress happen? Has it happened? Uh social class and status, virtue signaling, um, you know, uh

what evolution implies about the validity of our moral intuitions, whether there's such a thing as, you know, uh objective moral truths. I mean, these are all really fascinating questions, and you not only pick the most fascinating questions, but you write about them in a very clear, uh and and compelling, uh, interesting way. So I applaud you for that. Thank you. Yeah, I try not to be boring. I mean, much of philosophy is can can be kind of boring and overly technical. Uh there comes a point where you also once you've once you've gotten into one controversial topic or one controversy, you get addicted to to to fighting. Right. Uh and you get addicted to like, oh, this is more fun than just sort of being middle of the

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 happy for happy to be disagreed with and to disagree with people. And I really like this approach. I think this is from Tyler Cowan where he says um you have strong strong positions loosely held. Right? So you have like you know strong position, but I'm happy to give it up. Like, you know, if you if you tell me something and I'm like, oh, I guess I'm I believe that now. And I love I love to be in that space where I I feel comfortable to change my mind and update and uh and that's a lot of fun to me. Yeah, that's that's a very good way to approach intellectual life, I think, is to, you know, make strong claims and and really stand by them and give them a good run for their

money but like be willing to change your mind and that's really actually it's easier said than done. It's hard to do because once you make a strong claim you sort of stake your social status on it and then when you walk back from it you kind of look bad. That's that's kind of a social incentive problem. So it's all aspirational. It's all aspirational but that's what I try to do. Yeah for sure. Um so I want to get into your work on social class, because this is a topic that Dave and I have talked about uh a few times on the podcast with different guests. Uh one time we talked we talked about it with with Keila Williams, another with uh Leo Fettucci, who's done work on uh the morality of self control and indulgence,

and we briefly touched on how that might be related to social class. Uh we've we've talked about it from a life history perspective. Yeah, we've also talked a little bit from like a meta science perspective too, like even the class of scientists and what topics people find interesting colors the way science is done. Yeah. Yeah. So I know you have a book on cla on social class. Uh I I there's not yet an English version of it, so I have not read it. And I'm excited to just learn about it and get your take on it because I think it's a fascinating topic. And I think you're approaching it in the right way by drawing on insights from signaling theory. And I think that is that is the right way to tackle this topic.

Yeah, so I think I think social class is really at the you know, it's not the the explain all concept, but I think it does a lot of um interesting work and a lot of heavy lifting and understanding other phenomena, polarization, um, knowledge, uh um identity politics, you know, this this this this thing called wokeness and so on and so on. So many of these conflicts that we've all talked about a lot and read about a lot over the past five, ten, fifteen years. I think in many cases there there is at least a big part of it that's due to social class and socioeconomic status and the way that it makes people think and talk and interact and compete, and how it shapes people's views, and how it shapes society in general.

So, political developments of recent years, I think many of them are really fundamentally about socioeconomic distinctions and how they are maintained, and social exclusion, and how people want to signal who they are to other people. And of course, you know, there are different ways of thinking about social exclusion and identity and marginalization and advantage and disadvantage. And a lot of that has happened under these labels of racism and sexism and ableism. And I think that's legitimate, right? That conversation needs to happen and had to happen and still will continue, and that's legit. But I think in many cases, people have sort of like had this suspicion that maybe socioeconomic status and class membership are really you know the core phenomenon that

we're missing if we focus too much on um sexism, racism, and so on and so on. Uh and so that's kind of what I try to what I try to do in the in the book to really like look at everything morals and money and taste um and belonging uh through this lens of class distinctions and social signaling. Can I ask a clarifying question? Because I'm simple minded. So, from a very like first principles perspective, if you're a human being, you have evolved psychology for sort of two different things. One is who you're allied with. And then another one is how much stuff do you have and are you okay? And obviously these things relate because if you're allied with somebody who has a lot of resources, they might help you, and that's aspirational.

But if we take as I take it, and this is my elementary version of understanding the evolutionary psychology of something like social class, there's those are roughly two different phenomena in the sense of everybody walking around sort of has an evaluator of, you know, am I worried about having enough food or if my kid gets sick, am I gonna be okay? And it might be misfiring, right? Like somebody who's very objectively wealthy might still worry about their kid getting sick, although maybe they, you know, they'll lose their house or something. And there's there's sort of within your group of people you see on a daily basis, that comparison. And then there's also like, I know that there's other people I don't see that often who are

have much more stuff than me and much less stuff than me. Um so there's that kind of how much stuff do I have tracker? And then there's another part of it, which is um, who do I see on a regular basis? And then who do I aspire to be like? Um, and who do I want to signal that I'm sort of affiliated with? Yeah. Um And uh I think for most of our listeners, that would be a sort of rough take on where they're starting from. And so can you articulate um number one, if you would sort of agree with that as a rough take, or is that too simple, or do you depart from that? And then from there, what is uh the thesis of um uh um what David's talking about, if that's I mean, I mean, um, I'm not sure you agree with that or not, but I think a lot of evolutionary psychology

and a lot of what makes it interesting is about finding these misfirings, right? A lot of evolutionary psychology is about identifying an old mind and how it's placed in a different environment, right? It's about these evolutionary hangovers. Uh it's about, you know, still craving sugar when the supermarket is full, and you know, that it's it's just, you know, um our life is full of evolutionary hangovers and misfirings. And status competition and the intensity with which we are motivated to engage in status comparison and status competition to an extent where it doesn't even really matter how wealthy you are, right? You can you can have a hundred billion in the bank and you still want to be heard and

recognized, and you want to buy Twitter and so on and so on, right? Uh so that status competition, that anxiety just never goes away. And that's a kind of evolutionary hangover because it used to just not be possible until very recently to have durable wealth and security, right? You would always depend, it would always be much more elusive and much more fragile. And so it's just like pre-installed in our brains, in our psychology, to always worry about that, right? And it just, and it just never, never goes away because the circumstances that we that we find ourselves in now are so kind of recent and so unusual. And so our mind isn't really adapted to those circumstances so fully. And that's interesting, and it's it also explains why you find status competition and

status anxiety and status motivations everywhere in all socioeconomic classes and groups and strata. So I think that's just like, you know, fundamentally a very useful way of looking at the mind in general, is you see that it does all these weird things, right? Like optical illusions are a little bit like that as well, because it's a it's a it's a it's a weird environment that we've placed this relatively old mind in. And it used to be super important to care about your own reputation because you can break your leg and you still need people to share food with you, right? You need to be like perceived as a as a as a as a good person, as someone who once they've recovered, they will be part of the gang again and they'll you know share with you.

So we are intensely motivated to care about our own reputation just as a kind of insurance mechanism and a kind of survival mechanism, and that's still present. And also, we care about not just our own reputation and status and prestige, but also about um hanging out with people who have a lot of it. Right? We want to be around these people because we are we are a social, an intensely social, hyper-social Species or belong to a hypersocial species, and everything we know and everything we can do, so all our information and all our skills are downloaded from others. Right? Pretty much everything we can do is learned. It's learned from parents, from peers, from dead people. Most of it's learned from dead people, right?

Um, downloaded from dead from this cultural reservoir that's been built up over you know dozens of generations. And so we care about learning from the best cook and the best storyteller and the best hunter. And that is also I think why we track prestige and status and reputation in others, because it'll it'll allow us to sort of get the best information and get the best skills. Yeah. So if I can just interject, so you're describing the the the rationale. I'm hearing two things. One is you're describing the rationale for you care about these things, which I think most of us and David and I, I think most listeners are on board with. But what I'm hearing from the first part is, and maybe this is you're getting to the

thesis, is that um the this is a your argument is we should interrogate the degree to which our knee-jerk need for status actually makes sense given our objective situation. An analogy would be something where somebody who is bore grows up in extreme poverty and is just like hyper vigilant about food. And then they become wealthy as an adult, but other people around them see that person, care about that person, and see that their insecurity about food is having all kinds of negative knock on effects. Like they're not, they're just obsessed about it in a way that they don't need to be anymore. That's like an individual difference version of, I think, the evolutionary story, which is that as a if if as a species, we don't think about, um, if we don't think

about, well, why do I care about this? Why am I doing this? Is this to make the world better? Or is this just satisfying some sugar craving status thing that is actually making the world worse? That's enslaving some kid across the world that I don't even know about. Um, it's not making the world better, my local community better. Is that the kind of argument? So it's sort of an argument that by understanding and interrogating the source of this desire or motivation, it's a way to check whether or not it makes sense under current circumstances. Yeah, it's always also that. So when it comes to so there are these individual differences in in how how intensely people may be motivated to care about that.

