Moralizing Self-Control with Léo Fitouchi
2025-12-30 13:00:00.000 +00:00

Welcome. Wait, can we do the tagline first? Sure. Actual evolutionary. No, it doesn't make any sense to start with a tagline. Yeah, I think you'd start with the title. And then maybe title uh name. So what's the APA format? It's uh d author uh I think it's title names. Well, running head, but what is a running head? What what nonsense is that? And why are that is really ridiculous? I don't like the image of a running head. It's it's very grotesque and macabre. Uh yeah. We should bring class. Imagine like a head with like two two little legs. Yeah, it's really gross. Okay. Um not anyway. Um I'm David Petrozowski. This I'm talking to David Pinsoff, and we're here because we are on a podcast that you apparently clicked on.

Yes. And that podcast is called Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. Which is sort of redundant because we already know it's a podcast. That's true. We should just call it Evolutionary Psychology. Well, we don't want to claim to be like all of evolutionary psychology. Here's the thing you if you don't know that it's a podcast, then you just saw evolutionary psychology window it's a podcast, but once you're already in a podcast venue, it's redundant. There's no optimal way, there's no optimization. Well, I think we hit it right by putting it in parentheses. Oh that's true. Yes, we did demote it by putting it in parentheses. Okay. Yeah. So it's not yeah. The demotion was correct. Yeah, we made the right choice there.

Okay. Uh anyway, hopefully you made the right choice by listening to this and uh continue listening. Enjoy the music. Today we have Leo Fettucci. David Leo is in the enviable place of living in France. Yes. Living in France. Where is he? Uh he is at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, one of the uh best places to do evolutionary social science, in my opinion. Uh the people in in France who are doing evolutionary social science are just uh uh blowing me away. So we we recently had Magnifique très magnifique, uh we had Hugo Mercier on, he was awesome, and we have uh Leo Fettucci. Uh and he is um a up-and-coming young scholar. I believe he's the youngest person we've had on on the podcast thus far.

First postdoc, yep. First postdoctoral researcher. He's just doing really fascinating stuff on uh morality, cooperation, uh the psychology of self-control and delayed gratification, and and why we might moralize that, like why it's seen as virtuous to delay gratification and temptation and exhibit temperance. Really fascinating stuff. We get into all of that and more. It was a really fun conversation. Yeah, I've always been curious why people care about all these things that we care about. And if you're curious too, then this might be an episode for you. Absolutely. And I have a hard time delaying gratification when it comes to French cuisine. I I stuff my face with fine cheeses and uh well while you're while you're while

you're while you've got that mental image let's not delay your gratification of listening to this episode and let's get going. Enjoy. David would you like to do the honors? Yes. Hello, Leo Fettucci. It is great to see you. Uh, we're really excited to talk to you. Hello. Thank you. So you are at, I think, one of the greatest places to study evolutionary social science. And where is that, uh Leo? Oh, I mean, that's nice actually for the uh for the institute and the department. So it's the Institute for Advanced Studies in Toulouse. It's kind of a weird uh department or institute where there are many, many different uh disciplines uh brought together, often in an evolutionary perspective. So there are anthropologists, psychologists, evolutionary biologists, but also uh people

who are not that much actually in an evolutionary perspective, uh like economists and political scientists. And it's basically the goal is to break down discipline boundaries into a unified science of human behavior, blah blah blah. So of course this is close to what we try to do and I think you guys are trying to do too. So yeah it's it's quite cool. Yeah it sounds weird in a good way. Weird in a interdisciplinary some of the most cutting edge stuff in evolutionary psychology that I'm personally most excited about. I uh you know I I'm a fan of French food. I think it's better than um uh American food. I'm a fan of French music. Uh I th I I find it better than American music, and I I think the same is true of

evolutionary psychology. I don't think so for evolutionary psychology. But yeah, thank you. Uh the um uh I don't even know what I was gonna say. Something about Freedom Prize, but I'll just exactly uh that might be a good uh segue actually into a question for you. So uh speaking of freedom fries or French fries, uh if I just uncontrollably just guzzle down a huge plate of French fries, you might make certain inferences about my character, my even my moral character, how trustworthy I am, you know, whether I'm a good person. That's kind of a weird inference to make. What what's the connection between, you know, guzzling down French fries So what's what do you think is going on there? Okay, yeah, so I see where you're going.

So it's related to uh yeah. Um it's related to a question that has puzzled me, but for a more general question, which is about the cognitive architecture and adaptive function of moral judgment in general, but like in the space of how we explain human moral judgment, there is a a a tiny part of the moral domain that is that seems particularly weird because it's it's apparently not related to what we straightforwardly associate to like the adaptive function of reciprocal cooperation or this kind of stuff. And it's this kind of puritan what we've called puritanical moral judgment. So it's related to John Haidt's idea about uh purity, uh moral values, etc. And one type of moral judgment that people make in this kind of domain is that if you

indulge too much in pleasure, like uncontrollably indulge in your in your french fries or or also drugs or or any kind of behavior that we intuitively uh characterize as hedonistic or whatever the false concept. In many societies people seem to think that this kind of behavior is is wrong, although it's a behavior that is harmless to other people. So this is a classical puzzle in moral psychology, as you as you mentioned, it's uh it's it's quite puzzling. And so, what we've tried to argue is that in fact, so many people argue that uh these kinds of moralizations of apparently harmless behavior cannot be explained by regular cognitive adaptations for reciprocal cooperation or even cooperation in general.

Rather, to explain them, you need to mention other adaptive challenges that have explained separate uh cognitive adaptations. Sometimes people talk about disgust, the idea that uh glutony, for example, in the case you mentioned, is like it would would trigger disgust. And this is because we would have these feelings of aversion, of disgust, that we find them uh immoral. And what we try to do is to try to tie back uh this like purity type violation that is kind of harmless behavior into the standard uh approach to human moral cognition. And and the idea is that um In fact, when you indulge too much in bodily pleasure, this has a relation to self-control, self-control being the ability to uh resist temptation for

immediate rewards in favor of long-term goals. And it it happens to be so that uh conditional cooperation or reciprocal cooperation or how however you want to call it is a delay of gratification problem because like ultimately at the ultimate evolutionary level, it's literally a behavior that requires to resist or to forgo the immediate benefit of cheating. Like in the prisoner's dilemma, payoff matrix, really, you cannot make uh cooperation evolve if it's only one shot. Like in the prison, cheating pays more than cooperative. It's only because of the repetition of the game, because of the of the of the long-term social interactions or the long-term effects on your reputation that your behavior in the

prison uh carries, uh, that you can get an evolutionary benefit back from resisting this temptation of cheating. And so, in the same way that cheating uh requires uh delaying gratification, uh so because cheating requires delaying gratification, people should have a psychological mechanism for uh making inferences or social inferences based on the fact that people who are in general more indulging or less self control or less able to um delay gratification are less trustworthy cooperation partner. Now, I mean maybe maybe I can stop there, but like people often interpret the th uh the so my theory of puritanism as being just this, but I don't think in fact we don't argue in the paper that it's about uh inference of trustworthiness.

I think that the so is more more complicated, but um I mean if you want me to get into this or happy to so so um yeah let me just see if I can summarize the logic. Exactly. So um so in order for us to mutually benefit from cooperation, uh I have to delay a lot of uh pleasures. Say I see a candy bar sticking out of your pocket, I have to resist the impulse to just grab it. You know, if I'm in a marriage and I see an attractive partner who might be interested, I have to delay the or I have to uh suppress the urge to uh flirt with or cheat on on my partner. Um if uh if I see an opportunity to um to to kill someone or to hurt someone you know in the in the in the moment that might immediately benefit me, or

if I see an opportunity to lie to like get extra stuff, I have to suppress the impulse to do that. And the reason why I would suppress the impulse in all of those cases is for some long-term benefit that would ultimately outweigh the present benefit that I'd take. So if I value my marriage, the value of being in a healthy long-term marriage outweighs the benefit I'd get from immediately cheating. If I see you, the value of our friendship, our long-term friendship, outweighs the benefit I'd get from snatching the candy bar out of your pocket. You know, the the value of cultivating a reputation as an honest person uh outweighs the benefit of lying in the moment to get extra stuff. So all of these examples of of cooperation have this common thread where I need to suppress

the urge to get this immediate benefit in order to get this long term benefit. Um is that a fair summary of of the of the of the general idea? Yeah, the generality is that is that cooperation is the delay, I mean, the the missing link between uh harmless indulgence and reciprocal cooperation is delay of gratification. Both kinds of behavior uh imply a delay of gratification. Now, I don't think that you can get, and this actually speaks to the more deep nature of moral judgment in the human mind. I don't think that you can get from the simple idea that people infer uh from your indulging behavior that you're a non trustworthy person because you're a uh uh a non self controlled person, that the behaviour is immoral.

Uh because it doesn't explain what people what people in many societies uh uh uh don't don't only like um avoid uh glutons on the cooperation market, they also want them to stop from indulging. It's a scene. And as anything in many puritanical societies, people want to control it in the sense of stopping the behavior itself. So that's why in the theory, uh I had this weird part that was originally a weird part to me, which is the idea that in fact people believe that there should be a causal effect of your indulgence on your own capacity in the future to restrain your impulses. For example, in many puritanical cultures, what you find is folk psychological beliefs that uh if you indulge too much in sex or food or masturbation or drugs, then you will become in

the future less able to resist these kind of temptations. And so because it makes you a more impulsive person, it has a causal impact on your ability to honor your pro-social obligations in the future. And so just as having a gun in your pocket, you can think it's immoral if it increases the probability that you will shoot me, a harmful behavior. Then enacting a behavior that's increasing that increases the probability that you will cheat, for example, by uh degrading your character, which means making you more impulsive, uh, is immoral because it increases the probability of cheating, not because it signals uh that you have diagnostic threats of people who cheat. Doesn't that make sense? Yes, it does make sense.

