The One You Feed - The Greatest Lessons in Philosophy, Parenting, and Kindness with Scott Hershovitz

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

In this episode, Scott Hershovitz discusses the greatest lessons in philosophy, parenting, and kindness. He also explores how children are natural philosophers and how everyday life raises deep questions about identity, truth, and moral responsibility. Other topics include personal identity, relativism, civil discourse, and the importance of treating others as moral agents. Throughout, Scott connects philosophical thinking to parenting, politics, and personal growth, emphasizing kindness, humility, and critical thinking as essential virtues for a meaningful life. Exciting News!! My new book, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life, is now available!!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Key Takeaways: Exploration of the relationship between emotions like anger and gratitude and their role in self-respect and respect for others. The natural philosophical curiosity of children and the importance of nurturing critical thinking. Philosophy’s relevance in everyday life and moral decision-making. Examination of consciousness and the challenge of understanding other minds, including animals. The philosophical puzzle of personal identity and the concept of change over time. The impact of relativism and the importance of civil discourse in addressing differing beliefs. Insights from a seminar on abortion, emphasizing respectful dialogue and shared inquiry. The distinction between reasoning with individuals versus shaping their behavior. Reflections on responsibility, choice, and the complexities of the criminal justice system in relation to trauma and empathy. For full show notes:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you enjoyed this conversation with Scott Hershovitz, check out these other episodes: What We Know But Don’t Believe with Steve Hagen Everyday Courage with Ryan Holiday By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed, and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! This episode is sponsored by: ⁠Alma⁠ has a directory of 20,000 therapists with different specialities, life experiences, and identities, and 99% of them take insurance. Visit ⁠helloalma.com⁠ to learn more! ⁠Brodo Broth⁠: Shop the best broth on the planet with Brodo.  Head to ⁠Brodo.com/TOYF⁠ for 20% off your first subscription order and use code TOYF for an additional $10 off. ⁠Quince:⁠ Refresh your wardrobe with Quince by going to ⁠Quince.com/feed⁠ for free shipping and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. ⁠Rocket Money⁠ Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join at ⁠rocketmoney.com/feed⁠. ⁠Pebl⁠ – an AI-powered platform that helps companies hire and manage global teams in 185+ countries. Get a free estimate at ⁠hipebl.ai⁠ ⁠Hello Fresh⁠ – Get 10 free meals + a FREE Zwilling Knife (a $144.99 value) on your third box. Offer valid while supplies last. ⁠David Protein⁠ bars deliver up to 28g of protein for just 150 calories—without sacrificing taste! For a limited time, our listeners can receive this special deal: buy 4 cartons and get the 5th free when you go to ⁠www.davidprotein.com/FEED Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sometimes being upset, being angry, feeling resentful is a way of defending yourself in the world and respecting yourself. And, you know, we could tell a similar story about gratitude as a way of sort of respecting others and recognizing the sacrifices they might make on your behalf. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true, and yet for many of us our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. If I could have one wish, not something big or dramatic, I think I just want to spend an hour in a dog's mind,

just to know what it's like in there, how they experience the world, what any of it feels like from the inside. That kind of question might sound abstract, but it gets it something real. Because the truth is, we don't fully understand what it's like to be anyone else. And most of the time,

we don't even examine what it's, like to be ourselves. In this conversation, I sit down with Scott Hershowitz, who's the author of Nasty, Brutish and Short, Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids, and we explore what philosophy looks like in real life, through kids, through relationships, and through the kinds of questions that shape how we live. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. One of the shows I admire the most is the Being Well podcast. Content about something psychology and self-help is everywhere right now, but much of it is oversimplified or just plain wrong. On being well, host Forrest Hansen has spent seven years interviewing top

researchers, clinicians, and authors, serious people doing serious work, and he's great at translating their complex ideas into advice that you can actually use. Forrest is regularly joined on the show by his dad, Dr. Rick Hansen, a clinical psychologist and best-selling author. I've read his books forever. They have a great father-son dynamic and their warm relationship is one of my favorite parts of the show. I trust the Being Well podcast and I hope you'll give them a listen. New episodes drop every Monday and you can find them wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is brought to you by Tell Us Online Security.

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Learn more at TELUS.com slash online security. No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. Conditions apply. Hi, Scott. Welcome to the show. It's really terrific to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, we are going to be discussing your book called Nasty Breasty Breasties. brutish and short, adventures in philosophy with my kids. But before we get into that, we'll start

like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with her grandchild, and they say in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second, looks up with their grandparents, says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. So that's a really wonderful story and I actually hadn't heard it before. So it's been fun to think it through a little bit. I want to give you two answers. So in my day job, I'm a

philosopher who teaches in a law school. And I think a lot about philosophy questions about law. I think especially about the rule of law, what it is and how we can sustain it. And one thing I think it's really crucial to maintaining the rule of law is I think people need a kind of shared moral outlook. They need to agree that we're going to abide by the decision-making procedures that we've adopted around here, whether that's elections or hearing the legislation or following decisions that courts make. And I think one of the things that I find concerning in our country at the moment is the kind of viciousness of our politics and the reluctance of some people, especially right now, you know, people on the right to accept the result.

of elections, to adhere to the rule of law, and just generally to talk about their opponents in ways that are mean-spirited and vicious. And so I think that one thing this parable sort of brought up for me is I think all of us in our political activities need to think about feeding the kindness, even when we're interacting with people that we disagree with. So it's one thing to think, hey, I have different policy ideas than you do, and I'm going to vote for my preferred policy preferences, but to demonize people on the other side, to treat them viciously, is not going to be a way of sustaining a community over the long term. So that's sort of like the work life, professional reaction I had to the parable. I also had a very personal reaction to it.

You and I were just chatting a moment ago before you hit record. You said I'm approaching the interesting years of parenthood of a child who's reaching adolescence. My older son, Rex, and we definitely butt heads more than we used to have more conflict than we did when he was little. and I've made a kind of intentional effort over the last few months to really try and orient my interactions with him more towards kindness than towards anger to feed that aspect of our relationship, rather the other one that we so naturally fall into sometimes. Well, I think that's a great place to sort of jump off in the book, which is about philosophy and children. I mean, I can only imagine you arguing or debating with your children. You have created some skillful adversarial. in the way that you have been raising them all along, which is really to think for themselves and really think about their opinions. The book is really fun because you recount a lot of conversations from the children.

You say every kid, every single one is a philosopher. They stop when they grow up. Indeed, it may be that part of what it is to grow up is to stop doing philosophy and start doing something more practical. talk a little bit more about when you say that, what do you mean by philosophy? That's a really great question, actually. And it's a question that I've struggled with ever since I first took a philosophy class and discovered I really liked this subject.

