Making Sense with Sam Harris - #309 — Vulnerability, Politics, and Moral Worth

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

Sam Harris speaks with Martha C. Nussbaum about her philosophical work. They discuss the relevance of philosophy to personal and political problems, the influence of religion, the problem of dogmatism, the importance of Greek and Roman philosophy for modern thought, the Stoic view of emotions, anger and retribution, deterrence, moral luck, sexual harassment, the philosophical significance of Greek tragedy, grief, human and animal flourishing, the "capabilities approach" to valuing conscious life, the rightness or wrongness of moral hierarchies, "the fragility of goodness," 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. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, 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. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay. A lot going on in the world. I think I will save the topical stuff for the next podcast. I have an episode of that sort scheduled.

But today we're talking about the more ancient questions of philosophy and human vulnerability, because today I'm speaking with Martha Nussbaum. Martha is a professor of law and ethics in the philosophy department and law school at the University of Chicago. She has won many prizes, including the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, the Berggruen Prize in Philosophy and Culture, the Holberg Prize, and these are among the prizes that are regarded as most prestigious

for those who are not in fields eligible for Nobel Prizes. She has written more than 22 books, including Upheavals of Thought, She has written more than 22 books, including Upheavals of Thought, Anger and Forgiveness, Not for Profit, The Monarchy of Fear, and most recently, Justice for Animals, Our Collective Responsibility. I've long been wanting to get Martha on the podcast. She's certainly one of the most well-regarded living philosophers, and we cover a lot in this conversation. It has the quality of a debate at points, especially in the second half. We talk about the relevance of philosophy to personal and political problems, the influence of religion, the problem of dogmatism, the

relevance of Greek and Roman philosophy to modern thought, the Stoic view of emotions, anger and retribution, deterrence, moral luck, sexual harassment, the philosophical importance of Greek tragedy, grief, human and animal flourishing, what she calls the capabilities approach to valuing conscious life, the rightness or wrongness of moral hierarchies, what she calls the fragility of goodness, and other topics. And now I bring you Martha Nussbaum. I am here with Martha Nussbaum, and the gods of technology have not been kind to us.

Martha, thanks for joining me. Thank you very much, Sam, for inviting me. It's great to be on your program. So, yeah, we've had a few hiccups here which have tried our patience, so we're resetting, and happily we're talking about deep philosophical issues, which will warrant our labors thus far. Martha, can you summarize your background as a philosopher to just tell us the kinds of topics you've focused on? Well, there's a lot to get in here because I'm 75 years old and I started teaching when I was only about 27. But the two big things that I've worked on in my career are on the one hand, work on the emotions. What are emotions like? What role do they play in human

life, both personal and political? And then the other is normative political philosophy. What is a minimally just society? What does it do for its people, and what is the right way of thinking about the things that a good society provides. But within that, there are a whole lot of other topics that squeeze their way in. First of all, the history of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, including Greek tragedy. Second, the relationship between philosophy and literature, and more recently, between philosophy and music, the importance of the humanities for a decent public culture, work on global justice and global society, focusing in particular on India and development projects in India, and finally,

work on justice for a group of subordinated people, women in particular, sexual orientation minorities, racial minorities, people with disabilities, aging people. I have a recent book on aging, which, of course, I have a natural interest in. And finally, non-human animals. So all of those work their way into those two big topics. So I think there's a unity. I mean, I've been often asked why you work on such different things. And often people who work on one thing don't know that I've worked on the other.

What is the unity? I think the unity is the idea of human vulnerability and more recently, the vulnerability of non-human animals. the vulnerability of non-human animals. We're all creatures living in a world that we don't control, basing our plans on attachments to things and people outside our own control. How can we think about that? How can we live well? And of course, emotions come in there because they are expressive of our links to the things outside ourselves that we don't control. That's why the Stoics thought we should get rid of them. But then politics comes in because politics has to think what are the forms of vulnerability that are good in a human life? For example, the possibility of human love, which is a source of great vulnerability, the possibility of political involvement, which of course

is one of the most vulnerable things in the world, as Greek tragedies already show. But also some forms of vulnerability we ought to get rid of, and a good society would not have them. Hunger, thirst, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and a whole long list of other such things, sexual violation and sexual harassment and so forth. So thinking about what are the good forms of vulnerability? What are the bad forms? What should a good society do to create spaces for the good forms and to wipe out the bad forms? That really is a big connection between the two areas of my work. several, even many centuries long, which has tended to divorce academic philosophy, at least, from the urgent problems of practical ethics in most people's lives and even in most academics' lives. I mean, you know, this is a turn that was, you know, very clear in the middle of the

