Making Sense with Sam Harris - #52 — Finding Our Way in the Cosmos

Episode Date: November 16, 2016

Sam Harris speaks with physicist David Deutsch about the foundations of knowledge, the moral landscape, possible futures for conscious beings, 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 the physicist David Deutsch once again about the foundations of morality. And this podcast came about in a slightly unusual way. Since we did our first podcast, David read my book, The Moral Landscape, and he wanted to talk to me about it. And he wanted to do this privately, I think because there were some fundamental things he disagreed with, and he didn't want to break the news to me on my own podcast. But I urged him to let me record the

conversation so that we could release it if we wanted to. Because if he was going to dismantle my cherished thesis, I actually wanted you all to hear that. And I also wanted you to hear anything else he had to say, because he's just so interesting. The problem, however, is that I ran into some equipment issues at the time and could only record the raw Skype call. So the audio leaves a lot to be desired. And David's audio is actually better than mine, so it actually sounds like I'm on his podcast. And because we weren't totally clear that we were doing a podcast, there were parts of the conversation that needed to be cut out, and these cuts leave the resulting

exchange slightly free associative. We put in a few music cues to signal those cuts. In any case, David is such an interesting person, and many of you I know are interested in the thesis I put forward in The Moral Landscape. So I decided the best thing to do is release the recording, warts and all. I certainly hope to have David back on the podcast again, but I doubt we'll cover this territory again or cover it in the same way. So that is why I'm bringing you this conversation now. So one major caveat, however, is that I don't recommend you listen

to this podcast without first listening to my first conversation with David, episode 22, entitled Surviving the Cosmos, because we really just hit the ground running here. And if you're not familiar with David or his way of thinking about knowledge and creativity, you really might get lost, or at least you won't appreciate how interesting some of his seemingly prosaic comments are. David Deutsch is a physicist at Oxford. He's best known as the founding father of quantum computation and for his work on the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics. His main area of focus is now something he has called constructor theory,

where he's developing a new way to connect information and knowledge to the language of physics. And as with our last podcast, the irony is we don't discuss any of these things. Though his views about knowledge and the implications of its being independent of any given physical embodiment, the fact that you can have the same information in a molecule of DNA or on a computer disk or chiseled into a piece of granite, this problem of understanding the substrate independence of information and knowledge in the context of a physical world, that is occasionally working in the background. And it's one of the things that makes David's take on more ordinary questions so interesting.

For instance, his view about something as pedestrian as why it's wrong to coerce people to do things connects directly to his view about what it means for knowledge to accumulate in the physical universe and the error-correcting mechanisms that allow it to accumulate. And if you're not familiar with the way David thinks, many of his statements will probably just blow by you without your realizing that something fairly revolutionary has just been said. So again, please listen to that first podcast if you haven't, and then maybe listen to it again. And you should read his book, The Beginning of Infinity, if you want to get more deeply into his ideas. And now I bring you David Deutsch. Now I bring you David Deutsch.

Knowledge is basically critical. So this is actually the connection with what I want to say about your book, that the foundational idea of knowledge, that traditionally the idea of knowledge has been that we build it up. We build it up, you know, either from nothing like Descartes or from the senses or from God or what have you, or from our genes. And thinking consists of building brick upon brick and from our senses, of course. upon brick, and from our senses, of course. But Popper's view of science, which I want to extend to all thinking and all ideas, is that our knowledge isn't like that. It consists of a great slew of not very consistent ideas. And thinking consists of wandering about in this slew, trying to make consistent the ideas that seem to be most worst offenders of being inconsistent with each other by modifying them. And we modify them just by conjecture we we guess that something might cure the the various

inconsistencies we see and if it does then we move to that and to get your book i i'm i'm interested to see what you think of this take on your book um we're so coming from the same place in some respects and so coming from opposite, incompatible places in other respects that it's hard to even express to each other what we mean exactly. I think the reason, correct me if I'm wrong or if I'm seeing this entirely the wrong way, I think the reason you developed a theory of morality and took the trouble to write this book about it is not an intellectual reason,

or at least not primarily intellectual. It's not that you wanted to tweak the best existing theories and improve them or to contradict some prevalent erroneous theories because there are a lot of true and false theories out there and usually we don't write about them, you know, life is too short. So I think that the reason you wrote this particular book and developed this particular theory is, as I said, said it's not intellectual it's for a particular purpose in the um in the world namely um to to defend civilization you might say in grandiose terms yeah to defend it against um it's not really too much hyperbole to say it's an existential danger from, or two existential dangers.