So we're we're trying to explain two things. You know, one thing is why we might draw inferences about someone if they're gluttonous or if they're impulsive or if they are are bad at delaying gratification. But that's um a separate question from why we actually in some societies have rules that punish people for engaging in self contr uh in you know impulsive behavior. So there in in many societies that you know there were you know strong moral rules against masturbation. Uh I believe gluttony was one of the seven deadly sins. Exactly. So we're so we're not merely avoiding and distrusting people who display a lack of self-control, we're actively punishing them and creating rules and institutions that

inflict costs on them. And that's another thing that needs to be explained. And the idea, um uh your idea for explaining that is that we have this folk belief that if you um the more you uh indulge in your impulses, indulge in bodily pleasures, you know, eat the French fries, masturbate, uh, etc. etc., the more likely you are to defect in cooperative interactions, the more likely you are to cheat on a spouse, to cheat in a deal, etc., etc. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Uh can I can and and so I wanna poke on the the folk belief thing to make sure I understand. Um so my understanding of sort of uh the best adaptationist account of this of moral stuff is sort of people look out in the world and they're always

doing this very David Pinsoff Pinsophian. Is that the adjective? Pinsofian. I believe it is the adjective. Yes. I want to make it. Let's make Pinsafian a thing. All right, great. I like it. It sounds really nice. Um so so in the pin on the Pinsofian view, there's sort of these mechanisms whirling in the background that are sort of looking around and saying, um, I want to enforce norms that are beneficial to me, and that sort of carve up the world or produce externalities that benefit me. So just to make it very concrete, like just a stupid example, like let's say I hate driving, which I personally do. Um, and everything that sort of is a habit of people that leads to walking or riding their bike, I'm like, that's awesome.

But anything that leads to like selecting for cars or just people driving cars or like fast food restaurants, I'm like, these are morally bad. I'm like outraged about that, right? I have like this mild thing going on in my head all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so my question is, is that theory the the is is what you're proposing uh uh falling within that, but it's solving a more specific mystery that are that was existing within this worldview or is what you're saying different than this worldview? Yeah. It's different. And thank you for that question because it's always the uh I mean it's I think the deep question uh especially when I talk to Santa Barbara people, I mean from this kind of uh

No anybody from Santa Barbara will have discussion. Okay, yes the sophisticated French revolutionary psychologist compared to the Santa Barbarians. Yes. Yes exactly. No not not sophisticated, but like on this on this topic, this is uh this is a a regular conversation between the the French the French and the great and the Santa. Yeah, so let me yeah, I want to understand. So yeah, civilizes. No no no no no, that's not at all what I wanted to suggest. We're we're just gonna be able to do that. Fituchian? Fetucian. Pituccian's a lovely oh that sounds nice. Yeah. Petra Zussian, boy, that's horrible. Boy, like really Yeah, how how do you put the MJ's name is hor Yeah, yeah. I mean, I completely agree, and I'm sure that exists that people try to push uh norms uh

and moral judgments that benefit their own self-interest. That seems completely obvious to me. I completely I'm completely on board with that. It's just that the thing that I'm trying to explain is not why people push self-interestedly like principles, but rather like the cognitive logic of moral judgment in the human mind. So why is it that people think that some behavior are morally wrong? Sometimes, I completely agree, they will uh say or even think that what is morally wrong is stuff, or they will be predisposed to think that what is morally wrong are stuff that violate their own interest. But um uh so what we think is the the the content of what is morally wrong in the human mind, in like the perspective

that was that is basically uh developed by Baumard, André, and me and other people is the is the idea that what is morally wrong is what is what violates a principles of mutual benefits in the precise sense of what is morally wrong is uh the behavior such that if everyone did it on rough approximation, then everyone would be worse off. This is basically the principle of collective action and reciprocal cooperation. So the idea is more that we have a social contract. I'm competing a social contract when I'm making a puritanical moral judgment, which is if we all lived in a society or if we all behaved in such a way that we indulge in pleasures so as to make us uh worse persons in the sense of persons less able to uh

resist temptations, uh then we would all be worse off. So we have a reciprocal duty, we literally have a moral duty to control our base or base uh impulses because like this is the necessary condition for us to have an orderly, peaceful society or whatever. Uh and and this is the uh uh yeah so basically uh one one of the arguments I I I often uh uh uh give uh when I get the self-interest approach it's it's it's the following is that for people to benefit of the very fact of saying that something is morally wrong uh in order to manipulate the behaviour of other people in a way that benefits their own sinf interest. The fact of saying morally wrong instead of I don't like when you do this and and I will uh

and I'm threatening you has to be some additional benefit. Otherwise people wouldn't use it. You know, it's the whole signaler uh uh dokings and Krebs stuff, like for a signal to be to have a manipulative effect in the first place, it has to be uh received in the mind of the receiver. So in the same way that so the the receiver has to somehow benefit to receive the signal, otherwise the signal is not listened. So for me to benefit from the very fact of strategically manipulating people by saying what you're doing is morally wrong, it has to tap at least sometime into a cognitive system that interprets this message as actually what you're doing is violating the public good. And so you now you deserve to be punished because you're you're doing something that is

wrong that will damage your reputation. So what you're doing is violating mutual benefits instead of just my own interest. Because people have already psychological adaptation for like bargaining for self-interest. Why uh they they would need a new type of mental representation that is moral representation. So uh I need about right and wrong, and not and not and not uh what I like and dislike. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So I think let me let me make sure I understand. Because so I think I I think what I was articulating assumed what you said explicitly, which is always a bad thing. So in it's excellent that you said it. So the idea is that if you have machinery for sort of what is in interest for me, all

the things that are uh in my interest, only a subset of them will anybody else care about. Right. Like there's just other things, there's just certain things that like I want to do, but like that's and then everybody has that. And and that actually should be represented. Now there's another of subset of everything that's in my interest that at least like one other person, like maybe David, would go along with, but nobody else. Thanks, David. Um but then there's others that sort of more and more people might go along. And there should be machinery for representing these this triage of sort of how many others are likely to go along with it. And I think um what you're describing is that the moral system

has the design of distinguishing between those categories and what we quote unquote call as sort of moral things or ideas or suggestions, or when I'm motivated out of moral outrage, it's the expression of the calculation that it's not only roughly in my interest, according to the mechanisms, But it's also that there's there's a good chance that others will or maybe already have sort of expressed that they might go along with it too. Um that's what you're saying. That's a great uh uh point. So it's all I think it's all so I if I understood correctly I think it it's related to what I'm saying but like DIG is not only that what okay, so maybe now we should go into what uh we think or I think is the the the adaptive function of the moral system.

Sure, yeah, it's to it's to because like we are going into that. So um to answer your point, the the the design of the moral system is not uh made to detect what would be in other people's interests too. So it's not made to detect common interests, so there is a distinction in like uh evolutionary biology of cooperation between like broadly two types of cooperation. One is like common interest, mutualism, by product cooperation or whatever, and the other is really a reciprocity, conditional cooperation, collective action, whatever. The main difference is that by by product cooperation or common interest, uh so I mean any cooperative behaviour, that is behaviour that benefits another individual, but that is uh

already in the immediate act in the actor's immediate self-interest. So behavior that benefits others, uh, but without a free rider problem. It's just by by doing what is straightforwardly in my own self-interest, I'm also benefiting others. Uh but but this is different from the logic of conditional cooperation or whatever, where you I benefit from my cooperative, my own cooperative behavior, only to the extent that it triggers in the recipient on or other people a conditional response that benefits me. And this is where the free rider problems uh comes in. And to us, the Parisians, the moral cognition is an adaptation to detect what would be the social contracts, uh, these the mutually beneficial social contracts that would all benefit us if we all paid

the cost, the short-term cost of uh cooperating. So if we take an example, like if we all uh I don't know, uh pay our taxes, then we have a big public good and we can benefit. But there is an incentive to cheat. And what is morally wrong is to cheat, that is to take the benefits of others' cooperation without paying the cost of cooperating in return. Uh, but that is different from just uh uh morally prescribing what is in my own interest and also happen to be as the byproduct also in other people's direct interests. Because even for this kind of adaptive problem, you don't need a new type of mental representation. You just need we want. uh we want uh mechanism uh or we like but not we ought right it doesn't explain there's no there's no prediction in the in the first category the

non-public good there's no uh selection or explanation for a design that has a punitive enforcement uh structure and it's precisely because free riding is possible that that you're getting this um that you're you're basically asking uh people to accept that there will be some cost contingent on them not doing it. Um, and it's precisely for this second free rider um uh um free rider uh sensitive or vulnerable to free riding is the is the correct phrase. It's vulnerable to free riding and that explains the design features of morality that otherwise are a mystery. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. I mean, I think people thank you. Okay, cool. Um so uh now that we have this framework of morality in place, and I think it's useful to

think about it in terms of the game theory of it. So think of the the mutualism that you're describing, this would be something like a stag hunt or coordination game where um w you know it uh acting in each other's interests is not a matter of punishing freer riders, just a matter of uh just all of us just recognizing what is in our interests and doing exactly it's more of a coordination problem. Whereas uh the thing is driving on the right side right driving all on this right side of the road exactly it's not in my interest at all to diverge from what either of you are doing. It's just that we all we all are better off if we all coordinate. Yeah. Exactly. If we all speak the same language and use the same sounds to mean the same things, we all

mutually benefit from that. That's not moral, it's just a coordination problem, right? Um, but the the other domain uh is something like a prisoner's dilemma or a public goods game, where we might all benefit if people uh uh refrain from defecting or free riding. And and that's where the moral emotions come in. Cool. Um, and so and and so that is where the the idea of self-control being a signal of one's uh cooperative potential or one's value as a cooperative partner. The more self-control I have, the the the better I am at resisting those short-term temptations, the more likely I am to cooperate with you in prisoners' dilemmas, the more likely I am to invest in the public good in a public goods game because I'm gonna be able

to um resist that temptation to cheat in the prisoner's dilemma or free ride in the public goods game. Yeah, exactly. Cool. Um and there's this additional logic where if I do things um that indulge my short-term pleasures, then that um is going to make me more likely to indulge short-term pleasures in the future and more likely to defect or free ride in cooperative interactions. Okay. Cool. Yeah, and sorry, yeah. Yeah, sorry, just to just to uh uh finish the summary The final idea actually is that the fact that each of us refrains, even in private, of indulging in bodily pleasures, is itself a public good. So if we all uh if we all are you know are well practiced in our ability to uh suppress our impulses and delay gratifications, if we all practice that ability uh uh and