My dad, when I went home from college, you know, and said I was going to major in philosophy, asked the sensible question. He said, what's philosophy? And I realized there just had no way of answering that question. I started to stammer, you know, things that didn't quite sound adequate. And then I thought, well, maybe I can't tell him what philosophy is. I'll show him. and I started talking about this idea that maybe we're all just brains and vats,

kind of like the movie, The Matrix, like somebody removed our brains from our head, and they'll hook them up to electrodes, and they're stimulating us. And so I said to my dad, maybe we think we're at this restaurant having dinner, but actually someone's just deceiving us into thinking so. And he was like, can they do that? And I said, I don't know, but the question is, how do we know they didn't? And he said, that's what you want to study with a look on his face that was really not encouraging. And so I was kind of flummoxed ever since that moment to explain what philosophy is.

And then actually my older son, Rex, helped me figure it out in second grade, the first day of second grade, actually. And the teacher asked each kid what they wanted to be when they grew up. And she sent home a list. Here are all the things. There were firefighters. There were teachers. There were engineers. It wasn't hard to pick Rex's entry from the list.

He wanted to be a math philosopher. And when he got home, I said, I said, hey, Rex, Ms. Kine says that you want to be a philosopher of math. what's philosophy? And just without even thinking about it, he said to me, philosophy is the art of thinking. And I think that's just a really lovely explanation of what philosophy is. I think a philosophical problem is one that we make progress on by thinking carefully about ourselves, about the world around us in an effort to understand both of those things better. And so there's philosophy about really every aspect of our lives, right? Questions that you can ask about us that require us to deeply in order to reach a better understanding. That's what I mean by philosophy.

Yeah, you quote David Hills, who describes philosophy as the ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children using methods that come naturally to lawyers. That's great. Yeah, so that really captures my career, maybe my humanity in a nutshell, right, which is to say part of the pitch of this book is that kids are natural philosophers. They arrive in the world, and they're confused by lots of things in it, and they don't know what the standard of explanation of things are, and they're trying to make sense out of it. So they're asking really good questions,

and they're thinking really creatively about the answers to the questions that they ask. And then most people kind of leave that behind when they start to understand what the standard answers to things are or when they start to learn that serious people don't spend time on some of the questions and interest philosophers, like, am I dreaming my entire life or what is time? Right. So as people age, they kind of leave those questions behind. A small group of us, the professional philosophers, get stuck in the endeavor. And we kind of use methods that come naturally to lawyers. We, you know, make rigorous arguments and separate out our premises and don't exactly trade briefs like lawyers, but one person writes an article and another person replies and on and on. But what I want to communicate is grownups can get back to doing philosophy. They don't have to do it like lawyers. They don't have to do it like professional philosophers. In fact, it's better if you do it like a kid.

I love that. And, you know, I think that there is an academic element of philosophy of which you're involved in. And then there is very much the everyday aspect of philosophy. And if we really think about this idea of it where it's about thinking, you know, it's about thinking better. We can all think better, think more clearly. And there's something you say, as you're describing what philosophy is. And I love this line. You say, the goal is to get in the habit of treating your own ideas as critically. as you treat other people's. And I really love that, just that idea of like, if you bring an idea to me that I don't like, I can just pick it apart all the time. But my own ideas that I believe, and I'm believing them probably very largely from conditioning and emotional reasons. I don't bring that same degree of scrutiny to my own ideas. And I love this idea. And it really runs its way through the book of just getting better at asking questions about things that we might be taking for granted or assuming and looking just at life a little bit more critically. And when I say critically, I don't mean it in the negative sense.

I mean it very much in the constructive sense. Looking at life a little bit more critically and a little bit more deeply because one of the things that we explore on this show so much is how when we live our lives on autopilot, they become very shallow, they become very unengaged, they start to feel empty and meaningless to us, right? It's when we engage more deeply, we go off autopilot, and we really start asking ourselves, what matters? Yeah. What's important to me? And those are core philosophical questions. For sure. I think there's really two important things in what you said. The first is, like, thinking critically about our own ideas. I pick this up from a professor of mine who said,

hey, look, when somebody makes an argument and you've got an objection to it, I want you to imagine that they already thought of it and that they thought it was so misguided that it wasn't even worth mentioning and try to figure out why they might have thought that. Where did they think that you had gone wrong? And if you get to the end of that endeavor and you can't figure out where you've gone wrong, then it's time to tell people about your idea. But often, you know, if you put yourself in the other person's shoes, you can actually figure out, oh, here's the weakness in this idea that I've got. And I try to instantiate that in parenting my kids, right? There's a line early on the book where I say, Americans like to say that they're entitled to

their opinion. And that's not how my house works, right? You articulate an opinion and you should be prepared to defend it. I'm going to ask you why. And when you give me an explanation, I'm going to question that explanation over and over again. And so you're right. I have raised kids that are really adept at arguing because they know that they're going to have to back up the claims that they make. But one thing I think is important. The second thing I heard in what you were saying, I think it's important to remember that not all philosophy is adversarial in this way. It's not just about having arguments with other people. And our lives are shot through with philosophical questions. If you're trying to decide, how should I spend my life? Right. Like,

what's a good life look like? What's a good life for me look like? like, which career is the right path, or am I obligated to maintain a relationship with someone who's not treating me well? Maybe that person's my parents. Maybe that person's a friendship. These are all just philosophical questions. So one thing I like to remind people is that you're doing philosophy all the time. You may not think of yourself as doing philosophy. But when you're wondering how to be in the world, how to act in the world, those are some of the most central philosophical questions. And I do think you're right that it helps a lot of times just take a step back and to think about them that way and to talk to other people about them rather than just

move through on autopilot. Yep. And you know, you've got another line that I love. And you say, you believe our humanity lies partly in our capacity to distinguish what we ought to do from what we want to do. Say more about that. That's a really powerful idea. Yeah. So this comes up in a conversation. there's chapters about revenge and punishment in the book, since those are some of the kinds of issues that arise early on in parenting. You know, your kids might take revenge at somebody they thinks wronging them or, you know, certainly parenting involves kind of pervasive questions about whether one should punish, how one should punish what you're trying to accomplish when you punish. And it's in the course of that punishment chapter that I say this line, that our