One is moral relativism, and the other is religious dogmatism. Yes, that's very fair. And imputations of grandiosity are also fair. fair and imputations of grandiosity are also fair. Because I really, I feel like what I was doing in that book is attempting to draw a line in the sand to defend the claim that the most important questions in human life and the questions that are by definition, the most important questions and the questions that where the greatest swings in value are to be found, that the answers to those questions exist, whether or not we can ever get them in hand and certainly better and worse answers exist. And that it's possible to be right and wrong or more right and more wrong about those questions. And so, yes, it's very much a,

I wanted to carve out the intellectual space where we could unabashedly defend the intuition that moral truths exist and that morality is not completely different. Morality and values altogether, claims about right and wrong and good and evil are not on some completely different footing from the rest of the truth claims and claims to fact that we want to make about the universe. Okay. Well, so I agree that there's an existential danger. So I wasn't using the word grandiose pejoratively. I think there is that

danger. And those, whether they're the biggest dangers, I'm not entirely sure, but they are existential dangers, which is bad enough. And I agree with what you just said about morality. There is a true and false in morality or right and wrong. They are objective. They can be discovered by the usual methods of reason, which are essentially the same as those of science, although there are important differences, as I said when we last spoke. Okay, so this was your purpose. You had an intellectual purpose that was morally driven in developing this moral theory. And therefore, you had this moral purpose before you had the details of the moral theory. So you wanted in advance your theory to have certain properties, as you just said, to create an intellectual space in

which one could assert and defend the proposition that there's objective right and wrong. And so these properties that you wanted the theory to have in advance weren't just expressions of your personality or something. They were the fact that you thought that the moral values that made you want to write the book are true, objectively true? Well, forgive me, I'm starting to, I'm smiling now. If you could see me, you'd see how much I'm smiling because I'm just amused at how tenderly you're leading me down by the hand down the slippery slope to the dissolution of my theory. I think theory is too big a word for what I thought I was putting forward. I think my theory, such as it is, contains explicitly the assumption that

there are many things I can be wrong about right now with the morality that I have in hand. My theory isn't based on my current moral intuitions. Well, it's based on some of them. It's based on the intuition of what I call in various places, moral realism, which is just the claim that it's possible to be wrong. It's possible not to know what you're missing. It's possible to be cognitively closed to true facts about well-being in this universe, about how good life could be if only you could live it or could discover it, if only you had the right sort of mind that would give you access to these states of consciousness. So it's not so much that I think,

well, my intuition that gay marriage should be legal is so foundational that I know there's no state of the universe that could disconfirm it. That's not where I'm standing. It's just the intuition about realism and about the horizons. I wasn't making that sort of allegation. In fact, I think I agree with everything you've just said about morality. You see, the thing is, the ideas, the theory, if you don't want to call it a theory, whatever it is that you express in the book contains that, but it also contains something else. It contains the something else that I disagree with. There must be something else, because I've agreed with everything you've just said. The thing, I suppose the basic thing I disagree with and this

disagreement is probably deeper than it sounds that one of the properties you wanted to create this space is that this theory of morality or whatever you call it, should be

based on a secure foundation, namely science, the way subtitles of books get fashioned, as you probably know, that's sometimes outside the author's control, as it was in this case. But I wouldn't put it that way. I would say that it's not that morality has to be founded on the secure foundations of science. It's that the truth claims we want to make about morality are just as well-founded, however well-founded that turns out to be, as the truth claims we make in science. And that really, I'm talking about this larger cognitive space in which we make truth claims. And some of it, for bureaucratic reasons or methodological reasons, we call these scientific claims.

