Making Sense with Sam Harris - #245 — Can We Talk About Scary Ideas?

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

Sam Harris speaks with Peter Singer, Francesca Minerva, and Jeff McMahan about the newly launched Journal of Controversial Ideas. They discuss the ethics of discussing dangerous ideas, the possibility of having a market in vaccines, the taboo around the topic of race and IQ, the relationship between activism and academia, the shallow-pond argument for doing good, 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.

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As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access 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, well today I'm speaking with Peter Singer, Francesca Minerva, and Jeff McMahon. Peter is a professor of bioethics at Princeton, and he's been on the podcast before. He focuses on practical ethics and is extraordinarily well known for his book Animal Liberation, which is pretty close to the foundation of the animal rights movement.

He's also written a lot about global poverty and has been deeply inspirational to effective altruists everywhere. Francesca Minerva is a research fellow at the University of Milan, and her research focuses on applied ethics, medical and bioethics, discrimination, and academic freedom, among other topics. And Jeff McMahon is a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford University, and he focuses on a range of issues related to harm and benefit, including war, self-defense, and defense of others, abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, personal identity, the moral status of animals, the ethics of causing future people to exist, i.e. having children, disability, philanthropy, and other topics. And the proximate cause of this episode is that the

three of them are launching a new journal, the Journal of Controversial Ideas. And this is the focus of our conversation. We discuss the ethics of exploring dangerous ideas, and then we jump into some specific ones. We talk about the possibility of having a market in vaccines, the taboo around the topic of race and IQ, the relationship between activism and academia.

We revisit Peter's famous shallow pond argument for doing good. Anyway, a fascinating area, all too timely, and quite relevant to growing concerns around cancel culture and free speech, political hyper-partisanship, and the general dysfunction in our institutions now. And now, without further delay, I bring you Peter Singer, Francesca Minerva, and Jeff McMahon. I am here with Peter Singer, Francesca Minerva, and Jeff McMahon. Great to meet all of you. We're spanning the globe here.

So, Peter, you're in Australia. That's right. Why don't you each introduce yourselves briefly? I will do something proper in the intro here. But what are you each focused on? Let's start with you, Peter. You've been on the podcast before, people will be familiar, but let's just bring you in as now a podcast repeat. What are you up to these days?

I'm continuing to be professor of bioethics at Princeton University. I'm working on a range of questions in ethics, issues relating to global poverty, issues relating to animals. I'm actually currently doing a revised edition of my book, Animal Liberation, which came out first in 1975 and needs some updating. So I'm hoping to get that done sometime this year. So it'll be out next year. And I've been working on issues relating to the pandemic and ethical questions about doing human challenge trials, about vaccine distribution. There's a lot of things keeping me busy. Oh, great. Francesca?

I am a researcher at the University of Milan. I mostly work on longevity, immortality, and other biothical issues like enhancement and conscientious objection in medicine. And Jeff? I'm the Weitz Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University. I've done a lot of work on issues in practical ethics, issues like abortion, infanticide, war. But recently I've been working on a book on what's called population ethics, issues having to do with causing people to exist, which is a notoriously difficult area of ethics. of ethics, and I'm trying to show that a lot of the problems and paradoxes in population ethics are essential to understanding a broad range of other issues in practical ethics. Well, almost by definition, we could talk about the most interesting and consequential

things that face us as a species. There's so much to talk about, but this conversation is occasioned by you guys starting a new journal, the Journal of Controversial Ideas. If I'm not mistaken, this is a response to the perceived crisis in academia around political correctness, wokeness, cancel culture, spreading allergy, really an autoimmune disorder, intellectually speaking, to ideas that make people uncomfortable. I don't know which of you wants to kick us off here, but what is this project and just how concerned are you about the state of our intellectual discourse? Can I just say one thing first?