humanity lies partly in our ability to distinguish what we want to do from what we're we ought to do. And there I'm actually particularly interested in, like, what's the difference between a person and another central character in their book is our dog, Bailey. And Bailey has once, and she pursues her once in whatever she thinks is the most effective way. You know, she's been trained, so she doesn't just always do immediately what she wants to do. She knows that sometimes sitting and waiting for the treat is the way of getting the treat, not jumping for the treat. But she's driven by her once. And I think something that is, you know, maybe unique among human beings is that we don't just have to be driven by our wants. We can see

this distinction between what we want to do and what we should do and we can act on it. Or at least I should say, most of us can. I think that's one of the tasks of parenthood is to help your kids appreciate this distinction, right, to reflect on what they should do, to recognize that it may not be what they want to do, and to cultivate the habits of mind that will let them, as they get older, act on what they believe they should do rather than to satisfy their immediate ones. Yeah, I'm going to jump right to the chapter on Bailey. I could go a thousand directions in this book. This has been a difficult one to prepare for, but I can't resist going here because you do bring up Bailey. Yeah. And you say, what is it like to be Bailey? We spend a lot of time

talking about that in our house. You know, Bailey is your dog. And I love this because I do the exact same thing. You say Rex loves to narrate her life, but he doesn't do it like a sportscaster. It's not Bailey as in hot pursuit of Sammy Squirrel. Rather, he talks as if he's Bailey, you know, and my partner and I do this all the time with one of our dogs, Lola, like one of our dogs, Beansy, she's like a bat. I don't have any idea what it's like to be Beenzy. I can't fathom. She's so animal.

Yeah. But the other dogs seem so human in her way. And so, you know, Lola will facilitate conversations between us, you know, oh, well, I'd really like to have, you know, this or that. And so that part really struck me. But why I had to jump to this is A, I love to talk about dogs. But B, there's a fact in the book that made me stop and turn to my partner and go, you have got to hear this. And it's a section where we're talking about consciousness.

And we're saying, what's it like to be a bat or a dog and how we can't really fundamentally know? Then you go on to talk about how bats echo locate. They put out sound to create a picture of the world around them. And then you go on to tell a story about a person who can do this. And it blew my mind. You want to share that? Yeah, so this is a story about a guy named Daniel Kish who people sometimes call the real life Batman. And Kish's young child lost his sight and he just started to make clicking noises and was clearly using them in something like the way a bat would use them, that like they'd reflect off surfaces back to his ears and he would develop a kind of understanding of what was

around him that allowed him to move through the world in really astounding ways. so he can, for instance, ride a bike. And not just a little bit, but like ride a bike around town. He's getting so much information through echo locating. And, you know, Kish is an interesting character in his own right because he thinks a lot of times folks that are disabled or held back by other people's stereotypes about what they're capable of. He thinks that, you know, many more people who lack sight would be capable of the things that he does if they were encouraged and, given the training in an atmosphere that didn't take them to be as limited as we often take them to be. So I think Kish's is really important to listen to for that reason. But also it connects up with this bigger question in philosophy that you were alluding to earlier that really interests me. It's a question about the inaccessibility of our minds, right? The inaccessibility of other people's minds, of other creatures, minds. So one of the most famous essays in 20th century philosophy was by a professor named Thomas Nagel called,

What is it like to be a bat? And he was observing that bats have this ability that most human beings don't have anything like. And observing the distance between our external understanding, we know what a bat can do, but we don't know what it's like to be a bat doing it. We know what a dog can do. We don't know what it's like to be a dog and to experience, say, the rich sense of smell that they have. And then what is really interesting for me is I think that's just actually true of the people I live with too. It was starker when my kids are younger, but we would look at, you know, our six-month-old, our two-year-old and think, like, what is going on in his head?

Yeah. We don't really know. Actually, I feel sometimes I feel like I have better idea what's going on with the dog than I do with my children. And they're older now, so they're more like me. And I think I have a better guess, but I like to remind myself that there really are limitations to my ability. to understand what it's like to be inside of someone else. Yeah, I just had to get that fact about a guy who can ride a bike by echolocation because it's just stunning. You also say that, like, not only that, but the scans of his brain suggests that he is processing visual information.

That's right. So one question is, what's it like to be Daniel Kish echolocating? And he says he's having a visual experience. and when they put him in MRI machines, it seems like the visual cortex is active, which makes it plausible that his brain renders the information that it's getting in something like the way that sighted people's brains are rendering the light that their eyes are gathering. Still leaves open the question, what's it like to be a bat, right? So, like, we have a better idea what it's like for Daniel Kish to be echolocating,

because he can talk to us and tell us about it, and the bats can't. Yep. I often say if I could have one wish, and maybe this is just thinking too small, I'm like, I would just like to be in my dog's head for like an hour. I just. Or an octopuses, you know, like what does it like to be an octopus, right? I've got thousands of suckers that I can independently control and I can change the color of my skin. I mean, now I might say they are not very useful questions. You as a philosopher would probably say, actually, they are. So I think they're really interesting questions, actually. I quote a similar line from a famous developmental psychologist. I think his name is John Flavel who said that he would trade all of his degrees and honors to experience just a few minutes inside a two-year-old, just to have the insider understanding of what it's like rather than the outsider's understanding that he's spent years cultivating. One thing I think is actually really interesting about that is there was this famous British philosopher in the 20th century age. Jay Eyre, who was pondering this question of, you know, what's it like to be other creatures.

And Air thought there's a way in which it didn't make sense, in part because he was trying to imagine, like, what it would look like to fulfill your wish. That you, like, to be an octopus, you'd have to give up yourself, right? You don't want to be yourself inside an octopus observing. That's not what it's like to be an octopus. That's right. And so Air thought, like, there's actually just a limit. Even if a genie showed up to grant your wish, this is not a wish that really can be realized.

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. I will say back in my addiction days, someone once told my brother and I that if we drank a bottle of robatous and cough syrup and I don't know what else it was we took with it like 10 other type of cold medicine pills. They called this the lizard. And I will say it is what I imagine it might be like to be a lizard that I've ever experienced. I've ran this experiment. I don't recommend it. I don't recommend it. All right. So I want to go to another area. I'm kind of going into the deep. end of the pool here, obviously, but I want to talk a little bit about identity. I explore ideas of identity on this show a lot, and some of them from a pretty basic level, like, you know, can we identify less as, you know, these roles in our lives, and all the way down to the really profound experiences I've had of sort of the dissolving of self through some of my different spiritual practices. And you talk about the ship of Theseus. Could you explore that real quick? And then I want to go from there to a really profound thing that I think you said that was really mind-opening

for me. So let's start with Theseus. The ship of Theseus is a very famous philosophical puzzle that dates back thousands of years, really. So the original version of the story goes like this. Thesius's ship has been put into port in Athens. And over years, people come and they see it and they venerate it, but over the years, starts to fall into disrepair. And so when a board is rotting out, they remove that board, that plank, and they replace it with another one, and then, you know, they do that again, and they do that again. And eventually on down the line, you know, maybe decades have gone by, they've replaced every single plank on Theseus's ship. And then the question that people want to ask about this is, well, is it still Theseus's ship if it doesn't have any of the original

wood? And, well, let me ask you, what do you think? Is that still Theseus's ship? I can't answer that question without spoiling the payoff that we're headed towards here. I've already persuaded you of the answer I want to give to this. It sounds like maybe. A little bit. A little bit. Okay. Yeah. So here's the thing. If you say yes, that's not Theseus's ship anymore. Then the next question is going to be, well, when did it stop being Theseus's ship? When the first plank was replaced, right? When there was just a slight deviation, that doesn't seem like it could be true.