together, then we will all become better at um delaying gratification and we will all become better at cooperating. And that will benefit us all if we're all better at cooperating, we're all more willing to suppress our yes. Exactly. And so that that's how in the end the fact of indulging is a form of cheating. You're cheating on other people's efforts to become more disciplined persons uh that will make up for a more uh uh efficient cooperative society. Okay. So my question here, now that we've covered all this, is how might you begin to think about the pretty large variation that we see in these kinds of moral norms? So certainly, you know, in the past we had, you know, gluttony was a seven deadly sin,

masturbation has been moralized in many societies. But now, like, it's not really a big deal if you masturbate or if you eat a plate of French fries or whatever, it's like, you know, I I mean, maybe we might make, you know, some subtle social judgment, but there's no like moral rule against it or anything like that. It seems like in um, at least in weird societies, uh, we're pretty permissive about, you know, people doing impulsive things, uh, you know, indulging their bodily pleasures. Whereas in other societies they're really puritanical, uh, and they're you know, these strong puritanical moral courts. So how where do the differences come from? Why why is there such strong variation? If if your logic is right, wouldn't we expect to see this kind of puritanical morality

everywhere? Yeah, no, no, that's a great question. Um I don't think I have a definite answer. So um uh broadly, this this view of moral cognition as just an adaptation for detecting the set of possible uh collective action that we can undertake if we if we all pay the cost, uh some cost, uh surely will be super sensitive to context because like the the costs and benefits of different behavior and so the collective benefit the collective costs and benefits of different behavior will depend on the payoffs on the material payoffs that will depend a lot of the context and so from this it follows the general possibility that the moral judgment will vary a lot across contexts and so it it completely accommodates uh the

very fact of moral variation. Now, as to explaining the logic of moral variation, in particular in the plenary technical domain. So, what I have argued in the paper, I'm I'm not sure it's true, honestly. Uh I think we need more data, is um something like this. Uh so we like it seems to be the case that these folk psychological beliefs themselves, that the more you indulge in pleasure, uh, the more addict, the more of an addict you will, an uncontrollable addict you will become. Uh seems to decrease in modern societies. Possibly because like people are, I mean, we know that with uh with uh economic modernity, people are becoming less impulsive, less uh more self-controlled, uh more patient. So there's a lot of cross-cultural data on that.

Uh and so the I yeah, one possibility that I have in mind is that as people get less and less impulsive, it appears as less and less a collective action that is worth it to to restrain ourselves, given that we won't become addict in any in any case. You see what I mean? Like uh indulge in your French prize. I know you will be reliable tomorrow. You see what I mean? That's why I I interesting. So an analogy might be like if we're all like constantly being hunted by predators, we might be really nervous and uptight about people doing anything that might make them vulnerable by making loud noises or whatever. But if we live in a really safe environment where there are no predators at all, we're not

gonna be as vigilant and we're not gonna care as much. So th analogously, if we live in an environment where people have really low self-control and it's really threatening to social stability, uh, we're gonna be really uptight about, you know, displays of low self control. But if we live in a society where we're all really actually well practiced at delaying gratification and having self control, where our you know we have the the very fact that we have such a prosperous and well functioning society is a byproduct of the fact that we're so good at delaying gratification, then we're not gonna be as uptight about displays of low self control because we we already know that we have the situation under control.

Is that basically it's it's a contract that is not mutually beneficial uh anymore because the cost I would have to pay by uh refraining from indulgence uh is is so it's the same, but uh compared to the or but but the benefit that we get from uh an increased level of cooperation would not be worth the the the cost that we have to pay. That would be the idea. While I don't know in medieval Europe, where everyone is drunk all the time and drinking is a huge social problem, then of course uh people think that drinking uh is a deadly sin. I mean, uh actually it's part of the it does it doesn't tell this paradox this paradoxical prediction, which is that societies in that are lower in self-control moralize low

self-control more societies that are higher in self-control. Yeah, I would love to touch this position. I'm looking for ways to I think like descriptively we find it. I mean more britannical societies are also uh in general uh societies that are less uh economically uh developed and are also poorer, and we know that these societies also have lower trust and lower uh patience. Uh uh but now everything correlates with everything, you know. Uh so I don't know, but like and it might also expect that the more I perceive that other people in my social environment are low in self control, the more I should moralize self control. So yeah, yeah. So it's something I'm yeah, yeah. I don't know if people I yeah, no, sorry.

Oh no, go ahead. No, no, it's just uh then there's a subtlety that I I don't know uh how to deal with, which is like is it that uh is it you perceive I mean, I don't know how people form these false psychological beliefs. Is it by because they observe uh other people being uh impulsive and also being cheaters? Because these correlations seem to exist, but it doesn't seem to be objectively true that uh that the more you in that that training your self control will make you more self control, apparently. Like in the right. There doesn't. I mean, as far as I'm aware, there's no correlation between like masturbation frequency and and you know it freak a probability of like cheating on a spouse or something like that.

As far as I'm aware, the correlation doesn't exist. Yeah, exactly. The idea of a unitary thing of self-control is sort of confusing uh it's the spaceholder. It's a placeholder that's very quote unquote more domain general than it looks like. Right. And it might even be the opposite. You know, you m it might be that you know, the uh if you're if you're if you masturbate, for example, you're less likely to cheat on your spouse because you're you know you you're you're controlling your desires more and and and and allowing them an outlet in in some other way. Yeah let me uh let me poke on um I feel like I'm being slightly devil's advocate in this uh context which is great um but uh so I wonder so like let me make this concrete

um which is so like if we're all starving like let's imagine, like, you know, we're like the rugby team that crashed on the top of a mountain, we're gonna really, we're really hungry, we're gonna moralize gluttony for obvious reasons, right? Um uh and and so like why the self control in that context about that thing really matters, it makes complete sense, right? Not that it's trivial, it's still, you know, there's software that's required. But I wonder if like the the idea of sort of like in a modern market economy that like one account is that like people's self-control is just better. But another one is that the norms themselves sort of get selected in a dynamic way. So let me just like make the following example.

Um, which is let's imagine that we're like shipbuilders and we have uh this is a Rob Boyd point, like the world is opaque and complicated, and we might have superstitions. Like, let's imagine we have a superstition that if somebody wears purple on the ship, then it's bad luck, and like the ship will sink. And if we're a small group of people, we don't really test that idea. And so it's just exists in our world. Now, if you imagine that all of a sudden we're in a context where we're trading with and interacting with a lot of people, that idea, that sort of folk knowledge of like purple equals bad luck, if all of a sudden we're encountering lots and lots of boats and lots and lots of people, and all of a sudden it's like before I even know what happens, I'm like

talking to somebody who's crossed the ocean and they're all wearing purple, just just out of pure random. All of a sudden, it's sort of this thing of the world itself has sort of tested that folk linkage and it's violated it. And so one other alternative is that, just to like follow the analog, is that if David eats a lot of French fries, sorry, David, in a small-scale social world, uh it's it might just be equivalent to like the purple thing, right? Where it's just sort of like it, it's sticky with respect to my moralization for the same reason if we were actually starving, you know, it like it makes sense. But in a modern environment, it's it's sort of like all of a sudden I encounter somebody

who's just eaten a huge plate of French fries, but they're bringing me an iPad, you know, quote unquote, right? Like the the world got so big that like the world tested to see does that element of self-control actually matter? And it feels like a lot of things that people moralize, like every generation, they're sort of like, you know, like being gay or being uh just being weird in a way, right? Like it's when people encounter, oh, there's other people that actually can be this way who benefit me, who I can trade with, who are completely fine. The world didn't catch into flames, like this feels like a trope. And so I wonder if like in addition to maybe people are more so there's more self-control, it's actually that there's sort of like almost epid epidemiological selection

on just sort of which which things get moralized simply out of this sort of like in a large-scale social world, the ones that don't really count eventually get selected out. But our evolved psychology is constantly churning out the ones that are thinkable, like sex, like food, which really shouldn't matter for a modern technological economy. Do you buy that? And is that a different account? Or what what do you think about it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, it is a different account. I mean, it's very interesting. I think uh so yeah, so yeah, so there are many things to answer. Uh so first, uh first, it seems to me that uh so when I was thinking of the false psychological belief, I'm thinking of the false psychological beliefs about the effect of

the behavior on your on your um on your traits. That is, if you indulge, you become less self-controlled. This seems to be false. I mean, at least some things are addictive, right? Like for drugs, I think it's true that the more you take drugs, the less able to resist drugs you are. Now, the fact that it generalizes to other domains, uh, this doesn't seem to be clear. Um but but the correlation between uh the fact that people believe that there is a correlation between the fact that you're more impulsive and the fact that you will cheat more seems to be true, even I mean we've taken tested it actually with Daniel Dental. And people when we present people who indulge, people do uh answer that they they they

think they are more likely uh to cheat their partner if they had the chance to um to slack off and do and let others uh do their part of the work to uh to uh not repay debts uh some some stuff like that so uh yeah so so if i adapt what you were saying uh i i so i need to adapt what you were saying to the the fo the theory about the the dynamic of self-control uh i mean how how self control i become given my behavior so the idea is that have more evidence that this is false, maybe in in everyday life. Maybe. Maybe. But it's just you encounter a lot of people. I mean, in medieval Christianity, in medieval France, people still do encounter a lot of people, right? So I mean, I don't know, I'm speculating, but uh it it seems a bit different to me

than a pure uh taboo like superstition like if i if i go uh if i uh wear this pair of of uh of uh of boots then uh something bad will happen even that actually does does does even persist in in modern states it's I mean like people uh still have superstitions yeah I I mean I don't know I'm sorry. I don't know that's great that's super fun to think about. Yeah yeah no and in fact in fact what you suggest I think is uh is part of uh so so sometimes people take what uh what i argue as just trying to explain the whole of purity of the purity domain as it was carved by moral psychology. I don't think this this argument does. I think it does really just for the puritanical puritanical stuff that is really right

pleasure. Right. The fact that pleasure is a problem. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah. The purple or the weird purple shirt of the purpose of stuff or any apparently uh arbitrary uh norm. Which in fact for the taboos, uh the the superstitious like taboos, I think your your your account is completely uh uh uh I see completely uh probable. I mean I think what happens in small scale cities is that often people believe that there are dramatic consequences to I don't know uh uh walking down uh walking um I don't know uh touching that kind of tree. And if dramatic consequences happen, including to other people, then it's immoral. But you don't need the self-control uh medician to the same thing. You need this only if the problem is pleasure.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. This is a good just for as a quick aside and then but like this is a good example of like real time, like even in science, there there can be c confusion or misunderstanding or people even arguing past each other because there's lack of our ability to sort of coordinate about which slice of reality we're trying to explain. So I'm really glad we're having this conversation and that's a lovely microcosm of you. Uh um it's it's an important uh reminder to sort of try to to try to figure out what the the slice of the pie you're figuring out. So thank you very much, Leo. Sorry, Dave. No, no, thank you. Thank you. Uh yeah. So I guess the broader question that that we're getting at is um let's suppose for the sake

