Making Sense with Sam Harris - #446 — How to Do the Most Good

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

Sam Harris speaks with Michael Plant about the philosophy of happiness and effective altruism. They discuss the nature of well-being, Nozick's "Experience Machine" thought experiment, the validity of self-reported happiness data, the conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self, Derek Parfit's "Repugnant Conclusion," the disconnect between moral intentions and consequences, why treating depression is more impactful than cash, the massive disparities in charitable impact, the potential effects of AI on human flourishing, the meaning crisis in a post-work future, 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.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. 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. I am here with Michael Plant. Michael, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me on. So we were introduced by Peter Singer, and I think you, was he your dissertation advisor?

He was. All right. So maybe you can give your background before we jump into the topics of mutual interest. Well, so I'm a philosopher and global happiness researcher, and I kind of got started on this interest age, about 16. I first came across philosophy, my first lesson on philosophy, I came across the idea of utilitarianism, that we should maximize happiness. And I thought, oh, wow, that's, I don't know if that's the whole story of ethics,

but that's a massive story of ethics. You might say it was a waking up moment. And then over the next 20 years, I've kind of pursued two topics that's this philosophical question or should we maximize happiness? I mean, I thought that was quite plausible, but lots of people thought it was nuts. So what's going on there? And then this empirical question of, well, how do we do that? You know, what in fact, how can we apply happiness research to finding out what really we ought to do? And I've been kind of pursuing those tracks and those have taken me to what I'm doing now. So maybe we should define a few terms before we proceed. A couple will be very easy and then I think happiness will be very hard.

But you just mentioned utilitarianism. How do you define that and do you differentiate it from consequentialism? And what is the rival meta-ethical position or positions that if they exist, I'm uncertainness of whether they actually exist. But we can talk about that. Well, so utilitarianism is, or classical utilitarianism is the view that what one ought to do is to maximize the sum total of happiness. And then that differs from consequentialism, where consequentialism is one ought to do the most good. So you don't necessarily

have to define good in terms of happiness. You can think of that as desires or other sorts of things. And then these kind of consequentialist theories contrast with what are called sort of down to logical or kind of common sense ethical theories, where those theories will say, Sometimes you should maximize the good, but also there are constraints. There are things you shouldn't do. You shouldn't kill people to save lives, perhaps. And there are prerogatives. So there are things you maybe would be good for you to do, but you don't have to do.

So maybe the utilitarian might say, look, you should give lots and lots of money to charity. And the deontologist would say, well, I recognize it would be better in some way for the world, for people if I did that. But I don't have to do that. I have these kind of prerogatives. That's there. that's car lay the land. Now, do you feel that one of these positions wins? I mean, how would you define your met ethics? And in the, I mean, I think I've said this before in the podcast, but perhaps you're unaware of it. I do think any sane deontology collapses to some form of consequentialism

covertly. I mean, if you say it's not all about maximizing the good, there's some very important principles that we must hold to like, you know, cons categorical imperative or some other deontological principle. To my eye, what is smuggled in there covertly is the claim that that principle is on balance good, right? I mean, like if someone knew that the categorical imperative was guaranteed to produce the worst outcomes across the board, I don't think most deontologists would bite the bullet there and say, yeah, that's what we want. The worst outcomes across the board, they're holding to it because it is on its face intuitively a great way to implement something like rule utilitarianism or rule consequentialism. What's your

thoughts on that? So lots of the objections which you might make a kind of against utilitarianism that it's taking, maximizing too seriously, are also problems you're likely to find to a lesser degree in non-consequentialist theories. So an example is, you know, sort of a kind of a classic differentiating point would be you shouldn't kill one person to save. lives. So you might say, well, you shouldn't kill one person to save five people. And the consequences might say, well, look, you probably should do that, you know, assuming that's just sort of a, there's no kind of extra complexity to it. But then if you kind of up the ante and you say, well, what about if you kill one person to save a million lives or a billion lives, then the

moderate consequentialists might think, well, this is outweighed, these kind of normative badness of killing is outweighed by the kind of the goodness of the life saved. So you might think that there's kind of, you know, still what's going on under the hood of these, uh, delatological theories is there's still kind of some implicit maths going on, like trading off bits and pieces. But, so that's sort of an accusation that consequentialists might make against deontologists, but I mean, downologists will kind of fight back and say, well, actually, look, you don't, I mean, there are conceptions of downatological theories where you, you kind of can't do it

exactly like that. And so it's kind of a, there's an open debate, which, you know, perhaps we, is kind of too much in the weeds, but as to whether you can just reduce denatological theories to kind of looking at value plus some kind of other normative principles. Some people think you can and other people think that you can't. Yeah. The attacks on consequentialism always boiled down in my experience to not actually paying attention to the full set of consequences that follow from any action.