Like, you know, if the taillight on your car gets knocked out, you get a new taillight, but you don't think, oh, cool, I got. a new car. You know, so you can change a little bit without changing the identity of the ship. Yeah. Right. But is it when a majority of the planks were changed? People don't think that sounds very plausible either because it suggests that like, you know, right up until a 49th percent plank, like we had the same ship. Then when we tipped 50, we suddenly didn't. That doesn't seem right. Yeah. So it doesn't seem like we can identify easily a spot where it stopped being the same ship. And so some people say, well, okay, it's still the same ship. Right. Well, then enter Thomas Hobbes, the famous English philosopher, he added a little bit onto the puzzle. He's like,

well, just imagine that each time they replace one of these planks, somebody carries it away, puts it in a storage garage, the original, and, you know, stores it in case it ever needs to be used again. And then an industrious shipbuilder comes along, takes all the original planks and reassembles them in just the way the original ship was built, right? Well, that sort of sounds like it's Theseus's ship. It's the original planks in the original planks in the original. original pattern. So if that's Theseus' ship over in this storage yard, what's the ship in the dock? Yeah. So, you know, there's like endless iterations of this puzzle, but it raises this question, you know, how much can you change something before you've changed its identity? Yeah. And this gets to very

central questions about who we are. You know, what am I? And again, these questions can be asked at different levels. And that was the insight that you said that I thought was really, really good. And you said, answers to questions about identity, I think, depend on the reasons we're interested in them. Or I would add the context in which we're asking the question. And people get hung up on this in spiritual circles between like, on one hand, there's a teaching that says, well, there is no self. And yet we know absolutely. Eric is sitting here talking to Scott, right? And so the context in which I ask that question has everything to do with the answer.

If I'm asking about the ultimate core of life from a Buddhist perspective, perhaps the answer in that light is very different than the answer when I'm standing at the DMV and they say, Who are you? Yeah. So let's just back up one moment and think about, like, how we apply this Shippathias idea to ourselves, because nobody actually cares about the ship of Theseus. Yeah. Right.

But we can ask the same kind of question about our own personal identity, which is to say, what makes me the same person I was last week or last year, or I tell stories about my time? childhood in this book, the same person I was when I was dropped off at kindergarten. And it's a puzzle because I'm not made out of the same stuff. My planks have changed. Like pretty much every cell in my body has turned over since I was in kindergarten. And it's also not arranged the same way, right? Like, my brain is wired up wholly differently than it was when I was in kindergarten. And I'm bigger. My body is different. So it raises this question, like, how do we have continuity across time or do we have any sort of continuity across time. And as you say, I'm inclined to think that the answers to these

questions are highly purpose dependent, and I like your addition to this, highly context dependent, right? We need to understand, like, what's at stake about our identity? Why do we care? In what situation are we asking about it? And ultimately, I'm inclined to think that for some purposes, I'm the same person that my mother dropped off at kindergarten, like that we kind of share a life story, that little kid in me, right? For other purposes, I'm a wholly different person than that little kid, right? It wouldn't make sense to be angry at me for things that five-year-old had done. But we do, right?

Like, no, nobody's probably getting angry at the five-year-old. Right. But we are getting angry at the person from two weeks ago, right? That's right. And there's a really interesting conversation among philosophers who think about punishment. John Locke actually had things to say about this. You know, if I'm punishing you today for something you did last week, last month, 10 years ago, right? How can I be confident that I'm punishing the person?

who deserves it. Yes. Locke thought that when it comes to punishment, what matters is that you remember having done the thing. Right? And I think that may be a necessary condition, actually. Sometimes people remember things they didn't actually do. Except as a blackout drunk, there's huge amounts that I don't remember, that I'm sure

I did things that are morally offensive. That's really excellent, actually, because it suggests it's not even a necessary condition. And as soon as you said that, I think that's obviously right, we don't give people a pass say if they commit some serious crime when they were blackout drunk. And the standard story we tell in the criminal law is so long as the intoxication was voluntary, it was done knowing the risk of this kind of misbehavior when one was blacked out. So I think that's good. I'll give you one more story, actually, which was kind of challenging for me in recent years. There was a kid in elementary school that I thought of as my nemesis. It was like a little bit, a little bit of a bully.

And like five years ago, maybe, I just got a Facebook message from him, hadn't been in touch with him since elementary school. And the Facebook message said, hey, you know, I know that I didn't treat you very well. And I feel bad about that. And I want you to know, like, you know, me and the other guys, like we actually, we liked you even though we didn't treat you very nicely. And, you know, I was super appreciative of the message. I thought it was like really like a courageous and kind thing to do for him to reach out and to say that. But I had kind of complicated feelings about that. One thing I said to him when I wrote back is, hey, I can tell you're not that guy anymore. Like I don't feel like you need to apologize for what you did in elementary school. It's just

obvious that you've changed as a person. The other thing I wanted to say, which I think was maybe a little more challenging was I don't need an apology either, right? Like here my life is going fine. I don't feel like you owe me an apology. But what I kind of left unsaid was that, you know, there was a person who did need an apology. There was a person who did need better treatment. He's not around anymore. So I do think that these are really interesting. Like, he's crushed about identity.

You're really interesting. They arise in all sorts of ways. And sometimes the person to whom you owe your apology or your amends isn't actually around anymore to receive it. There's been times where I knew I could use some extra support, some therapy, and then I would start looking, and it's like who's a good fit, who takes insurance, how do I even sort through all of these options? And that's why I love what Alma is doing. They've built a network of over 20,000 therapists, and you can browse their directory without creating an account. You can filter

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who fits you. Local news is in decline across Canada and this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void and it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us because local news is big news choose news not noise cbc news going back to the ship of theseus if we assume that childhood being a formative part of our

overall development there is some part of you in some way that as we're saying is still a kid who was bullied and that had some we don't know what impact we can't say we can't tell which plank was affected. Yeah. But we can say, you know, there's something in there. And so I love these questions because they do get to the ways in which we define ourselves. Do I define myself as the kid who was bullied in school? And what does that say or mean about me?

