Making Sense with Sam Harris - #187 — A Conversation with Paul Bloom

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

Sam Harris and Paul Bloom speak about the epidemic of child sexual abuse, the ethics of loyalty, eugenics, existential risk, the Bloomberg and Sanders campaigns, and other topics. 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.

I am back with Paul Bloom. Paul, thanks for joining me. Hey, thanks for having me back. This conversation is always a break from what I'm normally doing on the podcast, but this week it is a very stark break because I've been having some very gloomy conversations. I just released one on nuclear war, and I just recorded one on this phenomenon that we euphemistically call child pornography, which if there's anything more gloomy than nuclear annihilation, it is the details of what is going on in tech around child pornography.

I mean, it's just, I haven't released this one yet. This is probably going to drop after we release this podcast. But the scope of the problem and our apparent unwillingness to actually confront it is just, it's impossible to understand. So anyway, that's where my head has been. No matter how dark you get, you'll be bringing levity to my world. Very few people say that to me. I'm normally kind of a downer conversation-wise. Also, I got views on child pornography, but maybe I'll save that until your thing lets out. We can talk about it a bit more. Yeah, we can talk about it next time. Actually, the guy I interviewed, Gabriel Dance,

he's the New York Times writer who's been covering this in a series of long and harrowing articles, and they just interviewed him on the daily, the New York Times podcast today. So if people want a preview of that, that's going on there. I think the daily conversation is like 25 minutes, but I think Gabriel and I spent two and a half hours wading into this morass. And it's astonishing that it exists, but it's just what you really can't get your mind around is our lack of motivation to

deal with it, because we actually can deal with it. I mean, there are technological solutions to this. There's obviously a law enforcement solution, but we just, I mean, we're paralyzed largely around, I think, the fact that the details are just so dark that nobody wants to focus on it for long enough to actually deal with it. I mean, it's taboo to even think about it. And I don't know, I mean,

maybe there are other examples of this kind of thing, but there's just such an ick factor with the topic that that has more or less protected these truly sinister people and networks from much scrutiny, much less prosecution. So that sounds fascinating. I realized I began this by saying I have views on child pornography and just kind of left that hanging. I think rather than wait a few weeks and let Twitter, you know, have itself at me, I decided I should really clarify. Okay, good save. Which is, yes, which is, you know, I have the same views everybody else has about it's, you know, it's morally monstrous

to prey on children. But what I would add to this is that there are people who are sexually attracted to children. And I see that as nothing but a curse. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. It is a terrible thing to have. And it is unchosen. Nobody wakes up and says, you know, oh, I'm going to rework it so that I can only be attracted sexually to kids. It is hard to imagine a worse thing to happen to you. Now, that doesn't excuse you morally if you act upon it. It still, I think, should reframe a little bit how we think about such cases. Yeah, that's actually a point I make at some point in that podcast, because if you view pedophilia as a sexual orientation, albeit an illegal and unfortunate one. Yes, nobody decides

to be a pedophile, but given that the production of child pornography is, in every case, the commission of a crime, so you're essentially, that's why the word pornography is a euphemism, and these are just records of, you know, child rapes and tortures. The difference is, this preserves the point you were making, it's as though being a heterosexual man is one thing. One doesn't choose it, and it's perfectly legal and happy to be one. But if you're a heterosexual man who likes to watch real women get really raped and are participating in a network that engineers the rape of non-consenting adults, that's a depraved addition to your sexual orientation for which you can't be held responsible. And just by its very nature, anyone who's consuming child pornography,

much less distributing it, is part of that second sadistic phenomenon. And so it's, yeah, but I completely agree with you. My position on free will commits me to that view, obviously. That's right. And there's stuff to be, again, this is exciting. I can't resist. It's just that what you describe is plainly evil and monstrous and should be punished. The question of fantasies that hurt nobody, but themselves are violent fantasies and perhaps involving depictions of acts, which would be terrible if they took place. Those, I think, sit in a more complicated place for me. And so we could talk about that at a later time, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. This is, okay. I promise people we will not spend too much time on this because

there's a lot to cover, but I don't think I got into this with Gabriel Dance in any completeness. What do you think of, this connects to your point about fantasy, what do you think about purely fictional products of this taboo material, right? So fictional child pornography, the production of which entailed the rape or mistreatment of no one, that's obviously nearly as taboo as the real stuff and also illegal. This is just, I don't know whether this is true or not, but I believe some people suspect that if it were legal, it would, to some degree, satisfy the desires of pedophiles who are otherwise seeking child pornography. I don't know if that's psychologically realistic, but what do you think about the ethics there?