I think it'd be probably appropriate for Peter to lead off with the main comment, but I just wanted to say that our concern is every bit as much with efforts to suppress free speech coming from the political right as it is with efforts coming from the left. Sure. Yeah. Sure. I can say something, although I do want to say that it was really Francesca who had this idea and brought it to me many years ago of responding, trying to produce a journal where people who wanted to publish anonymously or under a pseudonym would be able to do so,

but it would still be basically an academic journal, a peer-reviewed journal that would be rigorously reviewed so that getting into it would not be easy. There would be high standards of publication, but people could protect themselves against getting a lot of harassment or threats or harming their academic career by publishing controversial ideas. And I know that Francesca herself was influenced by an experience that she and her co-author had when they published an article about infanticide, and Francesca can tell you about that. I, earlier on, had also somewhat similar experiences when I was silenced in Germany,

when I was speaking about euthanasia for severely disabled newborn infants. And that, incidentally, those opposition came both from the conservative Christian right, and to some extent, from the disability movement with which some on the left were aligned. But there were, of course, a lot of other incidents, academics who were threatened or harassed or had articles retracteded because they were controversial, even though they'd been accepted by peer review. And that was really the driving force between trying to set up a place where people could publish and where they would know that articles would not be retracted just because of some

political backlash. And where, as I said, if they wish to publish anonymously, and not all of our articles will be anonymous or under a pseudonym. In fact, the majority of them that we've received so far are not. But if authors wish to do that, they will be able to do so. Francesca, why don't you say a little bit more about your inspiration for the journal? Yes, I published this article in the Journal of Medical Ethics in 2012. It was a co-authored article, and it was about moral status of newborns comparing it with the moral status of

fetuses, which is a topic that has been explored over several years in philosophy. Peter has written about it, Jeff has written about it. But when we published that article, things got a bit out of hand because at that point in 2012, social media were available, the internet was a big thing, and some right-wing online magazines and newspapers picked up the news about this article and

started spreading information about it, misinformation about it, actually, because the titles and the articles summarizing it, summarizing the content of this academic paper were not very accurate so very quickly we got a lot of death threats and online abuse and at the beginning that was quite scary also we were at the beginning of our career so we were quite surprised by this reaction But soon after I realized that the main threat wasn't really like the kind of physical threats that were mentioned in the emails I was receiving, mostly from Christians and right-wing people. But I started being worried about my career prospects and because I was told that I could not be hired because I was too controversial and in the following years I kept looking at what's happening in academia and I realized that these kind of episodes were becoming more and more common. So there were Rebecca Tuvall and the

Weinstein, the Christiakis, the Bruce Gilley. A lot of people were getting a lot of negative reaction, in some cases from the general public, like in my case, but increasingly from inside academia itself. So I realized that we started having a problem of self-censorship, either because people were worried about being the subject of these death threats, but also because people were worried about their career, because we started having a lot of petitions and letters to get people fired or having their papers retracted. So I talked about this concern with Peter and Jeff, and we decided to start this journal. And after quite a few years working on this project, we are almost ready to publish our first issue,

which should come out around the 15th of April. Well, it seems to me there's a kind of demarcation problem here where at least two concerns should kind of bound our discourse about the nature of the world and how we should all be living within it. And one is just the finiteness of time and attention, right? We all have a certain amount of hours to spend on this earth, and we can choose to spend them one way or the other. And the question is, well, why spend any significant amount of time focused on questions where either the question or the

possible answers produce a significant concern about harm, right? So there's some possibility of dangerous knowledge. The terrain is so ethically charged, it produces an experience of revulsion in the better part of humanity that may even just hear about the topic. And so there's just this question of, okay, well, just why do it on certain topics? And then there's just, apart from just the opportunity costs and the wastage of time, there's this concern about some kind of ethical and intellectual negligence because there are foreseeable harms that crop up down many of these paths, right? So if you're going to just take, I don't know what your actual thesis was in discussing the moral status of infants versus fetuses. But for someone to spend a lot of time on the question of why the impediments to infanticide are as high as they are could seem to many people to be just an all-too-casual