I think. But then there are, you know, there there's a spectrum of how intense that desire is and how how how strongly that anxiety is felt. And then once you see or once you understand the sources of of these motivations and these desires, you can use that a little bit and to some extent as a tool for self reflection and think, oh, maybe I should I should relax about that a little bit more. Uh and it's and it's making my life needlessly difficult because I'm um I'm I'm so you know hung up on um getting ahead and uh and I'm so it it causes me so much stress and distraction uh and it makes me makes me engage in all these pointless activities simply because I want to keep up with the Joneses, right?

Um and also this is socially also important because um I think you you talk you also talk about that a lot that's that status competition and status hierarchy is inherently zero sum, right? You can't grow the pie of status, so to speak. Uh it's just a relative positional ranking. So socially, it can it can be detrimental and it can be bad for society when you have extremely intense status competition. Because it it's it's it's just a mechanism that can't make everyone involved better off. Because in order for you to improve your status, you need to knock me down. And in order for me to improve my states, I need to knock someone else down. Yeah. Um and so socially it can be detrimental, it can be zero sum, or in fact,

even negative sum when too many people t invest too too to too much work and and resources into um these activities, right? And you're just trying to trying to capture a greater market share, so to speak but but but but no actual growth uh is happening and and it and and no no it's not there's no general improvement in in social well being um across the board and so you're describing why we don't have ads on this podcast it's well it's exactly basically what ads do full time exactly well um um that that's correct uh that's uh so advertising is in a way non productive Um it's just about, you know, uh getting people to buy your your product rather than um rather than another. And it's just about getting ahead.

And you're not you're not really making any stuff. Or if you are, I mean, but usually what the odds are is it's creating it's it's cues of a status scheme that are typically not necessarily the status game you would play if you weren't exposed to those cues. and it's creating a uh it's it's it's scientist it's stimuli force it's status game stimuli that one could argue much of is uh isn't adding any benefit to anybody except the producer of the ad, which is a signaling element, right? If it was in your interest you wouldn't need to sign. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And again, I think this is how I think about society, or how how I how I came to think, or how I learned to think about society in general, is I see everything in terms of collective

action problems now. Right? I see everything in terms of like fundamentally like that. So I sometimes like I sometimes say I I feel like I'm kind of I'm I'm a kind of left Hobbesian. Um I see the world like a Hobbesian, but I still think that it's worth thinking about, okay, I because I do think these sort of like broadly liberal progressive goals are often good ones, right? Improving people's lives, um trying to get more people join society in a way that benefits everyone, right? Not to harm people or discriminate against people on the basis of unchosen traits, right? I think these are broadly, it's very hard to implement them. It's very hard to think about like what's the best strategy of implementing.

But I still think these are good ideas, good, good, good values and norms and principles that are characteristic of modern society, but they are just brought down and undermined the whole time by this nasty Hobbesianism that is just, you know, that we can't really get ever get rid of. And so that's how I kind of see the world, and that's how I approach ethics and political philosophy as a philosopher is to sort of like see this is really difficult, right? It's really difficult to get cooperation going and make it and arrange it in such a way that it's good for people. Um and status signaling and competition is part of that way of thinking, or sort of like downstream perhaps of that way of thinking, because I do think

it is extremely recalcitrant. It is essentially not possible to really get rid of it. And there are evolutionary and strategic reasons for why that is the case. So I have kind of like pretty pessimistic thesis in this book, which is that we can't get rid of classes. We can't get rid of hierarchical groups. They are going to emerge if we have well if we have essentially a certain group size right I think I think a lot of it uh is also about um I think a lot of evolutionary psychology when it comes to cooperation is about is is if people think about how do how how did we and how do we scale up cooperation right so how did we move from tiny groups and we seem to be you know much of much of much of

our psychology and and physiology seems to be evolved to deal with life in very small groups. And then the question is, how do you scale that up? How did we manage to scale that up? It's actually to some extent an unsolved problem. I mean, there are good ideas now around for how that worked and how it continues to work. Um, but that's that scalability of cooperation is really interesting to me. And I think also signaling is one of the mechanisms that contributed to allowing us to move from, you know, being this East African savannah dwelling creature to the kind of stuff that we do right now. And that's a fascinating question to me. How do how does how how how did that work and how does that work?

And what are the forces that threaten it and undermine it and that can lead to regress? Um, and so I also think that basically scaling up cooperation is what's behind the thing that people call moral progress. You know, all these things about inclusion and the expanding circle and so on and so on, all that the the way I think about that is in terms of how did we scale up cooperation to have very large groups and what are the functional requirements that you need to satisfy in order to have these large groups? Hmm. So scaling up cooperation, I want to un unpack that a bit. So is it is it merely the idea that the pool of people that you are cooperating with or having mutually beneficial relationships with has expanded?

Is that uh uh what you're saying that that we've been you know somehow uh learning or evolving to cooperate with a larger and larger pool of of individuals? Yeah, basically, yeah. Okay. Basically, yeah. It's it's uh and it's also yeah, well well i I think in in in in evolutionary psychology the the the basic puzzle is why do humans cooperate with strangers? Because we tend to do that. Relatively speaking, we are quite good at it, Right. Relatively speaking, we are maybe not fully, but pretty unique in how we do it and unique even that we do it. And that's an interesting question because we, you know, what we do today, you know, in this podcast, or or what what what I did today when I bought a pencil from for my for my

for my for my daughters who just who are starting sixth grade tomorrow. Um, I'm cop I was cooperating with strangers and uh people I don't even know and then will never know and have never met. And that's fascinating to me how that works and what what what what institutional toolkit is required to make that happen because it can't be kinship, right? It can't be uh it can't be uh we understand the the the the the deep and tremendous importance of kinship for cooperation um and for the evolution of simple forms of altruism and and vicarious distress and sympathy and so on and so on. And we understand the role that simple forms of reciprocity have played for scaling that up a little further. But of course, you can't have a modern society of hundreds of millions of people

cooperating that's based on kinship. And so that's also fascinating to me. Like how did that happen and why did it happen? Hmm. Yeah, it's interesting to me that um you you noted just the basic fact that everything around us is a product of cooperation, just immense um sets of of division of labor, you know, the computer I'm and and the microphone that I'm using probably have parts you know distributed all across the world. Uh you know, uh uh many, many different people cooperated and divided labor to produce the microphone for me. Um it's weird because it's a kind of cooperation that I'm not really aware of. You know, whereas most cooperation uh happens, you know, between people like I know the

person that I'm interacting with, I I I have a sense of whether they're a good person or not, of their reputation. Um, whereas when it comes to just the basic um network of cooperation that underlies uh our global capitalist society, none of that is really conscious to me. Um it's sort of like kind of a kind of modularized cooperation where you know maybe the individual uh uh organizations that are distributed around the world are cooperating, and maybe you know the uh the the buyers and the sellers are cooperating, and and there are long chains of cooperation, and I'm on one end of the chain, and at each individual link in the chain, there's you know a pretty identifiable group of people who are cooperating.

But with me, I'm just completely alienated from all of that, and all I get is the last link in that chain. Yeah. So I'm wondering if that if that might be part of it, where it's just like, I I don't even know how all this works. And I don't have to. And that's kind of the how the system works is that it it decomposes and modularizes cooperation such that I don't have to be a participant in all of it to benefit from it. Yeah. Yeah. So there's this there's this nice phrase from the from their um early 19th century philosopher uh Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. And Hegel had this had this idea of a cunning of reason, right? The cunning of reason was, of course, Hegel had this sort of completely inflated

metaphysical idea that it's, you know, essentially, you know, the objective spirit, you know, so reason itself that is shaping human history and human behavior. Nowadays we don't really talk like that anymore or think like that anymore because we think it's much more random and much more uh and just not guided by this sort of almost divine the rational force. But the cunning of reason is still this idea that social structures and institutions and ways of cooperating don't really need the individuals involved in that to even understand it, right? It's sort of like these structures they reach through your intentions, and you're almost like fulfilling a purpose that you have no idea even exists, right?

Um now again, I'm I'm not I'm I'm I I don't I don't endorse the very very strong teleological version that Hegel endorsed, which is very, very metaphysically bloated and sort of just not plausible anymore. But still, I think what we see is that human cooperation depends on these structures that people don't have to understand, don't even have to know about, right? And that we haven't understood very well until recently, and until we started to also talk about culture in terms of evolutionary forces, right? So we have we are cultural being when we have these institutions and these rules and these frameworks and this inherited cultural capital that makes a lot of things work whilst being totally opaque and intransparent to us.

