Making Sense with Sam Harris - #16 — The Dark Side

Episode Date: August 26, 2015

Sam Harris and Paul Bloom talk about Donald Trump, torture, trophy hunting, and other terrors. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. Today I'll be speaking with Paul Bloom again. We spoke two podcasts back. He's a psychologist from Yale and a wonderful thinker. This time around we get into some controversial areas. We go to the dark side a little bit. We talk about torture, despite my better judgment. We talk about Cecil the Lion. We talk about Cecil the Lion, talk about politics.

You'll find at the end that I perform a kind of intervention on myself and Paul to some degree on the topic of eating meat. Many of you vegans and vegetarians have been after me for quite some time for a few remarks I made about having been a lapsed vegetarian, and now the chickens, as it were, have come home to roost. So you'll hear that I call for the best resources out there for how to be a vegetarian or a vegan healthily, and that's a sincere request. So if you have good information to send me, please do so through the email contact form on my website. And please put vegetarianism or veganism in the subject line. And I will keep you apprised of my progress. And without further preamble, I give you Paul Bloom.

I'm back with Paul Bloom, my friend, the Yale psychologist who was on the podcast last time. Hey, Paul, how you doing? I'm doing great, Sam. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. Well, you are back largely because I wanted to talk to you again, but people loved our last podcast. So I would encourage people, if they haven't heard you the first time around, to go back and listen to what we said about empathy. But now I think it would be good for the two of us to strike out onto some novel territory here. And I had the idea that we could look at some essentially moral case studies where we talk about stories in the news that are particularly

salient in moral terms and just essentially free associate on them. That sounds like a lot of fun. I mean, the issues that we could talk about are interesting in and of themselves, but it could also serve as sort of test cases to explore certain views that you and I have and maybe flesh out some agreements and some differences. Yeah, well, so, you know, you and I, in preparation for this conversation, just batted a few topics around. I think we both still dimly recall the Republican presidential debate, the first one with Donald Trump, which happened, I think, about 10 days ago. And one thing stood

out for me there that I just think is it's amazing that no one picks up on this. I don't think I saw this talked about in any journalistic context, but it seemed that at least three of the candidates there declared their opposition to abortion, not only in general, and not only in the case of rape and incest, but even to save the life of the mother. I'd like to just spell out what that actually means, because it's a really mind-boggling position for anyone to have, especially someone who would seek to run this country. I would guess that it'd be Huckabee and Santorum. Who would be the third? Yeah, I think it was Walker, Cruz, and Rubio. And Rubio, he didn't spell it out, but he said that his support for abortion in the case of rape,

incest, and for the life of the mother had been mischaracterized. It's kind of a hand-waving denial of his liberal position there. You have to respect it as a morally consistent view. If you do believe it's murder, then that follows. And you could admire these people, if anything, for their moral consistency and their willingness to see the implications of their views. Yeah, no, it's a courage of a certain kind, no doubt. So let's just look at the details here, because what this means is in a perfect world by their lights, by their lights, even if a teenage girl were raped by her father and became pregnant and there was some reasonable concern that she would not survive the delivery of this child, they would be against abortion. Even if we could intervene immediately, even the moment after conception and just remove a single-celled

fertilized ovum, they would be against it. That is, in fact, the moral position. This idea that life starts at the moment of conception and is equivalently sacred at that point, that's what they're committed to. And presumably, any doctor who could, by magic or otherwise, extract a single cell from the uterus of a raped daughter who was likely to die if she carried this fetus to term, they would want that doctor prosecuted as a murderer and presumably killed if they're for the death penalty, at the very least put in prison for the rest of his life. That is the totality of this moral position. It is just mind-bogglingly unethical.