20th century with people like Wittgenstein. Have you escaped that? It sounds like you have largely escaped that as a philosopher, but I'm wondering how you view philosophy as a field and its relevance to the rest of what we're doing to try to cooperate with one another. Well, of course, this need for cooperation comes from both sides. On the side of philosophy, I think you're right that there was a time, particularly in the 1950s, when Anglo-American philosophy did not engage very much with ethical problems because, for one thing, they thought that they were not capable of any rational answer. So John Rawls really recreated political philosophy, and he connected it to a long, long tradition, of course, including such figures as Kant and Adam Smith, but also the Greeks and Romans. And now it's one of the main fields of philosophy. So I'm by no means alone.

But there's also the question of who's going to listen to you. Now, in the United States, I would say people don't want to listen to philosophers. And that's part of a long American tradition of partly anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism, partly of deferring much more to religion than to philosophy. I mean, I can talk to people in government in many nations of the world, most European nations. I go to the Bundestag in Germany. I go to lecture in central places in France, Italy, but also India. But in the United States, no one in Congress, when I gave the Jefferson lecture at the big humanities lecture, it's for Congress, but not one congressional representative was actually there. I know personally only one congressman, and he was a student of mine.

I think, you know, it is a different tradition. And I think part of the basis is actually right. That is, I agree with John Rawls that in a pluralistic society, we should not base public choice on any single comprehensive doctrine of the good life. We all have different religions. We all have different secular or religious ideas of how to live. What we should do in politics is to focus on a subset of that, that we could expect people to concur in and form what Rawls calls an overlapping consensus. And that should be the place where philosophy would step in along with other disciplines. So that is a much more restricted role for philosophy than some people have thought, but I think it's the right role.

So that's the role that I would want to have if anyone wanted to hear from me. What about one's personal orientation toward the good life? I guess there are two levels at which we can talk about solving our problems. There's the collective systemic level, and this is where we engage politics and law, etc. individual and the kinds of thoughts one is apt to think when one wakes up at four in the morning. How do you view the relevance of philosophy there to one's private struggles to be happy and fulfilled given the life on offer? First of all, I don't think philosophers should be telling people what to do or how to live. I don't think you should ever tell people what to do unless they've asked your advice. I think it's quite nosy and wrong to go around preaching to other people. I do think that philosophy can give advice on political discourse because we all have to talk together. And the language of philosophical argument is a very, very good language. Socratic

reasoning, where we ask the origins of our beliefs and the basis of our beliefs, this has a big role to play in most people's lives, because we have to reason together with people who have different religions. So when I teach, especially when I teach undergraduates, that's what I would focus on. That's where I think philosophy should give advice and should train people in certain modes of reasoning that they can use together. But, you know, if they're evangelical Christians, they'll use that in political discourse. But in private, they'll do something completely different because they will not want to base their decision making on rational argument. That's not what their religion teaches them.

I happen to be a reformed Jew, and that's a religion that is about as rationalistic as anyone could be. And so, of course, there's great continuity between my personal deliberation as a Reformed Jew and my public deliberation, but that's not true for everyone. Catholicism is pretty rationalistic, but most forms of Protestantism believe that faith takes priority over reason. And I'm not going to tell people that that's wrong. That's none of my business. But I do think that in this country where we have many different religions, we've got to learn how to talk together. And that is where I think philosophy has a place. But doesn't that presuppose that at least a certain willingness to divorce oneself from one's cherished dogmas in order to have this conversation across sectarian lines? I mean, what kind of conversation can mutually canceling dogmatists really aspire to have politically, if these are dogmas they really are willing to live and die for?