And that's sort of like the modernized, naturalized version, I think, of this Hegelian idea of a cunning of reason. Again, it's not like, you know, we're not we're not we're we're not marching towards the end of history, as Hegel thought. Um conveniently he thought that culminates in the Prussian state that he was uh that he was part of, that that's sort of like the best thing ever. Right? So d no one believes that anymore, but there's there is a it's a little bit analogous the way that nowadays people think about cultural evolution is that sometimes good stuff is happening and we don't even know how and we don't even know why. And we can participate in cooperation without even understanding how it works, how it came

about, and it can still benefit us. It doesn't have to benefit us, sometimes it's also bad. But there's at least that potential for stuff to go right sometimes. Where do you think moral progress fits in on this continuum of stuff sort of happening in a distributed way where nobody's really aware of what's emerging? And it just kind of emerges spontaneously through the interactions of many individuals, just individually acting in their own self-interest, sort of in a Hayekian way where, you know, uh prices that send signals about supply and demand just sort of emerge spontaneously from everyone individually acting under their uh financial incentives. Uh is moral progress something like that where nobody really planned for it, nobody really

intended it to happen, it's just kind of emerge with you know uh from all these interactions and these processes? Or is it more like we really set out to uh to improve our morality and we made a plan and we made it happen and everyone was fully aware of what was going on? So, like where where do you think moral progress fits in on that? that? I think it's mostly it's mostly one of these processes as well that is intransparent to us and just happens when it when it happens. Of course, there are exceptions. Like I think, for instance, like you know, women's rights, gay rights, these were conscious demands, right? And people organized for them. And people thought, yeah, we know these things are this is where we are headed, right?

Yeah. You we can't really, you know, you you're in the 60s in the US and people just think like it's time, right? We can't have a society where you know just because of something a completely harmless attraction that is none no one no no one's business, where people you know suffer greatly, can't live openly, you know, can't form um companionships and partnerships and loving relationships and they need to be like secretive about it and so on and so on. And those are cases where people consciously said, we need to make this happen, right? And we need to march for it and we need to demand it. And here's why. And here are like consistency arguments, blah blah blah blah blah. But mostly I think it's driven by by these glacial forces of social

change that is happening in a in a in a certain in a certain direction. Now, Moral progress is in many ways, I think, perhaps the core idea of the Enlightenment, of the Enlightenment tradition, because people, it's always an artificial way to pick a timing, but let's say you know mid-18th century, right? Where that really started, then 1800 plus and so on and so on. So the heyday of the Enlightenment, people thought that if only we keep doing what we're doing, if only we keep getting rid of superstition, right? And religious dogma and ignorance. And if only we keep getting rid of arbitrary rule and oppression. And if we just keep doing that, right, everything will be fine. And everything will just continue to improve, right?

For everyone. Of course, I'm not denying silly or or or problematic views that many of these Enlightenment thinkers had, but by and large, I think that was the thought. Is that we if we keep doing science and technology and and and and um fairer and more just social institutions, everything is gonna only get better. And then, of course, that idea became immensely, well, immensely unpopular is one way of putting it. But it it was kind of catastrophically disconfirmed in the 20th century. Right? And so it fell extremely out of fashion. And and and um with with the the Second World War and the Holocaust and the nuclear bomb and all of these things, um, all the way up to Rwanda, if you wish, and or Bosnia, right?

All of these things that happened in the 20th century um seem to just make you know s seem seem seem to to design to to to ridicule this idea that we are automatically marching into ever more improvement and ever more well-being, right? And there seem to be forces at play that even the you know, even the most advanced places in the world, like Central Europe at the time perhaps, or whatever, they they can regress enormously quickly into madness and into and into barbarism and into mass murder. And in fact, a kind of mass murder that harnesses the power of the Enlightenment, right? That was, I think, so striking to people at the time, is that you can have kind of bureaucratically, rationally organized genocide.

So this isn't some this isn't some frenzy that that that that that that took, but this is like methodical years long, you know, with with accounting and the smartest people in the country running it, right? I think, and that was so shocking to people, I think. And so for the longest time, moral progress became kind of like a joke. And you could start with, well, of course, there isn't any. And then recently, this has been rehabilitated a little bit by these, you know, uh Hans Rossling and Pinker, who who who like wrote a couple of books. I have like a whole library full of them, that are all like, you know, things are better than you think, right? But of course, the New York Times isn't going to tell you every single day that another

hundred thousand people escape poverty. So you never hear about it, right? You only hear about planes crashing, you don't hear about you know the the amazing functionality of aviation and so on and so on. And so uh we just we just we're just missing this potential for improvement. So that's been rehabilitated a little bit. There's been a lot of backlash to it, and it's and people thought you're just chilling for capitalism and for neoliberalism and so on. And this is actually not true. But I'm mostly on board with that story. And I think that while there's no guarantee that there will be moral progress, if you um think if you if you think about how we can create and sustain successful cooperation between ideally lots of people?

That can be good for humanity. And it can be good, it's probably a good idea to not, you know, think that Germany and France must be eternal arch enemies. It's probably a good idea not to think about Japanese people as alien and weird and to sort of like you know to tear down these these these these boundaries and to enable large scale peaceful cooperation and trade and exchange of information and so on and so on. And I think when we allow that to happen and when we don't sabotage it, you know there are there are there are people pop up every now and then that almost seem like hellbent on sabotaging these these developments and these um these changes. If we don't sabotage it, that can be good for people.

So that's kind of how I think about moral progress. It's not teleological, I think, in the sense of there's some like objective spirit puppet master that makes sure it's gonna be fine and we can we don't have to worry about it. Um it's it's it's it's it's a slow and frustrating process that takes decades and and centuries to unfold, but there is potential in human society, I think, to get on that gravy train of change in a good direction. And often that means, I think, getting more people enfranchised in these cooperative structures. It means On broadly egalitarian terms, we don't have to say that you know everyone is you know literally equal, but that's a way of thinking about human individuality and and and and and and humanity that is

probably basically good, right? Where you don't demonize people because they look different or they have different cultures or different languages. Um and it also means that probably there's going to be uh a at least a slight bias in favor of more liberty and tolerance and um getting rid of weird arbitrary rules, right? That you know it's gonna be plot probably in the direction of pluralism and liberty and tolerance, because when you have a larger society, there's going to be more diversity, it's going to be more complexity. And if you want to keep that up, you can't have Protestants and Catholics hating each other, right? So there are these social developments that that people just thought, you know, after

after 30 years of war between 1618 and 1648, people thought this is not good. Uh right. And we can't we can't really we can't really metaphysically resolve this conflict whether it's literally Jesus' blood that transub substantiates into the wine or something. I don't even know the theology of it. You know, we can't kill ourselves, we can't keep killing ourselves about these sorts of questions. We need to chill, right? And if we want to uh if we want to have a have a peaceful life and thrive in this in this you know valley of tears that is life, we need to we need to stop um engaging in the in the in these in these pointless arbitrary conflicts that make everyone worse off. And I think that so it it's it's been centuries of of of learning that probably we we want

to head in in in in that direction. Which is why I'm I get so pissed off when when when these like territorial conflicts about like, you know, who should who should who which group should live in this swamp when they get like reanimated and so on. That that makes me that makes me mad. I I wanna dig into the question of the weird timing of this. Because you you told a story where people just kind of gradually learned that, like, hey, this makes everyone worse off, war sucks, this is all stupid. We gotta we should just stop this. Um but that picture doesn't really fit the empirical uh pattern that we see throughout the historic. It wasn't like gradually we just stopped doing war because we realized it was stupid.

It was like we had millennia of just endless war and bloodshed and conquest and slavery. Uh and everyone was totally cool with this. Nobody like really questions that hey, maybe maybe we should stop doing this. This is kind of making everyone worse off. It was just this was just the norm. This was the way the world worked. And then all of a sudden you you see this huge spike uh around 19th, 20th century, where we started giving a shit. You know, we started saying, hey, this isn't cool. Uh uh war sucks, we should stop being racist and sexist, and slavery sucks. Like all these things happened uh very recently. Yeah. Um, and and not gradually, uh uh if you look at the the the vast sweep of human history.