prying at the lid of Pandora's box, right? And perhaps this isn't the best example of that, because I'm sure there's an argument for the unconscionable suffering that is allowed to persist for certain babies that are bound to die soon. And so there's an argument for euthanasia there, which most or many people will be sensitive to. kind of generic question about this boundary that the three of you are contemplating and just how you will make choices about what's legitimate for inclusion and what isn't here. It seems to me that the best way to avoid wrongful harm is to be able to identify which kinds of harm are genuinely wrongful. All of this requires thought and reflection and discussion. It's not as if we know the answers to these difficult moral issues a priori. We simply have to think these things through unless we want to just be guided by

ignorance and superstition. If we can't talk about things and discuss them, investigate the different views that people have, subject them to reasoned scrutiny, we're just going to be casting about blindly, and we're much more likely to do harm that way than we are if we think things through rationally, looking at the evidence, and entertaining, listening to, and thinking about all the different positions that people might have on the issues. Ignoring these questions is the worst thing we can do, it seems to me. There are some limits. I mean, that is to say, if we know or have good reason to believe that some open discussion of some issue really is going to do harm to innocent people, then that's, of course, a very, very good reason not to discuss it. But I think that's a quite rare phenomenon, and that we're much more likely to do harm through ignorance than we are through careful, reasoned discussion of issues. Yeah. Peter or Francesca, do you have anything on that? I certainly agree that I think the general view is that being able to discuss things openly is likely to lead us to a better informed, more thoughtful, reflective understanding of the issue, more thoughtful, reflective understanding of the issue, and that that's likely to produce better results in the long run. You talk about harms, and of course, sometimes you can see immediate possible harms. A lot of the cancel culture has been about not offending people,

not threatening their sense of themselves or their identity or something like that. That is an obvious harm right there. But there may be other harms through not discussing issues, through not allowing people to have their say and to point out some of the drawbacks of current practices, perhaps, which will go on we'll continue. And I think we should have confidence that open discussion and trying to get to the truth of the situation and to the best and most thoughtful and justified views of the situation is in the long run likely to produce a better outcome, better well-being for all of those affected, and reduced harm. So I think that's the basis on which we generally answer those questions.

And I agree with Jeff. You can imagine situations where you would not do this. Some years ago, a magazine called The Progressive published an account of how to make an H-bomb. And I think there I would say, well, it's not clear to me that this is something that everybody needs to know. And, and scientists,

scientists nowadays have similar questions with how to engineer viruses that would produce a pandemic, you know, deliberately. I, maybe those are, those are things we would not publish. That's not what we're looking for.

We're looking for discussions and ideas where we think it's reasonable to want more people to be involved in this and to try to be better informed and more thoughtful. Yeah, I guess I'm trying to find both sides of that line in my imagination here. I guess I have a couple of examples off the top of my head that where one falls kind of well inside of it and one falls perhaps just outside. I guess perhaps you could react to this. I mean, so the one example from our current circumstance now where we're having this conversation at one hopes is the tail end of the COVID pandemic. And it seems to me that there's probably been discussion about this, but if there has, I haven't heard it. But it's at least an interesting ethical question as to whether there

should be a market in vaccine privileges, right? So if people who have earlier spots in line who may actually not want to get a vaccine because they're worried about, you know, vaccine technology, could they sell their spots to people who would want to buy them, right? I'm sure there are many wealthy people who would like to spend a lot of money to get a vaccine months earlier than they otherwise are going to. And I'm sure that if you floated that idea on social media, or certainly if you endorsed that idea on social media, you could expect the swift cancellation of your academic and perhaps professional prospects. And there's an obvious harm that comes from our inability to even discuss

an idea like that, whatever side we come down on, because that market could produce a lot of good, obviously. If billionaires early on could have been given the opportunity to spend millions for the privilege of getting the vaccine early, well, then those millions could have been used to privilege of getting the vaccine early, well, then those millions could have been used to cancel the very inequalities that people would be worried about in their ick reaction to a market in vaccines emerging in the first place. And so that seems to be something that we should talk about. But... Can I say something about that? Go ahead. Just very briefly. Sure. We've been having debates for quite a long time about very similar issues. For example, the sale of organs for transplantation and also just generally about how medical resources should be distributed in a society.