Some we call historical. Some we call merely factual. Some sciences are still struggling to be as scientific as other sciences, but we still call them sciences. But there is just this claim, the claims about subjectivity and in particular about well-being and what influences it. activity, and in particular about well-being and what influences it. And those claims, I think, are true, whether or not we can, or true or false, whether or not we can ever get the data in hand at any moment in history. And I just want to say, I mean, the example, I may have used this last

time with you, but the example I often use is there is a fact of the matter about what John F. Kennedy was thinking the moment before he got shot. And we won't know what he was thinking. We don't actually know what it was like to be him. In fact, we know there's no way we could get access to the data at this point. And yet, there's an infinite number of things we could say about that that we would know were wrong. I mean, I know he wasn't thinking about string theory. I know he wasn't trying to – I know he wasn't reiterating the largest prime number that we discovered a year after he died, again and again in his mind. You can go on like that until the end of time, knowing what his state of consciousness excluded. And that's as factual a claim as we ever make in science. And so what I was trying to argue is that morality, rightly considered, is a space of truth claims that is on all fours with all the other kinds of truth claims we make, differences of methodology aside. Yeah, well, there are two ways that something can be objective. And I think you're in favor of one of them, and I'm in favor of the other. That is, things can be objective in the sense that

their truths about them just are truths about the other thing. Like, for example, chemistry, the truths of chemistry just are truths about physics. And that maybe wasn't obvious when chemistry started, but it is obvious now that some of the truths are emergent truths. But still, in principle, everything, every every law of chemistry, everything you can say about chemical reactions and so on, they are all statements about physics. And chemistry then is objective because physics is objective. Then there's a different way of being objective, the way in which the integers exist objectively. The integers exist objectively. They exist objectively not because – and again, in the history of this, there were different theories about the integers that took different positions about whether they're real and if they're real, in what sense they're real. I think that they are real in a separate sense from physics, that the truths about them are independent of the truths of physics. Not that integers are objective because they are some aspects of physical objects, but they're objective because integers exist in some sense that is not the same as existing physically.

in some sense that is not the same as existing physically. And although they have an influence, truths about them are reflected in truths about physical objects, but they're not identified as them. If there's nothing we could discover about the laws of physics could possibly change the truth of theorems about prime numbers. And that is the kind of truth, I mean, sorry, that's the kind of independence that I think truths of morality have. Actually, David, can I interrupt you there and just,

just explore this a little bit? Because, so I think I talk about this in the book at some point, I follow the philosopher, John Searle here. I don't follow him in that many things, but he made a distinction between the ontological and the epistemological sense in which we can use this word objective. And I think that's a useful one that at least I've been pressing to service a fair amount. One, so if something's ontologically objective, it exists, quote, you know, in the real world, whether or not anyone knows about it, it's independent of human minds. It is the kinds of facts you just described with, you know, It is the kinds of facts you just described with, you know, chemistry and physics.

And we can imagine a universe without any conscious creatures. And those facts would still be the case, even though there's no one around to know them. And so that's ontological objectivity. And then there's epistemological objectivity, which is to say that there's the spirit in which we make various claims about facts of all kinds, which is to say that, so to be objective in the epistemological sense, you're not being misled by your own confirmation bias or wishful thinking, or you're making honest claims about data and the consequences of logical arguments and all the rest. And what most people worry about with respect to objectivity versus subjectivity, I guess I should talk about the

subjective side of those two things. So something can be ontologically subjective, which is to say it doesn't exist independent of human minds or conscious minds. It is a fact that is only a fact given the existence of minds. So when I'm talking about what JFK experienced the moment he got shot or prior to that moment, I'm making a claim about his subjectivity, but I can make that claim in the sense of it being epistemologically objective, which is to say it's not subjective epistemologically. I'm not being merely misled by my bias and my dogmatic commitments. I can objectively say about, that is epistemologically, about JFK's subjectivity that it was not characterized by him meditating on the truth of string theory at that moment. And so I'm more worried that the ontological difference between

objective and subjective doesn't really interest me. It's useful for certain conversations and I think not useful for others. And I think in the case of morality, what we're talking about is how experience arises in this universe and what its character can be. And the extremes of happiness and suffering that conscious minds are susceptible to, conscious minds are susceptible to and what are the material and social and every other kind of requirements to influence those experiences. And so part of that conversation takes us into the classically objective world of, in our case, talking about neurotransmitters and neurons and, you know, economic systems and, quote, objective reality at every scale that in any given instance may not actually require a human mind to be talked about. But the cash value of all of that, if you're

talking about morality, from my point of view, is conscious states of conscious creatures and whether they're being made more or less happy in as capacious a definition of happiness or well-being as possible. And as you know, that's a kind of a suitcase word I use to incorporate the range of positive experience beyond which we, the horizon beyond which we can't currently imagine, and the opposite being the worst possible misery for everyone. So the status of integers, whether they occupy some kind of platonic zone of existence that is not in fact linked to material reality in any way, but we still have to talk about as being real, whether or not anyone has discovered it. I actually don't have strong intuitions about that at all. I mean, that seems like, I feel like we touched that in our last conversation. And I think you could

