Making Sense with Sam Harris - #48 — What Is Moral Progress?

Episode Date: October 21, 2016

Sam Harris speaks with philosopher Peter Singer about the foundations of morality, expanding the circle of our moral concern, politics, free speech, conspiracy thinking, Edward Snowden, the importance of intentions, WWII, euthanasia, eating “happy cows,” 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.

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. Today I'll be speaking with Peter Singer. Peter is certainly one of the most famous living philosophers, and he's been very influential on public morality, both with respect to the treatment of animals and in this growing movement that I spoke about with Will McCaskill on a previous podcast known as Effective Altruism. He's a professor of bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton. He's the author of many books, including Animal Liberation, which is often considered the silent spring of the animal rights movement. He's also written The Life You

Can Save and The Most Life You Can Save and The Most Good You Can Do and The Ethics of What We Eat and many other books. His most recent book is Ethics in the Real World, 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter, and I highly recommend it. Peter and I talk about many things, and we ran out of time, frankly. We had two hours booked, and as you'll hear at the end, I come up against the brick wall of time constraint and really was wanting to talk about many more things, so I'll have to bring Peter back at some point. We spend the first half hour or so talking about how it's possible to talk about moral truth. And if that's not to your taste, if you're not

really worried about how we can ground our morality in universal truth claims, you might skip 30 minutes in or so where we start talking about questions of practical ethics. And we touch many things, the ethics of violence, politics, free speech, euthanasia. There's just a lot we cover, and I hope you find it useful. And if you do find conversations like this useful, you can once again support the podcast at samharris.org forward slash support. And as always, your support is greatly appreciated, and it's what allows me to clear my schedule to do this sort of thing and keeps us all ad free. And now I bring you Peter Singer. So I have Peter Singer on the line. Peter, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Sam, for having me on the podcast. It's good to be talking with you.

Listen, everyone will know who you are, but perhaps you can briefly describe what you do at this point and the kinds of questions you focus on. Sure. I'm a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, and I also have a regular visiting position at the University of Melbourne in Australia, which is where I'm originally from I work in ethics I've been interested in a range of different issues I wrote a book called animal liberation published back in 1975 that some regard as having started off the modern animal rights movement I've also been interested for many years in the obligations of the affluent, people like us, to people in extreme poverty elsewhere in the world. And I've written on issues in bioethics, questions about the sanctity of life, and a range of other questions that come up in that field.

Yeah, and your new book is entitled Ethics in the Real World. And I'll have a link to it on my blog, and I certainly encourage listeners to get that. It's great because it's divided into these 82 very short chapters, literally like three-page essays on philosophical questions. And again, emphasis is on the real world here. So you tackle questions like, should poor people be able to sell their organs? Is it more ethical to eat fish than cows? Should Holocaust denial be a crime? These are all questions where public policy and how people actually live their lives are just explicitly in play and just super digestible philosophical essays. So I recommend people get that.

If I'm not mistaken, Peter, you and I have only met once, right? I think it was at this Arizona event organized by Lawrence Krauss, which was... That's right. Yes, that's the only time we've actually met in person. Yeah, which unfortunately, it was titled The Great Debate, somewhat pretentiously perhaps, but it was you and me and Steve Pinker and Lawrence and Patricia Churchland, I think, and a few other people. And that's available for people to see on YouTube. If I recall correctly, you and I got somewhat bogged down, disagreeing about the foundations of morality and human values. But I had the sense at the time that we were talking past one another and

getting derailed on semantics more than anything else. So I'd like us to start with the topic of the foundations of morality and to answer the question or attempt to answer the question, how is it possible for something to be right and wrong in this universe, or good and bad? And then move from there into what is the relationship between the claims we make about good and evil, and right and wrong, and facts of the sort that fall within the purview of science. And then once we have just a concept of goodness in hand and how it relates to truth claims, then I want to go on to talk about just the practical reality of doing good in the world. And this will lead to questions of effective altruism and

population ethics and moral illusions and all the rest. So this first question I put to you is, how is it that you think about moral truth? Does moral truth exist? And if it does, think about moral truth? Does moral truth exist? And if it does, what is the relationship between the true claims we make about good and evil or right and wrong and facts of the sort we talk about in science? Right. That's a good question and a very large question. It's one that I've grappled with on and off for most of my philosophical career. And I have changed my views on it significantly in the last few years. So earlier on in my career, I would have said that there are no objective truths in ethics. But we can prescribe that certain things be done and we can prescribe them not just for ourselves or out of our own interest, but we can prescribe them not just for ourselves or out of