Well, I think, first of all, it has to be on the narrow range of topics. You don't want to get into discussion of the ultimate fate of the soul after death. There's no point. It isn't part of the political problems that you're facing, and people will never end up agreeing on that. So you leave out certain topics. But it also should be, as it were, metaphysically thin, so you don't use notions that stir up endless controversy, like do we have a soul or not? You try to find a neutral ethical language. And actually, the people who framed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did a really good job on that because they realized they came from, let's say, a French Catholic was one of the leading architects. There was somebody from Egypt who was there. There was Eleanor Roosevelt who was there. There was somebody from China who was there. And they realized right away that they couldn't use the metaphysical language of any of their religious traditions.

they couldn't use the metaphysical language of any of their religious traditions. So they found the neutral language of human dignity, which they felt they could agree on. And that's why the human rights tradition has proceeded the way it has. We think about agreeing on the idea that all human beings have a fundamental dignity that must be respected by laws and institutions. But we leave it to the religions to say, how do we cash that out? Is it because we have an immortal soul? Is it just because we're on the earth? That's not the business of philosophy in the public sphere. Right. But it just seems to me that when it really matters, which is to say when push comes to shove, something has to give here. So you have various religious cultures that are honor cultures, effectively, and one can argue whether

the honor part is orthogonal to the actual religious tenets. I think in most cases you can't really argue that, although people have tried. I think the honor is built into many of the dogmatic beliefs. And so you have a notion that, you know, let's say when a young woman gets raped, she has brought shame upon the family. And it's the sort of shame that in certain cultures and even subcultures in the West could cause her to be the victim of violence from her father or her brother or her husband. And so clearly, we can't tolerate that politically in a developed society where we care about the vulnerable. And yet, a significant portion of any society can argue that this is part of their deeply held religious worldviews to treat women this way. I'm just wondering how you would advocate we navigate moments like that, given the respect you have for people's religious beliefs and given your recognition that since there are so many

diverse beliefs on offer, you have to negotiate sort of above all of those commitments in some way. I think, you know, you just have to forge ahead and see how far you can get. Most religious people are interested in living on terms of, on the one hand, religious freedom, and on the other hand, goodwill and cooperation with their fellow citizens. And the religions have evolved in keeping with that. Religions like my own have evolved, but also so too has Islam. Muslims in America do not try to enforce genital mutilation or any part of the honor code. Muslims in India, starting at independence, already had gone through a kind of reformation where Islam had become very rationalistic and very feminist. So, you know,

religions change because they want to live on good terms with their neighbors. Now, when that breaks down, and I think to some extent it has broken down in the United States, though not as badly, perhaps, as one might think, then we have a problem. But so long as our project is to form fair terms of cooperation with our neighbors and where everyone has to give and take, then I think we're going to be okay. Atheists may hate religion, but they too want to live on good terms with their neighbors. So they want a society that respects the freedom of religion and so on. I actually have a program at the law school that I established with a grant from one of the prizes that I won, which is called the Nussbaum Luncheons, where people get together

on a very divisive issue. It's students with two faculty who differ on the issue. I sit together for an hour and a half because I found that people who had a different view from mine would not take my classes because we're polarized already. So I thought, what's a way of getting these diverse people into the same room? And so for an hour and a half over lunch, they would come. And we knew a little bit beforehand about what the range of positions in the room was. And I've always done these on topics such as gay rights issues, abortion issues. And so other people take other issues like intellectual property and all kinds of things that I don't know very much about. But I find that it really works. On the bakery cases, should bakers be able to exclude gay and lesbian people when they offer

their wares? The room actually figured out, even in that hour and a half, a compromise position that they thought they could all endorse. That's, you know, that's surprising. They don't always actually agree. So take the legalization of hard drugs, which is a hard issue, I think. And it's hard for me. And it was actually hard for the faculty member that I gave the thing with, because I think, although he's a so-called conservative, he's really a libertarian. And so he was more interested in the legalization of hard drugs than I am. And, you know, it was very hard for us, but we worked through it and we tried to think, well, what are the set of solutions that's really on the table? And the students

were very helpful in that setting. And everyone learned a lot because I didn't really know much about the data on hard drug use. Then a couple of months ago, we gave one on abortion. Now then, the wife of my faculty colleague, and she is herself on the left, she said, this is never going to work. This is where the Nussbaum lunches break down. discussion in the beginning by calling on a student of mine who was, I knew, a Roman Catholic, but I knew she was also a particularly subtle and respectful person. And she began by saying, well, I used to be a part of these anti-abortion groups, but I felt that they were too narrow, that they were too hysterical, and I dropped away from that, and here's why. And so she went on. And then it really did open up the room to a much wider set of positions. There were Jews who said, in my religion, the fetus is just like water, so we have to be respected when we want abortion rights. And then there were some Catholics