I think you're asking the right question. It's plainly icky. And again, I wouldn't want to be condemned to have that taste. But I think the answer to the question of what I think about that rests on the empirical issue of what its effects are. So if it turns out that these robot sex dolls or just people depicting themselves as children, but they aren't really children. If it turns out that men who satisfy themselves over that become less likely to harm real children and it makes the world a better place, then on balance, it seems like a good idea. If it turns out to sort of feed their desire and make them want more, it's definitely a bad idea. I'd be very mindful of the consequences of this, and I don't know what the consequences are. Right, right. Yeah, you've uttered the phrase that was uttered only once on this podcast before, genius will give us sex robots.

And the moment that arrives, some perverse person will give us child-size sex robots. I hope we avoid the path in the multiverse that is leading toward child sex robots. But I suppose if it has the consequentialist effects you hope, then it would be a good thing on balance. And it's a good illustration of a contrast, which we always get into when talking about morality, which is you're considered moral views, which might lead you to an unintuitive claim that child sex robots are a good thing and make the world a better place. And our gut feelings would say, you know, oh, that's disgusting. That's terrible. Someone who creates child sex robots should be strung up. But I think you and I agree, and we'll talk about this, that moral progress

involves turning away our ick reactions and focusing in a more considered and deliberative way on consequences. Right. Okay. So I see I dragged you kicking and screaming into the land of ick, but what are you thinking about these days? Yeah, let me actually, this is actually not incredibly far from it. It's another moral dilemma. By the way, I'm Paul Bloom. I'm a psychology professor at Yale University. And so I was at Cornell University giving a series of talks, and I was at a seminar talking to some students, some terrific graduate students and undergraduates, and we ended up talking about research ethics. And somebody brought up the case of this person works in a lab, and he talked about his lab mate,

hypothetically, what if she was engaged in scientific misconduct of some sort? Maybe his example is fairly mild, but it was scientific misconduct. And so, you know, we kind of agreed that he should encourage her to stop doing it and turn herself in, particularly if some data got compromised. But then the question came up, what would happen if she wouldn't, she refused? And he said, very matter-of-factly, well, then I would turn her in. And everyone's nodding, this makes sense. And something about it sat funny with me. They said, well, what if she was your friend? What if she was a good friend? And the student thought about it and said, no, I'd still turn her in. And I said, what if this was your girlfriend, your partner? What if she was your wife? And there was some hesitation and the conversation got a little bit awkward. And I thought of a couple of different things here,

but we were talking here about loyalty. And I had two observations from this, and I kind of want to throw them at you and get your own sense of this. But one is, I worried that my own intuitions were a little bit out of whack, and maybe this is a generational thing. I give loyalty of that sort fairly high value. You know, if my best friend was a serial killer, yeah, I'd call the police. But if my best friend was doing stuff which I thought was wrong, but fairly minor, I don't think I would. I think my loyalty would override my moral obligation. And then this got me to think about how subversive loyalty is. Loyalty pulls you together with your allies, your friends, and your family, and sits uneasy,

uneasily with broader moral goals, including a sort of broader utilitarian picture, you tend to defend. So I was wondering what you thought about that. And I was also wondering, to make it a bit more personal, you get involved in a lot of controversies and debates, and you're often defending your friends on Twitter and social media and elsewhere. And it's really easy to defend your friends when you think that they're right. But do you ever defend your friends when you think that they're wrong? Yeah, this is a really interesting topic. And I've been thinking about it lately because it's one of the variables I see in politics that leads to such dysfunction. And it's something that

Trump prizes above everything else. Every one of his abominations seems to be a kind of loyalty test for those around him. The people who will pretend he's not lying or pretend he's normal are essentially passing a loyalty test at all times, and I have waxed on forever about how degrading I find that. But I think loyalty is a virtue, obviously, until it isn't, right? So it's one of these virtues that can be kind of bivalent. And I'm not sure what other examples there are. But what's interesting is that it is kind of parasitic on the notion and experience of friendship.