And yet no journalist ever presses these people on it. I think it's because the journalists don't take them particularly seriously. And I don't know whether they should be taken seriously. I think for at least some cases, like Huckabee, for instance, this might express a sincere and considered viewpoint. But for a lot of these politicians, for one thing, they know that no such law would ever get passed. They're not going to revamp Roe v. Wade in this sort of dramatic way. I think what it is, is a signal. Look how far I'm willing to go. Even if you don't think I'm right, you've got to admire me, they're saying, for my consistency and

my moral strength. And I think the psychology of what's going on is very interesting, but I don't think that these are meant to be purely evaluated as moral positions. But they're only appropriate signals, which is to say effective ones, useful ones from a political point of view, if some significant percentage of the electorate actually holds these views. So at best, they're pandering to the convictions of a mob who actually would want the laws to change in this way. Yes. They're pandering to the most extreme members of the Republican Party in the hopes that all the non-extreme members will at least respect or not be repelled by their extreme views. But how could they be confident of that given what this moral position entails?

Again, we're talking about someone who's raped and who will die if she brings this baby to term. And we can prevent this catastrophe by removing a single cell or a collection of 50 cells, right? A microscopic organism without any nervous system, without any capacity to suffer. I mean, this is, in fact, what is being proposed. And they are confident that this will not alienate better than 50% of the electorate. I just don't understand. Their confidence is derived from either some assumption that just no one is following the plot here and no one actually understands the position they're articulating, or they just think that most people most of the time are close enough to this position that it's a safe position to stake out. I think some combination of the two. I think, I mean, another issue would be Trump's immigration policies, which if you spell them out, they're sort of unimaginably cruel, you know, expelling children and their

parents, including parents who are maybe legal immigrants or children who may be legal immigrants, in order to sort of establish some sort of anti-immigrant position. And I think like the abortion thing, if you spell it out to them what people, what the implications are, they would find it repellent. But at the same time, I don't think people are responding or meant to respond to the moral content of these views, as opposed to their status as signals. I mean, remember the whole thing about Obama's birth certificate. I actually think that most people who claimed Obama was not an American citizen didn't really believe this. They were just saying, boo Obama. They were saying, I don't like Obama. Here's a bad thing

we could say about him. And I think that a lot of these moral statements are not meant to be thought of as factual moral claims. In some way, I think you're giving the Republican candidates too much credit. I think you're sort of envisioning them as making these thoughtful ethical claims that are meant to be evaluated, as opposed to making dramatic flourishes for the audience. It almost doesn't matter which side of that you take, because the dramatic flourish is only effective, or at least not ruinous to your candidacy, if no one is objecting to what is suggested there. So it's like either you have to be confident that everyone is speaking and reasoning in bad faith

or enough of everyone for your doing so not to matter, or you have to think that millions of people actually agree with the letter of the position you're staking out. I haven't studied this, but I think the poll data suggests that it would have to be option one. I don't think this extreme pro-life view is held by a large portion of Americans.

I think most Americans fall sort of uneasily in the middle. And obviously there's a political party difference, but I think the view you're sketching out with its implications, if you put that to people, Republicans as well as Democrats, they say, no, we don't want that. To sort of put this in a nice light, it's analogous to a politician who says that such and so is their top priority and nothing is more important than saving American lives. Nothing is more important than this. Nothing more important than that, which is taken literally as absurd. Nobody would assume that a single policy should override all other policies.

is absurd. Nobody would assume that a single policy should override all other policies. But these are statements meant more as sort of speech acts that, you know, highlight one's commitment and one's loyalty to the party. So in some way, he may be the only American who's taking people to the work. The one person watching this debate who was actually doing the math here, morally speaking. You're taking that both in saying, but that's morally absurd. So actually, there's something that in Trump's candidacy and his whole style of self-presentation, which I think supports your interpretation here, which is that the fact that he is as popular as he is, given that it is almost impossible to take what he says seriously. There's a kind of histrionic bad faith to his style of self-presentation, where even he doesn't believe what he's saying, nor does he believe that you believe it,

and yet he's winning points for saying it as loudly as he can say it. People are just simply relieved to have someone speak in a uncensored way, even if it's actually a kind of bad faith performance where he's actually not voicing an honest position. I think that's right. I think people have pointed out that many of Trump's views lean very left. He's notably sympathetic to single-payer health care systems, which, you know, if somebody named, somebody like Bush or Rubio suggested, they'd be laughed off the stage. But there's a huge tolerance for Trump's views because they're not taken seriously as views. I mean, I find Trump fascinating. I find the ascendance of Trump just extraordinarily

interesting. And I mean, one thing I'll ask your opinion on this, because I'm genuinely dumbfounded, is what explains the variation in how people respond to Trump? So for me, and for most of my friends, which tend to lean very liberal, we find Trump repellent. We find his endless boasting, his bragging about his money, his derision towards his enemies, his personal insults, just this awful, awful person. But so many other people seem to be attracted to him. They seem to think this is terrific. This is this great guy who we admire, who deserves our respect, and give him hell, they say about Trump. What do you think underlies that difference? Well, yeah, it's hard to even locate myself on that continuum, too, because there is...