who did not drop away from the anti-abortion groups, but they listened. And they were surprised to hear me say that the Zionists thought abortion was permissible up till the sixth monthabortion groups, but they listened. And they were surprised to hear me say that O'Connor thought abortion was permissible up till the sixth month. You know, they learned stuff that they didn't know before. And later, that one most conservative in the room came up to me in the elevator and she said, I want to thank you. So I think the minute that people know that they're respected and that they're listened to, we have a little wedge in the door where we make progress. Might have something to do with what you're serving at those lunches. Maybe we need a cookbook.

Yeah, I mean, I don't eat because I just can't eat when I'm talking. But I think usually I try to get it to be vegan food, but I don't know whether it always is. That's what my money pays for, because of course, I donated money for this, but what can they spend money on? Everyone wants to come. So I think that it's pretty good food. Yeah, I know you've spent a lot of time on ancient philosophy and Greek philosophy, in particular Aristotle, I believe, but can you summarize the contributions of perhaps Plato and Aristotle to our thought currently? I mean, just how much do we owe these two men at this point? Okay, first of all, I want to say, let's never ever talk about ancient philosophy without saying

ancient Greek and Roman. Because first, whenever people say ancient philosophy, they really need ancient Greek and Roman, and they don't realize that they're excluding India and China and Africa. So I insist on that. But myself, the Romans are really, really important for me. So in the beginning of my career, it is indeed true that I worked particularly on Aristotle. But as time went on, I worked much more on the philosophers of the Hellenistic period. I just finished teaching a graduate seminar on Hellenistic ethics, the Epicureans, the skeptics, and the Stoics. Now, those, I think, make tremendous contributions. But when you say to our thought, I think you mean not all Americans, because Americans come from China and from India and from lots of different traditions. But you probably mean the history of modern Western European philosophy. But if you mean that, the Hellenistic philosophers actually make a bigger contribution than Plato and Aristotle.

In the Middle Ages, Aristotle was taken up by the Catholic thinkers, and the whole scholastic tradition is based loosely and with a lot of changes on Aristotle. Plato, not so much, but he was certainly known. But then, starting around the Renaissance and the Reformation, people didn't know Greek. Even by the time Aquinas was writing, very few people knew Greek. Aquinas did not know Greek. He had to have a translator working with him. And that meant that they read the Romans a lot more than the Greeks. So Lucretius, Seneca, Cicero, they are the ones who shaped the history of early modern philosophy. When Descartes and Princess Elizabeth want to correspond about an ethical problem that she's facing, they choose Seneca's De Vita Beata to talk about. When Adam Smith is

talking about global cooperation and global justice, he quotes from lots of people. But when he quotes from Aristotle, there's always a footnote. When he quotes from Cicero, it's just like in his own prose. He just incorporates huge chunks of Cicero in his own prose, because it's like Shakespeare or the Bible, he expects the reader to understand where it comes from. So that was the dominant thing until basically mid 19th century, when Hegel and then Nietzsche brought people back to much more of an interest in the Greeks. So by now, of course, they're both. And the Hellenistic philosophers have kind of fallen out of fashion in core curricula

because people think that Romans are not very philosophical and make a big mistake. But they also find it hard to teach them because the Greek Hellenistic philosophers are a series of fragments. And the fragments are fragments of very important works that were lost. I mean, Greek Stoicism invented propositional logic, which we all use and rely on. They invented the philosophy of language, which we all use and rely on. But nobody teaches that because it's a series of fragments. So the ones that survive in whole works are Seneca and Cicero. But it's not easy to teach philosophy to undergraduates with those texts, because the arguments are not very clearly disengaged

from the rhetorical purpose of the work. So anyway, they're not as widely taught, which I think is a great pity. I think, of course, Lucretius is not only a great philosopher, but he's also a great poet, and he's appreciated more as a poet than as a philosopher, which again, I think is a great pity. So I'm always campaigning for the Hellenistic philosophers. So such important things. The idea that human beings have dignity wherever they are in the world, and that we have duties to people outside our national borders, that's an idea of Stoicism. It did not exist in Aristotle or in Plato. Then subtle thinking about emotions. Aristotle says

