Making Sense with Sam Harris - #183 — A Conversation with Paul Bloom

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

Sam Harris and Paul Bloom discuss topics in the news including the tragic death of Kobe Bryant. They also explore the paradoxes of moral responsibility. 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.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content.

And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option at SamHarris.org to request a free account. And we grant 100% of those requests. No questions asked. Okay. I am here with Paul Bloom. Paul, thanks for joining me. Hey, Sam. Thanks for having me.

So just a little preamble to set up this conversation. So just a little preamble to set up this conversation. I have been thinking of late that I've been kind of getting boxed in in my normal podcast format. I'm often having conversations with people where they've written a book, very likely, and I've rather often taken the time to read it, and this may be the one conversation I ever have with them. And so it really has to be focused on their topic and fairly buttoned up and exhaustive and doesn't really allow me, in most cases, to just kind of wander around and hit topics of interest and be a little more freeform and conversational. And so I was thinking of starting a new track in the podcast where I can be more topical and kind of of the moment and experimental and talk about work in progress and all the rest. And I was thinking about who I could do that with.

And you were the first person to come to mind. And so, as you know, I reached out to you, and here you are. So thank you for agreeing to do this. Well, I was really thrilled to be invited to do this. I've always felt that our conversations go very well, and I think it's because you and I hit a certain sweet spot where we agree and disagree in the right measure, making our conversation sort of productive, but not us constantly saying to one another, oh, you're right. You know, you're exactly right. So this should be fun. Yeah, yeah. And so I must apologize in advance. I have a cold for our inaugural conversation. And if you catch it over there at Yale, I think it will be due to an excess of empathy on your part.

My biggest weakness. Okay, well, we have to begin on an unhappy note because we are speaking today in the aftermath of Kobe Bryant dying in a helicopter crash along with his 13-year-old daughter and I believe it's seven other people. We're speaking on the Monday after and, you know, the outpouring of grief and just the way the world seemed to stop around this event. In my memory, the only thing I remember like it was Princess Diana dying. I don't know if that's what else compares to that, but how do you perceive moments like this? I mean, this one is complicated by several other factors, which we'll go into,

but it's pretty breathtaking the way the death of a celebrity like this cuts through death denial in a way that few other events do. It's really affecting. I was in London on sabbatical when Princess Diana was killed in this car crash. And the outpouring of grief was extraordinary. The streets emptied out while people went to the funeral or watched it on TV. People could talk about nothing else. And people were viscerally affected. You'd walk past people on the streets who were weeping. And it's extraordinary. I think when it comes to certain sorts of celebrities, the amount of personal contact people have, a lot of people said that they were more affected by her death than the death of their brother or their mother. It's this powerful feeling that,

and it's not only that she was beloved, it's that she was some sort of, I don't know, fairytale character for them. And I think great athletes often fill a similar niche for us. Yeah. And also his 13-year-old daughter who looked like she was going to be a superstar basketball player in her own right, that was really devastating. In fact, it wasn't clear that she was on the helicopter at first. So his death was announced. And then you saw all these images of him with his daughters circulating. And then to find out that she was also killed, it was really brutal. I mean, there's the familiarity component and the fact that you've seen this person so much, but this is an additional fact that it's just, it pings the, you know, if it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone part of the brain in some way. So it makes life seem especially precarious.

And, you know, again, especially with a child involved and dying in an accident in this way. Yeah, you could have a taxonomy of deaths of people you don't know. On the one extreme is older people in their 70s and their 80s, where it could be sad, it could be really affecting. But in the end, it's not a shock. It doesn't seem particularly unjust. Then you get young people, and this is a case we're dealing with now, and that could be far more moving. It seems so arbitrary and frightening. And then you get children, and children are the worst. It is the worst when something like that happens to a kid.

them and they have their friends and their enemies. But, you know, if there's one thing everybody agrees on, it's that kids shouldn't die. And if you ever want an argument for the cruelty, if there is a God of God, it'd be the death of children. Yeah, it really is the argument for which there's no rebuttal. The normal arguments about free will and any kind of justice for a person's behavior while alive, obviously, it doesn't apply to kids. So really, it has become the perfect storm on social media because immediately upon the announcement of his death, it might have been before anyone realized his daughter was involved. There was this Washington Post writer, Felicia Sonmez, I'm not quite sure how to pronounce that last name, who tweeted a link to a 2016 Daily Beast article written by somebody else detailing the never-quite-settled-to-everyone-satisfaction rape allegations against Bryant.