So, yes, where do you lie in that continuum? Like, how do you personally respond to Trump's style? You know, I think I'm in two places on it, because it was in some ways a relief to have him on that stage because he was just so ungovernable. He destabilizes what is otherwise a machine perfectly designed to produce non-information and to give you absolutely no insight into how people would actually govern. And because he's destabilizing the Republican Party, I think it's, if nothing else, interesting. Yeah. And I think, as it sounds like you do, that he's probably not committed, not truly committed to anything all that scary.

So he's actually less scary than some of the other Republican candidates in terms of how they would likely govern. Also, I don't think he stands a chance of becoming president. So I'm not worried about him in any deep sense. But he is a genuinely comic figure. And it's hard to imagine people who truly like him not seeing that. a truly successful and brilliant billionaire who has gravitas because of how much he's accomplished, that's very hard for me to believe. But I'm sure most of the people who support him do more or less take him in that sense. I mean, for the last many years, I've been writing on defense of human rationality, arguing, contrary to people like my friend John Haidt, that we're actually far more rational and reflective than people give us credit for. Even people, even in our political domain, we are capable of rational thought and rational liberation. I have to say, you know,

this, the Republican debate and Trump in general is proving to be an embarrassment for my theory. I feel like getting refuted more and more each day by watching the reactions to Trump. And I feel, you know, and it's kind of sad that at some level, well, let me back up. You know, Chomsky has famously argued that we really, that the rational thing to do is not to care about these, the debates between the political parties, because to all intents and purposes, they're the same. They're all the parties of big business and imperialism and so on.

And I don't believe that, but maybe people aren't taking this seriously. They're enjoying a spectacle of Trump. They're rooting him on. And maybe if you press them on it, they would say, we don't really care that much about the difference between Republicans and Democrats. We're just there for the show. on our political process, but just my collisions with my own critics have caused me to worry that, as I recently just said on Twitter, that I fear that reason is actually an acquired taste. And not that many people seem to acquire it. There's a style of argumentation that I'm running into again and again and again. And it's on Twitter, but it's at much greater length. It was with Chomsky when I attempted to have a conversation with him, where there is such an unwillingness to engage with the details of an argument that

you don't want to be true, your opponent's position, that you're not even willing to take the time to understand it. The style is you just want to demonize the person for merely broaching a certain topic. And yet this strategy of vilifying someone, distorting their position, yelling louder and louder and louder until you silence them, that is viewed by many people who support your side of the argument as a truly clever thing to do, that it's really effective, it's morally appropriate. Just call the other person an asshole or a monster loudly enough until the conversation is over, and then you've won. And that's just more and more I'm finding that that is where people who imagine that they are highly scrupulous and honest and

intellectually serious agents of progress, that's how they're behaving. It's very depressing. I mean, it now makes me want to pick my battles far more conservatively, because it's such a waste of time and energy to even attempt some of these conversations. I can understand that. I've kind of watched as a horrified spectator to some of the things you're talking about. And you have my sympathies. In some way, I won't defend that style, but I'll make an observation about it, which is that if what you're going after is trying to find out the truth, then you don't want that style at all. You want to listen with an open mind. You want to let both sides air their disputes. You want to explore counterfactuals and so on and so forth. On the other hand, if there's something, if there's some policy you want and you have a goal in mind and you've already settled the issue to your own mind,