our own interest, but we can prescribe them in a way that is, to use a term that my former Oxford supervisor, Professor R.M. Hare coined, universalizable. That doesn't mean that they're the same for everyone, but what it means is that I can express them without referring to myself or without using terms like I or proper names. So, for example, if I were to say, as Donald Trump has recently been saying, it's fine for me not to pay any taxes, then I would have to say it's fine for anyone in my situation not to pay taxes. And of course, you know, one might not be so keen to do that. You can think of other circumstances in which people might say even worse things. The Nazi might say, it's good for me to kill Jews. But then we can ask the Nazi to imagine, well, suppose you suddenly discovered actually that you're of Jewish ancestry or your parents had hidden this from you. Does that mean that it's fine for any Nazi to kill

you? Most Nazi probably would think twice. There might be a few ideological fanatics who would still say yes, but most people wouldn't. So that was as far as I thought you could go, really, that it did depend on people's inclinations and prescriptions, and there was no objective truth in it. But I now think that that's not correct. I think that there are some claims which you can say are truths, that they are things that we can reflect on and that strike us as simply undeniable, if you like, as self-evident, although that's not to say that everybody will immediately agree with them. But an example would be that inflicting agony for no real purpose, let's say inflicting agony on someone else because

it brings you some kind of moderate enjoyment, mild enjoyment, uh, uh, that that's wrong. Um, uh, and what's really, what's really at work here is the idea that, that agony is something that's a bad thing, that the world is a better place if there's less agony in it. Um, and I do think that that's, that's a very hard claim to deny, that the fact that someone is in agony provides us, provides anyone really, with a reason to try to alleviate that agony or to stop it. And the fact that doing an action will cause someone to be in agony is a reason not to do it. Not necessarily an overriding reason, but it is a reason against doing it. But now, so you say your views here changed recently. Well, I guess, how recently? Are we talking since actually I saw you in Arizona or before that?

Probably when I saw you in Arizona, I was to some extent in transition. And it's been a sort of slow transition. I was always trying, even maybe 30 years ago, I was trying to find ways in which you could tighten up the arguments, that you could bring in some role for reason in this. The problem with the position that my mentor, R.M. Hare, had developed was that he said that universalizability just depended on the concept of ought, the basic moral concept, ought, good, and right, incorporated this idea of universalizability. And the problem with that was that if somebody said, okay, so I'm just not going to use those words, right? Instead of saying you ought to do something, I'll say you schmort do something or, you know, that's schmite. I'm just going to invent my own concepts. And now it's fine for me to not pay any taxes. And I don't have to say that anybody else in my position, you know,

also doesn't have to pay taxes or any of these other implications. And that just didn't seem good enough. That seemed too easy a way out of moral arguments. So, um, I was always looking for something a bit stronger and looking at whether you could argue that, uh, there was a rational requirement, uh, that was corresponding to this universalizability. And, uh, so I guess I, I only wrote about this in a book called the point of view of the universe which is a co-authored book with a polish philosopher karajina de lazari radic came out in 2014 so it's you know perhaps a year or two before that um in the in thinking about that book, I had already come to the conclusion that you can argue that there are some things that are moral truths or self-evident.

The 19th century philosopher Henry Sidgwick, who we discuss in that book, describes them as moral axioms. Yeah, so it's within the last, let's say, five years, definitely, that I've come to this position. So if I'm not mistaken, this is anchored in a kind of consequentialism or utilitarianism. So what do you do with the claim that consequentialism is itself just an expression of a mere preference and is unjustifiable? Well, I don't think that that's correct. I think that, I mean, there are different forms of consequentialism. What they have in common, of course, is the view that what we ought to do

is the act that will have the best consequences. And then the discussion is what do we mean by best consequences? But, um, but I think that that's right. I think that, uh, when you think about, uh, different actions, if it's clear that one act will have better consequences, all things considered than any outcome, um, I'd be prepared to say that it's then true that that act is the right thing to do. Now, obviously, you know, that can be denied by people who think that there are some moral rules which we ought never to break, no matter what the consequences. That's not a view that I accept. I would try to argue that my view is true, but that really has to be at least in part by undermining the foundations of the alternative view. It's not so self-evident