a few things about the emotions. Plato says less. But really, it was the Hellenistic philosophers that made that a huge topic. They had elaborate treatises on the emotions. Again, some of that is just fragments, but we're lucky to have big fragments of Chrysosphis' work on the emotions. And then Seneca, Cicero, they have very lengthy works of their own on emotions. So we know quite a lot about what they thought about that. And that's the basis for all of my work on emotions. Yeah, well, I'm glad you mentioned the Stoics. I thought, we'll probably talk about this when we talk about emotions, but I thought you were not such a fan. In fact, I think you might have

said as much a few minutes ago, not such a fan of their view on the emotions. But as you may or may not know, Stoicism is very much in vogue, especially outside the academy now. There's just this resurgence of interest in the Stoics, including people like Marcus Aurelius and obviously Seneca. and there are several popular authors who have written a lot about the Stoics of late. And people are applying the tenets of Stoicism, such as they are, to their lives in very much the way I was asking you about a few minutes ago, just not so much as a framework through which to view our political projects, but much more a framework through which to view one's personal collisions with the vicissitudes of life. So maybe just let's talk a bit about Stoicism specifically, and maybe some of the reservations

you have about it. Fundamental distinction I want to introduce. What the Stoics said when they said what emotions are, what is their form, what is their shape, what is their origin. And then completely separate is the normative view they take about whether we should have them, whether we should get rid of them, and so forth. So I actually think the first is they're deeply insightful and mostly correct, although their view needs to be adjusted. But on the second, I think they're just dead wrong, not

totally wrong, but quite wrong. And the people who write about Stoicism today don't make that distinction for the most part. A lot of the work that you're talking about really doesn't do serious work on Stoicism. So if your listeners want a really good book, there's a recent book by my former student Nancy Sherman, a really excellent philosopher, which tells what she thinks the Stoics were really on about, what the normative tenets of Stoicism are, and what is the part that we can take seriously. And she criticizes a lot of this other work. So I would strongly recommend that book to anyone who really wants to know. It's written for a general audience. But anyhow,

no, what I'm interested in is what they think emotions are. The claim that they make, which at the time was not so surprising, but later, I guess people have come to doubt it, and now it's back in vogue again, is that emotions are not just mindless gusts of wind or impulses that flow through our bodies, but they're forms of thinking about the important goods outside ourselves that we don't control. Now, as I say, for a long time, all the way up through Adam Smith, that was the dominant view in the Western tradition of philosophy. Spinoza is nothing but modernized stoicism. But then along came both Hume and William James, and they created a much more irrationalistic view of emotions such that they're mere impressions recognized by the way they feel without any cognitive content. And that view held sway in England and the United States, while on the continent, Sartre, who stuck to the more

original Stoic view, had a lot more to say about emotions. So for a long time, the philosophy of emotions was very arid. But then a group of psychologists noticed that it actually, the Humean view, doesn't explain the behavior of animals or humans either. There's a great psychologist named Richard Lazarus, who said we really have to go back to Greece, you know, because we're now on the wrong track. And so that work and work by other later psychologists put us back on the right track. And then more recently, work by biologists who study the emotions of animals. The great primatologist Frantz Duval has a new book on this called Mama's Last Hug. Mama is a chimpanzee. Anyway, he says by now, everyone agrees that

emotions involve thought about the world. And the person he gives most credit to, and I think a very extraordinary person, is the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. Damasio studied a patient whose brain had been damaged, and he was damaged in a way that affected his ability to feel emotions. It harked back to an earlier case with damage in a similar part of the brain. But anyway, this patient not only felt no emotions, but he couldn't make up his mind about what to do. He scored very high on IQ tests.

He could play chess and so on, but he couldn't tell what he was gonna do next because nothing stood out as mattering more to him than anything else. And so from this, Damasio developed the view, which the Stoics already had, that emotions are responses to things to which we ascribe great value out there in the world. And they evolved. Of course, the Stoics didn't believe in evolution, but Damasio did, they evolved to help steer us in the world. So an animal needs to know what is the bad out there. And so fear informs the animal, here's a big bad

thing, you better get out of there. And that's the role that emotions play. They involve appraisals, and the appraisals of the external thing are what I would call eudaimonistic. That is, they're pertinent to our own well-being and they guide us in the world. So that's now the prevailing view in biology. And there are still some philosophers who cling to the Humean model. I teach a course called Emotions, Reason, and Law, and I've taught it for now about 15 years. When I started, there were people whom I could assign as modern Humeans. But by now, those people have qualified their view so much that really, there's none that I would count as a real modern Humean.