in some cases that may be the most rational strategy to demonize your opponent, regardless of its sort of moral qualities. The example I'm thinking about is debates over torture, where when people raise, you know, I'm thinking Alan Gershowitz, for instance, has made some provocative claims about the occasional necessity of torture under certain circumstances. I followed him down that rabbit hole and, you know, I get his hate mail still and I get my own hate mail and it's a totally thankless job. As I've said in various places, I actually regret having even talked about and written about the topic because it's just – I mean I think it's hugely interesting ethically. It's something you absolutely want to be able to talk about, and it has great consequences as a matter of public policy, but you are so perfectly demonized even for talking about it that it's just not worth it. And that's a feature, not a bug. I mean, that's the point. The point is that if you have a certain view that says that torture is repellent, one should never do it, it's monstrous, and that's an absolute

principle one holds, then you may choose to demonize people who argue in favor of torture rather than engage with them. Because you want them, you want to make their views and to make those people repellent. You want to disincentivize holding that view. But the problem is, as I hope to show in my arguments on this topic, is that the consequences of that position are even more repellent if you actually follow it to the letter. It is somewhat analogous to this abortion example I just raised. It's just if you actually look at the details of what it would mean to never, under any circumstance, have recourse to making another person so uncomfortable that they talk to you, right?

What you call torture by another name. You can easily concoct not just thought experiments, but very realistic situations. In fact, situations we know have occurred where the person before you, you absolutely know is guilty and has information that would save lives. And yet you're just delivering them coffee and cigarettes and giving them cable television to watch. If you look at the details, you can easily find a situation where you would be a moral monster to not have recourse to that, and yet you can't even push the conversation far enough as to reveal that. No, it's true. And I've seen this style of demonization applied to people on the right, people on the left. It's something that individuals with

tremendous confidence, both in the correctness of their views and, you know, the monstrosity of other views will kind of cheerfully engage in and believe they're undecided angels. And it's not such an alien feeling. I mean, if I bumped into a Holocaust denier, I wouldn't give them the respect of having a lengthy discourse with them. I would ridicule them. But that's because you know that that's such a heavy lift. I mean, there's just so much evidence against their view that even their very interest in pursuing that line of inquiry says something negative about them.

Intellectually speaking, leaving the ethics aside, it's like belonging to the Flat Earth Society. Exactly. The fact that your attention is captured by that project says something derogatory about you. I think some people would say the same thing about people arguing for genetic basis of ethnic differences, people arguing about torture, people arguing about unfettered capitalism. And so you know, and so my claim, I'm not defending this, but I'm sort of making a descriptive claim that those who do the demonization

see themselves as in the same position that you and I would see ourselves when confronted with a Holocaust denier. Right. You're confronted with somebody who must be motivated by sheer animus and sheer irrationality. They're not worth the time of day. And actually, they don't belong in the sort of free marketplace of ideas. Just to show you how browbeaten I've been by this, I feel the need to insert just a defensive caveat here,

because having merely raised this issue, echoes of my former self on the topic of torture, I'm going to get slammed. echoes of my former self on the topic of torture, I'm going to get slammed. So I just have to point out that my investigation of the ethics of torture drew a parallel between torture and collateral damage. And the core of my point is that collateral damage is worse than torture across the board. It is worse to blow people up, innocent or guilty, than it is to waterboard them. It's certainly worse to blow them up along with their children than it is to waterboard them. And if we ever found ourselves in a situation where torturing one person seemed likely to minimize the prospect of collateral damage, torture would have to be preferable. Waterboarding would have to be preferable. Waterboarding someone who is Osama bin Laden or he merely looks like Osama bin Laden, it would have to be preferable to dropping a 500-pound bomb on him

and his family in moral terms. And yet, we accept collateral damage more or less without argument. There's no one whose reputation has been destroyed by his willingness or her willingness to accept collateral damage in time of war, and yet merely raising the prospect of torturing a certain class of known terrorist just would destroy you, as Dershowitz and I have experienced to some degree on the margins. So anyway, I have to point that out. I think torture should be illegal, but not everything that should remain illegal is in every instance unethical. Trespassing should be illegal, but not everything that should remain illegal is in every instance unethical. Trespassing should be illegal and theft should be illegal, but there are situations where