that the consequentialist view is right, that one can just state it and everybody will see it to be right, partly because there'd been a whole history and culture of moral thinking, which is based on rules. Um, moral rules do have a certain social purpose. They're useful. They simplify decisions. We can't calculate from first principles every time we act, which act will have the best consequences. So it's not all that surprising that people sometimes think that these rules have a kind of inherent objectivity of their own and that we should obey them no matter what the consequences. But that's the kind of argument you need to have. I think we largely agree here. I'm tempted to

not spend a lot of time fishing around for areas where we might disagree in metaethics, but I think most of the listeners to this podcast will be familiar with my views on morality and moral realism as I lay out in my book, The Moral Landscape. I guess just a couple of points I would make here. I think whenever I hear someone say that they are not a consequentialist, they hold to some rule that they think is important regardless of consequences. What I believe I have found, without exception in those conversations and in reading the work of people like Kant and other famous non-consequentialists, is that they smuggle in consequences into the primacy of the rule. If the rule had bad consequences, it would never suggest itself as a reliable basis for ethics. If Kant's categorical imperative reliably produced needless human misery that was otherwise avoidable, no one would think that the

categorical imperative was a good idea, right? And so if you drill down on why people are attached to a rule, you tend to get justifications for it, which have to be cashed out in the form of consequences, whether they're actual or potential. Has that been your experience, or do you see it differently? I certainly think that the tendency of most of the rules that are part of everyday morality is to produce better consequences. I think you're right about that, and I think you're probably right that any rule that reliably produced more misery would be dropped, and a different rule would be substituted. But of course, what does often happen, and Kant is a good instance of this, is that you have a rule that generally has good consequences,

like the rule that you should tell the truth. And then somebody imagines a situation where a would-be murderer comes to your house and asks if you have seen so-and-so, and it so happens that so-and-so knows that this guy is pursuing him and has asked if you will hide him in your basement. Now, most of us would, of course, say, well, it is justified to lie in those circumstances, but Kant actually sticks to the rule and says, no, it's wrong to lie even then. So part of the problem with the people who are not consequentialist, or some of them at least, is they want to stick to their rules no matter what, even if the general tendency of the rule is to have good consequences. And so I would describe that as a rule that

we should apply in everyday life, but not as a rule we should stick to no matter what. The other thing here which gives us this sense, or gives many people the sense, that there can't be such a thing as moral truth is we value differences of opinion in philosophy, and in particular moral philosophy, in a way that we don't in the rest of our truth claiming about the world. So if someone comes to the table saying that they have a very different idea about how to treat women, we should make them live in bags as the Taliban do, and this is how we want to live, and there's no place to stand where you can tell me that I'm wrong because I'm just being guided by my age-old moral code, for which I even have a religious justification. Many people in the West, I think largely as a result of what post-modernism has done to the humanities, but perhaps there are

other reasons, imagine that there's just no place to stand where you can contradict that opinion or dismiss it. You can't actually say, well, some people are not adequate to the conversation for reasons that should be obvious. And yet we do this in science and everywhere else. I mean, just in journalism or in history, in any place where people are purporting to make claims that are true, when someone shows up and demands that their conspiracy theory, theories about alien abductions or whatever it is, get taken seriously, we just say, sorry, these views are so uninteresting and so obviously incredible that they don't actually constitute any kind of rejoinder to what is being said here. And so it's just, it's very easy to disregard them.

Now, occasionally some, you know, outline view becomes credible for some reason, and then it subverts what we think is true. And that's just a process of criticism that just has to run its course. But I feel like in moral philosophy, many people have just tied their hands and imagine that everyone gets a vote in moral epistemology, and it's an equal vote. And so, you know, there's just, you know, what Derek Parfit thinks about morality doesn't matter any more than what Mullah Omar thinks, and everyone is on all fours in their truth claims. And I think that's been very destabilizing for many people in the West

when it comes time to talk about the nature of human values and how we can talk about them in universal terms. Just the fact that you can still meet anthropologists, and it might even be still a majority of anthropologists who doubt whether a universal notion of human values is even a credible thing to aspire to. Yeah. I mean, anthropologists seem particularly prone to that. Maybe it's kind of occupational hazard of studying a lot of different societies. And of course you do find different particular practices in different societies, but you also find some common tendencies. For example, reciprocity is pretty much a universal value.