I mean, it's strange that if you went on to the internet and advocated the sort of proposal that you have mentioned, you would get attacked for that when people in the United States tolerate rich people being able to get the very best medical treatment anywhere in the world and poor Americans being left out almost entirely. So, I mean, there's a parallel debate about just how ordinary medical care should be distributed. It doesn't seem to be fundamentally different from what you're discussing about the sale of vaccines. Yeah, that's a great point. Nevertheless, Sam, if you wish to write it up and submit it as a paper to the Journal of

Controversial Ideas, we'll be very happy to have it considered. And if you want to do it under a pseudonym so that nobody knows it's your idea, although you have now let it out on this podcast. I don't think my pseudonym is going to work at this point. So, and then the other topic, which is one I'm all too familiar with from this podcast, has been the taboo around discussing the data in IQ differences between populations, right? I mean, this is just absolutely radioactive. And I stumbled onto this topic not because I have any interest in IQ per se, much less in racial or ethnic or population differences in it, but because I became very concerned after witnessing the defenestration of Charles Murray, the upteenth defenestration of Charles Murray, 25 years after

he wrote his infamous book, I became very worried that our society seems to imagine that something absolutely existential politically and ethically rides on our not finding out that there are group differences, right? I mean, it seems to me, just as a theoretical assumption, extraordinarily likely that anything you would test between various populations of human beings, no matter how much you want these mean values to be the same, you will find mean differences. IQ, this is literally anything you could want to test, that you could measure, you are going to find that the Norwegians and the Italians and the Inuit and the Australian Aborigines or people who just identify with those groups, and they may be imperfectly actually related to those groups, you're going to find differences. It seems to me that most of our society seems to believe that our future happiness and cooperation as a species depends on that not being true, because we would not be able to absorb those facts politically, because they are so toxic. absolutely absurd, and there's nothing really riding on there being no group differences. But I do question, and this is the one question I had for Murray on my podcast with him,

why one would spend any significant time trying to establish those differences or looking for those differences. You know, I think we need to be able to talk about this because we will be ambushed by evidence of those differences because if we just decide to study things like intelligence generically, these distinctions between populations may just leap out of the data. And we have good reason, I think, not to care about them. But I do question whether it's worth publishing somebody's heroic effort to establish the reality of these differences because of the social cost that can follow from that. I don't know if you think that's a distinction without a difference, but

I'm wondering how you feel about that example. Well, I actually think that you're right about this in that whether there are these differences or not may not matter in the slightest. That is to say, what people ought to be discussing, it seems to me, is if there are such differences, why that should matter. Should it make any difference to the way we think about any particular individual or about the way that we treat any particular group? It might, if a group turns out on average to score lower on some measure, that that's a reason to provide disproportionate resources for that group in order for it to be able

to achieve equality in practice. But what we should be questioning is whether any of these differences, whether at the individual level or at the group level, make any difference whatsoever to moral status. And if they don't, then it's unclear to me why anyone should be concerned if these differences do emerge at the population level. I'd slightly disagree with that, Jeff, in that we, as we are present, we feel that if there are differences in, let's say, the number of people who are admitted under certain tests to elite universities, people who are admitted under certain tests to elite universities, if that does not admit a proportion of a certain minority group that's similar to their proportion in the population, that there's, you know, this must be racist practices or biases in the admission.

And so we go to significant lengths to try to overcome that now you know that it may be relevant you know it may be that there are other causes that lead to different results and that they're not the results of systemic racism which is the the assumption that we currently make now you know what actions follow from that of of course, is a different question, as you say, and it may be that even if we were to find that there are, on average, genetic differences in demographic groups, it may be that the result of that is we should put more effort into trying to improve the environment of those demographic groups which do not have the same average scores as high as others. That's what I was suggesting, by the way.