So to say that someone is loyal to a friend or is a loyal friend, it's almost redundant because being a real friend entails some degree of loyalty. That's right. Also family as a second case. We're loyal to our children, we're loyal to our parents, to our siblings. Yeah. And then derivative of that, people become loyal to organizations or to parents to our siblings. Yeah. And then derivative of that, people become loyal to organizations or to, you know, loyalty to your nation is, you know, is patriotism. But I think the edge cases are interesting and we reach the edge when, you know, a friend or a family member or a member of the organization to which we're pledged or our country does something terrible, right? And at that edge, I think being anchored to loyalty as though it were the moral virtue that trumped all others, I think that clearly is pathological.

My country, right or wrong, just becomes blind nationalism if your country is doing something obviously illegal and wrong and counterproductive. You can turn up those dials as high as you want. At some point, you look crazy for supporting your country at any apparent cost. So to speak of groups for a second, everything I tend to complain about with respect to tribalism and identity politics really just looks like a perversion of loyalty to me. It's just that if a member of your group is behaving like a psychopath, you should be able to acknowledge that. And if you can't acknowledge it because you have a different set of ethical books you're keeping for people in your group than from people outside your group, well, then that is tribalism or identity politics. And

it's obvious that can't be a foundation for universal ethics, right? Right. To be universal, you have to be able to triangulate on something that's happening within your group and judge it by a standard, you know, certainly the standard you would apply outside your group, and that erodes loyalty. This same argument applies, though, for friends. And for friends, it's more complicated. For friends, I think there's more of a pull for loyalty. The bar just gets higher for the interaction. The bar gets higher. Yeah. And certainly for your child. I would do all sorts of things for my child. Would I,

I don't know, if my child murdered somebody, would I lie to get him off so he doesn't go to prison? That's a toughie. And there was a movie having this theme. Would I murder another child to take away that child's organs to save my own child? Probably not. My preference ends somewhere. Again, it comes down to mitigating harm for me. So let's take it back from the far extreme. If you have a friend who's doing something objectively wrong, we can use the scientific misconduct case, or it just depends on what you mean by misconduct. But your loyalty to the friend should translate into a commitment to their well-being, right? And so if they're

doing something wrong that you think they should stop doing, on some level, you view it as bad for them too. I mean, at minimum, it's making them, at minimum, it's making them a worse person, right? Or revealing them to be worse than you wish they were. If you want to improve them in some way, if you want to improve their ethics, if you want to bring them into compliance with intellectual standards you think they should share in the scientific case, well, then you're urging them to stop and correct their misdeeds based on a concern for them, at least in part, it seems to me. Right. There are cases where it could conveniently line up that way, where the most loyal act is also

the act that is the best for the community and the best as a whole. But I think we've got to agree that there are some cases where they really diverge. Yeah. So then the question is, what are the real motives and the real consequences of the transgression? So, I mean, I could imagine a murder, which, while illegal because it's a murder, could still be viewed as ethical or close enough to ethical or ethically gray enough such that it's not clear that you even think they did the wrong thing, right? So then the question is, you know, you're helping them to conceal it or you're not turning them in. That becomes much easier to think about than if you think this person who was a friend of yours

did something completely insane and sadistic and poses a further danger to society, right? That's right. Well, you know, we might get on to talk about Richard Dawkins' recent adventure on Twitter, but put aside exactly what happened. I imagine, I admire Dawkins a lot, but I don't know him personally. I think you do know him personally. Let's say, hypothetically, you'll view him as a friend. But suppose you thought he was really on the wrong side of it. I might imagine you might, you know, at minimum not be vocal about that. If it was somebody you didn't like, you might sort of announce it