of argument that this this all all this puritanical morality, this business about self-control and it relating to cooperation, let's just assume for the sake of argument that it's all just an elaborate superstition, that it's not actually true, that there's actually no correlation between um your ability to delay gratification in a food context or a masturbation context or whatever, and your your cooperative uh potential, your your ability to cooperate in prisoners' dilemmas. Let's say that, you know, indulging in bodily pleasures has no effect on your future ability to cooperate in social dilemmas. Let's just assume that it's all bullshit, right? Is your theory compatible with that possibility or does it require that there's some act

objective truth to it? No, that's a great question. Uh the theory doesn't need that, but then it's unsatisfactory that people just believe bullshit. Because as an evolutionary psychologist like you, I like to believe that uh what people think is not too far from reality because the mind wouldn't be designed in such a way that of making huge mistakes, except in in cases that uh are also interesting, which is like adaptive misbelief or byproduct of otherwise adaptive mechanisms, superstition being one of them, as as as uh as uh as uh Dave uh put forward. But yeah, the theory is compatible. The theory is compatible with just the theory just states uh when whenever people moralize uh harmless body pleasure is because they hold the folk psychological belief

that this behavior has an indirect uh social cost, uh which is the increased probability of cheating that this uh private behavior will have by altering your character or whatever. Or at least the prototypical cases in human cultural story like the the the seven deadly sins, uh yeah. Are about are about this kind of bullish. I I wanna I wanna float a a possibility um by you, which is that it may be that that the the the ideology of of Puritanism is is totally false. Um but there's something about it that that it makes it kind of self-fulfilling. Um and that um if I moralize anything that imposes a cost on people, so let's say I have to like fast for a few days, you know, uh every every uh year or every

month or whatever. Uh and and and uh we all have the belief that if you if you do the fasting then you're a really good person and you're going to be prioritized as you know a marriage partner, as a long-term cooperation partner. And that's really costly, obviously, with withholding food. And uh as as a you know, we've created an institution where the only people who are willing to pay those costs who are willing to fast are by definition the people who prioritize their uh long-term reputation uh in this community. And the people who are unwilling to pay those costs are people who do not prioritize their long-term reputation in this community. So there's something about norms that inf that inflict short-term costs on people uh that

that automatically become self-sustaining, right? And so it might be that any norm that it that inflicts a cost on people becomes a reliable signal of moral character because it's a costly signal and because it uh it communicates the person how much the person values their reputation in that community. Yeah, that's a Sosus uh thing. I think Sosis had this. And uh he's saying it's like Fight Club, where like you can't even get into Fight Club unless you stand out on the rain on the porch for uh for a day. David, that's great. I love that. Yeah, that's a great yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really uh yeah, yeah. It's really the costly signaling uh alternative. It's just that costly signaling is more uh uh the reason I I I uh uh I

uh came to the self control ID is that the costly signaling ID doesn't seem it it's it's more like it could be any cost that you incur. It doesn't explain the specific uh uh focus and even obsession, it seems, of puritanical cultures with pleasure. I mean it's really like uh then sex and and and you know the what is pleasure? Pleasure is just a benefit, right? I know withholding that benefit is a cost by definition. That's true. That's true, that's true, that's true, that's true. But like, yeah, yeah. No, that's true, that's true. Yeah, it's good, David. I also want to like maybe there's a subtle prediction too, which is um, and maybe this can maybe I'm Leo, maybe you've thought about this, which is so uh broadly speaking, this sort

of like, well, I want people who are sort of have self control and to not like sort of take short term benefits. But if you think about um from an evolved perspective, I actually shouldn't want that for myself. And to a discounted degree, I might not want that. And I can qualify that in a second. I might not want that for like my close partner or my kids or something, or people I'm like biased, quote unquote, towards, right? There's sort of like these like scales of sort of like how much I care about their intrinsic welfare versus then I just want them to be good citizens because I'm going to interact with them. And so I wonder if something like, you know, do I care if my best friend or my partner or my child is gluttonous or taking short-term benefits,

the um versus not. Um I wonder if like looking at those sort of closer people, or myself even, um, I wonder if looking at that case sort of teases apart some of these things. Now, of course, there's this issue of if my like let's say for my example, my child, I don't want them to be seen as a bad cooperation partner by the world, right? So there are social signaling costs. Um so it's it's a complicated prediction. But I feel like I don't know. Have you thought about that as like looking at these cases where we're not talking about strangers, but we're talking about these like, you know, the the sort of gluttony and self the the non-disciplinary, the non-discipline, like non-puritanical, non-stoic

indulgences? How do people feel about those for themselves and other pe and people like that they're really close to, quote unquote? Yeah. And does that tell us something about the design? Yeah, that's a good question. Honestly, I never thought about that. No, it's a good question. Yeah. I need to digest. Yeah, no, it's I mean, because you can see it either way, right? Like you can kind of see it as like, I want, like of all the people in the world, I want myself and like my reproductive partner or like my kids to just like take the goods, like not disconnect the future. But on the other hand, there is also the issue of even though I want that, more than I want, I want them to do it more than other people, but I still also want them to look to

other people like they're like they're they are following the norm. Right. And so maybe maybe that sort of hypocrisy, quote unquote, maybe maybe there's sort of design features for that. Because you really um you know uh for you know if we're all starving on the on the on the top of the mountain after the airplane crash you know like if my kid eats the food uh I'm fine with that but if another kid eats the food and it's not my kid and my kid's more hungry I'm really upset about that. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah completely it's just that um I'm trying to disentangle while thinking about it the again what I want and what I think is wrong. Yeah. I mean we also talked yeah, we also talked to Daniel about like self-conscious emotions,

which is sort of the function of them, right? Is to sort of is to represent if I do this, how will others view this? And I think that this is a really the self-conscious emotion adaptations, I think, are really important for this, which is it's not only like what will if I eat this plate of French fries, Um, you know, what what are all the what's the list of costs, what's the list of benefits and the machinery is just going? And yeah, if if you if you and David are gonna, you know, think really badly of me, then um that's gonna go in the cost list. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even actually, so I I would distinguish a further so there there is like what I like, what personally I would like, how I would look uh in the minds of others if I did that,

which is the shame function. I mean the shame uh what feeds into shame. And to me, what I'm most interested in is really moral judgment, which is another thing, which is what I think is wrong, even if I do it, uh which feeds guilt. Uh and and it can be the case that I do something uh which I think is not wrong, uh but other people think uh that I did something wrong and so I look bad. This is what I mean. But it's it's uh uh interest it's important, functionally important and approximately important when we think about the logic of moral judgment in the human mind to really uh uh talk only about this particular type of mental representation that's not my representation of my reputational value or whatever, but really what I think is wrong or not, which

ultimately of course serves the uh the reputational function of being a trust for uh cooperative partner but seems to be approximately dissociated. Actually I think Daniel has worked has worked uh where where they precisely show that you can um not do something wrong but when you get cues that uh people want to socially exclude you that you have a low social value or reputational value then shame is triggered while you still have hold the belief that you did nothing wrong. So it it seems that the two systems the system that uh uh uh computes what we owe to each other, what what I deserve to receive and and what I should or uh do or not and what is right and wrong, is is cognitively distinct from another system that is

computing the the the the the benefits that I get from it. Does that make sense? Yeah yeah. Yeah. Uh yeah yeah it ties back to again to this this game theoretic distinction between the you know coordination for mutual benefit and cooperating in a prisoner's dilemma or public good game. So if I do something that shows that I'm a bad partner in coordination games, so if I use words improperly and say stupid things and communicate poorly, I might feel shame about that because people are going to judge me as a bad conversation partner, right? But I'm not gonna feel guilt because it's not it's not a moral failing, right? It's gonna damage my reputation, but I haven't defected in a prisoner's dilemma or or or

anything like that. So it's really guilt and other moral emotions come online when uh when we're in situations that are analogous to the prisoner's dilemma or the public goods game. And not just uh reputational damage in general or reputational damage as a coordination partner. It's in particular reputational damage as a cooperation partner. Yeah, and and yeah, yeah, yeah, completely. And and yeah, completely. And the function of guilt, just to review, is different or the output of guilt is is approach and reparative according to the Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. The the I mean all it seems that all the design features of guilt are there, uh perfectly well designed to repair your moral validation, that is to compensate the gap between what

uh you owed to other and what you have actually given them uh guilt, detects that gap and and and give you the motivation to really uh restore justice by giving people what they deserved in the first place and that you didn't give them in the first place. I mean many people disagree with that. That's why I'm gonna do that. So th this is a nice segue into something that I know you've thought a lot about recently, which is punishment. Um And uh why why we punish, uh, why we inflict costs on wrongdoers. Um and what's interesting, you have a very different perspective on this. So it might, from a naive perspective, it might think that you know the reason we punish is to deter. Um I punish you so you don't do that thing again, so you don't mistreat me or you don't

mistreat my friends again. And that seems very intuitive. Um uh that that's that's the function of of punishment. But you but you have um a slightly different perspective on on what punishment is for and and how it evolved and it relates to this um uh contractualist theory of morality that I know is is popular among you uh Parisians. Um so if you could but but only among Parisians. Only among Parisians. No I'm I'm I'm partial to it as well. I think it's it's uh it's insightful. Um so so what how are you thinking about uh punishment uh and and how does it differ from the more intuitive view of punishment? Yeah yeah no that I I mean yeah, that that's really something I'm struggling uh with uh now.

So um so yeah, so the the the the question I'm trying to so on the theory side, the question I'm trying to answer uh right now is uh and that uh we've already talked about uh sometimes with David is uh not why so it's not exactly again why we punish. So why is it that people enact the behavior of if inflicting costs on cost inflictors or cheaters or whatever? because I do believe that there is a very good evolutionary function of deterrence that is uh here. So uh, or at least dyadic deterrence, like more in the in the really Santa Barbara light stuff, less of the norm enforcement uh boyed uh view. Uh so I do think that the function of revenge is to deter future uh cost infliction toward uh towards yourself.