So when someone says, well, if you're a consequentialist, you should be happy to have your doctor come, you know, you show up to the doctor's office for a checkup, your doctor knowing that he's got five other patients who could use your organs. he should just come out and, you know, anesthetize you and kill you and transplant your organs and his other patients. And that's a net benefit for the world. You know, five people get organs and one person dies. And that's often put forward, or examples like that are often put forward as kind of a knockdown argument against consequentialism. But what people are not adding on the balance there is all of the consequences that follow from such a callous and horrific practice, right?

I mean, if all, if everyone knew that at any moment they might be swept off the street and and butchered for the benefit of others, what kind of society would we be living in? And what, you know, what would it be, what would it mean to be a doctor? And how would you feel about your doctor? And how would the doctor be able, you know, asleep at night, et cetera? I mean, so the consequences just propagate endlessly from a practice like that. And it's just obviously awful. And no one wants to live in that society for good reason.

But again, this is all just a story of consequences. It's not the story of some abstract principle. But anyway, we don't have to get wrapped around that axle. I just wanted to touch that. So if you're a consequentialist of whatever description, what should you care about in the end? Well, there are kind of a few options as to which kind of consequences you're going to say matter. So one which I think any consequentious is going to buy into is well-being. So well-being, kind of term of art and philosophy for what ultimately makes someone's life go well for them,

kind of three canonical theories of well-being. You've got hedonism, so happiness is what matters. You've got desire theories where getting what you want is what matters. And then you've got this thing called the objective list where it's usually a few things. Maybe it's, you know, happiness and desires are on there, but it might also be things like truth, beauty, love, achievement. And I think there's, you know, so any, that's going to be kind of one of the key consequences. You might also think maybe there's, you want to account for kind of equality or justice. It's kind of a, you might think it's a bit of an open question as to whether those are kind of deontological principles or sort of value-based principles.

But when I think about this and what kind of, kind of, kind of most, motivates. My thinking is that it just seems that I find it, I just find it very compelling that when we're thinking about what makes someone's go life for, their life go well for them, it's their happiness and their suffering. It's the kind of the quality of life for them. It's how they, how they feel overall. And this is, I guess it's, you know, there are some bits of philosophy that think that this is, is kind of a mad theory and kind of no zick in the experience machine, would you be, you know, if you really believe in happiness, would you plug yourself into a matrix style scenario? But I think in kind of weighing up the three theories of well-being,

I just think the hedonism, the idea that what makes your life go well for you is how you feel overall. I think that's got the strongest arguments behind it. And that motivates lots of the other things that I do. Yeah, I mean, I think to take No-Sex, experience machine refutation of consequentialism here, utilitarianism, it's, again, is what he's pressing on there is the intuition, which I think is widely shared by people, is that we should have something like a reality bias, right? That you don't want to be, you don't want your state of subjective well-being to be totally uncoupled from the reality of your life in the world. You don't want to be in relationship with seeming others who are not in fact others, so you don't want to be hallucinating about everything, right? So this is why you

wouldn't want to be in the matrix if you, in fact, you wouldn't want to be in the matrix. Now, I would grant that there's certain conditions under which the matrix becomes more and more attempting and reality becomes less and less so, right? I mean, we can imagine just some forced choice between a very awful universe that is real and a simulated one, which is perfect, in which case we might begin to wonder, well, what's the point of reality in that case? But I think it's, again, that this is a story of yet more consequences at the level of people's experience. I mean, to know that you're, you know, I'm just imagine, you know, having the best day of your life or years of your life and you're in a relationship with people who are incredibly important

to you, who you love, and to find out at some point that all of this was a hallucination, right? And there was no, which is to say not merely that it's impermanent, which any experienced empirical reality is, we'll all discover that at death, or even just the end of any hour, but there would be this additional knowledge that it was fake in some sense, right? Like the person you thought you were in the presence of sharing meaning and love with was not a person, right? They had no point of view on you. It was all just a hall of mirrors. I think that we get an icky feeling from that, and it's understandable, and that icky feeling translates into a degradation of the well-being we would find in that circumstance. But again, I don't think we can

press that too far. I think having a loose reality bias makes sense, but I think you could easily argue for ways in which you would want your view of yourself or the world to not be the most brutal, high contrast, you know, right at all times view, if in fact that would prove dysfunctional and corrosive in other ways, which I think it's, you know, it's pretty easy to see that it might. Yeah. So, I mean, in addition to that, I think a reason not to get into the experience machine is I think we have more responsibilities.