you would have to be a monster not to trespass or not to steal if the stakes were high enough. And finally, in my defense, and this is now torture to realize how boring this is, the position I have on torture, it's precisely the position you get if you read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In their article on torture, they have an example of a carjacking where a guy stole a woman's car at a gas station and she had her infant, you know, babysit in the back seat. And he abandoned the car on an incredibly hot day. I think it was in New Zealand or Australia. And the police promptly caught the guy and wanted to know where the car was. And he just denied against all evidence that he had stolen the car. And they knew that a baby was dying in the back of it somewhere on the side

of the road. And they smacked him around a little bit. And then he immediately told them where the car was. And they saved the baby in the nick of time. That's the example that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives in support of, at the very least, a nuanced ethical consideration of the validity of torture. For me, I think that should stop you in your tracks. I mean, the idea that cops could not make this guy at all uncomfortable physically when they knew he had taken this car. They knew it because they had video footage of him. He was like a 300 pound Samoan guy with a blonde Afro or something. I mean, it was like the most recognizable person on earth who they had on video. And yet, if you try to have a conversation on this topic, it's over before it even starts. Yeah, I think my intuition is the same as yours,

certainly in that case. I mean, this is consequentialism 101. And in fact, certainly in that case, I mean, this is consequentialism 101. And in fact, you know, the utilitarians like Bentham were actually, you know, they used torture as an example and they said there should be, you know, that the logic is causing one person suffering to save a thousand lives is a rational thing to do. And so the same moral philosophy that gives you gay marriage and gives you personal freedoms of all sorts that liberals like me like also gives you the justification for torture. I would say as you're aware, there is a counter argument, which I'm sometimes persuaded by, which is that in that instance, you're certainly right that torture is a good thing. But nonetheless, as a matter of policy, one should block it absolutely.

Well, that is my argument, in fact. It's actually not original with me. I got it from Mark Bowden, the Atlantic writer who wrote a long article on torture, which is linked somewhere on my website. He argued basically that he thought it should be illegal across the board, but our interrogators should know that there are certain cases, perhaps never actually reached, but certain cases which, if reached, will be ethically and psychologically obvious to them, where it would be ethical to make somebody uncomfortable by whatever means, because you absolutely know that you are in one of these ticking bomb scenarios, which potentially can occur.

And in that case, you would still be breaking the law, but there's no judge or jury who would want to prosecute you for what you did. So you will be ethically and in fact off the hook, even though you will have broken the law. And I think that's the right policy. I think it should be illegal across the board because of all the other consequences of having some legal mechanism by which to torture people. So I like the analogy you gave before of collateral damage, which makes a nice point. I, I taught a freshman seminar a couple of years ago on the seven deadly sins. And I started at one

point, a famous trolley problem, which I think we spoke about last time we talked, you know, and basically the question is, would you kill one person to save five and one innocent person to save five innocent people and my students by and large says yeah it would they would and then a bit later in the conversation i asked would you torture somebody to save five people and they said no right they said they said and then and then i said but which is worse killing somebody or torturing them? Yeah. So that's the thing. Now, here's what I'll say, which might shock you.

I have the same intuition. I actually think that in some way, although, you know, at least for certain tortures, I'd rather be tortured than killed. I guess there's some torture so horrific I'd rather die. But I'd rather be smacked around than killed. I guess there's some torture so horrific I'd rather die, but I'd rather be smacked around than killed. Nonetheless, I think in some way, smacking around or certainly waterboarding the more serious tortures are worse than killing somebody. And I need to sort of nail down the intuition. It has an intuition to human dignity and respect. You know, somebody who kills another person, in some way to act is less degrading than torturing another person. Though in another respect, of course, it's far worse to kill than to torture.