So, like, what how do you explain like the timing of it? Like, why then? And why so dramatically at that point in history? where you know, why did it take us so long to realize how how stupid this stuff was? Yeah, I mean it's that's a that's that's a that what one one of the huge questions that we uh wanna and you're right, the story I told is very false, right? Uh yeah in sort of like the timing and the empirical details. Um but so there's a couple I th I I do think that probably most people most of the time did hate this, even millennia ago and but they were kind of like you know also this is also a collective action problem where they couldn't you know uh resist um you know the the the the

the the plans of Agamemnon to raid this city right they but they they were kind of forced to and they couldn't resist they couldn't organize against it it was supported culturally by certain values uh but it did but it but it benefited No one really. But these people just weren't hurt and they couldn't, and they couldn't, um, they didn't have the power to to to to to resist that. And also for the longest time, of course, um, we we had we we we hadn't understood and we only understand economic growth that it even that is even possible. It's a very recent thing, right? You see all these graphs on on our world in data, and you know, there's nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And then, like you said, very recently.

So we had to kind of it's very past dependent and we had to kind of like at some point we we we locked into that potential a little bit, escaping the Malthusian trap and figuring out how can we have positive sum interactions between people. And for the longest time, if you wanted to get rich or grow your economy of of your city state or of your of your, I don't know, um, you had to just, you know, take it from someone else. Right? Uh and people just people just couldn't think of like how would you even how would you even, you know, distinguish yourself and become rich and powerful without taking resources from other people? Because it's just a you know, because re because resources are finite and they aren't

making more of it. And we and and it's apparently it apparently it was very, very difficult for us to figure out that that's not true. And we can actually be enormously productive and make new stuff and create fridges and and uh and uh and airplanes and and and uh vaccines. Um now, of course, even after we discovered that, so you're totally right, even after we discovered that, people still didn't stop warring and and conquering and and and and all this madness. Because, of course, you know, group antagonism and group conflict is very easily activated. It's very old. Uh, and it's very, very easy to get people to hate each other on the basis of seemingly arbitrary characteristics like being French or German, or being white or black, or being,

I don't know, Japanese or Chinese. Uh, it's just it's just very easy to to to get that hostility, uh, those hostility juices flowing. And so that's that that that's how I would say, yes, it's not like we learned this gradually. Um, I do think that for the longest time this was kind of an elite phenomenon that was at the expense of the majority of people. Um, warring and conquest and so on and so on. Um and human society at one point kind of in some places figured out that oh you know we can we can we can we can create these positive sum interactions between people and even then it was still difficult to make that work and to and to keep it around. And And then sort of the ultra optimistic way of telling this story is that just like after the 30 year war, in

1648, in 1945, there was another moment where people like in the Western world kind of said, like, this is not good. We need to, you know, we can't we can't think about society and the world in terms of racial groups being being in conflict with each other over land and resources, right? Which was which was a very, very important part of Nazi ideology, is that you have these groups of people, these races, uh, right? And there's the Aryan race, and there's the Jewish race, and there's the black race, and blah blah blah. And they are in conflict with each other, right? And if you want the Aryan race to do well, it needs to come at the expense of the others, right? Um, and that was a bad idea. It became extremely popular, unfortunately, for um between

33 and 45. And it's still something that is very popular and easily reactivated, right? To say that you know Canadians. But still, the ultra-optimistic version of telling this story would be that after this, after after this huge catastrophe, people started to think that we need to build some sort of global institution, ideally global institutional framework that will allow more positive sum interactions, economic growth, and more widely shared wealth and well-being to happen. And this has been at least unusually successful, I would say. You know, in historical comparison, this has been quite surprisingly successful. Very far from perfect, of course, and very far from guaranteed that it will continue to

happen, but uh but that's kind of how I would tell the story. And I mean, bad ideas and bad rules and bad institutions can stick around for an enormously long amount of time. Like footbinding was took a thousand years, and it's and it's that and it's the most bizarre, cruelest, most pointless idea you can even think of, right? And it took a thousand years. Probably some pervert in China a thousand years ago loved it, right? Some powerful pervert. And it made it stick and it like and it flowed through society, and people started doing it, um, and so on and so on. But when you think about it, it is extremely bizarre to like disable your wife cruelly, or to to your daughter, you know, uh uh cruelly.

Um uh and and and and it's possible for these kim the philosopher Kim Sterelny calls these snafu, situation normal, all fucked up. Um there are these snafus in in in human society that evolve and then they're hard to get rid of. Think of genital mutilation, right? You know, there are there are people you know, pretty big groups of groups in in in in in East Africa and in so pr broadly that region that that just you know cut off young girls clitoris with with dirty with like a shard or something, right? Or or a rusty knife. It's a it's a terrible idea, right? It's like the it's like the worst idea I've ever heard. uh but it's it it's kind of evolved as a mutation and it sticks around and then you have

and people are locked in this phenomenon that christina bicchieri called pluralistic ignorance so everyone thinks that you know the neighbor wants it and the neighbor thinks that you want it uh and it becomes very very hard to get rid of and that's unfortunately also how society works and so you can have a lot of bad stuff that's sticking around and that's and that's and that once you get rid of it you think like what were you what were you thinking Um, and it's it's bizarre, cruel, and pointless. Yeah. We we at the beginning of this, we talked about having uh strong opinions weekly held. Um, I'd like to offer one here, which is well, I want you to hold them weekly. My opinions are I'm gonna start.

I'm holding it weekly, that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm prefacing this. So um and I'm curious what David thinks about this as well, because you guys have thought about this more. So we've talked about recently there's sort of we we now understand these these moral goods. Um I'm curious what you both think about the idea that we haven't learned anything. But there are just externalities of just dynamics that have consequences. So for example, let's say that we just we live in a society with no refrigerators and then we have refrigerators. We all turn around and look at each other and say, hey, we have a lot more food, and it's buffered against uh you know time um heat and time and whatever. And so maybe we're all more cooperative, right?

So we look around and we say, look, we're not fighting as much, but the mechanism of that is like a refrigerator, right? So there's two separate things. One is how did we get there? What's the mechanism? And then the other one is the observation or the mean, the outcome, right? Like, oh, we've, you know. And so my w the thesis I want to argue for is that moral progress is a is a is the equivalent of noticing we all have more time and food, where we're looking around and saying, hey, look, like it's really good that you know, these people who were oppressed are not, but the means to get there have been sort of opaque. And the idea is that, I mean, for example, the idea that, you know, we're not um having

slaves or we're not taking stuff from people in order to make money, one argument is that's still happening. It's just more hidden now. It's more economic, it's more regional. You know, there's still economic slavery, there's still regional things like that. And so what used to be done by nation states is now done by you know nation states in collaboration with like corporations or something. Um and uh and so the idea is that we we haven't changed our moral insight, and now we're checking will this behavior produce these negative externalities of coercion or manipulation or enslavement? We're not doing that. We were just looking around and being like, hey, look, there's a lot of slavery that doesn't exist anymore.

There's a lot of um indentured servitude that doesn't exist anymore, but we're not looking for it going forward either. It's just that other shit happened. Um, uh, and as a consequence of that, it's gotten better. So this is this is a thesis, and again, I don't think I entirely believe it, but it has implications, right? The thesis is that moral progress is an outcome, but it's not the means to get there. And we don't, in most cases, even if we want to get there, there's an opacity about how to get there. And it's often weird things like refrigerators, not we should all stand around aiming to have more peaceful interactions, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So I would I I'm I mean I would love I

would love to disagree with more but but but I think I'm pretty happy with that. So so I so there is a sense in which people don't get better. Right? And so I I'm I'm happy to I'm I'm I'm I'm happy to call myself a materialist. Um you know I think these changes are driven by stuff, technology. I also think a lot about human cognition and human interaction in terms of offloading things into your environment. Right. And that's where we store the knowledge. And by it's kind of trivially true that each generation starts afresh, right? You you know, babies come, Babies are Neanderthals, right? They are cavemen. And they don't know anything. And if you get rid of the refrigerators and the and the washing machines and the and the

courts that maintain the rule of law and so on and so on, you revert back like that. So if if that's what you mean, I'm I'm on I'm on board with that. So it's not it's just not in our brains. It's like p p it's it's it's it's all offloaded into the environment. But I think that's we as a human species, that's what we're all about, right? So there is this nice research in cultural evolutionary theory about how a lot of our basically, you know, a lot of our physiology and our anatomy has been shaped by the fact that we externalized cooking, We externalized digestion into cooking. Right? So we are we are these super effeminate apes, right? We are these super like gay apes, right? These golden retriever kind of creatures that are sort of super super uh uh uh um um

uh uh naked and and and and and and soft and weak. Um very grassile. We're very grassile, yes. Exactly. It's like we are like the ballet dancers of uh of apes. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, Neotnus were cute. I I I I me I just ballet dancers are pretty uh probab probably there was some fighting between Neanderthals and our and our ancestors. And I just imagine, you know, because humans basically look like Neotinous chimps. Yeah. You know, because we um the Neanderthals would have been basically having to fight against, you know, big babies. Like like their enemies would have been cute to them. You know, those big babies outsmarted them. Oh yeah. I just find that a very funny image. That's why we love the underdog story, right?