probably argue that one way or the other, but to bring it back to what you were just saying, I guess there's the physical reality, which is often called objective ontologically of chemistry and physics. There are things like integers, which are not, as you just said, dependent on what we know about atoms. But then there are the experiences of conscious systems, whether or not we can ever understand what those experiences are. They have a certain character. And that character depends upon whatever material requisites exist for those conscious systems. But that hasn't been worked out. And even if you work that out perfectly, it's still the subjective side of that coin that is of interest. So, yes.

It's funny, just at the end, you said what I was about to say. It took me a while. So I know that you use the term science, for example, more broadly than some people. And I think that's quite right. So do I. And so you and I both use it to encroach on things that some people who think they're purists would like to exclude from science. But to expand science, you know, so therefore part of philosophy, you can call part from science. But to expand science, you know, so therefore part of philosophy you can call part of science and the Popper's criterion of demarcation

is not intended to be either sharp or pejorative or criterion of meaning or worthwhileness or anything like that. It's just a matter of convenience, a matter of convenient classification of subject matter. If you want to extend the term science to cover certain things that are traditionally considered a philosophy like the interpretation of quantum theory, for example, which I think is definitely part of science. But then if you want to sort of make the connection between human well-being and neuroscience,

then you're trying to encroach on neurophilosophy, as it were. And neurophilosophy is epistemology it's and the thing but once you've extended it to neurophilosophy and into epistemology you run into a deep fact about the physical world which is that epistemology is substrate independent it is knowledge or feelings or consciousness or any kind of information or computation is instantiated in a universal device, then the laws it obeys are completely independent of the physics and of the neurology and every kind of physical attribute of the device falls away. And you can talk about the properties of those things as abstract things, or not perhaps abstract is the wrong word, because they're perfectly objective. It's just that they're not atoms right they're

not neurons i would just say that i think at this point i'll go with you there i think i think that's probably true but what's your what you seem to be smuggling in there in the leap from atoms is a kind of kind of information based functionalism where we just we're assuming for the purposes of this conversation that we know consciousness to be an emergent property of information processing, and it's not some other constituent of physical reality that isn't based on bits. But if we assume that it is, if it is just something that computers, non-biological computers can one day have, yeah, well, then I'm with you. This is something that is generally true of morality, that morality has reach. If you don't morality, that morality has reach. If you don't steal a book from a library when you realize that you easily could do so without getting caught, this doesn't just affect you and the library.

Because this comes from a universal machine, which is you. This machine has universal theories, or theories which try to be universal theories, or are universal in some domain or other. And when you commit the crime, for instance, you're changing the facts. You're changing something that you can't change back. Isn't that change occurring in you, assuming that there's no one else who will ever discover your act? I mean, where else would the change occur but in you? Well, for example, suppose you're telling your children about morality. Do you say, OK, well, when you're in that library library situation it's okay to steal the book because no one will ever find out right or do you say no you shouldn't even in that situation

if the if the first then it's affecting your child as well yeah and if the second then you are lying to a child right which itself has vast implications yeah no i no, I'm totally with you there. Let's linger on this one point that, again, I understand it's disconcertingly far afield, but I just think it's interesting. So if you could apply a painless local anesthetic to the child for the purposes of receiving a vaccine, that would be a better thing to do and it's being better is the measure of its or or or the claim that it's better is synonymous with the claim that it's good to reduce needless suffering and and the suffering is is both needless and and in, probably harmful for the child to whatever degree. Yes, I'd say that my first line of my critique would be that it violates the human rights of the child. But OK, there are all these other things which are related.