Do I define myself as a Republican or a Democrat? What comes along with that definition? I mean, all these identities shape who we are. And so I love your formulation because the thing that I've arrived, at with identity is it's a useful tool. The more loosely we can hold it, though, the more flexible we can be with it, applying on an identity when it's useful. So, for example, there's lots of studies that show someone who says, I'm not a smoker and takes that identity is less likely to smoke again than somebody who says, I'm not smoking right now. Right. So there's a positive use of

an identity there. Yeah. But we know there's negative uses of identity. I label myself. a certain way and I start living into that. And so anytime I can slip the ship of Theseus into this podcast, I do it. But secondly, I really thought your idea about the reasons that we use them and the context was a really helpful way to think about these ideas. So I think that for me, like the really helpful thing in what you just said is this idea that we should be flexible about what we want to incorporate into our identity and think of it as a tool that's sometimes appropriate to use and sometimes not.

So I think you are absolutely right. There's a lot of discussion about this in the philosophical literature that, you know, say, if I see myself as an honest person, right, like part of what it means to take that on board as a part of my identity is that I'm just going to see myself as set against dishonesty. I'm not going to on each occasion, right? Say, oh, look, is there a good reason to tell a lie here, or is there not? Like, committing that this is how I see myself in the world is a way of structuring or forestalling deliberation that you may not.

want to get into. Yeah. And that, I think, can be really constructive. But then as you say, I think that sometimes people often incorporate things into their identity and make themselves too rigid, right? Like, the tool can be overused, right? So that, like, there might be occasions for making commitments in this way, and there might be occasions for maintaining flexibility. Yep. As much as I want to segue into cleverly disguised donkeys, I'm not, although I'm teasing that out for listeners. What you just said, And what we're talking about, I think, leads really into the idea of us talking about relativism a little bit. Particularly, I want to talk about this idea of, I'm not sure I'm going to say this word right, epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. Because I think this gets a little bit to how attached are we to our ideas, which are a form of identity.

So let's talk a little bit about relativism in general and then epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. Yeah, so the conversations about relativism started in a really interesting way in my house. They started just after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, and we were sitting around the dinner table, and Rex said that Donald Trump is a bad president, sort of thinking about how he'd encouraged the attack. And Hank, our younger son, said, well, Donald Trump is a bad president to us, but he's a good president to the people that like him. And I said, Hank, do you mean that we think he's a good president? and they think he's a bad president, but that one of us is right and the other is wrong. And he said, no, we think he's a good president and they think he's a bad president and there's nothing in the middle that says who's right, right? This was very much the idea he was articulating was we each get our own

truth. Like, here's a judgment. Is Donald Trump a good president? And he thought, for some people's truth, the answer is yes. And for other people's truth, the answer is no. And I wanted to see how far I could push this with him. I said, hey, Hank, if I take you outside and I, I, say it's raining and you say it's not is one of us wrong and the other one right and he said it's raining for you but not for me which i thought it was just kind of wild right that he was like i mean he is he's a tough cookie sometime right like he is he's willing to stick to his guns yeah and you know i think most of us are not relativists about the rain right we think it's either raining or it's not and you know we usually think there's a reason somebody's mistaken if they disagree with us maybe they just haven't gotten

drops or maybe they're being difficult, right? But a lot of people, I think, are inclined towards a kind of relativism about a valued of judgments. Like, was that a good or bad movie? Is Donald Trump a good or bad president? You know, is Mozart better than Beethoven? I'm not inclined towards relativism. I think there are truths of the matter about questions like this, or at least many questions like this. And even though the truth can sometimes be hard to find out, we should have some humility about whether we've identified the truth and we should be open-minded and listen to arguments and like we were talking about earlier, we should wonder whether we've got things wrong. But implicit in the idea of wondering whether you've got things wrong and being open-minded to the

evidence and listening to people that you disagree with you is the possibility of getting it right. So the stories in the book report some of my attempts to argue hank back into the idea that some things can just be true. But then one of the questions that I ask in the book is, well, if I'm right about that, if there's truth of the matter about some of these questions, why is it that we disagree so much? Why do we have so much trouble settling on the truth? Yeah. And I think especially in the media environment we have now, two concepts that people find really helpful for thinking about this are epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. Let's pause for a second. Before we jump off this point, I want to go back to a few things you said. And I also hopefully we remember to work in how you broke Hank.

Okay. But I want to explore this a little bit more because I am someone who probably is somewhat inclined towards relativism, but I'm not sure it's a well-thought-out opinion. Okay. So, except among our classical music aficionados, let's take a less charged topic than abortion. Let's start with, is Bach better than Beethoven or Beethoven better than Bach? Yeah. You believe there's a way to arrive at an answer to that. To me, that seems completely subjective.

Yeah, I should confess, I have limited classical music knowledge, right? So I'm not prepared to defend the view. Okay. that Bach is better than Beethoven or that Beethoven is better than Bach. And I'm not even actually committed to the idea that there's necessarily an answer. I think one possibility is it's indeterminate. They're good arguments on both sides. But let's take arguments that people probably have with their friends all the time.

It's Michael Jordan better than LeBron or is LeBron better than Jordan? Or is Serena Williams the greatest woman's tennis player of all time? Or is it Steffi Graf or is it Martina Vratilova? These are the lifeblood of lots of drinking sessions, right? The things that people love to get together and argue about. And I think the fact that we have arguments and the fact that the arguments are passionate tells us that we all presuppose that there's a right answer to this question, even if we right now disagree what it is.