Because biology is something everyone has to pay attention to. And the biologists are saying with one accord, emotions involve thought. So that's where we are today. And the Stoics have, you know, won the battle as it were against the humans. guided by our emotions to the degree that we are by default. So you take an emotion like anger, you know, someone has said something that you find powerfully annoying, and the recognition of this event out in the world which you can't control, you know, the small mouth noises made by one of your detractors, causes you to feel a surge of anger which seems to suggest some kind of behavioral imperative, right? If you're going to follow this gust of anger to its logical conclusion, you will say or do something which will further compound, on the Stoics account, further compound your problem,

and that the deeper problem is that you yourself are being blown around by events over which you have no control, and normatively you should recognize how absurd this is and what a waste of your energy and attention it is to be so captivated by the thoughts and words of other people, and you should seize some kind of sovereignty over your inner life here and simply let go of anger. You should have woken up that morning realizing that you were going to confront a host of imbeciles throughout the day who were going to say things that were designed to provoke you, and you should be unprovokable. What about that picture do you not like, if anything?

Well, you'll soon see that anger is a special case for me, but let me just talk about the general issue. So what phoetics think is that we all should not ascribe any high importance or value to anything outside ourselves that we do not control. And they think, for example, you shouldn't really love your children. And if the child dies, you should think, in fact, this is a direct quote from Cicero, I was already aware that I had begotten a mortal. Now, what I think is there are some things to which people ascribe great importance outside themselves about which the Stoics are right. For example, we probably shouldn't describe much importance to reputation or gossip and things like that. And a lot of the examples that the Stoics use are of that kind, because Roman society, people are getting very wrought up over,

I mean, Seneca meditates at the end of each day. He got all wrought up because somebody, the doorman was rude to him. Somebody seated him at the wrong table and so on. But I think, you know, it's very important to love. And the Stoics don't make room for love. They just don't. They think that we should have attachment only to our own rational being, and that that can never be damaged. So of course, we don't have to have fear in that connection, or grief. And so there's no place, no place for fear, no place for grief, and that we should care for one another in a rational way. But if one person dies, not an occasion for grief. The

community can be based on a kind of rational goodwill. And this is, you know, this is, I think, wrong. I think deep love always causes some problems in political life, for sure. It causes problems in anyone's life, but the right thing is not to get rid of it. So I do not think that we should or could get rid of love and therefore not of fear, but we can calibrate them and think, when is this fear justified? Am I fearing too much or for the wrong reasons? All of those things. But now anger. Okay, so anger is usually defined in this tradition as not only involving the thought that you have been wronged by somebody, but the thought that it would be right to take some kind of retribution or retaliation against that person. So it includes the desire for either revenge or retaliation as a part of

what anger itself is. Now, what I say, and I came to this realization later, it was when I was working on my Locke lectures for Oxford that I gave in 2014. And so it's in my book, Anger and Forgiveness in 2016. I had not talked much about anger before that. I talked mostly about grief and love and the ones that I particularly like. But anger, I just sort of, it slipped by me, and I included it in lists. But when I began to actually work on it, and think about the damage done by retributive wishes, I came to the conclusion that this wish for payback, which is very influential in both personal life and political life, is not only counterproductive, but it's actually a form of kind of empty, magical thinking. People think, oh, my child has been killed. Well,

if I make sure that this offender gets the death penalty, then that will pay back, and then things will be even in the cosmos. The cosmic balance will be struck. And it doesn't do anything to assuage the grief. And it doesn't do anything to make a world in which fewer crimes would occur. So while I think punishment is often justified, I think the reason for which it's justified is never backward looking retribution, which does no good and is empty. But rather, it's forward-looking. That can include reform of the offender. It can include deterrence of the offender, deterrence of other people, and it can also include expression of society's most important values. But that's all forward-looking. So there is a kind of anger that I sort of give a name to because I think all of the ordinary words are unclear as to which type

they're talking about, which I call it transition anger, an anger that faces forward and says, well, that was outrageous. Now, let's see what we can do about that. That should not happen again. And that kind, I think, is very, very important. And since we're on Martin Luther King's birthday today, I want to point out that he made that distinction. I only discovered that he made it later after I had kind of invented it myself, but he made exactly that distinction. He says there's one kind that's retaliatory, backward looking, and it does no good. And he interestingly says it's not revolutionary. And I think he's absolutely right, because you can't have a revolution if you're just looking behind you. You have to look forward. And of course, his speeches include many injunctions to a kind of transition angle because he points to the outrageous things that racism has done.