I think that the way we interpret and value very powerful stimuli is remarkably susceptible to the conceptual frame around which that experience is held and the conceptual frame within which it is held. So which is to say your thoughts about your experience and your thoughts about reality are in many cases constitutive of the sum total of the experience. And there are many things, but this does connect back to, I agree with you about human rights and consent to a large degree. I think we want, certainly when you're talking about adults who can consent, you want them to be able to consent to various experiences. But I can still imagine experiences that are unpleasant, that it turns out are very good for a person, and you have done them a great

favor if you subject them to these experiences. And you may, in fact, and this is just kind of a paternalistic claim, a possibility, you may, in fact, and this is just kind of a paternalistic claim of possibility, you may, in fact, be doing someone a favor to subject them to these experiences without their explicit consent, if, in fact, the benefits are so great. Now, I don't know what those experiences are, but let's just say it's true that a culture finds that there's a certain ordeal that you can put teenagers through, and many of the teenagers don't want to do it, but it is just so good for you as a human being. That strikes me as possible. I just don't have an example, but I do see people who do consent

to do things which are really incredibly difficult, like people become Navy SEALs. I've met some of these guys and in many cases, literally went through hell to equip themselves with the skills they've got. And part of the training is a kind of culling of all the people who are not fit to go through the training in the first place. And so it is a selection procedure, but these guys go through an intense ordeal and come out in many ways, enviably strong psychologically and physically as a result. And I can see that there are extreme experiences that we might not want to rule out just in principle as being bad for us. As I said, it's a matter of knowledge. If we know this, then we have an explanation. If we have an explanation, we can give it to the people.

If we have a machine that can detect whether somebody would benefit from Navy SEAL training, and it can just detect this by putting it on their head and pressing a button, then you would probably find that a lot of people who aren't Navy SEALs would benefit from it. it's true. If the theory on which this machine is based has a good explanation, then you should be able to persuade those people to take the training or they might say, yeah, well. So what if you can't or what if the benefits you're conferring on someone is out of reach to them? So let's say you have people with severe autism who really can't consent to much of anything and you can't really explain the benefits you're about to give them, but the benefits you're about to give them is a cure for autism. Yes. Well, this reminds me of a cure for lesbianism or something. There are people who think that raping somebody will do them good under various circumstances,

will do them good under various circumstances. But you can't base either a legal system or a moral system on saying that if one thinks that that's true, one should do it. Well, no, but clearly in that case, it certainly sounds like on its face to be a delusional and unethical claim. Yes, we're considering all sorts of implausible things here. What I hear you doing is using the principle of consent and human rights to trump everything else that might... It's more epistemology, because I don't think human rights are fundamental either. They are just a way of implementing institutions that promote the growth of knowledge. And the reason why knowledge trumps everything else here is fallibilism. In all these cases, where we have a theory that something is better, we're implementing a moral theory and we might be mistaken about that. And it must be a fundamental fact of morality, an objective truth of morality, that it's immoral to close off the paths to correction of a theory if it turns out to be false.

theory if it turns out to be false. Oh, yeah, I'm totally with you there. But that seems to be asserting my underlying claim, which is human flourishing conceived as broadly as you want. And it's a definition that is continually open in the manner you just described for refinement and fallibilism. That is the point. And, you know, we want to move in the direction of better and better worlds with better and better experiences. And who knows how far that can go, but we know it's possible to move in the wrong direction. And we never want to, we never want to tie our hands and make it impossible to correct course. tie our hands and make it impossible to correct course. Yes. So once you have an institution that allows that, this is why consent isn't just a nice thing to have. It's a fundamental feature of the way we handle ideas. If you have a system that allows people to enforce an idea on another person who disagrees with the idea, then the means of correcting errors are closed off.

You know, you imagined people who had a disability or something and couldn't but could be cured of that disability, but it couldn't be explained to them and so on. Well, the thing is either those people are in a constant state of suffering, in which case applying the thing to them won't change that, or there is a thing that they prefer to some other thing, and then there will be a path towards the better state that involves just doing things that they prefer. Like if it involves an injection, that involves just doing things that they prefer. Like if it involves an injection, then it might involve either an anesthetic or getting into a certain mood in which an injection doesn't matter. Let me give you an example. Again, I want to get back to these

core issues, but all of this is just, I find too interesting. I think this is an example that I mentioned somewhere in the moral landscape, but I'm not sure. The Nobel laureate in economics, Danny Kahneman, did some research. I think he was just associated with this research. I don't think he was the main author on this paper. But they did some fascinating research on people receiving colonoscopies. And this was at a point where there was no like there was no twilight anesthesia associated with colonoscopies. And this was at a point where there was no twilight anesthesia associated with colonoscopies. So people really had to suffer the full ordeal. And they discovered, they were trying to figure out what accounted for the subjective measures of suffering associated