I mean, I'm totally sold. Uh Um what again seems puzzling to me is the future of the moral judgment of punishment, which is something uh of the moral judgment that is often baked into uh uh people's intuition about when you deserve you morally deserve to suffer or not. It can be the case that I punish you, but that you don't deserve it. Right? If I punish you for doing something that is uh not immoral, uh, I will deter that behavior. You will be less likely to do that behavior to me, even though you had the right to do it. Uh but yet people have very fine-grained intuition about the fact that you didn't deserve it. And it's not about only about whether uh enacting a deserved or undeserved punishment, it's

even a very quantitative, fine-grained uh uh intuition because uh if uh you um you steal uh an apple from me and I kill you, I'm sure that nobody will steal an apple from me again, but it's morally wrong to do so. I don't have the right to punish you disproportionately compared to the compared to the to the your what is often called in the punishment literature in moral philosophy but also in moral psychology, your just dessert. So uh what I'm trying to explain is what is the cognitive grammar and corresponding adaptive function of this puzzling mortal representation of just desserts. That is the quantity of cost, the precise quantity of cost that moral violators morally deserve to receive uh in order to restore justice or to restore balance or or or this kind

of so the this this speaks to uh an old debate in moral philosophy uh in the philosophy of law and the philosophy of punishment between like what is often called like the consequentialist account of of punishment in moral philosophy according to which the function of punishment is to deter. So the justification of punishing people is only uh forward looking in the sense of uh rooted in the future benefits that this will generate by uh uh uh disincentivizing future uh violations versus uh retributivist accounts of uh punishment rooted in like the SDs of count and and much later. Uh the idea that uh we pun the justification to punishment is just to give offenders what they deserve. By the very fact that they have committed a moral violation, that they have uh taken

benefits from other people, uh uh they morally deserve in order to pay their debt, that is, to inflict a cost that is proportionate to the cost they have inflicted, and to evolutionary psychologists, the and what what we find in the social psychology literature is that people are more intuitive retributivists. That is, uh, when they think of uh uh the the what punishment should be prescribed, they think in terms of just deserve that is balance, uh proportionality, uh uh they think it's immoral to go too far in punishment compared to the violation, etc. And they don't think to think to they don't think seem to think that much into in in a deterrenced way. So this is a puzzle for an evolutionary psychologist because the form doesn't seem to

follow the function. The function of punishment in all of the evolutionary social sciences deterrence. And yet the cognitive design doesn't seem to be sensitive to deterrence relevant cues, or it is, but not completely. And the the the and in and many uh features don't seem, yeah, don't seem to follow many features like uh uh proportionality, the fact that uh that it's it's about justice, like in the same very same way that uh we think about distributive justice, punishment is about retributive justice. So the idea that uh the by inflicting a proportionate cost on you when you have inflicting a cost and restoring uh justice in the same way that uh if you uh have done more work in our collective action by giving you more benefits and restoring justice because you deserve

more. So, all these features, these precise cognitive features of the moral psychology of punishment don't seem to straightforwardly follow from the uh standard evolutionary rationals. And so that's the puzzle I'm trying to solve. And the the so the the the the the reason why I'm trying to bring this new theory of the moral psychology of punishment is not simply that I want to propose a new theory, but I I generally think there is a puzzle in the moral psychology of punishment that has not been addressed by the evolutionary literacy. Yeah. That's so you want to yeah. Sorry, go ahead. Oh no, yeah. So go. Yeah. So what is the how does so there is I love this that it's a lovely example, just to be meta

for a second, of this is an example of taking the design features you would expect given a function and looking at this phenomenon in the world. And you're seeing it's a lovely example of the testability of how making design predictions. and we have this thing, uh moral um uh this moral um system or the moral phenomena is better way to put it um and you're saying look it's not it doesn't have the design features for um the forward looking uh deterrence and it really seems uh ret r retributive so what's going on so yeah so what's the solution for why it's more retributive than deterrence I don't think uh I mean I'm not sure it's true it's a it's I'm trying. Yeah Yeah, exactly. So the the basic idea is the following.

So again, uh we need to go back to the so the basic idea we try to spoil it, spoil it and then elaborate on it, and it's counterintuitive at the first time. It's like it's uh for our moral psychology, punishment in the sense of an infliction of costs after uh uh cheating behavior is uh a form of compensation to the victim. So when uh and I will I will explain that. So i let me go back to uh uh what is an injustice in general for the mind. So cheating in general is perceived approximately as uh an injustice. Cheating is a behaviour that gives uh if I'm copyright with David and I give David five euros while his he deserves ten, uh uh I create an injustice in the world that is of five euros. Like there is a gap between what David owes, uh what I owe to David, what David deserves,

and uh what I have actually given him. And by this very fact, this creates literally a moral debt. That is that now for our moral psychology, the five missing euros are literally the debts that uh I owe David if I am to restore justice, that is to wash away the moral wrong. That is to restore a relationship to a distribution of costs and benefits that ought to be in the first place, because it was mutually beneficial, and that wasn't. In any moral violation or cheating behavior, there is a moral debt from the offender to the victim. Now, a straightforward way in which humans uh deal with that in order to restore justice is material compensation. If I give back the 10 euros and maybe a bit more, uh, we feel that uh justice is restored.

That is that uh David has got back what he originally deserved in the first place. And accordingly, justice institutions across human societies, and we've we've done work with um Manjia Singh and many other people uh trying to look at the justice systems of small scale, even small scale politically decentralized societies, compensatory justice is absolutely central to the justice systems of human societies. A straightforward way to deal with wrongdoing is not punishment, actually, it's compensation. But another way to deal with punishment is uh to deal with a moral violation is punishment. Hence what I'm trying to argue is that this notion of just desert is just uh uh compensation of this uh moral debt, but in another

currency, which is the any benefit that I can I can get, that they that David can get uh from harming me. Uh in in social life, there are many uh uh social inter uh contexts in which the very fact of harming others is uh is ultimately a benefit to you. For example, if we are uh competitors with David and David inflicts a cost on me, by this very fact, ultimately speaking, David, David is extracting a benefit from me. So for David to be compensated of the benefits I owed him in the first place, one solution is for me to give David a pig, but another solution is for David to compensate himself by harming me, that is by extracting benefits, uh ultimate benefit, by the very simple fact of harming me.

But and one of these benefits that David can take from me by harming me is not only like, for example, cost infliction in a competitive interaction, it can be also deterrent. So by by by by by um by signaling to other people that he's not the kind of person uh who can be easily exploited. There is a deterrent element to it, but the the quantity of costs that David is morally allowed to inflict on me uh after uh my my uh cheating uh to him is constrained by this backward looking logic of the quantity of benefits I owed him in the first place, and that he is now allowed to extract back to cost infliction. Does that make sense? To praise it another way that is much less simple, is that uh this notion of just

there, the quantity of cost that the offender deserves to receive in order for justice to be restored is just uh uh um uh a benefit extraction through cost infliction that is computed distributively. Basically the distributive computation that that are the core of our moral psychology, which is about calculating what we owe to each other, what is the quantity of benefit that you deserve and I deserve, and how much uh so what we owe to each other. The cost that we infoke on each other after moralation, after moral violation, are also computed distributively. And so the amount of cost that you are allowed to inflict on me after a moral violation is proportionate to the cost uh I have inflicted on you.

For the this very same logic that the the the quantity of pigs you allow to take back uh from me by through material compensation after a moral violation is proportional to the number of pigs I've taken you. Otherwise, you're if you're taking too much, you're simply violating mutual benefit or justice in the other direction. You're creating a new offense the other way around by taking too much, and that is taking more than you deserved. Does that make sense? It's always a mess to explain. I mean, I think a concrete example would be like let's say that we all are pig farmers, and um and you take um one of my pigs, but you end up taking a hundred from all of us, right? Now if I took the if I took um that many from you,

um, then uh, you know, I was I had a cost of one, but I'm taking a hundred from you. And if everybody did that, you know, you would be it would be really, you know something uh like you would you would be in negative things right um now but if i was sort of acting on the if i was like sort of the uh given the the role of sort of punishment seeker i'm i might take more than one but it's not because of me idiosyncratically but i'm sort of representing that for everyone but but everybody sort of agreed to that so i think the intuition that sort of what i'm allowed to do as an individual because of the cost incurred in me versus um versus that the costs were inflicted on the whole community. And I'm not allowed to sort of free ride on the retribution of

the whole community. The fact that that's true even is sort of an acknowledgement of this design feature. That sort of if David's another pig farmer, if I don't, if if he's not benefiting and getting a pig back either, you know what I'm what I'm doing as a punisher is actually screwing him over too, and he's not gonna Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh so completely. And uh so one way I try to to to put it for people to have the intuition too is just it even if you say only to the d the dyadic case, uh, where there is no and it's it's basically the logic of an eye for an eye. So uh uh student uh researchers on honor cultures, for example, or or revenge cultures, they they say exactly that that uh um uh taking your eye after you took mine

is is a form of compensation that is not with money or cattle, but that is with the benefit I get from uh uh being CR, basically. So having the reputation of someone who is not easily exploited, which is a deterrence rationale. I do think the deterrence rationale is true that that people have benefited from harming others after moral violations, because and the benefit they get is that they get a reputational capital of someone who is not easily exploitable. Basically, they deter your aggression. But the amount of the deterrence benefit that you are allowed to take from me is constrained by how much you are allowed to take in the first place. And how much you are allowed to take from me in the first place is constrained by the debt

that uh you you have to. I mean if I stole you one pig and I and I take 100 pig, clearly it's immoral in the same way that if uh uh you I uh um uh you I take one pig from you and you kill me, it's too much. I think what you're arguing is that you're we're sort of reframing the logic of punishment and deterrence from one that is focused on the perpetrator to one that is focused on the victim. Yes. Um so the purpose of punishment um you know is not focused on hurting or or deterring the perpetrator so much as making things right for the victim. The victim has incurred a huge cost and what can we do to make that right, to to to make them uh uh well off again or or or where they were before the the transgression turned out.