And the response to that was absolutely infernal. She's actually just been put on administrative leave from the Post. And this is one of those moments where it landed with me. I don't know if I'm representative of most people here. I mean, I'm not a basketball fan. Kobe really hasn't had much of a space in my brain. And I was aware of, obviously, these allegations against him and was still not aware of what I think about them. I mean, it's just obvious they precede the Me Too moment. Had they come about now, there's no way he would have not been canceled. But, you know, they predate everyone's heightened awareness of these issues. And so she was,

you know, re-promoting the scandal in the immediate, I mean, to say immediate aftermath of his death. I mean, it was literally within 10 minutes or something. It seemed an example of enormous bad taste, given what his family is now dealing with. But it is an interesting question, just what is appropriate to acknowledge about a person when it's too soon, and what's the right way to play a moment like that? It's just, you know, again, it struck, I think, almost everyone as fairly tactless and masochistic on her part. But I don't know where the line is. And it's just interesting to see what social media has done to us here, because it's tempting to feel like you need to express an opinion at moments

like this if you have any public profile. And, you know, she is certainly reaping the results of having expressed hers. I don't know what the rules are here. I don't think she knew either. This conservative figure, Roger Scruton, he died recently. And for the most part, a lot of his friends and family and his fans posted, you know, gentle stories about him and respect for him and expressed their sadness. But there were many people who said this guy said awful things and maybe was an awful guy and so much, you know, so much the better. The world is without him. And my own bias is that we should always err in favor of being kind to the dead, at least in the short term.

But, you know, there are different views on this. I know Christopher Hitchens, famously your friend Hitch, argued that we should not be kind to the recently dead. If we think they were terrible, we should be up front and say this. Yeah, I'll just remind people that he was on the news savaging Jerry Falwell at that point. And then given that I shared his views of Falwell, I really didn't feel much critical distance from that savaging. But I saw the other side of that very equation when Glenn Greenwald wasted no time dancing on Hitch's grave when he died. And it struck me as fairly craven, given that this is the kind of thing he wouldn't have fared well saying to Hitch's face. I mean, in this case, it just seemed like

the grief of Kobe's family needed to be so paramount. You're just imagining his wife and her remaining daughters dealing with the death of a husband, father, and a not so clear. I mean, you know, the infidelity part is clear and you can be as judgmental about that as you want, but it's just not really your place to judge if the marriage survived it, right? I mean, who knows what the understanding is or was between his wife and himself at that point. It's like, given that it's unsettled, it just, I don't know, it was kind of a self-immolation of a journalist. I'm not sure that was the hill she was right to want to die on. So that's one way of looking at it, which is the accusation was uncertain. And given that, you shouldn't have brought it up. But there may be other things going on.

If in that case, for instance, if it was Mike Tyson, who had actually, you know, done time for rape, bringing, you know, saying, well, there's a dead rapist now. People might have a different feeling about that. Well, that opens the other issue of just the moral significance of having done one's time. And this is actually something I want to talk to you about, and we can get there when we get there. But what are the physics of redemption? I mean, when you have someone do something awful, let's say there's no uncertainty about it. We think it's awful, they admit it was awful. What constitutes an appropriate readmission to our good graces? How does somebody get their reputation back when they've done something terrible? And we have

examples of this. I mean, there are murderers who get out of prison who then become paradigmatic stories of moral rehabilitation. And then on the other end of the continuum, we have people wanting to cancel someone for all time for a few errant tweets that they unleashed as teenagers. How do you think about that, even in the case where the previous moral infraction is quite clear? It's a good question. I'll say just two things. One thing is, I think that one force in all of this that we should acknowledge is, I think we pull apart particularly famous people. They're either good or evil. They're either Princess Diana or they're Jeffrey Epstein. And there are forces

that pull you to one end or another. The idea of saying, okay, this guy died and there was goodness and there was badness and he has critics, he has his friends, is uncomfortable, particularly over social media. You have to take one side or another. As for redemption, you're right. There are all of these famous cases of these neo-Nazis who became, you know, crusaders to help minorities. There's people who, murderers who have achieved, in the eyes of others, what you see as redemption. But I'm trying to think of this, and I can't. Can you tell me one famous celebrity figure who was really, use today's word, canceled, and now is in everybody's

good graces. I don't know, Pee Wee Herman? Yeah. Well, I don't know that anyone is paying attention to him now, but I think he did sort of come back and get redeemed. But Kobe might have been, I mean, Tyson is also an example of this, but both Kobe and Tyson are examples of people who really more or less made it all the way back for most people. I mean, Kobe to an enormous degree. I mean, he just, his career, most of his triumph was still ahead of him as an athlete. I could have that slightly wrong. Again, I don't follow basketball, but I mean, he was like 25 or 26 when that scandal broke and, you know, he died at 41. So, I mean, I guess once you're tarnished, you're always going to be tarnished