and say this is really irrational and immoral. But if it's somebody you like, you'd say, ah, I'm sure he was well-intentioned, everybody makes a mistake, or you might just be silent. And I think that's actually the right way to go. I think that as his friend, you have some burden of, you should treat him in a different way you would treat anybody else. Yeah, I understand that. And I think by default, I fall into that pattern. I do think that being more and more ethical and compassionate would certainly wouldn't require that you wouldn't require that you treat your friends worse but it does require that you treat

strangers more and more like friends i think so you know i am increasingly suspicious of the impulse to dunk on somebody who i yeah an enemy, or at least somebody who's worked very hard to make themselves my enemy. And I do look for opportunities to do the opposite. I mean, so for instance, Ezra Klein, I forget what his perch at Vox is now, he's one of the founders of Vox, and he's no longer the editor-in-chief. But I mean, he's somebody who I do think has treated me terribly and never apologized. To the contrary, he's actually someone who just simply can't see that he's treated me unethically and dishonestly and actually done considerable harm to my reputation.

These just strike me as objective facts. I mean, when I get outside of my reaction to them. But recently I saw, he just released a book, and there was an excerpt from it in, I think it was the New York Times. It was an op-ed there. It might have been the Washington Post. And I read it and thought it was very useful. I thought there was just some great political analysis in there. And so on Twitter, with the caveat that we disagree

about many things, I circulated that as a great piece of political insider. I forget how I phrased it, but basically just pure praise while just telegraphing that I hadn't completely lost my mind and forgotten how much blood there was under the bridge for us. So first of all, that feels much better to me. That's leading me in a much better direction as a person psychologically than my endlessly rehearsing all the reasons why I have every right to despise Ezra Klein. And so that's one example where it's like, I acknowledge the difference you're describing. And so if it's a friend who does something embarrassing, I will, I'm certainly inclined not to add any topspin to the bad press they're getting. And if it's somebody who is a neutral person or somebody who I have

reason already not to like, you know, it's certainly more tempting to give their reputation a push toward the brink. But I don't know. I just feel like there's a course correction that I'm looking for more and more in my life, which is leading everything to converge on the standard you seem to be articulating for friends. Right. And I understand that. You and I have had this discussion many times before, and it's a good discussion to have

where you're always pushing for impartiality and being an optimist about how much of a sort of pure impartial morality we should have. And, you know, I see some of it, but I see so many cases which are kind of zero-sum, where you have A and B and you have to choose between them. And the option of treating everybody the same just isn't available to you. But I got to say, I agree with the general point, which is I am trying very, very hard to be nicer on Twitter. And I am trying to recognize, you know, I think maybe the exception of Donald Trump, but that everybody, you know, these are real people here and nobody's a villain in their own heads and people have had unfortunate lives. And the sort of public shaming, the impulse, which I think people, everybody has it.

They just have different targets, is an unhealthy and corrosive impulse. So I'm in favor of treating everybody nicer on Twitter and elsewhere. Yeah, I think it's a hard balance to strike because I think becoming completely anodyne and just not participating in any public criticism of bad actors, I don't think that is the sweet spot. At a certain point, you have to say something about a phenomenon, especially if your particular take on it is underrepresented. And when you're talking about somebody like Trump, the only real danger is boring yourself and everyone around you. But I do think the ethics are pretty clear. We have to figure out how to get this guy out of office.

So you want to be critical, and you don't want to take that away. That's right. But a friend of mine, Owen Flanagan, once got to ask a question to Dalai Lama. You know, it'll translate. So he asked, and the question was a good question. He said, if you had had a chance, would you kill Hitler?