It's very hard to find a society in which it's not considered a good thing to do favors to those who've done favors to you. And conversely, that you're entitled to have some kind of retribution on those who've done bad things to you. But that's, of course, not to say that this is actually the right morality. This is just to say that this is kind of the evolved morality of our species and indeed not just of our species, but of long lived social primates who recognize each other as as individuals. But but I wanted to get back to the larger point that you were making. And I'm not actually, I don't quite see as much reluctance to criticize ethical views of different cultures as you described. I think most people, for example, who are not of that religious group, and it's not all Islam, but it's a particular part of Islam, who think that women should not go out in public without, you put it, wearing a bag over themselves. Um, uh, I think most people who are not of that religious group would be prepared to say that that's wrong, that, that it's, it's wrong to treat women in that way. It's wrong to, uh, deny them, uh, privileges that, uh, men automatically have. Um, and they would reject as unethical

that way of treating women. Now, what does come over the top of this is that we have, I think you and I would agree, perhaps excessive respect for religion. And I think that comes out of a long tradition of people fighting over religion and often killing over religion. And at some point, perhaps, you know, around the 17th and 18th centuries, people started to say, well, enough of this, you know around the 17th and 18th centuries people started to say well enough of this you know i'll i'll leave you alone to practice your religion and you leave me alone to practice my religion and then we don't have to kill each other over it uh and of course in in some sense that's a very good idea that we don't have to kill each other over it but um it can be taken too far it can be taken to the point of, well, every religion is somehow good in itself or

beyond criticism in itself. And I think that that's completely wrong. But if somebody tried to put it forward as a secular belief that women should cover themselves completely whenever they go out in public, whereas men are perfectly free to display their arms and legs and so on, and of course face. I think people would be pretty baffled by that view. And I don't think that they would think, oh yeah, that's fine. Well, you haven't spent as much time criticizing these views as I have, I think, in public. I would agree that most people feel that there's something wrong there, but I've noticed that the more educated you become, certainly in the

humanities, actually not just the humanities, it's science as well. Pumes, you can't derive an ought from an is, has become this shibboleth among very educated but incompletely educated people. Well, I'm going to disagree with you about that because I think that's true. That's a philosophical claim that I think is defensible. I think it's defensible within a certain construal. Yeah, we can talk about that. But I know physicists who will say, you know, I don't like slavery.

I personally would vote against it. I would put my shoulder to the wheel in resisting it, but I have no illusion that in resisting slavery, I am making any claim about what is true. There's just no place to stand in science to make those claims with respect to morality. And so what that does is that divorces morality from any conception of the well-being of conscious creatures like ourselves. And it's claiming that no matter how far advanced we become in understanding well-being and the possible experiences that suitable minds can have, we will never know anything about what is better or worse in this universe.

I mean, but so my view, again, I don't want to spend too much time on this because there's so much in applied ethics that I want to talk to you about, but I do want to hear your pushback on the ought and is issue. But I just, my claim here is that, I mean, we could forget about ought as you suggested earlier, though I take that in a very different direction. I mean, just imagine we have no conception of ought and we have no conception of morality, but we appear in a universe where certain experiences are possible. So I view morality as a kind of navigation problem. kind of navigation problem. We are conscious systems, and there is a possibility to experience unendurable and pointless misery for as long as possible. And then there are all these other

possibilities. And my view is that anything is better than the worst possible misery for everyone. Look, I totally agree with you about that moral judgment. And I also agree with you that understanding well-being, what causes brings about well-being, what reduces suffering, how our minds work, all of that is highly relevant for deciding what we ought to do. But and so I think and I also think that the physicist that you mentioned is wrong if he says my judgment that, you know, happiness is better than misery, let's say, is not true. I don't think that I can say that this is true. I think you can say that it's true, but I don't think it actually follows from the description of the natural universe. I think it follows only if you make that judgment, and I

think you actually made it, you use the word better, that it's better if there's a world in which there's, you know, people living rich, enjoyable, fulfilling lives than if they're miserable, suffering and so on. But we have to say, well, what is that judgment that it's better? I think it's a judgment that we use our reason to get at. So I think that we have normative reasons, even if we didn't use the word ought, even if we decided that the institution of morality is not one that we want to be part of. I think we'd have to say, do we have reasons for acting to bring about the happy world that you described rather than the miserable world that you described? And I would answer, yes, we definitely do have reasons for acting because it's a better world,