Yeah. But what I'm saying is in terms of, you know, I wouldn't say that it makes no difference at all because it does make a difference as to where we look for how we ought to respond to this. And rather than beating our chest and saying we're such a racist society that we are in some subtle way that is not, you know, or maybe not so subtle, of course, some of this is absolutely the opposite of being subtle, but that we are looking for ways in which we ourselves are guilty of having these racist biases. It may be that instead we ought to be saying, no, it's not that, but there are some other things in the environment that we could help to

overcome this. Yeah, I think I'm prepared to even go a step further there and say that in many of these cases, specifically at an institution like your own, Princeton, to the contrary, not only is there not overt racism keeping certain groups out and underrepresented, if in fact they still are underrepresented, I think there has been a pretty active campaign of affirmative action at most schools like your own, though there are some exceptions. And just to think of this more widely, I do think it is pathological for us to assume that unless every conceivable, desirable position in society shows a perfectly proportionate representation of the population, the only explanation for that mismatch is bigotry. We know enough at this point

to know that's not true. If nothing else, there are many cases where there's just differential interest, you know, born of culture in some cases and in biology and others. I mean, just look at the difference between men and women in their representation in scientific fields, right? There are fields in science that are now dominated by women. I mean, certainly more than 50% of psychologists and biologists at this point, I think it's fair to say, are women, at least in graduate schools now. And there will be, you know, viewed with the lens of bigotry, an unconscionably low number of women in engineering departments, right? And probably in physics departments still. And I'm not sure there are any honest people left

who think that bigotry is what explains that. I mean, there's got to be some differential interest here. And, you know, perhaps in certain cases, aptitude, when you're talking about the extremes of mathematical ability, you know, there's probably, you know, this is the very claim that got Larry Summers thrown out of Harvard when he speculated that perhaps the different representation between men and women in engineering and physics and other, you know, almost purely quantitative fields is due to not different means in those distributions, but a different level of variance, right? So once you get several standard deviations from the mean, you could have many more men with that mathematical ability at both tails, right?

You know, both the high end and the low end. Now that's a hypothesis. I think there's still some considerable evidence for it. I don't think that the jury's in on that. But, you know, if that just turns out to be true, the fact that we spent any time at all lacerating ourselves over, you know, now for many, many, many years over residual bigotry and misogyny in these departments will seem like a terrible misuse of energy. And again, this is not to say that misogyny hasn't been a problem, and isn't still a problem in other cases. So I take your point, Peter, that understanding this will allow us to correct for a misdiagnosis of the problem. But I do think there's this added piece of around the perversity of just investigating in areas where there's such an

ick factor where one feels, you know, it's what good is going to come of that? You know, if that's my first question upon hearing that someone is writing a 5,000 word piece for you on X and my first feeling about X is wow, that just seems truly morbid. I'm just wondering

if we can conceive of what that how we would find that boundary in principle or if you're not really thinking about that, you're just going to know it when you see it. Well, one thing to say about that is that it's right that some people could investigate certain phenomena for the bad, wrongful, discreditable reasons. On the other hand, sometimes results just show up as side effects of inquiry or phenomena are just there and they call for

some explanation. So a lot depends on how these questions arise and why they are pursued. Yeah, I mean, the results just showing up is the most important variable from my point of view, because they will just show up. And we currently have a social and intellectual order that is advertising its brittleness literally on a minute-by-minute basis, and there's just no reason for it. If we could render indelible our political commitments to equality and compassion, if we could articulate clearly enough what kind of society we want to live in, where individuals are treated as such and everyone was given every opportunity they could possibly use to thrive, right? If that's our goal, right? And we're not, you know,

That's our goal, right? And we're not, you know, covertly trying to engineer some noxious political order where, you know, some groups benefit to the disadvantage of others systematically. I mean, if we have a kind of Rawlsian understanding of what this project is, it seems to me we should be able to talk about anything, but we really do feel very far from that moment. But, I mean, if we can agree on that, and yes, some people are going to be offended and going to feel hurt by the fact that we're talking about somebody's working on infanticide or IQ, but this is also how we make progress. Like, 20 years ago, it was considered absolutely, at least in my country of origin, which is a Catholic country, Italy, you couldn't really tell, even among like left-wing, secular, atheist people, that gay marriage was a good thing and that, you know, gay people should

be allowed to adopt children, to have children. But then the conversation started. And yes, a lot of people were annoyed, offended, hurt by the fact that people had this non-Catholic, non-religious views. But 20 years later, we now have gay marriage and, you know, gay people can adopt and we have made a lot of progress with these rights. And we can't tell before we start talking about these issues whether the change for society is going to be for the better, for the worse, but people anyway are going to talk about these issues. And I letting that conversation to some hidden groups that don't really get any feedback and don't really discuss their ideas with the external world.