in somebody's eyes, but that was a pretty solid example of having put it behind him. So, what did he do right? In case, practical advice for anybody listening to this, or for you and me, if we ever really get into trouble, what's the technique for achieving public redemption? Well, it sort of depends on what for. I think there's some unhappy data on the efficacy of the rather Trumpian tactic of never apologizing, right? There's some social science data suggesting apologies backfire. And in the political scheme, apologies, they just... I've seen apologies by people who have done inappropriate things,

and their enemies just mock them and say, we wanted more. Yeah, yeah. So it is interesting to consider what constitutes and what should constitute a acceptable apology, whether it has strategic value in general. And I think in the case of something like accusations of rape or their own thing, but I mean, just take the infidelity part of it. The crucially exculpatory thing in the case of somebody like Kobe Bryant or, you know, like Tiger Woods is whether or not the wife, you know, stands by your side, right? I mean, that's a different outcome or the husband,

as the case may be. But yeah, you know, again, I didn't follow it so closely, but I mean, he just seemed to have come all the way back. And again, it was pre-Me Too. It's hard to imagine it would have survived the glare of the present moment. I guess Bill Clinton is a sort of parallel case, although because his infidelities and the accusations of rape happened when he was president and a lot of people supported him at the time, he never really fell that much from grace. But I think the fact he was supported by his family, and I think there's sort of, at least he tried to tell a redemption story,

probably reasonably successful. When he dies, people will be saying wonderful things about him. Yeah, that's another example where Hitch was on the case. I don't know if you ever read his book, No One Left to Lie To, The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton. Hitch went all in on the accusations of rape there. I must say, it's been a long time since I've looked at that book, but I found it fairly persuasive and it reset my view of Clinton. whatever's true about the extreme accusations there, that the utter dysfunction of his marriage with Hillary or the political liability of whatever deal they had cut

in their marriage came back in the 2016 election when she's on stage debating an opponent who was eminently cancelable based on his own sexual transgressions and the legion accusations that he was trailing. And yet to that debate, he brought Bill Clinton's accusers into the audience. And Hillary couldn't say a word about any of this because of how she had conducted herself during the time of her husband's presidency and when those accusations were surfacing, how she just excoriated these women as liars and gold diggers. She was so on the wrong side of history there

and so apparently dishonest in how she took his side and scheming in a Lady Macbeth sort of way. history there. And so apparently dishonest in how she took his side and, you know, scheming in a Lady Macbeth sort of way. I mean, it's just everything lined up to just completely neutralize her at a moment where she would have had an overwhelming political advantage. Yeah. Yeah. It is one of a set of ways in which it would be better to have somebody running against Trump at the time. And this is also an example of something you and I have talked about before, which is how our moral code now causes us to reevaluate things in the past, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly.

You know, if these things about Bill Clinton came out and he was a president and it was now, the ramifications would be far, far worse because we see it as his behavior is as inexcusable in a way that many people didn't back then. I think that is true on the left. I mean, every place left of center is a spot on the map that is truly hostile to even a rumor of a rumor of an accusation of that kind. even a rumor of a rumor of an accusation of that kind. But what do you make of the fact that Trump really suffers no such penalty? I mean, it seems like there's nothing, no accusation of that sort or any other sort that matters in his world. I make of it extreme despair.

It is now, I think it's apparent that there's no such thing as dirt on Trump. There is nothing he could say or do that would cause his fans and a large majority of Republican base to give up support for him. I think this is one case in which tribal loyalty dominates individual character. And in some way, it's entirely rational for people like you and me and, you know, roughly half of the country to attack Trump and despise Trump. But by doing so, it sets up a dynamic where anything new reported against Trump, tribal loyalties kick in and you say, you're attacking our guy. And Trump feeds off of that. So, I mean, look, I don't want to come off like, oh, I would have predicted this all along. Honestly, I had thought that, naively, that American conservatives were actually

conservative in manners of propriety and sexuality and conduct, in which case they would find Trump honestly repellent. And this has been a rude awakening for me, how they managed to put up with that guy. And not only put up with him, celebrate him. Yeah. It is an endless source of surprise that there's any remaining capacity for surprise on this score. It's just, I mean, just when I think he's crossed a line that is going to force people to defect. It never happens. I mean, the apocryphals, the legendary presumed tapes of him, you know, having bizarre sex acts with Russian prostitutes where he pees on them or has them pee on him or something. These could come out, be on YouTube and a front page in New York Times. I don't know what it would do with his support. I don't know whether it would cause it to drop at all. This reminds me of other tapes that I occasionally mention