That's where we're the um yes exactly. Anyway, continue. Sorry. We are very very we are extremely cute. Um, and you know, with small, useless jaws, uh, and very slender figure and so on and so on, just because we we offloaded all of that into you know chopping things, fermenting things, cooking things, making them soft, digestible, blah blah blah. And and that that that's basically the paradigm of how I think about human corporation and institutions as well. We offload all of that into our environment. Um I mean in the case of cooking we literally become you know dependent on it yeah so um it is this is this because this goes back so far um that we can't really do without it anymore with that technique and and no one no one no one does without it there's the you know all

human cultures do that and care about it enormously um and the rules and structures and institutions of cooperation, I think, are kind of like that. They are features of the environment. They are in our cities, they are in our roads, in our buildings, in our laws, um, um and and and and we offload things into our environment. And that's what makes us work. And we are um we are uh we are the extended mind kind of species right so in philosophy there's this extended mind hypothesis is that the you know we are extremely unique in in in in in in offloading knowledge and skills and and abilities into our environment and that scaffolds our behavior and and our and our and our society and so uh I mean tell me if I'm wrong but that seems to be a way of

like agreeing with you that I think I think there is a sense in which hum you know each and every human doesn't become better, and each and every generation doesn't, in some sense, internally become better. Um, it's just hopefully an increasingly an increasing amount of good ideas get offloaded into the environment, and and then hopefully not too many of them get destroyed as we pass them on from generation to to generation. But if you do destroy them, it can be very hard to get them back. And it can take a very, very long time because, like you said, we don't really understand where it came from. We and we we and people didn't invent. I think there's actually a lot of serious research on how women's rights were aided by the

washing machine. Right. But of course, the inventors of the washing machine, they couldn't care less about that. They were capitalist pigs that wanted to make money. But they it had this this this this side effect, like you said, of just like creating more food and time, so to speak. And then people start demanding, oh, uh by the way, you know, uh we should be we we should we we we we should we should be able to vote. Um and and people recognize like, yeah, that's probably after a lot of struggle and a lot of strife, people you know, some some amount of people recognizes that that's probably a defensible idea and so on and so on and so on. Um but that's that that's that's that I I agree with that.

If moral progress happens, it happens almost entirely outside of our heads. And it's like externalizing our d digestive system. We've externalized cooperation into these structures and and institutions, and that's what makes them fly. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think to rephrase or to just paraphrase what you're saying to make sure I understand it, it's sort of that we're codependent as a species. We're the codes dependent species on the environment or the external structures. And that in in some sense, and I think this is even what you're saying, helps me clarify what I think my point was, is almost there's a tolerated scrounging sense of moral progress, which is it usually is the case that everybody wants more

morality for themselves in the sense of more rights, less exploitation. Yeah. And if the circumstances allow it, people will say, All right, I'll give you more if it doesn't really blow back on me too much. So it's this tolerated scrounging idea of um I'll sort of I'm not gonna fight for it. I mean, I obviously there's wonderful exceptions and uh but I just mean it's a general dynamic. In aggregate, you'll if I'm okay and you're gonna get better, that's okay with me and I'll kind of tolerate and but but the means to it is this very ethereal, codependent, uh nonlinear thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and and yeah, I I like this perspective a lot. Um you could think of it as a, you know, emergent moral progress or Hayekian moral progress

where it's not anyone's, you know, it's not centrally planned. It just kind of emerges spontaneously through interactions and ecological changes. And we mentioned one of the biggest ecological changes, which was, you know, in the agricultural era, you know, uh it it really mattered, you know, how much land you had. You know, agriculturally productive land was the thing to have if you wanted to have resources, right? Uh and unfortunately, agriculturally productive land is a limited resource that can be monopolized and defended with a group of thugs with swords or spears or whatever. Yeah. And so the entire economic system was inherently zero sum. It was who had the land, right? Yeah. And uh eventually the value of productive land became so high that you know, whoever just

happened to be sitting on the land, you know, uh a long time ago became the king and they just got to boss everyone around because they were sitting on the land, you know, a hundred years ago, right? Yeah. Um, and and and war just became about seizing land. Yeah. And and and and it was kind of inescapably zero sum just because of the nature of the ecology uh uh and and the economic system. But then gradually uh we began to create new resources that w uh moved above and beyond simply agriculturally productive land. We began to uh invent ideas about how to make the land more productive. You know, ideas aren't really monopolizable in the same way as a patch of land is. We began to invent new products and new goods and services, uh and the creation of those

things could very much grow the pie for everyone without you know excluding other people from the pie. So there was just a a a massive change in the ecology and the economic structure that I I think is is underlying what we call moral progress. It just it you know the the the economy itself became less zero sum and the gains from cooperation and positive sum relationship just exploded. Um and and and what we call moral progress, I think, is is people gradually like adjusting to that new ecology and waking up to all of the past arbitrary, cruel practices that they had to live with, but but now all of a sudden became optional. Yeah. Uh and and you know, here we are. Yeah, and that's why that uh again that that's why it's so just frustrating to

to see like you have the literally the lit literally literally the largest country in the world and the and its leaders say you know what we should be larger right uh and and that's so important that um it is worth sending a million young men to perish, Right? That makes me bad. Right? Because because it's it's it is obsolete. Right? This it's based on something where you realized maybe used to be true thousand years ago when that situation obtained that you described, right? Where you had to have the land. Yeah. But now you can just you know you can just share it and trade and and and and you know and and and that and this so this is literally sabotage, I think. Um uh sabotage of potential gains um with enormous costs um

um for for some weird well historical obsession with Vlad the Impaler, or I don't even know. Right? Um, uh, that that makes me incredibly annoyed. Um because it's it's just we know that's not the way. Right? And it took such a long time, and like you said, it's so precarious and so unlikely to even realize that at all, right? Uh uh that now that we in principle at least have realized that that's possible. Um it's it's very very frustrating to to see these like group needless group conflicts reactivated and and for for for political gain for for votes um for financial gain for clicks um and for um weird obsessions um and it's it's And I think these ide these these insights and ideas and these institutions that make

um positive some interactions that in principle can improve the well being of more and more people involved, it's it's these insights and institutions are really worth defending. And that is a sort of like Small p progressive point of view, in that sort of like it's like a long-term progressivism in that. It's like, let's think about it in terms of centuries, right? And you see that by and large, not killing each other on the basis of weird group conflicts is probably a good idea. Um and um and that is yeah, that is that is that is what moral progress largely consists in, and then all the rest of it kind of drops out that, you know, more it it's it's gonna be slightly more egalitarian because if you want to have larger groups, you know, there's

gonna be pressure to admit people into this franchise on sort of equal terms, right? And it's gonna be in and uh treatment of children is gonna become better, treatment of minorities is gonna become better, frustratingly slow and imperfectly and with setbacks and and so on and so on and so on. But in principle, I think that's the functional dynamic, kind of like pulls in that direction. Hope. I hope. And I hope it'll continue to do so. It's almost like you're saying that like this this huge ecological and economic change and transformation that we've undergone. Like we're we're still sort of catching up to it. Like we still haven't quite fully adjusted. And we're still having cultural atavisms where we're uh acting as if we still lived in a

world where the where land was a zero sum resource and you know, if whoever has the most land wins. You know, you could you could view, you know, the the recent war on Ukraine as a kind of cultural atavism where like Putin is acting, he's like a man from the 17th century that's that happens to be in the in the present era, and he's acting under the logic of a man from the 17th century. Yeah. Uh and he's just out of place. It's just kinda like he hasn't woken up to the fact that hey, um uh this we're no longer in a world where whoever has the most land wins. Yeah, yeah. You and I think you can you you can you you can view Israel Palestine as a very complicated issue, but in principle that's how I see this as like this should be happening.

Yeah. Right? Uh um uh I mean, I don't think this this this you know part of the world is that desirable to begin with, but if you want it, right, you you could you could share it, right? You if you think about it long term, like um uh or or whatever, you know, we need Greenland. It's just so silly. Yeah. I I think there's a more pessimistic take on David's articulation though, which is that I like I agree that I get angry when people do this atavism. Let's get stuff. But on the idea that we haven't learned anything, or if we do, it's it's a it's a narrative of within the range that the circumstances are allowing, there's this tolerated moral progress. And I agree with that. I mean, uh as a person, of course I do.