but I wouldn't claim that I can deduce that reason for acting simply from the description of here's one world and here's the other. Um, there has to be, it's not just a description, there has to be, as I say, something normative, by which I mean reasons that ought to move a rational being towards choosing one world rather than the other. Right. Well, I would fully agree with that, except the reason why the is-ought dichotomy is uninteresting to me is you can't get to is uninteresting to me is you can't get to any description of what is without obeying certain oughts in the first place. I mean, so you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps at some point. And so, you know, logical intuitions are not self-justifying. We just grab them and use them. And, you know, a desire for evidence. Why should you desire evidence? What evidence are you

going to provide to convince someone that they should desire evidence if they don't desire evidence for their truth claims? Or what logical argument will you use to prove to someone that they should value logic if they don't value logic? I mean, these are brute facts of epistemology which we use without any apology, really, because we can do no other. I would just say that valuing any movement away from the worst possible misery for everyone, right? I mean, so again, just, you know, I want our listeners to absorb what those words mean. Imagine a universe where everything that can suffer suffers for as long as it possibly can, as deeply as it can, and no good comes of it, right? There's no silver lining to this. This is a

perfect hell for all conscious creatures. That's bad if the word bad is going to mean anything. And getting out of that situation is good and it's something you should do if words like good and should mean anything. And that, in my view, that's all we need to get this consequentialist machine turning. Okay, I don't think we're disagreeing on anything very significant here. Perhaps we're disagreeing on whether these are facts that science describes or whether they're reasons that are part of what it is to have reasons for action. Yeah, I don't think we disagree there because I mean, the point of confusion that I think you and I got bogged down by the first time around was in a very different definition of the word science. I mean, I was always using science in a much more elastic sense

to coincide much more with the way you're using the word reason. And so I'm not just talking about people in white lab coats who can run experiments immediately on any given hypothesis or ever. I mean, so there are truth claims we want to make or could make about the world, which we know we would never test scientifically, but we know there are facts of the matter. And the fact that we can't get the data in hand doesn't make the truth or falsity of those claims any less assured. So, I mean, again, the one I use all the time, and I might have even used it with you in Arizona, was, you know, what was JFK thinking the moment he got shot? Well, there's an infinite number of things I know

he wasn't thinking. I know he wasn't thinking, I wonder what Peter Singer and Sam Harris are going to say about what I was thinking. And the list can just grow from there. And that's a claim about his inner life and what it was like to be him that is ontologically subjective, right? I'm making a claim about his subjectivity and on some level the state of his brain, but it's epistemologically objective in that it's, which is to say it's true. You know, it's just there's every reason to believe it. And people doubt that you can make claims about human subjectivity that are, wherever you stand, surviving all of the tests of credibility that claims about physics and chemistry need to survive. And I mean, that's my particular hobby horse, that people feel that this area is just, by definition, less clear, less truthful,

less grounded in the kinds of cognition we use to do science. But again, I just think there's nothing more sure than some of these claims we could make about morality once we look at the intuitions we're using to make the claims. The intuition that two plus two makes four and that this abstraction is generalizable. So it works for apples, it works for oranges, it works for boats. That intuition that is at the foundation of arithmetic, again, is just something we apes are doing with our minds, and it works, but I just think it's not in a different sphere from the kinds of intuitions you and I are talking about with respect to it is good to reduce pointless agony, all things considered. of subjectivism and relativism that the postmodernist ideas in particular have encouraged some people to have. I find that quite disappointing in a way. You get people who

come out of backgrounds where they're doing cultural studies and they come up with the same sort of views that freshmen come up to Princeton with and we discuss in early seminars. And, you know, they usually fairly rapidly see that those views aren't really tenable, that they have implications that they don't want to accept. But there are certainly more sophisticated forms of that kind of relativism and subjectivism that are still around and i think we're we're agreed that uh ethics is a field in which there are there are truths uh exactly you know how we classify those truths um uh is is a fine point but i think probably it didn't really delay us any longer. I think we've clarified where we are. Okay, so let's move forward with that consensus in hand. So we want to reduce suffering, all things considered, and maximize the well-being of conscious creatures,