Exactly. So one way to do that is to um provide benefits to the victim to make them whole again. Uh another way to do that is to uh hurt or deter the perpetrator so that they're less likely to harm uh the victim again in the future. So to sort of satisfy the the victim's uh anger. Um and uh those are two equally uh viable routes to uh uh satisfying the victim and making them whole again. Um and you could kill two birds with one stone by having the perpetrator uh themselves benefit the victim. So it not only deters the perpetrator, it also provides benefits to the victim. And that's the ideal way that conflicts are restored uh in in in the wake of transgressions. And this is how conflicts are usually restored in small-scale societies.

This is what your work with uh Manvir Singh. Um So it it entails a lot of really interesting predictions, which is that the desire to or the morality of punishing the victim should very much depend on how the victim feels toward the perpetrator. If the the victim is really angry uh and vengeful toward the perpetrator, then then punishing the perpetrator is going to seem more just. But if the victim is actually not very vengeful and not uh and and has forgiven the perpetrator, let's say, then all of a sudden punishing the perpetrator becomes less just because it's not actually benefiting the victim in any way. Yeah, yeah. And and the same thing goes where um, you know, uh if the if the victim themselves is

allowed to inflict the punishment such that they personally benefit from deterring the perpetrator from harming them in the future, that's going to be seen as more just or it's going to be more satisfying for the victim than if if the perpetrator just faces uh a cost anonymously. Um so let's say, you know, if if you take my eye, um I get to personally take your eye back, right? Um, that's much better for me than if you just randomly get, you know, uh uh struck by lightning in your eye, right? That's gonna be less satisfying to me than if I personally get to take your eye, right? And so uh what should be just is that the the perpetrator should know that the cost was coming from the victim themselves.

And so that they are deterred in particular from harming the victim again. Yeah. As opposed to the general community. So it's benefiting the victim in particular. That's really interesting. Yeah. And that and that's a real trope in sort of modern legal things, you know, where somebody's like, I wanna like, you know, hurt this person and the legal system is like, no, no, no. No, we we're gonna do it. And it's the conflict of interest, and that's exactly for exactly the reason David just said. And there there actually are cases where the victim's family uh gets to decide whether the the perpetrator uh gets a life in prison sentence or a death sentence. In fact, I believe this happened in the case of Matthew Shepard, who was murdered.

Um uh Matthew Shepard's parents knew that uh he was um anti-death penalty, and so they actually made the decision that the the perpetrator should get a a life in prison sentence as opposed to a death sentence. And so these decisions can sometimes be left to the victim or the victim's family as opposed to the state. Yeah. And the argument, David, is that that that sort of feels good and it's empowering because it's creating common knowledge that the victim, or in this case, the extended interests of the victim, because the victim is now dead, um, are sort of uh calling the shots, quote unquote. Yes. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Important thing about this is that uh the victim still uh doesn't have the right to go too far.

Moral cognition is computing what is objectively uh the the amount of benefits that the victim is allowed to take back in order for justice to be restored. But if she wants to take back more than this, for example, I don't know, prescribe a death penalty for someone who just stole their car, we judge that it's an excessive claim. And it's in this fine-grained feature of judgment of judgment that I'm that I'm uh that I'm trying to explain, it's an excessive claim because it's disproportionate to the debt uh That is to the quantity of benefit that they were allowed to receive. You see what I mean? And this and this actually might be the exception that proves the rule, because I like that, Leo. And I think there's exceptions to that, but it's for the same reason you're arguing, which

is, for example, when it is excessive, or what counts as excessive depends on such community. So, for example, quote unquote, if there's an out group, that's sort of outside of our quote unquote moral boundary, which is actually the tautological thing. Because, like, so if there's a group of people whose interests we're not interested in, and we're especially not worried about them reciprocating conflict. Then it might be the rule that if you steal a melon from me and it's not one of our group members who stole the melon, but an outgroup member, we're allowed to like kill them. No limit. And everyone is like, that's the moral. And so that that shows you that what gets counts counts as moral moralized, or

what counts as the fair or overgo going too far, is a consequence of social agreement about sort of who we are, right? And so, like, yeah, I don't want to get killed because I steal your melon, right? Like, or like, you know, I have to deal with the person who stole the melon again today and the next day, the next day. But in the out group, no, I don't, right? So I don't care about them. So like it's like we so I think this also makes the the explains sort of this quote unquote moral circle or sort of what's what seems like an excessive just dessert really is in the eye of the beholder and specifically it's with within these like clines of sort of is this a group that we are all roughly speaking going to

have future interactions with and we care about um because it's in our interest to versus not and then in that case you would expect just dessert to look very different for out groups or people we don't care uh we don't see or interact with. Completely. Yeah. Yeah yeah. So for for for there to be a limitation to the quantity of punishment that is allowed to be uh enacted, there needs to be a moral contract in the first place. If there's no moral contract, then the spontaneous play of a of the of the victim self interest has no boundaries and you can if if uh as a group we are attacked by a group with whom we have absolutely no moral contract, then all is fair in love and war, let's say. yeah.

Yeah. It does it also suggests a a prediction that um if it's about restoring the victim rather than punishing the perpetrator, and there are two ways to restore the victim, one is to benefit the victim and one is to uh harm the perpetrator and and thus deter them from harming the victim. Um if we uh as a society prevent the victim from getting any benefits, as in the case with a criminal trial. So in a criminal trial as opposed to a you know a civil or tort trial, um, the victim doesn't benefit at all. It's just a matter of how much the the perpetrator is getting punished. Whereas if it's a tort trial, then the victim is actually getting compensated uh for the harm. Um and so if the only way that the victim can be benefited um from the the ordeal

is harm and being inflicted on the perpetrator, then you might expect more harm to be delivered to the perpetrator because they aren't able to get benefits in any other currency. The only currency they can get is how badly the uh the perpetrator suffers. So if so in in the case of a criminal trial, you might expect uh a greater retributive response because that's the only way that the victim can benefit at all. Right. Whereas in a tort trial, if the victim is compensated, you might not expect a lot of, you know, a lot of harm that needs to become to the perpetrator because the victim is made whole. You know, if a if if if a company, you know, you know, makes a product that makes a person sick or injures that person, if they compensate the person, the company's fine.

Like you don't need to inflict additional costs on the company to really make them suffer. As long as the victim is fairly compensated, we have the intuition that, you know, justice has been served and that's fine. But if the victim is unable to be compensated because it's a criminal trial, then the only way to actually restore the victim, uh, is to make the perpetrator suffer, then you're gonna uh get more sadism uh and more cruelty in criminal trials uh toward the perpetrator. Um and so it may be that when you when you cut off one route to restoring the victim, it forces you to to invest more heavily in the That's great. That's awesome. Actually, this is a so we are trying to develop a project with Manvia Singh where we try to

test that. Is it the case that if I punish you, then you're then if the offender is punished, then the victim is not entitled anymore to compensation. If punishment is really a form of compensation, then the fact of punishing should dissolve the moral right of the victim to compensation, because they they have already been compensation in the currency of the harm, of the benefit they get from the harm to the to the offender. And I never thought about the the the fact that you mentioned, which is that sometimes uh so that the criminal injustice system actually cuts the the very possibility of compensation and maybe that's why it's it's so punitive. I I only thought about the fact that maybe it's why people are are are unsatisfied with it

because like it forgets about the victim. Often people say, you know, it's only um the victim is not restored. That that's what the whole uh restorative justice movement is about, saying like the people we forget about the victim in criminal trials and we just impose costs uh on on on offenders. But yeah. Right. And if you if you go back to like the history of of you know conflict resolution and and and legal systems. So I'm I'm reading a really interesting book now, I'll I'll send it to you later called Common Law, Liberalism and the Evolution of Common Law, which is basically tort law, you know, compensating the victim. Uh and it's transitioned into criminal law, which is you know uh you know cry uh it's a

basically a crime against the person versus a crime against the state. Um and in you know uh in medieval Europe, the main way that people resolved conflicts was through tort law. Uh and then gradually um the king realized that uh the king could get money from uh the perpetrator by framing it as a conflict against the state versus a conflict against the victim. And gradually it was replaced with criminal law where the the victim was no longer compensated and all of the money went to the king, basically, in terms in the form of fines. And it basically became a way for the state or for the king to basically profit from uh conflicts happening in in the community. Um and uh it it evolved into what is now the the the criminal law institution, but it's

actually a kind of unnatural way of resolving conflicts. The the more natural way is what you see in small scale societies and what you see in tort law, which is where the victim is is compensated and it's very much centered on on repairing and restoring the victim. Yeah. I was gonna say why don't we work compensate victims along with pun like it it actually doesn't make any sense. It doesn't, yeah. It's because it evolved from this kind of parasitical. Criminal law. Yeah. It's uh because like I mean, yeah, concretely, it's sort of like if you're speeding on the highway and you get fined, you should actually. I mean, I guess the argument well, if you're speeding on the highway, David, let's just

say, you know, and Leo and I are next to you. Your money, if and if you get fined, the money should go to us. Maybe the person who caught you, because you know, they have to do something too. But like this idea that sort of it just goes to the king right is sort of silly yeah yeah totally it's a it's a really interesting the other thing that I think is interesting um because you know as Leo as you said like the the the retribution versus forward or deterrence looking is sort of also a approximate ultimate confusion right because ultimately like it's it's kind of a little bit of wolf. and I like this bringing back to groups thing where sort of who is the victim also matter or is is different depending on the situation.

So for example, if if David, if David steals the pig from me and we're all in the same group, you're not the victim per se, Leo, especially to the degree that like I did something to David, right? But if uh if David steals the pig because you and I, Leo, are a group member, wear the purple shirts, and David hates the purple shirts, then now all of a sudden you're calculating, well, he could have done that to me. Yeah. So in some sense, you are probabilistically the victim too. And so the idea that sort of the the amount of just deserts that we feel, um, and whether or not like why somebody like did a crime. So we had um um Keela Williams on, and this idea of sort of like, you know, did somebody

do something? Like, let's say somebody kills somebody. Is it because they were just the fourth person to walk by? We really want to punish that person. And the idea is that that's because probabilistically we're all victims. It's just that we're victims, we were possible victims who got lucky that we weren't the fourth person. But if the reason why that person killed somebody was because you know they had a long-standing relationship, and you know, we all know we don't have that kind of relationship. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It it really narrows down that like that that's diagnosed diagnostic, that that person would hurt us per se. And so I really like this idea of um that what counts even as a just

dessert is a function of sort of who the victim is. And in some sense, we become the victim like a terrorist attack. You know, like we were all attacked, this like trope or like a group based attack. Um, and that would suggest then that the just dessert for responding is much higher as well. And it's because we're sort of all victims, because we're all sort of calculating um, you know, that this the from a social signaling perspective, exactly. It's sort of like if David successfully steals the pig from me, but we're both purple shirted Leo, it's show it signals to the world that you are also exploitable. If you and I don't punish David, um, it actually puts you in a worse situation because everyone knows you're a purple shirt too.