Yeah, well, I think it does have certain connections to the trolley problem. It does invoke that difference between flipping the switch and pushing the fat man. That's right. There's something, the up close and personal hands-on aspect of it. But all of those are aspects that are separable from the actual ethical case, which is to say that you could have modes of torture that didn't entail any of that. I mean, the example I gave, which to everyone's horror in the end of faith was you could have

a torture pill, which delivered the instruments of torture along with the instruments of their perfect concealment. And your experience as a torturer would be you gave the terrorist or the evil genius this pill, and he laid down for a nap of an hour and got up and then confessed everything because he never wanted to go through that again, I think at the end, you'd be tempted to call it a truth pill. You would not, this would all be concealed from you. And your experience was just having people come to you saying, okay, whatever you do, don't do that to me again. Now, again, I'm not arguing that we should have such a pill. I'm saying that all of these surface details are separable from the core case, which is worse,

killing someone, killing their children by accident, as in the case of collateral damage, maiming children, you know, standing within 500 yards of the bomb you dropped, orphaning them, or making a person you know to be guilty and in possession of crucial information to save lives uncomfortable to whatever degree is necessary to get them to talk. Yeah, I mean, I agree with what you said before, which is these are deep issues. They're important issues and they're issues that we're confronted with. I'm kind of annoyed at the sort of prissiness of some philosophers who refuse, who would argue that,

you know, torture of any sort is absolutely wrong. Collateral damage of any sort is absolutely wrong. Killing is absolutely wrong. And failing to confront the fact that in the real world, when we deal with these, in times of war, in times of the criminal justice system, of the criminal justice system, people have to be questioned. People have to be detained. And the question of what is torture, even if one is categorically against it, you still have to confront the case of where it begins and where it doesn't begin. There's no excuse for failing to delve into these issues. And the same of collateral damage.

Someone who's, for me, hardcore pacifism isn't merely a sort of unrealistic position. It's basically a monstrous position. Because it says you should not engage in war under the most, even to stop the most savage brutality. Even if a relatively costless invasion could stop the Holocaust, you shouldn't do it. And to me, I think this is awful. Yeah, well, recall, as I did in The End of Faith, Gandhi's position on the Holocaust. Gandhi thought that the Jews of Europe should have willingly walked into the gas chamber so as to arouse the rest of the world to the moral horror of the Nazi regime. But then you ask yourself, what is the rest of the world supposed to do once they're aroused when they themselves drink the Kool-Aid of Gandhian pacifism? Do they go into

the gas chambers too? I mean, there's absolutely no moral core to pacifism when you actually take it to its extremity. What you're committed to doing as a pacifist is simply bearing witness to the misery and death of innocence imposed by the world's sadists and thugs. And you are not going to dirty your hands in the process. And if push comes to shove, you're going to let them kill you and your children too. How this is ever sold as the not only a moral position, but the highest possible morality. It's a total mystery to me. But yeah, again, this is one of those positions where if you don't unpack it, it can pass as an incredibly scrupulous ethical view. I mean, as you say, people, there is a burden to understand what is entailed on both sides of these arguments. If you're categorically against torture,

if you're categorically against abortion, if you're categorically against abortion or for it, you know, whatever your position is, you have to be willing to look at what that commits you to. I was rereading this article by a really smart criminologist on violence, and he was likening violence to a cancer. And I thought that's the worst analogy ever, because cancer is something which is unnecessary, awful, and if you eradicated it, the world would be a better place. But violence is inevitable and important and essential for having a good and compassionate society. You need to threat of violence in order to make sure that people honor contracts,

that they don't rape and steal and kill one another, that they don't free ride on the accomplishments of other people. And, you know, by just about any evolutionary account, the reason why we have anger and a punitive appetite is to keep people on the up and up and to keep them from, you know, from being predators upon one another. So, you know, I'm kind of down on empathy, but I've been persuaded by people like Jesse Prince that anger and the punitive desire is actually, can be a tremendously good thing. If you took away an appetite for violence for people, a desire to inflict suffering

on those who do bad, I think the world would fall apart. So Paul Bloom is against empathy, but for violence. That'll be a good tweet. And now I have a subtitle for my book. Well, I agree with that. I think it's also a fascinating area to talk about. I still want to linger for a moment on this topic of, I guess they are taboo topics of conversation. A taboo topic is something which taints you for even mentioning it.