But he then turns to what can we do about it? And we have to face the future, he always says, in a spirit of hope, faith, and love. And then he quickly says, I don't mean romantic love, and I don't mean you have to like the people, but I mean the kind of love that sees in that person a possibility of change. And that's the kind of love that he preached. So, you know, that's what I said in anger and forgiveness. And I say it again. So I think anger is unusual in the sense that the Stoics are more right about that than they are about other things, but they don't, you know, they don't do it for the right reasons. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I think I hit upon a similar distinction in Shades of Anger. You use the word in describing it, I think of a distinction between personal anger. It may in fact be just anger in one of its modes, but it

has as its object not retaliation or retribution, but stopping whatever ongoing harms can be stopped and making the world better. But it does have this divisive energy of recognizing in a very visceral way that certain things out in the world are unacceptable and shouldn't be tolerated. But the transitional part is in the mode that the intolerance of the unacceptable takes going forward, and whether that is a vengeful, backward-looking, magical attempt to settle a score, or if it's actually a forward-looking attempt to just make the world a better place. There's some other emotion. Go ahead. I want to say that there are a lot of people who do make the distinction,

but they still like the retributive. If you look at the field of law, the justification of punishment, I would say the majority of people in the United States think that retribution is the primary justification for punishment. The deterrence people have been around ever since the British utilitarians. The utilitarians thought that deterrence was the only rational purpose of punishment. So people like Bentham and Beccaria, and then of course, they argued that the death penalty makes no sense. But most people today, you know, both the lay public who love retribution and the legal thinkers still cling to retribution. I actually hadn't thought to talk about this, but I just find this such an interesting question.

How do you think about cases of punishment when someone has committed a crime and committed real harm, but it's obvious from the nature of the case that this is not a person who is ever going to create such harm again? So that you can't tell yourself the story that this person belongs in prison because of all the harm they may yet do other people. You know, crimes of passion fall in here, but I thought of a case the other day which is similar, which you think of, and actually this goes to the question of moral luck, which I wanted to speak with you about. You know, many of us, this is a point that Thomas Nagel has made and perhaps others have made as well, that, you know, so much of acting for the good or the bad in the world comes down to luck.

Many of us have gotten away with things that would have been astounding and life-deranging examples of negligence had we not gotten away with them. So we've all driven a car, having had too much to drink. There are many people out there driving a car while looking at their phones when they shouldn't or adjusting their stereos at dangerous moments. And some number of people don't get away with this, right? So somebody is going to be texting on their phone today behind the wheel, and they're going to run over somebody's child. And obviously that's going to be a terrible outcome for the child and the child's family, but it's also going to be a terrible outcome for the quite ordinary person who did something stupid for half a second and his or

her life will never be the same as a result. And we currently punish such people. I mean, people do go to prison for having been texting while driving and being unlucky enough to kill somebody. But the truth is, we all know what it's like to be that person because virtually all of us have been that person and merely been lucky enough not to suffer any consequences. for any consequences. So I guess this is a two-part question. How do you think about punishment in cases like that when it's obvious that the, in the case of the person who was texting while driving, that person's already suffering the punishment of the damned because they killed someone's child when they were just looking at their phone and they're, you know, these are, let's stipulate, completely ordinary, well-intentioned people who just did something stupid. You know, this person's life is never going to be the same. Now we're going to put them in prison, presumably just to make an example of them and to deter,

hopefully deter other people from texting while driving. But it strikes me as a morally questionable or at least interesting case because we know this person is not, this is the last person who's going to be texting while driving ever again, and we know their life has already been ruined by what has occurred. So I guess the question is, how do you think about cases like that? And then more largely, how do you think about the moral significance of luck? Okay, well, that's a big question. Yeah. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.

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