And this is showing that like look, purple shirts are willing and able to be exploited or have their pig. Um so you should really care about like making sure that the world knows that when you steal a purple shirt's pig was super weird example. When you steal a purple p you know a pig's uh a purple shirt a pig uh um pig from a purple shirt, it's gonna be punished, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually even more harm has been done in the world exactly when you when you do a a violation that is that is harming the the reputation of of several uh the deterrent reputation of several individuals and not only the proportionate response is higher. Yeah. Exactly. So yeah, predicts very much. It explains why hate crimes are punished more severely than individual crimes.

It's a crime against an entire group. It threatens the entire group versus a specific individual. Yeah, that's that's really good. Yeah, and that's why there's a search for what's the motive. Uh, which is sort of always always sort of like it's a very instinct blindness thing where it seems obvious why that is. But I think this this is actually the causal teeth for it, is that it's actually asking what kind of cost who who are the reputational um uh yeah, from a social signal perspective, who what's the class of victims? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's really good, David. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, that's really interesting. Actually, I think it's it relates to what you were saying, David, about the I mean the

question you were asking about uh criminal justice. So the way I was thinking of criminal justice is is that for certain behaviour, uh why why do we have civil and criminal justice? Like it's real. Yeah. Yeah. And and and because the king, the king had to get paid. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, but even even in modern societies, we still have that. And they often say, so I I I I'm not I'm not a legal scientist, I don't know, I don't know anything about law, but I think I got that, I'm not sure. Uh please correct me. Uh is that they seem to make the distinction between uh, as you said, a tort and a crime, and a tort being uh uh uh in our language of evolutionary social scientists, I was framing it as cheating behavior in a dyadic reciprocal interaction where they think.

And I was framing uh understanding the crime as a cheating behavior in a collective action. Yes that does many victims. And so you know they say a crime is a tort uh tort against society. Uh uh so there are behavior that violates the interest not only of one particular individual, but all of the individual in the nation or the social contract. And so it's the society, so that is all of the all of us that respond. And anyway, so this relates to I I was just making that connection in my mind with what you just said, Dave, about the that the fact that certain violations have uh more than one victim and how this implies stuff about the justice response. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And that circles back to the morality thing, right?

Like I mean the argument that sort of morality is this sort of thing of like, hey, we've all been harmed. You know, it's it's essentially an implicit claim of like it this wasn't just, you know, this eating French fries thing isn't just harming me. It's harming all of us. Hey, everybody look at this thing and say this is bad and let's do something about it. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool stuff. Um so we're we're approaching the end of of our time. We didn't even get a chance to talk about uh religion and mutual policing, which is a shame. Yeah. Because I wanted to talk about that. It's a super fun topic. Uh, but another thing I wanted to talk, I wanted to run by um a pet hypothesis of mine about uh elite status signaling and see what you think of it.

All right. Okay. So um so there's this idea of like quote unquote highbrow art. So there's the uh fine dining versus McDonald's. There's you know uh uh the the Russian novel um Shakespeare um versus you know uh trashy airport novel, or there's you know a you know seven hour black and white uh film about a collapse of a you know uh farming collective in post-communist Hungary versus um you know reality TV or you know um uh you know the latest dumb you Marvel movie or whatever, right? Yeah. And some of these forms of art are considered higher status or classier. And it might be that insofar as self-control correlates with social status, and you know, and it's irrelevant why the correlation exists, but let's assume for the sake of argument

that it does exist, that higher status people tend to have more self-control, or at least self-control has for whatever reason become a cue of high status, then you then you might expect people to signal their self control via the types of art that they consume. So, insofar as something requires uh a suppression of impulses, if I can sit through a seven hour black and white film and suppress my urge to get out of there and and and you know, suppress the urge to um quell my boredom, then that must mean that I have a lot of self control and I'm and I'm really high status. Or if I can um look at uh a painting that looks hideous, but like sort of have the set suppress my my urge to to walk away or look at something else and try to find the beauty in

it, then that suggests a kind of self-control. That there's something about elite art or highbrow art where it requires you to suppress some kind of impulse um in order to appreciate it. And that's what makes it classy, that's what makes it high status. It's not the uh instant gratification or uh of the reality TV or the or the Big Mac. It's not an an indulgence of bodily pleasure. It actually takes some kind of refinement, it takes some cost, it takes some investment in in terms of like learning, you know, the old English if you're reading a Shakespeare play, or learning the historical context if you're watching a black and white movie. All these things require costs. And it is and insofar as the cost re insofar as the art requires you to incur costs to

appreciate it, it is seen as more highbrow uh because it's a signal of self-control. What what do you think about that theory? No, I I love that theory. I mean uh I would love it to be true. The only the the So yeah, so I thought it was actually true, and I was thinking, I think it's the case, but only insofar as self-control also cues competence. It doesn't seem to me that uh that the the kind of status related inference that we make about some people having more sophisticated uh cultural consumption than others is about trustworthiness. That that doesn't seem to be what is at stake when people despise um uh uh T V reality is what I mean. Yeah. Uh in rather they seem to say that these people are dumb.

These people say I see. What seems to be like and and so there are there are two dimensions I mean allegedly there are two dimensions of of person perception, of social perception, trustworthiness and competence. Competence means your ability to extract benefit from the environment and trustworthiness, how much you're willing to give benefits to others. My argument on puritanism was really focused on the trustworthiness dimension, uh, that is your ability to resist cheating. It seems to me that in in this kind of uh social distinction, uh status-related inference for based on cultural consumption, people are really making inference about competence, that is how smart people are, how sophisticated people are, but which also relates to

self-control. I mean, um, self-control signals uh your ability to to do more productive stuff uh in the world independently of your uh uh willingness to uh uh repay debt or or or help others in uh in cooperative interactions. So I I I I I love what you're saying. Ma it's just that what I s what seems to be the most plausible route in this particular case is not the cooperation uh self-control relationship, but rather more the other relationship that seemed to exist between self-control and uh competence. Does that make sense? And what do you think? Yes, yes. No, I buy that. No, I think that's probably part of it too. I mean, it'd be interesting to study this empirically and like you know, give a vignette

about someone who watches reality TV or or or whatever, and see what kind of inferences people make about that person. Uh I would agree that yeah, you'd probably make the inference that they're dumb, but like maybe you'd also make the inference that they're low status. Um, but what is low stay use? I mean, that's your topic, but uh yeah, what is yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, what is what is what is status but you know, perceived confidence comp competence, right? I mean, so I'm not saying it's necessarily a moral signal, but more of a status signal. Uh maybe qu quasi moral. Like there's a bit of a moral flavor to it. Like it's almost seen as more virtuous to like watch the black and white French film than

you know, watch the dying film like yeah yeah and this is a throwback to Keela Williams. This is like we should have Keila and you on together. Um because also the the the her idea of sort of or the the that idea coming out of their labs is this idea of like ecology stereotypes and sort of discounting the future. And this actually feels like a very similar um um expression of the same idea which is just sort of that there's the her idea and you know Steve Neuberg's idea and other people's ideas that there's sort of machinery for tracking to what degree people are calibrated to discount the future. Um and it might be a blanket thing, but it might even be very specific, right? Like, like, you know, David might discount the future um when we're at home.

uh and like throw things around and it pisses me off, you know, like like, you know, for example, um uh but uh so but I don't, right? And that's just sort of like a distinction and a difference, and I might moralize that like, oh, you're just you're being a slob, right? Um, and then the f to then it goes the the full gamut to like, you know, David's boring book example, um, where it's sort of showing that I'm I'm singling I'm the kind of person who is uh not discounting the future at all, Um, you know, and we're all PhDs like super uber in this category, um, right, uh, of that. And so um, yeah, that feels similar to this, um, to this, and that's really my point, is just yeah, it's connection.

Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's a weird you know fusion of status and intelligence and competence and self-control and virtue that's sort of fuse together in sort of elite and highbrow culture. It would be really interesting to look at empirically. Yeah. And I mean I think we were even arguing that in that episode that sort of status is sort of maybe just the confabulated word for these other dimensions, right? Like I don't think we have whatever word like signaling high status or highbrow. I don't think like there's very much like a if you told a robot that they'd be like, what the hell are you talking about? Like we haven't cashed it out computationally or an evolutionary perspective. But I think when people talk about like status, in I think competence is like I think you

can, like Leah, like you said, like competence can be very much like, you know, can you do this thing? Um but general competence, I don't know, right? And like I I don't know, in like general status, um like I I do feel like there's some work to do to sort of unpack what does high status mean or high brow. And I think you guys are exactly right. Um but it's a good example of like that's still a really big place of instinct blindness. Like there's tons of work and concern about like social status differences, social class differences, and people looking down on lower classes, quote unquote. Um, and uh it would be it, yeah, this seems like a really important thing to unpack. And I I suspect what you're studying as part of that.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Well Yeah, yeah, uh yeah. I I would love to know what status is uh once you figure out uh Yeah. I mean uh I mean honestly I think I think what we're talking about is is class more than status. I think there are actually probably relevant differences between class and status. I and and and class may may relate to these uh ecology stereotypes that we talked about on the Keila Williams episode where class is you know if if you're if you grow up in a privileged versus, you know, unpredictable and threatening environment, it's gonna lead to different, you know, uh abilities to delay gratifications, different, you know, time horizons and willingness to di you know discount the future.

Um and that stuff might be what we're thinking about when we think about class. But that it might act but status might actually be a different thing. Um and so it makes it even more complicated. And and power is a different thing, and these these are very related but also but but potentially separable and you know, very subtle and complicated. Uh just a complete aside, David. Uh, I feel like class, I mean, maybe I'm wrong and maybe I'm not reading the right things, but like there is sort of like academic propaganda or intelligentsia propaganda. I feel like class, maybe it's because of marks or something, but I feel like class doesn't come up as often as you would think it would. Is that true?