Yeah. I think they're hugely consequential. I wasn't planning to talk about torture. And every single time the topic comes up, and I find myself digging the hole a little deeper, I seem to regret it. But there are so many topics like this now, which are like, they're just radioactive. And many are far more consequential than torture, because that really is a kind of outlier case. But for instance, in the news now, I'm going to raise this topic and we are not going to talk about it because I truly think this is radioactive. But I just want to I'm going to raise this just to show listeners how this comes up for me. the now very current topic of police brutality and racism and the inequality between the way

blacks and whites have to deal with the misuses of police force. All of that has, I think, been appropriately shocking to people. And no news to anyone now, this is hugely talked about in our society in the last 12 months or so, ever since the killing of Michael Brown, or actually even before that, it wasn't police-related violence. But the Trayvon Martin case, I think, primed this discussion. And then now we've had maybe a dozen very high-profile cases where cops have killed a black man in very different circumstances. Now, there's a range of circumstances here, and this is what cannot be talked about. Everyone on the side of the outrage insists upon grouping all of these cases together as almost like a single datum, a single proof that white racist cops are killing black men based on their racism. And this is a fact that is so

obvious as to be undeniable and to attempt to parse it in any way is going to stigmatize you for the rest of your life. But I think one thing should be absolutely obvious is that these cases are very, very different. They're very different uses of violence on the parts of the cops. They're very different victims in terms of what they were actually doing in the world. Now, to my eye, we've had in 12 months really the full range of example where you have a case of a sadistic, stupid, poorly trained cop essentially committing a murder and the cop should be in prison for the rest of his life, all the way to a totally appropriate, understandable, and conservative use of force, which resulted in the death of the criminal suspect and everything in between. suspect and everything in between, right? And yet you cannot talk about this. And it has to be talked about because anyone who's going to group all of these together as a single problem is just not even remotely speaking honestly about what's going on in our world and about what it takes for

cops to do their jobs or what kind of cops you want or what is an appropriate use of force given the situation. We can't talk about any of these things because of how taboo it is to differentiate among these instances wherein a black man died in the presence and because of the actions of cops, black or white. I think that's a correct diagnosis, but it leans a bit towards the pessimistic. I mean, Obama's Justice Department, for instance, parsed it pretty nicely with regard to Ferguson, where they said, you know, on the one hand, the killing of Michael Brown was legitimate. It was a justified shooting by police officers, and there was no reason to have further charges. But at the same time, the Ferguson Police Department did have a history of systematic racism.

You can parse it. It's true there's a certain dynamic where if you were to rush out on Facebook or Twitter and then say, well, this shooting of an unarmed black kid was justified, people would immediately take all sorts of implications from it, from your statement about that. Yeah. And there is a certain dynamic. Similarly, if one was to go on Facebook or Twitter and say that it was unjustified, it was murder, you know, a cop, you know, committing murder because he could, people draw justifications from that too. So there's sort of a bizarre polarization that happens with these issues, which is,

you know, you're forced to, once you take a side, you're forced to categorize all instances that bear on the debate as falling into your side of the issue, even if this is just irrational. I mean, the shorter version of all this is nuance is underappreciated in certain contexts. Quite consequentially so. I just think it's a... I'm sort of arguing from an N of one here. I'm just kind of what it's like to be me because I seem to touch all of these controversial topics because I find them, one, interesting,

but two, very consequential. I just think the intersection between philosophically interesting phenomenon, philosophically and scientifically interesting phenomenon, and huge social consequence, that is the most interesting intersection of all. And that's where I want to spend my time. But the consequences are you wind up touching topics like violence and racism and war. And these are the big moments in life. and war. And these are the big moments in life. However statistically rare they are,

these are huge cases where we have to get things ethically straight. But the personal, psychological, and social cost of dealing with the blowback on these topics is understandable. It's just that it's a bandwidth problem. People don't necessarily have the time to fully understand what you said or what you meant to say or what was actually in the original article. They just see the sliming of you that is the loudest thing out there. And so the style of arguing where you just maliciously misrepresent someone's views or encourage a misunderstanding of them. Again, I'm just kind of marshalling time and attention and kind of emotional resources now and obviously doing it badly because in this conversation, we've raised torture, we've raised all of these topics.

Gun control and racial profiling. Yeah, exactly. Let's go straight there. It's an interesting question how much of the sliming is a sort of accidental byproduct of how people's minds work and how much of it is a purposeful strategy of people on certain sides. And I think it's both. I think you can dissect that out. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content. Thank you. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.