with this procedure, and also what would positively influence the compliance of patients to come back and get another one on schedule five years later or 10 years later or whatever it was. So they found that this confirmed, I don't know if this was the first instance, but there's something in psychology called the peak end rule, which is your judgment about the character of an experience is largely determined by the peak intensity of the experience, whether that was good or bad, and what the character of the experience was at the end of the episode. So those are the two real levers you can pull to influence whether someone thought they had a good time or a bad time. And to test this, they gave the control group, they gave these ordinary colonoscopies and took the appliance out at the first moment where the procedure was over. But in the experimental condition, they did everything

the same except they left the apparatus in quite unnecessarily for some minutes at the end, providing a low intensity, a comparatively low intensity, but decidedly negative, and again, unnecessary stimulus to the subjects. And the result was that their impression of how much they had suffered was significantly reduced, and their willingness to come back and get a potentially life-saving colonoscopy in the future was increased. So, you know, a greater percentage of them showed up in five years for the next colonoscopy. And so this was a, you know, by any real measure, this was a good thing to have done to these people, except what in fact it was, if you just take the window of time around the procedure, it was prolonging an unpleasant experience without any medical necessity.

Right. And yeah, so that's so I just want you to there's got to be a way of telling them that you're doing this and it's still working. Presumably. But what if what if, in fact, is true that the placebo effect is ruined? is ruined if you if you tell someone that that that might be what's happening to them or that you've done you've done you've done this thing it's not medically necessary but we're gonna leave this tube in for a few minutes because you're gonna feel better about it afterwards what if that actually cancels the effect again um the universe hasn't got it in for us it it doesn't like us at all it doesn't care about us but it hasn't got it in for us. If what you just said is the case, then you could, for example, there'll be a way of getting around it. For example, you could say to them, you could say to the patient, look, there is a

way of reducing the amount of perceived suffering of this procedure, but it involves a placebo. But it won't work if we tell you what the placebo is. So, you know, do you give us permission to use this placebo? And of course, the administration will say yes. And if that doesn't work, there'll be some other way. But is that really consent? Because what if we just run the alternate experiment? What if we say we pose it like that to people and then, you know, 99 percent say, sure, you know, sign me up. compliance and we say, we tell them exactly what the placebo is in this case. We're going to leave the tube in you for five minutes, not doing anything. And you're going to, for those full five minutes, those will be five minutes where you would have been saying, when's this going to be over already? And you could have been off the table and driving home, but now you're still on

the table with this tube in you, but that's the placebo. Let's say the people sign up for that drops down to 17%. So now we know that there's all these people in the first condition who are only consenting because you have masked what the placebo is. And so in fact, they're not really consenting to the thing you're doing. I think that's still consent rather like, you know, if you you if you uh you don't have to you don't have to be a doctor and and have know exactly what the heart surgeon is going to do to your heart in order to to um consent validly consent to heart surgery and it's the the same with the placebo you know if you're told that it won't work if you know what the placebo is but there will be one then you're consenting and the p the one percent who still say no uh those people are just making supposing which true those people are simply

making a mistake the same kind of mistake as you would be making if this whole theory wasn't true you know we you can't you can't uh bias the rules under which people interact towards a particular theory that they disagree about but there are people who have ideas about reality and ideas about how we should all live within it, which are so perverse and incompatible with everything we could reasonably want to do in this world, that we do have to wall off their aspirations from the rest of what's going on. I mean, whether that's locking them in prison because they just are so badly behaved or just exiling them in some way from the conversation. So again, the people I use are like the Taliban

or ISIS. They don't get to vote on our public policy and for good reason because their votes would be crazy. Yes. Well, again, we have institutions. We try to tune the institutions to have the property that – the political institution should have the property that disputes between people are resolved without violence. disputes between people are resolved without violence. And the moral institutions include the idea that participating and obeying such institutions is morally right. And also in interpersonal relationships that don't involve the law, we still want, we want a bit better than that. We want interpersonal relationships not only to resolve disputes without violence, but we want them to resolve disputes without any kind of coercion.

An institution that institutionalizes coercion about something is ipso facto irrational. Now, I'm not saying that I know of institutions that achieve this perfectly. I'm saying that this is a rough criterion any more than I do in the political case. I'm saying that that's the criterion by which institutions should be judged, by how well they are, how good they are at resolving disputes between people. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at I don't believe it. app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.