Because we're treating it very differently than we treat different kinds of conversations. If you and I go get ice cream, I might be like, hey, what kind of ice cream do you like? in what kind of ice cream do you like? Well, I like all kinds. But if I had to put it into a category, I'd say chocolate. Okay, so you like chocolate ice cream? Actually, I like chocolate ice cream, too. But I wouldn't think that you and I are objectively right as against the people who prefer vanilla or the people who prefer salted caramel or whatever it is. I would just think, okay, like, this is how taste works. Yeah. There's the thing that tastes best to me and there's the thing that tastes best to you, and this is not a disagreement. But when we're having an argument about Jordan or LeBron or

Serena Williams or Steffi Graf or Beethoven versus Bach, we're not usually treating it that way. We're not saying, hey, I like Beethoven. And you're saying, hey, I like Bach. We're thinking there's some criteria of excellence here, whether it's basketball excellence or tennis excellence or musical excellence. And we're trying to evaluate these people's bodies of work against those criteria of excellence. And I think that project assumes that it's possible there's an answer. Here's an answer. Was Beethoven better than Scott? Yes. Yes, right. Beethoven is a lot better than me. And I suspect that Beethoven was a lot better than a lot of very famous pianists or composers. Was he better than Bach? I don't know. We need somebody with some classical music knowledge to pop in and help us sort that out. Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting. The word you use there is taste. You know, what's a matter of taste and what's a matter of objective fact? And I think the reason that I would take art generally off the table as there being a objective answer. And this gets to how we define art. To me, art is about making people feel something. And that is extraordinarily subjective. Is Steve Vi a better guitar player than my friend Chris, who's also the editor of this podcast? The answer to that, if anybody was looking at technical prowess, would be Steve Vi, hands down. But I would argue that I would much rather, much rather hear my friend Chris play guitar than Steve Vi because it moves me. You're making Chris's day. I am. Chris knows I love his guitar.

So let's move away from art, though. But I think now LeBron James versus Michael Jordan is good. We're assuming a standard of excellence. So now let's move into something slightly more emotionally charged, which is like, all right, I'm going to regret this, but let's just wander right into the abortion debate that's here. Because I often, when I look at this, I'm like, okay, if I look at this from the perspective of someone who is anti-abortion and if what I believe is.

that an embryo is a fully formed human being equal to what a five-year-old is in whatever my belief structure is, I'm going to argue fairly vehemently that we should not kill five-year-olds, right? If you came to me with that proceed and you're like, you know what, being a parent's a drag, if you know, if you got a five-year-old and you want to get rid of them, get rid of them, I'd be like, well, hang on. And I think most of us would. On the other hand, there are plenty of great arguments for why we should respect a woman's

right to choose and it's her body and there's all these things. How do we get to right there? That's where I get stuck. I'm like, well, I know what I believe. I know what my moral framework is, but it's not everybody's and should it be everybody's. So tell me how you think about that. So I just taught a class here at the University of Michigan called Life, Death, Love, and the Law. And it was some law students and some philosophy students. And it was really one. wonderful experience. I had students across the political spectrum with differing views about the moral permissibility of abortion. I'm certain, though, you know, people didn't share their personal stories that some people in the room probably had personal experiences, you know, with making those

choices, whichever way they might have made them. But I said up front that there's places in the world where, you know, people shouted each other about these issues and they try and drown each other out and they talk to each other in ways that are really nasty. And that's not what we're going to do in this seminar. Right. If you want to be in this seminar, we're going to listen to each other really carefully. We're going to share our own thoughts and our ideas. And we're going to hear what other people have to say about them. And we're going to display the sort of virtues of inquiry that we talked about earlier, wondering how we might be wrong, right, and inviting other people to help us think about how we might be wrong. And the students really rose to the occasion. And we had really

deep and insightful conversations about abortion, about euthanasia, about lots of these sort of like beginning and end of life kinds of questions. And, you know, it's not the case, I think, that we arrive at agreement about what the truth is in the course of those conversations. But I think we all got a much deeper understanding of the issues. We saw that some arguments that we might have thought were good were actually not so good and some arguments we hadn't entertained before we felt attracted to. And so I think the question of, like, like how does one seek truth in these really fraught issues is, right, through this kind of shared inquiry, through this kind of shared deliberation to kind of turn the temperature down in a way that

our culture makes really hard. Yeah. If you only think about this stuff by watching cable news or by going on Twitter, you're not going to think it through very carefully. You know, I like to recommend there's a philosopher named Kate Greasley who teaches at Oxford, who I think is the most thoughtful person writing about the morality of abortion today. She has a book that she co-authored called Arguments About Abortion, which is a kind of accessible introduction. And then also she was recently on the Ezra Klein podcast is actually a really great place to get her help in thinking through some of these issues. So podcasts actually, this one, others are a really great place to dive deep and think in them slower way than you can. But the point of all the thinking is that we think

we might reach the answer, right? So you said, well, look, if you think that an embryo, is just the same as a five-year-old, then, of course, you're going to think abortion is impermissible. We don't kill five-year-olds. We know that we shouldn't. And I think that's right. But then I want to put that view, right, that an embryo is the same as a five-year-old under a microscope. And I want to find out whether you really think it, right? And I'm going to present you with, you know, scenarios to consider.

And here's one. You work in a hospital. and there's embryos that are frozen in the hospital, and there are, you know, five-year-old children around in the hospital, and the hurricane is on its way, right? And you realize, as you're about to grab the embryos, that there's one five-year-old who can't walk themselves out. You know, that's why they're in the hospital. There's one five-year-old that's still in the hospital that didn't get evacuated. And now you've got a choice. You can carry the five-year-old out, or you can carry a dozen embryos. out, which one are you going to take? That's the trolley question framed up for abortion debate. I mean, I know what I would do. I'd grab the five-year-old. I actually think I sort of first encountered this scenario through Kate Greasley.

And I think it's a really great way, actually, of revealing to a lot of people that even if you care about the embryo, even if you value the embryo, even if you think God's made an investment in that embryo and we should protect it, most people actually don't think it's on a par morally with a five-year-old. Given the choice, they're probably going to save the five-year-old rather than several embryos.

And so I think it's through this kind of reflection that we can start to get a deeper understanding of the issues and our own views about them and work towards views that we think we can defend as truth. Need a vehicle that isn't afraid to make a splash? That's the Volkswagen Touse. Capable and confident, the Volkswagen Touse is fit for everyday life,

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And enjoy. Via rail. Love the way. Your whole approach here is really kind of what I wanted to get at, which is this idea of how do we talk to each other more civilly, but also more deeply inquiringly. You know, how do we ask good questions of ourselves and of the people we see things differently with? And you've got a line I want to read because I love it. You basically said, we should talk to people who think differently and we should be open to revising our views in light of what we learn. But we shouldn't give up on the idea of truth or the search for it.

And I love that idea that, again, we could debate which things you could come to objective truths on and what you couldn't. But the search for it, you know, and the attempt to try and investigate. I would have loved to have sat through your course. And I wish that we could, you know, have you lead the national debate on all these things. Because more than any policy that I see happen, and there are plenty that concern me, it's our structure of conversations. that is just so disheartening to me these days. Yeah. So I think that's right.