So we can have this conversation in the open. Maybe we find out that, you know, there was a mistake in the data collection or there was a mistake in the argument or there was a mistake in this view we had. But this has to be discussed. And some people will be offended for sure. And some people have been offended in the past. But I think overall, for a lot of issues, that was a good thing because it allowed us to make progress, like I mentioned in the case of gay marriage and adoption. I think you should probably lean into this and publish your journal or the best selections from your journal every year around Christmas as a coffee table book, lavishly illustrated. And just use it to your advantage. It could be a very interesting document. What museum is that? Is it the Mutter Museum that has collections of

things that everyone would be otherwise terrified to see? I don't know about that. Yeah, there's a museum that has human anomalies, cyclopses in formaldehyde, and just ghastly things that... I'll look it up. I forget where this is. So what kinds of topics are you expecting slash hoping to publish on? Francesca, do you want to talk about the papers that we've accepted in broad terms? Yes, very, very broadly, because it should be a surprise. We had some papers on animal rights, some submission on transgender questions, some papers on the group differences, and well, we'll see what else is going to be accepted. So far, we accepted around six, seven papers, and we hope that for the first issue, we'll

have around 10. so there are various topics some more controversial than others but all quite controversial and i'll just add we we to go back to the previous conversation we do have one not on group differences in intelligence but in more generally about the role that the genes play in intelligence and the denial of that or the difficulty of talking about that in some circles. Yeah. I guess if we can maybe just close the loop on that topic, it's interesting just to try

to take the thorn out of this rosebush, because for a person thinking about this particular problem, I guess my moral intuitions have been so worn down on this that I'm just not sure I can recapitulate the problem here. So it's just, it's like, you know, I am half Ashkenazi Jew, right? So that's part of my group identity, I guess, and genetically, certainly, and in part culturally. And this is a group that has been much celebrated for the correlation of its misadventures in the world with, you know, mathematical ability among other intellectual abilities, but it is patently obvious that knowing my Ashkenazi background tells you absolutely nothing about my mathematical

ability. And in my case, though I was never bad at math, I'm certainly not good enough by nature so as to have gravitated toward it as a career. There is no question. I do not have the genes of an Alan Turing here. So what am I going to do with that? And what is the basis for offense if, I mean, a person has whatever they have in this space, and they can make use of whatever opportunities they're given to the degree that they can find them. And it just seems to me obvious that we want a society where the opportunities and incentives are such that every individual can flourish to the greatest possible extent, and that will be different in different cases. And it's never a question of everyone being equal in all of their capacities. That's

clearly a pipe dream and not even obviously a desirable one. But it is also a case that all boats can rise with whatever tide we can engineer to make life and opportunity better and better for more and more people. And that's our ethical responsibility here. But the basis for offense or pride or anything that could correlate with any summary of group differences, I mean, all I see is a very easy path to daylight to get past all that. And obviously that is, you know, from one point of view, that is my privilege talking. But yeah, I have the privilege to recognize that there was no way I was going to be the next Alan Turing, right? Through no fault of my own.

And, you know, and I live in a world where it would be great to have that native talent. You know, that's something that I would, you know, if I could buy it, I certainly would buy it. But, you know, I'm playing different games as a result. So I don't know if you have more to add to that, but it's just, it feels like there's an ethical and psychological inoculation we need to try to perform on more and more people to give them the ability to have the kinds of conversations you're proposing we need to have. I don't think it's quite as simple as that, because I think the fear is of information reinforcing stereotypes. And even though, as you correctly say, the information about group differences is not going to enable us to apply that.

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