Like, of course, we should fight for um rights and uh moral progress, and within the range of what is explicitly representable and negotiable, it has huge effects. There's no, there's enormous history, historical record of that. But I think the argument would be the pessimistic one would be that it's no surprise that there's somebody who's always being like, let's just attack those guys, or like, let's get more land. because, like you said, people don't change. And people are just always throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks. Yeah. And the scary thing then is that no matter how much moral progress there is, it's not an inevitable improvement. It's just a description of what we've gotten to so far.

It's not because we've it's it's a counterenlightenment argument, which is that it's great that people have these values and ideals, or as to put in David's language, it's ideology, but it's not that it's ideology then determines the future outcomes. It's that everybody's trying to get status, everybody's trying to get resources, and then there's this tolerated scrounging for morality. And that's a very different prognosis because then the argument is we assume that it's all gonna go away and we have to think carefully about which status schemes are gonna produce which externalities and which moral externalities, and that we haven't learned that it's bad to exploit people. We haven't learned that slavery is wrong, we we haven't learned that war is wrong.

It just looks different. It's hidden, but we haven't learned anything. And I think that's a very different prognosis. It's a very pauper point, which is like the point of the social sciences is to study the unintended consequences of policies. Um, it's one that is sort of like we are all horrible and we're letting horrible things happen, and we only want to know insofar as it affects us. That's that I think is the most pessimistic view, that we haven't learned any moral progress, and we're just we just like to think we have. Yeah, there's a market to buy that idea. Um, I don't again, I don't know if I agree with that idea, but I think that's the most pessimistic um argument. And it's the one with the responsibility of saying everything we're doing, we should be

kind of constantly checking for what externalities is what we're doing causing. Yeah, yeah. I mean, to some extent, it seems to me like we need to do like a minute of like in philosophy people sometimes say semantic ascent, where you sort of like let's talk about the word learning first, and then we can agree or disagree. Exactly. Um depends a little bit on what we mean by learning. Yeah, so I I I I yeah, and there is a there is a sense in which we haven't learned that slavery is bad. Yeah. Uh but but but there is another sense in which we have. Correct. Uh so you so yeah, uh, but but but in the in the first sense, I'm I'm happy to to to to to to totally concede that point to you. Um We have built an external environment and a new

ecology that has allowed a thriving economy without slavery. I mean, I I like to I like to point out to people that Aristotle, he he he, you know, by seen by many as the greatest mind ever produced by by humanity. Maybe not by me, but it's a you know it's a strong contender. He was fine. He was fine. C plus. And and he he he you know his book on on human society uh and uh you know the politics it it's it's the f on the first page he says okay first of all you gotta have slaves. Yeah. Right? He couldn't even, you know, who who else is gonna do the labor? Yeah. There's just no concept, there's no understanding of um. And so we've we we've we've you know fortuitously stumbled upon a set of institutions that make slavery.

not advantageous anymore. Um it's not a good way of running an economy. Again, it's it's it's good, it's good, you know, it it it it's advantageous for the slave owners, right? Uh for for the individual plantation owners. That was a good deal, right? Um, but it's overall not a good way of running a society and of making a society rich, and it's I mean, not even not not to not even to speak of, of course, of the slaves, right? Uh uh for whom it's not good. Um, but yeah, so in that second sense, we learned as a society that it's that it's a bad idea and that you shouldn't treat people like that. But yeah, I'm I'm I'm very much a sort of like the the owl of Minerva is starting its flight at dusk kind of person.

So you have these material changes first, and then the intellectual grasping comes later, Right. And then you c and then you dress it up in in in in nice sounding terms. This is going to be, you know, very, very uh agreeable to you, David. You know, dress it up in these moral terms that, oh, you know, don't we all know? And so, but but much of that is sort of like epiphenomenal, perhaps, or or after-the-facts or rationalizations of stuff that already happened and that has now become easy for you to agree with, Still think these this is this is not to undermine these ideas, but uh but I think um I think the sort of like um the internal learning of these ideas is very flimsy. Yeah. And very and very revertible.

It's interesting. There's a more optimistic spin you could put on this, where maybe uh on some level we always knew that slavery was abhorrent, right? Um and the very reason why we had all of these elaborate rationalizations and justifications and ideologies uh to make us more comfortable with slavery suggests that we were on some level uncomfortable with it. Like we wouldn't have needed all of these rationalizations. It would have just been the yeah, slavery, yeah, uh they they can do stuff for me. I can force them to do that with violence, and I'm just gonna do that because that's good for me and that sucks for them, and they're no different from me. But you know, I'm a selfish person and I'm just gonna exploit them and dominate them.

And that's yeah, that could have been the way we talked about slavery, yeah. But it very much wasn't. There was this huge tapestry of uh of rationalizations, you know. In in you know, uh primarily it was rationalized in terms of war where you know slavery is better than dying. So it seems like, hey, it's a nice thing to do to give someone the option of being your slave as opposed to killing them. Oh, what a nice guy I am that I'm conquering this land and I'm, you know, letting these people live and be my slave. So like that that was like one rationalization that emerged and it was very common. And then eventually, once slavery became so productive agriculturally, we needed a new rationalization because we were no longer getting slavery or slaves from war.

We were just going and taking them, right? To make us more more productive. And we need a new rationalization. And then emerged the the uh the the white supremacist rationalization of slavery, where they're they were savages, uh, they uh they um they they live in a very primitive, horrible lifestyle. We're doing them a favor, you know, they're they're inferior to us, and then you know, and when we're they're when they're serving us, they they're really they're living their best lives. So we're doing them a favor, and you know, a new set of rationalizations emerged. But the fact that at every step of the way we needed rationalizations suggests that we were uncomfortable with it, you know? And we were wort wary of other people judging us as being domineering assholes.

And we needed some kind of story to tell them for us to look good. Right? And so what happened was that just the material incentives and the and and the game theoretic equilibria changed to a point where slavery no longer made economic sense. It was no longer sustainable to have this apparatus of of slavery underway. And all of a sudden like the discomfort that had been there the whole time just started to win. And then the rationalizations started to lose. Yeah. So maybe that's a more optimistic spin on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. That's great. And I also think that often when we look at practices uh from the past, they seem abhorrent to us, but they are really just intermediate stages.

Right. So often you have this example that's mentioned that, you know, um in biblical times, uh an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and then people say, Oh, how cruel uh that is. They shouldn't you know, um what a what a what what a what a what a what a vengeful way to think about justice and punishment and so on and so on. But really this was huge progress compared to you know just you know ultraviolent feuding between groups of people. It was it was some taming of a village for it was it was exactly against a village for an eye. Exactly. And so Philip Kitcher has this nice example where there used to be a rule in one of these tribes from Mesopotamia, I believe, that but that's you know, if if if if if

you rape my daughter, I as a matter of justice, I get to rape your daughter. Right? It was just kind of like this is kind of symmetrical in a in a weird primitive way, right? There's something equal about that. But it's a very, very primitive and and I I wouldn't say childish, but arithmetic way of thinking about justice. Right? It's sort of like you do the same thing to them. Right? Um and and that was replaced by rules that were somewhat better. But more progress is this thing that you know happens you know, cumulatively, and you can't you can't build a you can't build an engine right away. First you need a wheel, and then you need, you know, gears, and you know, you need to you need to you know build it up over over time.

And so you can't have, you know, fully progressive egalitarian world right away, even if some of the dispositions you already have, they were kind of already there, right? Everyone has some aversion to causing suffering, like a little bit at least, right? Yeah. Um, that can be that can be recruited for good ends, but it can also be overridden. Um, and then maybe people said, you know, slavery is fine because for the longest time, when you won the war, you kill all the men and you rape all the women, right? That's what that used to be the thing that people that people do. When you when you win against a group, all the men get killed, right? So it could it could have felt humane at the time to think like, oh no, um, you know, we we

could we we're just gonna you know make them work for us. And and um and so people came up with these rationalizations that made it mal made it palatable um to them. And also people try to just be a little bit better than than than than than they used to be or than their parents used to be, right? We don't really strive to be morally optimal. We strive to be morally slightly better than average. Yeah. Right? And and and then that and that that's what then that's what you get when you when you when you have that motivation is like my parents used to kill everyone, so I'm just gonna keep them round as slaves. And you convince yourself that you're really good and noble and peaceful. And so I think that can also um happen and what and which which which but it I mean

I I'm very far from defending slavery, but when you when you look at it this long term, it's sort of like it makes it it makes it understandable how the how how it could have developed like that. Or seen as pro it could have been seen as moral progress. Yeah. Which is also another point. Right. Like which is also like we shouldn't think about moral progress as being uh pure in this sense either, right? Like, you know, it might have it very well could have been moral progress. As you've nicely uh there there's an argument that slavery was viewed as moral progress compared to what preceded it. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah, that ties back to your your point you were making about status as fundamentally zero

sum and in comparison to other people, and such that when I rise, just someone else has to fall in the social hierarchy. But when you once you start thinking about virtue itself as a kind of status, you know, morality, you know, obviously, you know, how good of a person, how virtuous I am is a huge part of my social status. Yeah. Right. And so if status zero sum, then virtue must be zero sum too. And so that helps explain why we don't, you know, strive to be the best possible person in an absolute sense, but just a little bit better than average, a little bit better than the competition. I don't want to be a great person, I just want to be better than you, you know. Um and so if you view morality in that context, then you know it starts to make sense.