It's the structure of our debates, you know, especially our public debates. You know, like it's possible in a quiet seminar room to have conversations with goodwill, but we haven't really created public spaces in which we're accustomed to having those conversations. It's actually one of the reasons that I suggest toward the end of the book. Like, we should talk to our kids about philosophy at home. But it's also something we should incorporate into their education that in other parts of the world, grade schools have a philosophy curriculum or high schools have a philosophy

curriculum. And I think that those are really terrific ways of getting kids trained to have civil conversations with one another, to get them in the habit of listening to each other, thinking carefully about what other people are saying, hearing their objections, and thinking about where you might have gone wrong. I think that it would be wonderful if that was a more regular part of the way we taught children. Yeah. So let's go back to how you broke Hank of his relativism. Yeah. So remember, Hank's relativism was super thoroughgoing. It applied not just to a value of judgments about which many people are tempted towards relativism, but it applied to, you know, matters of, like, you know, is it raining outside? Yeah. So I was putting Hank to bed that night. And as I kissed him

good night, I said, good night, Hank. You're the sweetest six-year-old I know. He said, angrily, he's like, I'm not six. I'm eight. And I said, well, maybe to you, but to me, you're six. And he lost it. He said, um, eight. Some things are just true. So even in the end, right, once I hit on the thing Hank cared about, right, he couldn't handle my thinking differently about it. Yep, yep. I'm trying to think of what I feel that strongly about Chris versus Steve I, definitely. Excellent. Let's pivot to an article that got a lot of press. It was called What Shamu taught me about a happy marriage by Amy Sutherland. Tell me a little bit about that. I think there's a lot of great things to unpack underneath that. Yeah. So this was an

article that was at the time the most emailed article ever for the New York Times. Maybe it still is. Wow. It was an article written by Amy Sutherland. She was working on a book about animal trainers, say like the trainers at SeaWorld and how they get these animals to do extraordinary things like balance a ball on their nose. And she's telling this story in the New York Times. She says that she realized that maybe she could use these animal training techniques on her husband. His name was also Scott. She goes home and, you know, one of his problems, maybe also one of my problems as he leaves his clothes on the floor. And so she says, well, I learned from the animal trainers that you don't give negative feedback. When you get behavior you don't like, you just ignore it entirely. You act like it didn't

even happen. Right. So that's called least reinforcing syndrome. But then when you get positive behavior, like the least little step in the right direction, you reward that wildly. So she stopped complaining about his clothes on the floor, but if he actually picks him up and put it in the hamper, she would praise him wildly, right? And then, you know, like, he'd like the praise. He'd put more clothes in the hamper, and she'd praise him wildly again, and she reports that over time, his behavior started to improve, right? Like, he was the sea lion balancing the ball on his nose, right? This caused kind of some tension in our house. I saw the article, and I knew that I had a problem, and so I kind of disappeared our copy of the paper. One night I thought, oh, wait a minute,

you know, Julie, my wife is like praising me for something that really ought to be doing anyway, like putting my dishes in the sink. Did she see that article? And I asked her. I was like, is this about Shamu? And it turned out she had seen the article. She was trying to shamu me. We made an agreement. We weren't going to try and use these techniques on each other. And actually, you know, this arises in the book in the context of the chapter on punishment where I say, look, your little kids, treat them like animals. Like when they're two, when they're three, they really can't understand yet what they're doing wrong or why they should be doing better. So all you can do with very little kids is adjust the incentives that they face so that you elicit the kind of

behavior that you want. But I think the aspiration is actually to raise a person that you shouldn't treat that way, to raise a person who's a person and not an animal. And what makes them a person is, as we were talking about earlier, that they can appreciate the difference between what they want to do and what they ought to do and they can act on what they ought to do. And then it's appropriate for us to feel grateful when they behave well and angry when they behave poorly. Part of what it means to relate to each other as people and not to relate to each other as animals is to have these kinds of reactive attitudes. Like I get angry. I'm appreciative.

And I think that that's the way spouses, friends really ought to be relating to one another. You shouldn't be trying to train your friend in the way that you would train an animal. So there's lots of interesting things in this. You talk about this as seeing a person rather than an object, right? And there's a philosopher, I don't remember her exact name or his name, but said, you know, to see a person as an object is to see them as something to be managed or handled or cured or trained. Yeah, so this is a philosopher named Peter Stralson, who is a prominent English philosopher in the 20th century, and he distinguished two different ways of looking at human beings. One, he called the objective attitude is what you just described. You just see a person like an object in the world, subject to the laws of cause and effect. You know, if I push over here, this might happen. If I give them this incentive, it might change their behavior in that way.

And he wanted to contrast that with what he called the participant attitude. Like, you're a participant in relationships with them. Maybe as their spouse, maybe is their friend. Maybe you're the teacher and somebody else is the student. And there, right, he thought we have these attitudes like gratitude and anger and resentment and love. And he thought that, like, it's not that these ways of looking at people, the objective attitude and the participant attitude are absolutely incompatible.

We can take both, right? I can look at my spouse objectively or look at my kids objectively. And say, oh, look, you're tired today. I know that you don't really mean what you say. I'm not going to get mad at you about it. Or I can hear what you've said, understand the way it's insulting, and I can get mad about it. Right? And Strausson thought there's occasions to have both of these attitudes, but he thought it was a serious

mistake to try and always look at other people objectively because you'd lose touch with their humanity. You'd lose touch with the kinds of relationships that we really value in our lives. if you only treated other people like they were objects or animals. This is a really fascinating topic because my primary, I would say both philosophical, psychological, and spiritual orientation has largely been a lot of Buddhist thought. And Buddhist thought is very much about being non-reactive, right? It praises a certain degree of objectivity.