on this podcast, the alleged apprentice. The N-word tapes. Yeah, where he uses the N-word with abandon. And as I've said several times, I know to a moral certainty that those tapes exist. I know people who have it directly from the mouth of Mark Burnett that they exist, and multiple people. The one thing I would point out about that is that, you know, Mark Burnett is living with the illusion that by not releasing those tapes, he has done nothing. Presumably, in his mind, releasing those tapes would be an extraordinary act, you know, that would go off like a nuclear bomb. And to withhold those tapes is to take no action. But I would say that the opposite is the case. He took an enormous action and, you know, act of responsibility to decide

for a nation of, you know, 340 million people that no one could know about what this man is like behind closed doors when he had the evidence of it. And I remain somewhat hopeful, this will never be confirmed or disconfirmed, but I do think that hearing those tapes would probably make a difference. I mean, it's one thing in the abstract to know, okay, this is the kind of guy who probably uses the N-word without any irony or meta-context, just how he talks in private. To know that in the abstract, but then to actually hear it done over and over again with all the context. I mean, I think it would be kind of like, I don't know if you remember this, the way the Mark Furman tapes played during the OJ trial. That was the end of the end of the trial when we heard just what this guy's mind was like.

What do you think? I mean, do you think it would matter if we had, you know, hours of him speaking with a band and like a member of the Ku Klux Klan? No. If I had to guess, I would say no. I would say Trump over over and over again, Trump says things and does things. You know, the whole Access Hollywood tape.

I would have guessed in that simpler time that that would be the death of any politician. But it wasn't. Endless, you know, now there must be hours and hours of him saying things that are grotesque and tweeting them, in fact, I actually think if he got caught with those tapes, in some way, it would be his brand. You know, it may be more embarrassing for him if he spent, you know, two hours, you know, rhapsodizing about how he likes, you know, Japanese poetry.

And he's really a cosmopolitan at heart. Then people say, what the hell? Right, right. Like a localist. But him saying N-word, he's a straight-talking guy. I don't know. I mean, there's just something so toxic about the word. I mean, it has a magical power that I think no other word does in English,

and certainly in America. And I think famously it doesn't have the same kind of power in places like Australia and you get the occasional Aussie who will use the word thinking well you know surely this is fair game to talk about the use of the word in this context but I don't know unfortunately we will never hear those tapes so let's go back to this the topic of those tapes. So let's go back to this, the topic of moral redemption, and I guess we could broaden it to moral responsibility and forgiveness. And there's also this concept of moral luck, which I have always found fascinating. I think this phrase originates with Bernard Williams, but Thomas Nagel also wrote an essay. And I think Nagel's discussion of it

is really the one that I have in my head. But there's this feature of moral transgression and culpability and good and bad outcomes. We have an intuition that for a person to be truly responsible for their actions and to deserve the punishment or the reward that comes to them, it shouldn't be mostly, much less entirely, a matter of luck that their actions occur in the first place, right? I mean, it shouldn't just be this spin of a roulette wheel that gets you put in prison with everyone thinking you deserve it, or gets you celebrated as some kind of moral hero. But when you actually look at how events unfold, there's a component of luck that you just can't ever purge from the system. And so the example that comes to mind for me is that of

a drunk driver who winds up killing somebody's kid or otherwise causing tremendous suffering. And then you think of all the people who drive drunk who have no bad outcome. They just get home safely to their beds and sleep it off. And the difference between those groups seems purely a matter of luck. And if that example doesn't really land with people, because most people are now, they're scrupulous enough not to drive drunk, and they feel like, well, if you kill someone driving drunk, you deserve it. Well, then think about texting. Virtually everyone listening to us now will have at some point behaved irresponsibly with their phone in their cars. And some people are more or less still committed to doing that on a daily basis,

despite whatever admonishments come their way. And texting while driving is an unambiguously dangerous thing to do, which most people get away with. And yet some people wind up killing people and go to prison for it. So then the question is, if the only difference between you and the person who's now in prison for, let's say, 10 years for killing a child while glancing at their phone and driving, if the only difference is a matter of luck, how do we feel about the punishment? Aren't they, on some level, already punished enough? I mean, just think of how ruined

your life would be. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org. Thank you.