If you're just stuck in the experience machine, you can't make a difference to. to anyone else. I also, a couple more thoughts, I also think it's sort of, I'm using that the experience machine has taken as a sort of a slam-dunk objection to hedonism when, you know, if we look at how technology is changing, we are increasingly living in something like the experience machine. I mean, there are some days, like, I don't leave my house. Like, I interact with people the whole day, you know, through the magic of the internet and so on. Am I, in fact, in the experience machine? But anyway, leaving those, those bits to the side, I think a point that's really substantially overlooked is when there's discussion about what well-being is, it's often,

okay, so the argument is, is happiness the only thing that matters? And then there's this sort of, there's this sort of cognitive mistake from thinking, well, if happiness isn't the only thing that matters, then it doesn't actually matter very much. And so I often find I have to remind people, even if they are not hedonists and few people are, and that's fine, that, look, even if you don't think it's anything that matter, you do still think that it matters. If you didn't think that it matter, you would think that people's suffering and misery didn't matter in and of itself. And that's a very peculiar thought. So it's at least going to be one of the things that matter, or it's going to be very important to whatever it is else that matters intrinsically.

So if you're engaging in morality and you're not taking happiness seriously and taking suffering seriously, then you're missing a major part of what really matters. So what do you do with the fact that happiness and well-being are these elastic concepts that are really impossible to define in any kind of closed way because there's their frontiers of happiness and well-being that we are gradually exploring and presumably there are experiences that we would all recognize that are better than any we've yet had and they're sort out there on the horizon and we can't really close our accounts with reality at this point and say hey you know well-being ultimate human well-being is this because a thousand years from now it may consist of something you know

that we can't even form a concept around presently. And what do you do with the fact that, and this is explicit in many of the objections to the concept of happiness because it somehow seems thin and doesn't somehow capture everything that's worth wanting, what do you do with the fact that there are certain forms of suffering and stress that seem integral to the deeper reaches of well-being,

you know, so that it's not, it can't purely be about avoiding pain or avoiding stress or maximizing short-term pleasure, right? I mean, we all know what it's like to, or many of us know, what it's like to go to the gym and work out hard, and if you could experience sample that hour, it would be true to say that much of it was excruciating, and if you were having that experience for some other reason,

like if you woke up in the middle of the night and felt the way you felt, you know, doing a deadlift or whatever, you would run straight to the hospital, you know, convince you're about to die. But because of the context and because of the consequence, of spending that hour that way, most people learn to love that experience, even if it's negatively valenced as a matter of sensation and physiology while having it. How do you define well-being or flourishing or happiness to encompass those wrinkles? Yeah, so I think the definitional

problems are maybe not so sharp. I mean, in kind of philosophy, we just sort of nail them down one way or another. So well-being, well, makes your life go well for you overall. And then happiness, I just understand, as feeling good overall. So it has this intrinsic quality of pleasure. If you don't know what pleasure is, sorry, I don't think I can tell you what that feels like. But that's sort of the, you know, the kind of end of the line. We just sort of recognize there is an intuitive, kind of pleasantness, kind of positive or negative valence in our experiences. So then there's this question about the causes of happiness and, you know, what is happiness consistent? So what I think happiness consists in is positive valence experience. And then what are the causes of happiness?

Well, you know, that's a, that's an empirical question. You're absolutely right that, you know, are we can possibly discover lots about what are the causes of happiness to how do they compare to each other over time and what in fact are the best ways to promote happiness, which hopefully we will come to a due course. On the bit about suffering, yeah, this comes up quite a bit as like, well, you know, but if you only live the happy life, wouldn't you, this is a bit like the point you're making about kind of consequentialism. People say, well, if you, if you only experience happiness that would in fact not maximize your sum total of happiness over time because you need the misery to have some happiness. But I mean, I think that's, you know, sort of fine as a fact

of the matter. If you're looking at your experiences over time, then you do want some kind of good stuff and some bad stuff if you're going to, you know, have the greatest area under the line. I mean, we, you know, we know this. We do things like we take ourselves camping because we know it's going to be a miserable experience so that then we can go back to civilization and enjoy the fruits of civilization. Some of us do. I've stopped camping. I've retired. You've had the camping experience. So maybe that, you can remember, oh, thank God I'm not doing that. Yeah. Well, so, but do you actually think that my intuition kind of runs the other way? I don't think we need awful things to compare our happiness to, to recognize that we're happy.