It praises a certain degree of seeing that what you're doing is not necessarily. necessarily personal, that it has its causes in the world and all that. And so it's easy to see the benefits of that, right? But I love that you're making a point that sometimes anger or gratitude is a better response than trying to think about how could I get that person to behave in a way that doesn't make me angry. Say a little bit more about that because that's pretty fundamental. Yeah, so I think anger is an emotion that needs some defenders, actually. We don't need more anger. Actually, it's plenty of anger in the world. But the culture is constantly telling us to let it go, to not be angry. And I think it's important to see that anger serves some important purposes. In particular, my getting angry is sometimes important to my respecting myself. So, you know, here's a person who's mistreated me, right? And they've done something, you know, like maybe they've

exploited me, they've used me, right? If I don't react in any way, right, then I'm in a way acquiescing in my own mistreatment, right, you know, signaling to that person and others that it's okay to treat me this way and maybe most disturbingly of all possibly accepting for myself, that it's okay to treat me that way. And so I think anger can be justified as a kind of protest. It says, hey, look, it's not okay for you to treat me that way. I want you. you to know it. I want you to know that I know it. Now, it's important not to be consumed by one's anger and for anger not to be the only thing that one feels. So I think that like the thing that people often have right is people take their anger too far. And so it's important to be able to let your

anger go and not let it take over your life. And I think like the Buddhist kind of Buddhist practice that you're talking about can be an incredible aid toward that. I just want to make a pitch for sometimes being upset, being angry, feeling resentful is a way of defending yourself in the world and respecting yourself. And we could tell a similar story about gratitude as a way of sort of respecting others and recognizing the sacrifices they might make on your behalf. Yeah. Now, the line between shamooing somebody and being grateful is very thin, right? Because if I want you to pick up your clothes and put them in the basket and you do, I could praise you because I'm like, I want more of that behavior. I could also say to you, thank you. I'm really happy that you did that. Yeah. Which they're very close to each other,

but you're saying it's the spirit. Yeah, exactly. So it may involve the same sentence that would be said either way, but we all know the difference between, maybe we can't always tell, but we all appreciate there's a difference between the thank you that's offered sincerely and the thank you that's offered strategically. And actually, my wife wouldn't thank me sincerely for putting my clothes in the laundry hamper, right? Because it's not, it's not like a situation where I've gone above and beyond. It's like I did the minimum. I did what I should do on that occasion, right? Like, chances are that thank you is strategic. And if Sutherland's husband had thought about it, he may have recognized that actually she's not as appreciative as she seems to be, she seems to be in the moment.

But I guess I want to make a pitch for not feeling these motions or expressing these emotions strategically, though sometimes perhaps that's helpful. But for being the kind of person and having the kinds of relationships where you feel and express these emotions sincerely without letting them take control of your life when they're not constructive. Yeah. And I really love how you said that we're all going to do a little of both of these, right? With context, we're back to this idea of there being context. But I really love this line where you said she stopped reasoning with him. This is talking about the animal trainer and her husband. She stopped reasoning with him and started shaping him.

And I love that distinction, right? That if I'm always trying to shape you into being somebody else, I am treating you more as an object versus reasoning with you. Now, I might be diving off the deep end again. But we're talking about the belief that people are capable of reason. We talked about how you should shape a three-year-old because a three-year-old isn't fully capable. I'm just going to do it. It seems like a terrible idea, but I'm just going to do it. Sure.

Is there a case that says certain people aren't intelligent enough to know, to figure out what's right, to figure out, to reason through to the right thing? What's your response to that? You know, I think I'm a little bit resistant in putting it in terms of intelligence because I think it's more complex. than that, but there's a kind of question that is confronted constantly within the criminal justice system about who's responsible for what they do. Yeah. And who's not? Yeah. Right. Because we think that many, most people are responsible for the choices that they make and are appropriate objects of the condemnation that's associated with punishment. But we also think that there are people in the world that are suffering from various sorts of disabilities that may inhibit their ability to understand

the choices that they're making or to control the choices that they're making. And we have some doubt that these people are appropriate objects of punishment, in part because we have some doubt that they're appropriate objects of condemnation. We don't think that we're in a position to have demanded better than they did. I'll tell you a little about, like, one of my favorite papers in philosophy I love to read with my students is by a philosopher named Gary Watson. He writes about one of the most heinous murders that you'll ever read about, just tells the story of somebody who murders two teenagers in a way that's shockingly callous. And you read this story and you have, like, as harsh a judgment

of a human being who would do this as you would have of anybody. And so Watson kind of meditates on that reaction for a little bit. And then he says, well, let me tell you the story. of this guy's upbringing. And then he describes what his childhood was like. And I shudder every time I think of it. I won't describe it here, but it's the most abusive childhood I've ever heard described. His mother kind of resented his existence and his parents deeply mistreated him physically and emotionally. And, you know, Watson gets to the end of that. And he says, well, well, now I think, of course, now I understand, right? Yeah. I don't think how come. it had been otherwise, because I know some people survived that abuse and didn't do these things,

but I do think, but I see why you had so little regard for other people, because the world showed you so little regard. And what Watson ends up saying is something I feel very deeply. He says, at the end of these, it's not like I can choose one or the other perspective. He says, my anger at the man this person is now just sits alongside my empathy for the child that he was. I find it very hard to form an overall view of this human being and to understand how I should react to them and how I should treat them in the world. And I think this is actually one of the deepest questions for the criminal justice system. As we learn more about causes of behavior and limitations that the people in different circumstances face, it's to sort of straddle these two perspectives. The engaged perspective of we're really angry about what you did, we expected better from you, is tempered by.

this other perspective where we think the world hasn't treated you so well and we understand maybe why you weren't capable of better. I don't have full answers for you for how to reconcile this. Yeah. And I could go down this for hours and we have minutes left. But I do think that this is a really interesting topic. I think it's going to become more interesting in the criminal justice system, as you say, as we begin to understand more about the effects of trauma on people's responses. You know, a question I ask as a recovering heroin addict and alcoholic is how much choice do people have when it comes to these substances, right? And we do know that the data seems unequivocal that the more trauma you've suffered, the much higher incidences of substance abuse

you have. With substance abuse, I think it's a little bit easier to be like, well, let's not penalize an addiction, you know, but we do things as addicts that probably do need punishing. This gets very complicated. And I look at my own life and I think back to the degree of choice I feel today around these substances. And I feel like I have as much choice as anybody who's never had a problem, more or less, right? I probably have to do some things to maintain that, but more or less. But there was a day where the amount of choice I felt I had was just a hair's breath. You know, it's interesting to have felt both those things in the same human being around the same thing at really different times.

You know, I was transporting opiates for my mother recently with no problem, but I would have robbed you at gunpoint for those once upon a time. And so I think the, you know, I agree with you. I don't think there are easy answers to these questions because there is a compassion element of it, but there is also a fairness to the victims element of it. There's also a protecting our society elements of it. And I think these things are really, really complicated. And I would love to spend like four hours with you.

you talking about these things because I think they're fascinating. But we are out of time and we didn't even get to cleverly disguised donkeys. But my question for you is, do you have a few minutes for a post-show conversation? Absolutely, I do. And listeners, if you would like access to the post-show conversation and the joy of giving a gift to this podcast and its listeners, go to when you feed. Dot, dot net slash join. Again, Scott, thank you so much. The book is a true joy to read. It's funny. It's engaging, it's deep. The notes I have on it are countless, so I encourage listeners to check it out. And again, thank you. This was so much fun. Thanks for having me on. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you

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