Like, you know, i i yeah, um, you know, in in an age where conquest was the norm, um, yeah, slavery would is an awful thing, but but it doesn't matter how objectively awful it is. What just matters is that I'm less awful than my social competitors. And if I'm the nice guy who doesn't kill the people I conquer and I let them work for me, well then I'm a little bit better than my social competitors, right? And I win out a little bit. And then all of a sudden that becomes the new social norm and the new equilibrium, such that if you violate it, you look worse than other people. And so you can get this ratcheting effect with moral progress, where like, you know, some person gets uh virtue status for doing something that's like a little bit better than

everyone else. And then that becomes the new norm. And then the new person comes along and they can get more status by doing something that's a little bit better than everyone else. And once this keeps going over and over again, you can get something that looks like moral progress. Right. And so that might be another uh engine behind this where you have these status games and these new equilibria emerge, uh these new reputational equilibria. Uh, and then as soon as they're established, there there become new social rewards for uh uh pushing the equilibria up a little bit further. Yeah. Yeah. I like that a lot. And I also think there's this nested, it's all about coordination, right? So there's always social commentators that are way ahead.

So this thing about, you know, slavery is inherently bad. Um, and every people have known it always, and it's it's in there, right? Like baked in. And there might be an argument that there were always people saying, look, slavery is bad, and other people listening, but people didn't know how to coordinate around that, right? Um, and so I think what I don't think like thought leaders is anything new either. I think there's always people who are articulating possible future coordination games. And then they're offering them, and some of them are like, slavery's bad. Some of them are like, hey, maybe we should go back to that. Some people are like, you know, so there's there's always different um coordination games.

And I think they're always there, but then it's the the slower, larger things of now we can all coordinate around um as like the the every a larger set of people can all coordinate around this thing because some external thing in the sociology or the environment has changed and um and then you can kind of get that. So so I like this idea of um there's it's coordination as you're saying, David, um and the the vanguard of the coordination is just different ideas about what status games or coordinations we might like to try out. Yeah. Um there that there is a way of making these points work against moral relativism. So I think that moral relativists often point to really surprisingly deep disagreements

between cultures or historical eras to support the idea that we have fundamentally divergent values. And so first of all, I think a lot of this was kind of Made possible because anthropologists they don't want to return from their field trip and say these people are kind of the same, right? And so they and they say you're not gonna believe you're not gonna believe how these people live. Yeah. And of course, this also partly because people wanted to be culturally tolerant and embrace diversity and so on and so on. Um, but also when you look at moral relativists, The examples for these deep disagreements that they give, they are usually, you know, 200 years ago we believed slavery was fine. Or in Middle America, in Mesoamerica, they believed human sacrifice was fine.

Or in China, they believed foot binding was fine. Or in East Africa, they believed female genital mutilation is fine. And so on and so on and so on. But what I what I think we could we can notice about these types of examples is that you can always ask, well, who's the we that thought these things were fine, right? The slaves didn't think that was fine, right? Presumably, these young girls they didn't agree to being mutilated. Um, the women didn't plausibly agree to being being bandaged and and and abused. Um, these people that were, you know, in in in in in in in the Aztec Empire that were whose hearts were cut out, or you know, children that were roasted over the fire because their tears would placate the weather god or something, right?

They didn't you know agree to that. So it's often like, who's the we in these in these stories? And we often know that probably, probably the vast majority of people at the time we just never hear about them. Right? Of of course not. They are totally invisible. We never get to hear their views. They're not writing anything down. And it's I think really the vast majority of examples that are supposed to support this moral relativism are almost always examples of elites helping themselves towards you know abuse or cruelty or something, right? And it's not like some monolithic culture that in the American South made everyone believe that slavery was fine. Most people didn't have slaves, right? And again, the slaves, you don't you're not counting them.

Uh that that that that that that that that doesn't really make so of of course there are different different ways of living and different priorities, and surely, surely many people in in 19th century Iran had different values and and and moral ideas than we do or whatever. But I think it's often this radic these radical disagreements are often um you know not monolithic cultures believing something, but small groups in a society being weird or being oppressive and cruel and exploitative. 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 the examples that are supposed to support moral relativism very carefully because they often are kind of like that: human sacrifice, footbinding, and slavery.

Um, and when it's close enough to us, all of a sudden this argument doesn't work anymore, right? So we wouldn't say Germans believed 70 years ago that you can just kill the Jews, right? because we know that that's not a monolithic thing, um, at the time. And it would and we were like, What do you mean that we people don't use that example to support relativism because it's obviously reminds people of no no no, this was you know, this was you know, they they they had they had to violently enable themselves to um to do that against against a la at least a large group of people that that that that were you know very much against it, not to speak of even the victors. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I I I really like this argument.

Um, you could even push it further by saying, yeah, uh the people who were subject to the oppression uh obviously didn't think the their oppression was morally great. Um and we don't hear from them because history is written by the elites and by the people who were enacting the oppression. Uh but you could take it even further and say that it's plausible that even the elites didn't really think that what they were doing was right. Because all all we have from the history books is all the rationalizations that the elites wrote down. Right. And the excuses they could. Yeah, all the excuses, right. And so when we look at those, like, whoa, they must have thought this was really virtuous. But you could take it as evidence for the opposite, actually, that the reason they needed

to work so hard to write down these elaborate, fanciful justifications was precisely because on some level they were not okay with it. Or they felt that other people would view them as as cruel monsters. And so you could take that a as as evidence itself that um that that maybe the elites weren't really even that okay with it and and that the reason they had to work so hard to come up with these ideologies, I think, is evidence of that. Yeah. Um they were they they were like confessing. Yeah. Right. So like them, you you you sit down, you write into your diary and to all these things that like really bother you about yourself. Right. And that you it's impossible to see like you know historiography and and and all these

epics as kind of like, you know, people feel really bad about the things they did and so they had the ne the psychological need to like cope. Right. It it makes me think. I mean, there's there's a concept that just came to my mind that nobody's thought about that that I'm aware of, which is rationalization cost, where some things are just harder to rationalize than others. And I think you know, the more just flagrantly absurdly cruel and unusual a certain practice is, the harder you need to work to come up with it with a good ideology and rationalization for it. Like if you want to do a Holocaust, boy, do you need an elaborate ideology. Boy, do you need to work really hard to make that make some kind of superficial ethical

sense. Whereas some things just have a very low rationalization cost because, you know, they they look pretty good. Yeah. They don't make you look bad. And so what we could be seeing in the history of moral progress is just an abandonment of things with just a really high rationalization cost, right? And just the cost just became too high and it was just unsustainable and the thing collapsed. And it's just we've just been moving toward things with just lower rationalization costs that are just easier to justify, to easier to do and feel good about yourself and convince other people that you're a good person. We've just gone more toward those types of things. Um I'm curious what do you think of that?

I'm just having this idea right now. This is this is this is starting to sound pretty Hegelian, right? I mean, it's just like the you know, the flip side of that is just you know, we we we we we started doing more and more things that are just like justifiable. Yeah. Or don't even stand in need of um justify. So this would be a kind of picture where sort of like reason kind of asserts itself in in history because on some level maybe people realize like I'm being I'm being I'm being so bad. And so I need to I need to you know rationalize it and and work really hard to make it to make it make it psychologically tolerable to me and people around me. And indeed you see that you see that you see when when when regimes and we when we've

mentioned all of these cases, the Nazis and and and you know Rwanda and and all these conflicts, it it people talk about it a lot, right? They talk about it and they because they have this need to constantly repeat to themselves, this is fine. Here's here here are my reasons and so on and so on. And and you need you have a very high demo for ideology and for and for um uh embellishment. um of of of what you do. It paints a darker picture of the history of intellectuals as well. Cause it suggests that a lot of what intellectuals do is they're trying to uh market these rationalizations for for people and they're trying to provide the intellectual uh justifications for you know doing these horrible things that people have self interested

reasons to do right I think that's I think I'm I I think that's right. I think that's right. I think that's right. I mean for I mean uh um philosoph Western philosophy was founded by slave owners right Plato had slaves Aristotle had slaves yeah um and the the well if you go back further I think that societies that that can afford a group of people who are professional intellectuals right? And and and and and and priests and so on and so on, like a priest caste which then develops into philosophy and so on. People who just sort of like deal deal in ideas mostly they are gonna be employed by the by the powerful and much of what they what they do and what they're expected to do is to justify why all of this is good and right.