and we don't need to waste much time justifying that going forward. So now what do you do in a situation where people claim that suffering is being produced, and suffering is in fact being produced, but you feel that the basis for the suffering is illegitimate? Let's say it's based on a religious dogma. So the example that comes to mind now is the cartoon controversy. What if a consequentialist, philosophically minded, but still doctrinaire panel of Muslim philosophers came to you and said, listen, whenever you cartoon the prophet or tolerate others cartooning the prophet, you produce a tremendous amount of suffering in millions of devout Muslims, suffering that you can't compensate us for, suffering that we are

committed to feeling based on our beliefs, and therefore it is just wrong to do this, and you need to conform your freedom of speech to our religious sensitivities. How do you think about that? I do think about that in terms of the consequences of the action. So I'm not somebody who's going to say, no, I have a right to free speech. And if I choose to exercise that right to free speech, I will do so no matter what the consequences. The question to be considered is, what are the consequences of restraining free speech in this area? And there's no doubt, I think, that these cartoons are offensive to Muslims and they will cause some hurt feelings.

Perhaps more serious than that, because, you know, people can get over their hurt feelings, I'd say more serious is the fact that some of them may then engage in protests that turn violent, may attack Christians if they're Christians or, let's say, non-people they consider to be infidels, not necessarily Christians, but, um, not Muslims anyway. Um, if they're living in their country, you may attack and kill them. Um, these things have happened. And, uh, I think that that's, uh, something that anybody thinking of publishing these cartoons needs to give a very significant weight to on the other side. Um, significant weight to. On the other side, I think that religious intolerance is a major source of suffering in the world and of course in the case of militant

Islamic views we've seen very clearly in recent years how that can cause specific violent attacks, which clearly cause a lot of suffering on the people who are killed or injured and the families and relatives and so on. So the question is, do we want to just accept that those religious beliefs cannot be criticized and that therefore they will continue forever or indefinitely i guess nothing lasts forever um uh or do we want to see whether we can in some ways encourage fewer people to hold those beliefs or at least encourage people to hold them in a

more open tolerant form um and then of course and I think the answer to that is yes, I do think that we should be free to criticize religious beliefs, especially those that do a great deal of harm. And then the further question is, is the use of ridicule an effective means of achieving that end? And on that one, I'm not so sure. So in other words, if it were a question of publishing arguments against the claims made in Islam, publishing historical studies about how the Quran came to be written and publishing studies of the Quran showing

how the Quran came to be written and publishing studies of the Quran showing contradictions or inconsistencies, which, of course, exist in the Bible and in any of these substantial texts from long ago, going to be demonstrably inaccurate in some places. So is that the way we want to try to persuade people to shift their religious beliefs or should we try actually ridiculing those beliefs? And my guess is that probably both have some effect, but I'm not sufficiently convinced at the moment that that ridicule is so much more effective as to outweigh the serious consequences that it can have. Yeah, I guess my intuition here is that the rule of privileging free speech over everything else is just so useful that the need to rethink it in any local case is almost never pressing. I think free speech

being essentially the equivalent of sunlight spread on bad ideas, it's such a reliable mechanism for bringing bad ideas to light, criticizing them, getting others to react to them, that the moment you begin to look for local instances where you need to calculate the harm done by exercising it, I think it's almost always counterproductive. And for instance, there's one area here where I know you and I agree, because I've read what you wrote in your most recent book, but the idea that Holocaust denial should be illegal, right, because of all the harm it does both to the survivors and their descendants, and also just the fact that it seems to encourage, or at least is imagined to encourage, the survival of these noxious views, you know, Nazism and Neo-Nazism

in Europe. You and I both agree that it shouldn't be illegal and that you shouldn't put people in prison for denying the Holocaust, that the appropriate response there is ridicule and the attendant destruction of their reputation and just talking more about the evidence for the Holocaust and just the normal process whereby we expose bad ideas to criticism and use the immune system of conversation to deal with them. Yeah, I mean, we certainly agree about that example. I think that the way to deal with Holocaust denial is to simply show the evidence that the Holocaust existed, and that evidence is totally overwhelming, whereas locking somebody up who denies the existence of the Holocaust

probably just encourages conspiracy theorists to think, oh, well, if they have to prohibit people denying it, that must be because there isn't really good evidence that it happened. So that's a case where we're completely in agreement. But I'm not sure that, you know, if you're saying there is no case where a restriction of freedom of speech is justified, then I disagree. And I disagree with the kind of case that John Stuart Mill, who, of course, is a famous