I think happiness or human well-being could become increasingly refined such that the thing you're comparing the best experience to is still a very good experience. It's just not nearly as good as the best. So there's some version of camping that is better than what 99% of people experience on a day-to-day basis, but which could become the reference point if one were needed of comparison to some yet future state that's even more blissful and expansive and creative and beautiful. encompassing of depth and intuitions that we, you know, very few people ever experience. Yeah, so I don't think, I agree with you, it's not sort of logically necessary. But if you look at how kind of happiness seems to work for people, it's, it's highly

comparative. And there's some kind of oddnesses about the things we choose that could compare ourselves to and not others. So I kind of, a case in point that's kind of relevant for the moment is in the kind of the west of world, you know, your side of the pond, my side of the point. We're talking about a cost of living crisis. Okay. And people are sort of feeling like they're feeling the pinch, incomes are going down, things are more expensive.

But look, here's sort of another perspective on this. If you earn the median salary in the US, which is something like $40,000, you're in the top 2% of the global distribution. And if you think about how many people... I think it's more than that. I thought the, you said median, but I think the mean per capita GDP in the US is like $65,000, something like that. I think it's higher than that, but it's higher than the UK. Yeah, I'm thinking of the median. I don't know the mean GDP. Yeah, I guess the median way is considerably lower because there's very rich people, yes.

Yeah. And then if you're looking not just at the moment, but across time, I mean, you know, how long of, when did homo sapiens become homo sapiens? But if by one estimate, there's like 120 billion people who have ever lived. So if you put those together, if you're alive today and earning a median salary in the US, you're in the top 0.1% of rich people, 0.1% of rich people who have ever lived. And yet, what are people talking about? They're saying, oh, this is the cost of living crisis.

Things are so expensive. And when I make this point to be, they'll look at me like, I'm strange. Well, of course, that's not relevant. Like, that's not how I think about my life. But, you know, that's the kind of curiosity there is that how there are certain things we compare our lives to and sort of naturally, intuitively, but we could make different comparisons. And so relating to your point, we could bring ourselves to think of the misery in the world that we are otherwise avoiding.

And that would give us greater happiness. But in fact, we're in quite narrow tracks and we just compare ourselves to the things which are salient, the people near around us. And so in practice, maybe you do need that reminding now and then of some misfortune that can make you grateful for the rest of your, for the other parts of our life. Well, this issue of comparison, I think, runs pretty deep because given it's so, much of our judgments of our own well-being and in fact our experience of whether or not we are flourishing is based on comparison, it's based on context, it's based on the cognitive framing that is laid over the just the raw sensory experience of being oneself moment to moment. One could ask, what is the, we're going to get into effective altruism and what is, you know,

what problems on Earth are worth solving and how we prioritize those things. But if it's a matter of alleviating suffering and alleviating the most excruciating suffering first, presumably, and maximizing human well-being, maybe it's in fact true to say that the homeless on the streets of San Francisco are suffering more than the poorest of the poor in sub-Saharan Africa or in an Indian village or somewhere where objectively they are more deprived, right? Because there's no one starving to death in San Francisco, whatever their condition. I mean, they might be dying of fentanyl abuse or something else, but there's no one starving to death in America as just not a thing because there's just so much food. And you can go to a

shelter, you can go to a pantry, or you can go to a dumpster, I mean, you can get food. But there are places on earth where people still starve to death. Happily, that's less and less the case. And yet, if you imagine the experience of being homeless, you know, right outside of the Salesforce Tower or wherever you are in San Francisco, the prospect of comparing the unraveling of your life with the lives that seem to be going on so smoothly all around you suggest to me that it's at least conceivable that's that suffering, that mental suffering, the experience of being in that bad condition is worse than much or maybe everything that's going on in objectively poorer parts of the world. How do you think about that? Yeah, I find that extremely plausible and very probably true.

having walked through the streets of San Francisco and also visited some some of the poorest bits of the world. Yeah, I would imagine that we're more so no. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.