And is that because it's in nobody's interest to bring it up? Yeah, It very well could be. Yeah. No, I think honestly, I I I think class differences are kind of the water that we swim in as, you know, classy elite people. Yeah. Uh and I think it's a lot of the underlying uh cause of populism. And it's part of why we can't understand where it's coming from as elites, because what it is is it's resentment and hostility toward our class of people. Right. Um and and we can't understand that because it's it's the our class is you know, it's the water we swim in, right? But we can understand people who are outside of that and who see it and who resent it and view it as a threat. And I think that's a big part of what um you know uh populism is.

Right. Um yeah. And so and we're incentivized to um uh to not uh land on high versus low class or having resources and not, but to do something that's an orthogonal category. So say, look, there's other high resource people that differ than me in another dimension, and I'm my evolved psychology should pick out that because it won't land on me. So I want to distinguish if I'm high, if I have high resources, I don't want the narrative to be high versus low resources. I'm incentivized to consume propaganda that's about uh the high resource people who are unlike me. Yes, now now you're thinking a Pensafian way. Pensophian, yes. Yeah, okay. Cool, cool, cool. Yeah. Uh Leo, is there anything that we should have asked you?

Whoa. Uh no, I don't think so. I don't think so. Well, actually, let me listen, let me ask you something. Where so I think you might be one of the first postdocs that we've interviewed. Is it true that you're a postdoc and that you're looking for a job? Yes. Okay. Yes, I am. Okay, good. So if you're listening to this and you uh and you like what you hear, um uh Leo is uh looking for a job. Exactly. I'm looking for a job. And thank you so much. I mean, I'm honored to be the first one. Yeah, well, and yeah, yeah. And one related question is what are you working on now, or what do you plan to work on in the next like little bit? Um, just just briefly, uh Yeah, yeah. So I'm increasingly thinking about the so I'm trying to finish this punishment stuff, but

like but the more the next idea I'm more interested about is like the moral psychology of authority. So when is it that so applying these same contractualist ideas to when is it that we that people uh think that you have a duty to obey uh that leaders have a right to command again these uh these uh moral judgment follow a very fine grained logic like uh if you're my superior that's there are some things you can ask from me but other things would be excessive or immoral to ask from me so we are I'm basically trying to apply this uh this idea of like the co contractualist uh benefits in the in the authority relationship itself while most previous ideas in moral psychology have been about dominance, uh games, this kind of thing.

I think it's all about reciprocity. That's a really fascinating and understudied question, the psychology of authority and when we th view authority as legitimate. and I'll I'll probably send you other books on that topic. Oh yeah, the most who I mean I I I I'm so happy you are saying this because I completely completely agree. I like that too because it's a it goes in the direction of uh the the theme of what you're doing is also shifting the sh perspective because a lot of that dominance work is about the aggressor, but you're talking about the victim again. Or sort of like or the people who might be the recipients of the authority and saying when is it when do they decide it's okay and when do they decide it's not.

Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah and uh yeah yeah again the the theme is is is a bit always the same is like uh we have good theories of uh when we people will submit and other people dominate but we we don't have good theories of when it's a moral duty to submit and morally right to command or when it's morally wrong to disobey uh uh or even morally obligatory to disobey so we don't have good theories of the of the moral representations that are somehow uh somewhat disconnected from the uh proximate and ultimate logic of people's actual behaviors. So yeah, anyway. Ooh, well, I just that just really uh one quick question. We had Deb Lieberman on Deb Lieberman's studies moral psychology. And she we we talked a lot about how sort of the dark side of morality.

Um maybe this is too uh facile and too blanket of a question, but like after you're thinking about all of this, do you think that like morality are you is it that if something's moral and you don't know anything more about it, it could be good or bad from like a uh our or like as complicated of a God's eye perspective as we have? Like or or are you sort of if it's if we as organisms are moralizing it, it probably means it's a bad thing and morals our moral psychology is generally bad or general or moral psychology is generally good. Like, I think most people who don't who aren't evolutionary psychologists maybe or would just say, like, oh, our moral psychology is good. Of course it is. Except for people who know about like history and international relations, like, you know,

in lots of moral. And so many historians or social scientists might say our moral psychology is bad. I think when you take an evolutionary perspective, I think people fall down all kinds of continua of sort of you know depending on what you study where do you or maybe there's no right answer. Like I yeah what do you think? Yeah no I'm sure there's no right answer but like uh so my my my impression when I I think about this uh dark side of morality ID is that often it's just behavior that we judge morally wrong but because of our moral psychology. Yes exactly it's It's just that there are moral, there are moral disagreements because the cognitive algorithm is sensitive to input parameter. And so people will have a different moral judgment depending on the input that they have.

And when they look at uh history and they see horrible moral norms, they say, Oh, that means that morality is not good. But what uh what you're saying is moral is that your morality is good. So by definition, uh it's just that there are moral moral disagreements, yeah and we have to explain there are more there is moral variation we have to explain it I don't see how it could be the case that uh morality is not good right uh from the perspective of the guy who describes what morality is. Right, right right yeah yeah so I like that it's obviously the answer is it's morality all the way down it's morality all the way down there there's a there's a a non there's a non-contradictory way you could think about it where you could say that most of morality

and moral discourse and moral practice is in large part net harmful to people. It it leads to exploitation, domination, and rationalization of oppression in all sorts of ways. Um and uh you could say m um morality in general for the most part is, you know, net negative in terms of its consequences. Uh except for of course the moral judgment I'm making about that very thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I'm more on the good side. I'm more on the on the so to answer the question without escaping it now that that David has that road. Yeah. I'm more on the good side. Yeah, but maybe we can agree that like I think, and this is again sort of the value of taking an evolutionary approach, is that the idea that's because something is entrained by

our moral psychology, right? And I think maybe this is like people, listeners are often like, What what lesson can I take from this? And Leo, you can tell me if you agree with this, is that I think one of the big lessons from evolutionary psychology of moral psychology is that just because something feels moralized to you, that's not data that it's actually a good thing per se. It might be, but just because you feel morally strong about something doesn't automatically mean that it that what the content of you of that moral belief, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's good from the perspective of if I sat down and thought through the consequences of it. Yeah. You know, it I think that's I think that's fair to say it's not that it's yeah, I

completely agree. But just as uh to me, it's like I I'm seeing morality uh a bit like uh I don't know, intuitive physics. Yeah. Uh yeah so in a way you can say intuitive physics is false, but like it's pretty good. No, exactly. It's pretty good. It's really a nerdy it's really a nerdy thing to say it's false if you're doing modern physics, you could say most folk physics is bad and we should try to candidate in favor of modern physics. You could say a similar thing about you know morality, you know, most morality and most folk morality is bad, but we we should abandon it in favor of like, you know, uh cost benefit analysis and institutional design and stuff like that, you know. Yeah, exactly.

I agree with that's yeah, and this comes back to like we've had we David and I have had this come up when we talked about like is intuitive psychology wrong or right? Or I think we even had this earlier in this conversation. It comes back to like what's the swath of hu of reality you're imagining. And if I'm imagining all the bad things that moral psychology does, because most of the moral entrepreneurship that I see on social media is bad. I might say all of more most of our moral psychology is bad. And if that's what I'm imagining, it makes sense that I'm saying that. But if somebody's imagining, well, you know, like, you know, the reason why like we aren't just like all killing each other all the time is because we all thought about like it's not

moral to do that. And if that's what you're imagining, then our moral psychology is good. And there's really not a fact of the matter. It's just like what you're what class of the world you're imagining. So I think that's Yeah, yeah. That's the problem with morality is that unlike with physics, there is no objective, I mean, yeah, philosophical debates I don't want to enter too into, but let's imagine that let's imagine there is no more objective moral truth. Then what does it mean to have it objectively morally right? I think it's just like taking the good inputs, having the inputs right, and then all you have is the computation. I mean the universal computation of the human mind to know if something is right or wrong.

You see what I mean? So then I think that there's still a difference between intuitivity and intuitive uh uh moral judgment or morality, that's in that that's all we have in a specific. There's an intrinsic conflict of interest in uh costs and benefits that don't exist in physics, right? Like uh that's true, yeah. So uh recognizing that it's a coordination, the ultimate grammar of it is coordination, and it's also about people's costs and benefits, and accepting that I might I think just being honest about like what are the costs and benefits I'm trying to get, what are the costs and benefits another person is, and then just trying to have a discussion about that. Of course, a lot of the rhetoric is designed to obscure that, right?

That's that's another Pinsafian point. Like I don't wanna but I think that's the the way forward. But yeah. Cool. Well, what a fun conversation. We gotta have you back. Maybe we should do like a religion episode with with Leo and maybe someone else. Oh yeah. Because it's really good. I'm happy to talk about uh about anything. I mean, thank you so much. It was so fun. Uh it was so cool. Thank you so much. Yeah, time flew by. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Thanks so much, man. Is that a good French accent? Je Paul and Petit for France. Yeah. I I don't know. I'm not, yeah. Yeah. Uh in any case, uh if you enjoyed that episode, uh you can do a lot of things to express your joy. Uh you can leave us a kind review, you can visit us on Patreon and support us there.

You can say nice things about us on social media. Uh you can even send us an email if you want if you have ideas for topics or guests. Uh have some have some french fries. But uh organic French fries. Don't uh pesticides are a problem. So please get some organic potatoes. Maybe make your own or Ooh, homemade french fries. That would be that would be nice. Yeah. Yeah. Uh and there's you know with French fries. Send some French fries to us. Yeah, send it in the mail. That would be nothing like getting uh French fries on the mail. I wonder how often that happens that I mean it it feels like an old nobody sends anything in the mail anymore. It's true. Yeah I wouldn't I wonder how you could actually like don't people there's a there's a

there's a there's this thing about people sending a coconut in the mail with just a stamp or something. I feel like well if you figure out how to transport French fries. Uh if you can get us french fries, we'll be very impressed. Yeah. Uh you know what? We'll we'll uh we'll have you on the podcast and we'll just ask all about how you're if you bring us french fries, we will have you on the podcast 100%. That's our guarantee. All right. Enjoy and uh we'll see you next week. See you next week.