defender of freedom of thought and expression in his book on liberty, carved out an exception where he said that, you know, in his day, corn dealers were very unpopular. It was thought that they were hoarding corn, profiteering from it, and starving the poor. So he gave the example of somebody who, standing in front of the house of a corn dealer, addresses an excited mob saying that corn dealers are starving the poor or robbing the poor or something of that sort. And he thought it was legitimate to prevent that speech taking place. On the other hand, he said if in different circumstances somebody wants to hand out a leaflet expressing exactly the same views, but not in front of the house of a corn dealer

and in front of an excited mob, then that was perfectly legitimate. And there was a right to freedom of thought and expression that extended to expressing that opinion now of course times have changed somewhat and we have instant communication anywhere and so the case of the the case of the cartoons which are then we know going to get spread over the internet and read about or reported in countries where there is a lot of militant Islamic thought, may have a similar effect in terms of inciting a mob to attack and kill, as I say, the people they regard as infidels or representatives of the government where the

cartoons are published or whoever it might be. So that's why I'm not sure that the exceptions ought not to extend here. Not that I really want to see a law against those cartoons. That might be a step too far and might be difficult to say exactly what is legitimate, um, uh, ridicule or satire and acceptable. But I, I would, I think if I were an editor and I were aware that of what the consequences were going to be, if I, let's say had reliable evidence that they would cause the death of, of hundreds of innocent people, um, I would choose not to publish those cartoons. I would agree that if you are going to make the causality absolutely clear and say,

well, somebody is going to die if you publish this cartoon, we know that, well, then that, it becomes difficult to justify publishing it. But then we're always dealing in probabilities. And if the probability is high enough, as it probably is in this case, you could reasonably expect that people will riot and someone will get injured or killed as a result. But the thing is, it puts us in a position where a whole civilization, whole societies can be held hostage to the whims of, in this case, religious maniacs. to the whims of, in this case, religious maniacs. But I'm by no means just focusing on the specific case of Islam. It's just anyone could announce Unabomber style, if you say X or you don't say X, I'm going to kill someone. And there's just something so corrosive about that. And it can be so consciously and cynically used against us, again, until the

end of the world, that it's tempting to just say, well, sorry, we don't play that particular game. And the game we do play is we basically talk about everything. And we encourage you to talk about everything, and you will feel a lot better once you do. The other thing that's implicit in having a position of the sort we have sketched out here where we think that moral truths exist and it's possible to be right and wrong or more or less right and more or less wrong about what a good life is, that entails the claim that certain people and even whole cultures may not know what they're missing. You know, what I would want to claim here is that a religiously blinkered culture that feels no affinity for freedom of speech and thinks that cartoonists and novelists and

other blasphemers should be killed for saying the wrong thing about the provenance of a certain book or about a certain historical figure, these people don't know what they're missing, and they don't realize how much of a price they're paying for this attitude toward freedom of thought and freedom of expression. And on some level, we know we're right about this. We know we're on the right side of history and we have to encourage, cajole, browbeat and ultimately even coerce people to get on the right side of history. Yeah. I mean, again, I largely agree with what you say there. And I don't think that if somebody is trying to blackmail us into not saying something by deliberate threats and is using that as a tactic,

I don't think we should yield to that, although there might be a significant cost. But obviously, once that succeeds, then it's going to be a tactic which will be used over and over again. And freedom of thought and expression is something that is really important to defend. I certainly agree about that. is really important to defend. I certainly agree about that. So, you know, it's really the rather different case that I was talking about, where it's not a deliberate tactic, it's just a reaction, and it's specifically about cartoons. It's not about expression of ideas. It's not about being able to criticize the religion. I certainly don't want to see any religion insulated from criticism, because I do think that there's a lot of harm that flows out

of that. So if it gets to that point where people are saying, you know, if you even dare to say that it's not the case that every word in the Quran is true and ought to be followed, clearly we're not going to play that game. We are going to be free to criticize whatever religious texts people put up that we disagree with. That's a very important and fundamental freedom and something that we should defend even if there is some cost to doing so.

Yeah, well, I would just argue that the cartoons were of a piece with that larger consideration back there. 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, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org. Thank you.