And this is what they did. This is what what political philosophers did for them for the longest time and still kind of do. I mean, there is this libertarian philosopher that I really like, Michael Humer. And see, he says all all these political philosophers, they all have Stockholm syndrome. They're all justifying, you know, they all say, oh, you know, the guy who abducted me is kind of nice. Right. And that's what political philosophers do often. They try to come up with a rationale for why, you know state authority is fine uh and why and why the state can do to you what it um what it does. And I'm I do think modern states are much preferable to um uh to what what was around in the past, but there is a there there that's it's an interesting

like provocative way of looking at it. Interesting is that really really you know philosophers and and political philosophers are largely uh behave affirmatively towards the powerful. Right? You could yeah, I mean you could yeah. You could think of the state itself, you know, as a system of organized coercion of people getting together to force people to do things that they would be disinclined to do, that like that itself is a thing with high rationalization costs, right? Yeah. Uh you need to figure out a way to make that look good. Yeah. And you could think of a lot of political philosophy as rising to the the demands of those rationalization costs. And you know, maybe, you know, maybe it can be justified at the end of the day.

You know, who knows? I'm not a political philosopher. But it's still it's still something that needs a justification. If I'm just gonna go up to you and put a gun to your head and ask, you know, you gotta do what I say, or I'm gonna take your stuff, or I'm gonna kidnap you. Like that that's a icky thing to do, and I need like a really good story to tell before I do it, you know. Yeah. So these these are these are my small like libertarian inclinations that that no one in Europe shares at all. Right? So this is just so this is just like a like a way of looking at the state in politics that is just d doesn't work in in uh in Europe for some reason. Uh it's it's just like, you know, the sort of like sc state skepticism.

I'm not and I'm again I'm not I'm not really full blown libertarian or anything. But I like that kind of thought as just like a like a like a like a a critical sting somewhere in in in my ideology, just like is this even really I don't know. I'm not so sure. Yeah. But even I love this. This is a BBS paper, which is the public intellectual as the provider of rationalization costs for the powerful and elite. This is your guest paper. Let's do it. That's great. Sounds great. I mean, we should get Dan Williams on it. I'm basically ripping off Dan Williams. He has a wonderful paper called uh The Marketplace of Rationalization. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. Yeah. But this explains there's this whole genre of like there's um like these books like

Sapiens, right? Or like these books, I can't say that 'cause it's like it's this garbage book. Like it's just it gets all the anthropology wrong, but it's like wildly popular, you know, like it's made like lots of money and there's always these these intellectual books. And the argument, I mean, this is even this is not my argument. There's many people just making this argument, is this is just telling people a story, largely people who are doing already doing some status game, some of which is probably good, some of which is not so good. And it's just justifying that. It's giving it the rationalization. Yeah. So I think like a lot of consuming politics, consuming media, consuming people making

arguments, moral arguments is shopping for rationalizations. David and I really like this. It's all propaganda all the way down. Everything is bullshit. I've heard that somewhere. Yeah. Well, Hanno, uh, this is wonderful. Um uh in the very brief closing time, if people are more interested in your work based on this conversation, where would you point them? Um or not. Yeah, I I I have this article. So I have this article com coming out that's called Conspicuous Compunction, which is a great title. David is gonna is gonna be one of the commentators uh of that, and I'm excited to uh and curious to hear what you uh what what um you have to say about that. So that would be some uh something uh and I have a couple of like shorter articles in

English uh about this, um, why it's hard to get rid of class structures and class society. And there are also YouTube videos where I present these ideas in English. For instance, I recently went to Australia to the so-called Festival of Dangerous Ideas. And it sounds pretentious and stupid, but the dangerous idea that I was presenting was, you know, class structures are very hard to get rid of, surprisingly hard to get rid of, and you underestimate the problem. And so this this this is going to be on YouTube if you want to if you want to check it out a little bit. And then hopefully the class book, which was really uh, you know, did really well in in uh in Germany. I hope that that's that's gonna come out in English at some point.

It'll be interesting to see how having lived in Germany for 10 years. I feel like there's more acceptance of class. Uh class is a bit of a third rail in the US, and the the joke is always that nobody's poor uh because they're about to be rich. So yeah, yeah, it's all it's a nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Exactly. Exactly. All right. All right. Well, this was a r uh a huge treat for uh for everyone, I I assume, but especially me. Uh this I just had a blast. This flew by. So thanks so much for for coming on, Anno. Thanks. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me. David, we are uh we're as the expression goes, we're getting back on the horse, we're getting our episodes back out.

I don't know if these are gonna be weekly. I think we might need a summer caveat. Um of Yeah, we summer really screwed us both. I gotta say, David, jury duty really got us. We have jury duty got us, yeah. It was a whole perfect storm of different different things. That's okay. Yeah, it happens. Yeah. So um, but just let you we're letting you know we're we're getting back on the horse, as they say. Exactly. And it's it's a good, vigorous horse. It's a pr a proud steed, valiant stallion. All right. Yeah, I like it too. Okay. Um uh usual Patreon, social media. Um I don't know. Uh we do need to be able to do that. Leave us a kind review. We should start getting shirts. Then there's a shirt cut. Would you would you actually wear an evolutionary psychology of the podcast?

No, but if there was like ex things we've said on the shirt, I might. Oh, like quotes? Like Valiant Stallion? Well, tolerated scrounging of morality or something. I don't know. That's maybe a little esoteric. That's a little pretentious. Tell you what, listener, if there are any quotes that stuck with you that you think would be cool on a t shirt, let us know. Send us an email. Yeah. Or like taking things out of context. Yeah. So yeah, if you could take us out of context in the most humiliating, uh uh Reputationally damaging way, that would be uh yeah. Anyway, enjoy the rest of your week. Um take it easy and and you know, try to put progress. Yeah, be kind. In your in your own uh small P way.

Don't start a new moral movement. Um unless you know you're like doing a religious cult. Maybe just inch inch the thing forward just a little bit, you know. Just go go the extra mile. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Not mile. Maybe go the extra, you know, tenth of a mile. Uh, can we do it in in non-weird fraction units? Maybe uh oh the couple meters, like 400 meters. Meters, sure. Yeah, say living in Germany and then coming back to the US and I'm like installing furniture. It's insane to use fractions in a base 12 for a length. I mean, I get Fahrenheit versus Celsius. Like Celsius is less like graded, like for normal temperatures. But my God, like uh three, six, I mean, literally like measuring things that are like fractions of an eighth or sixteenth, and then it's a base

12. You have to do addition and fractions instead of just being like, oh yeah, now this thing is like 47 point 47 centimeters and four millimeters. Like we are hurting ourselves. Those of us in this weird system. The rest of the world, of course you know, and you can just it's one more thing to wag your finger at us about US. Yeah. And England. All right. Anyway anyway. That was that's my how to get that out there. Um if somebody could do something about that, please let us know. Let's uh let's let's adopt the metric system for at least some things. Evolutionary psychology the podcast is pro metric system. For some things. For some things. Or anti? I don't know where we s where we come out of this.

Uh for lengths for sure. Volume two, like what is a pint? Do you even know what a pint is? I mean, well, a pint is easy because of the phone. I know it's a beer. I know it's something that's a drink. It's only because of that, but like a port and a g in a bushel. I mean, my God, what is this? It's insane. We gotta clean this shit up. This is we we need we just shut the whole thing down and figure out what the hell is happening. Our next episode is just gonna be our opinion on various metrics. Yeah, we should just have just a c a list of a kvetching podcast. Yes, exactly. Exactly. What is this? Uh what was the Seinfeld thing? It was um uh the festive it's uh where you just complain airings of grievances.

Oh the airing of grievances, yes. We we should have an airing of grievances. Maybe many podcasts are just the they're just synonyms for the airing of grievances. The airing of grievances. Okay. Well on that note, uh enjoy your week and um you know, use the metric system if you're gonna measure something this week. Mm-hmm. Take care.