And Dalai Lama has translated and he thought about it and he smiled and he said, and his answer was, yeah, I would kill Hitler, but I wouldn't be angry at him. And I would do it with ritual and grace and kindness. And to answer was, yeah, I would kill Hitler, but I wouldn't be angry at him. And I would do it with ritual and grace and kindness. And to some extent, I'm not sure that's good advice for killing Hitler, but it's pretty good advice for Twitter, which is if you have to correct somebody, this person's wrong, this is an immoral view,

you shouldn't take this adolescent glee in it. You shouldn't do it out of anger. You should just, you know, trying to help people. Yeah, I totally agree with the anger part. But this also, it connects up to something we spoke about. I think we spoke about killing Hitler last time or the time before that. And it does raise the ethical question of at what age is it appropriate to kill Hitler? Because if you go back and kill him as a seven-year-old, you do look like a moral monster because he's not quite Hitler yet, right? So it's interesting

to consider when that would happen. And I think someone should produce a YouTube animation of the Dalai Lama going back and killing Hitler with ritual and without any hatred. That's a cartoon. I was thinking that you would imagine like a science paper which has a graph, and the graph is the best time to kill Hitler. Yeah, that's right. Hey, we could float that as a poll on Twitter or somewhere. I'm sure there would be a bell curve around the appropriate age. Yeah.

I'll do that. Okay, so back to Dawkins, who, yes, I do consider a friend, and I did not react one way or the other to his tweet. Maybe I should remind people what the tweet was, though. I went out on Twitter before this recording and asked for questions, and this came up, as you might expect, a few times. So it was a series of tweets, I believe, to—forgive me if this is somebody else's summary—but it's one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, or moral grounds. It's quite another to conclude that it wouldn't work in practice. Now, I mean, this is kind of

hilarious because this really is, I can immediately understand the spirit in which he tweeted it. I'm not sure what the proximate cause of him deciding to screw up his day and week this way was, but... Can we agree he's very bad at Twitter? But this is, what's hilarious about this is just, it really is, you take one look at it, having been around and around the block with this kind of thing, I mean, this is just poised to explode in the minds of every person on earth who's just waiting for another reason to vilify Richard. Yeah, I don't know what got into his head around this. Do you know what his point was? Is this point that as biological creatures, our intelligence

and creativity and kindness can be shaped through breathing? What was his point? Well, I think his point might have been a topical and political one. I think there's somebody in the press in the UK right now who just got nominated as an advisor to Boris Johnson or something. And then someone did a little scandal archaeology in his Twitter feed and found some celebration of eugenics or something. And so that could have been what Richard was reacting to. But anyway, he's making the obvious point that eugenics is a thing. I mean, forget about its history as a movement among scientists and pseudoscientists 100 years ago, as the facts of Darwinism and genetics were only starting to be absorbed. It's just obvious that

whatever is under genetic control, whether that's the way our physical bodies perform and look or, you know, the way our minds emerge from our brains, basically everything about you is genetically influenced to some degree. You should be able to breed for that or engineer towards some goal in the same way that I think in further tweets he uses the example of cows giving more milk and all of that. So the biology of it is not debatable. And that's just his point as a biologist. Like, of course, this kind of thing is possible. And acknowledging its possibility is not at all a suggestion that it's desirable that we institute any kind of program to do this. So he was just separating people's political and moral reaction to the idea based on presumably

some notion of what its social consequences were originally and would be in the future, and separating that from this claim that it wouldn't work in practice. I'm not sure which claim he was responding to there. Yeah. Out of context, it was weird. I mean, like I said, I don't know him. I'm a huge follower of his work. And I think he is an extraordinary scholar and has a lot of interesting to say. I think nobody in their right mind would think that he's really defending eugenics. It's a comically unfair take on this. But as somebody pointed out, the very structure of what he said is the same structure as, you know, it'd be wrong to burn down Paul Bloom's house on moral grounds, on political grounds, ideological grounds.

But if you had enough gasoline and enough tinder, yeah, you could burn it down. And it has this sort of taunting, trollish claim. And I'm totally accepting that it wasn't intentional. And I think it probably speaks to the idea that Twitter is the wrong arena for these sorts of comments. Let me take the opportunity to get us into more trouble than Dawkins got into. Don't we practice eugenics on some level? 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,

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