Hi-Phi Nation

 Night of PhilosophySeason 2, Episode 9Complete TranscriptBarry: A couple of years ago, I heard about this event at the French Embassy in New York City. The embassy brought in performers and philosophers and for twelve hours overnight from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. They had public performances lectures and debates and they did it in short bursts, every little bit only lasted about twenty minutes. They called it a “Night of Philosophy,” it's kind of like spending all night at a museum, but with ideas. And my first thought was, no one's gonna go to this thing.VO: this is very much of a French idea, we are kind of crazy in our countryIan Olasov: the line was like two hours it was a you know as clearly there was people were hungry for that sort of thing and there wasn't a capacity for it.Barry: over 5,000 people showed up there were lines begin and even at 5:00 a.m. and they got so big that they had to move it into successively bigger spaces, the next year and the next.IO: last year, the night of philosophy was held shortly after the election of Donald Trump and the night of the announcement of the first Muslim ban. There was this incredible foment sort of in the streets, people were going out to the airports to protest, people were protesting in front of the courts. It sort of felt like it was some kind of intellectual like crystallization of that sort of thing. It tapped into some sort of fundamental dissatisfaction with like how society is organized. The liberal or global World Order in one way or another isn't working for ordinary people and we have to kind of think our way out of it. We need to sort of create philosophical spaces in which people can sort of strategize and figure out what sort of society we want to build. Barry: while in 2018 the Night of Philosophy expanded to libraries all around the world and I decided to go down to the Brooklyn Public Library where the New York City event was held this year.VO: All of you gathered here in our lobby are proof that against the odds, we will hold tight to knowledge.Barry: from Vassar College you're listening to Hi-Phi Nation the show about philosophy that turns stories into ideas. I'm Barry Lam. Today I'm gonna do a little something different on the show, two of us me and producer, Sandra Bertin, we're going to be wandering the floors of the Brooklyn Public Library all night from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. at the Night of Philosophy talking to some of the more than 10,000 people who showed up at the event. I'm serious you couldn't even sit down in any of the talks. All the while I'm gonna bring you ultra short bursts of philosophical ideas, instead of having one idea and story I'm bringing you lots of them in short chunks, just like they did it the Night of Philosophy. So if you didn't make it out to your own hometowns Night of Philosophy or even if you did, here's the episode for you.SB: I arrived at the Night of Philosophy at around 7:30 and I knew I had a very long night ahead of me so I headed straight for the free coffee, and an old man just asked me in Latin if the coffee was free so that is where we are starting, with my coffee I went over to see the keynote speech of the evening which was being given by Professor George Yancy. He's a professor of philosophy of race, whiteness and African-American philosophy, and he recently wrote a piece in The New York Times called “Dear White America” in which he asked white Americans to accept their own racism in the way that he had come to accept his own sexism, and in response professor Yancy received a lot of racist and violent threats. During his speech he shared some with the audience, and please be aware there is incredibly hateful speech in this. GY: Dear n----- professor, you are a piece of shit destroying this country. You are neither African nor American, you are pure n-----, you would never marry outside of your n----- race that's a fact, you are educated with education, you're a fucking animal just like all black people in the United States of America…SB: one message he received just said the n-word hundreds of times and he read aloud each word over and over again. He wanted to make us uncomfortable and it definitely felt intense in there. It was a generally pretty white crowd not in comparison to other philosophy events, because it was in Brooklyn, but still it was definitely an audience that was caught off guard by such frank discussion of racism and whiteness. Once he was done I felt like I definitely had to be on top of my white ally duties, like calling people out for saying something racist and that kind of thing.Barry: and with the keynote over Sandra and I split up. The Brooklyn Public Library is huge within a half mile of it'll is more than two million people, there are three floors in a basement level and even then the place was packed.IO: hi yeah I'm Ian Olasov, I work with an organization called Brooklyn Public Philosophers, which organizes public philosophy events in Brooklyn and in New York City at large.Barry: Ian Olasov is a graduate student in philosophy who lives in Brooklyn, he co-organized the dilemma series of the Night of Philosophy where a philosopher leads a group discussion about some dilemma from everyday life. He also has a habit of taking philosophy to the streets of New York.IO: the “Ask a Philosopher Booth” is sort of what it sounds like, I mean we set up a table at green markets, book festivals, at Pride Parade, and block parties, and wherever, and hang out and talk with people about their philosophical questions. People either come by and sort of raise their own questions or we sort of start a discussion based on the material that we provide.Barry: even though I'm incredibly awkward at talking to strangers, I tried a little bit of this myself throughout the night.A: my name is AyanBarry: how much power do you feel you have over your own happiness?A: I think we need to stop putting a focus on happiness and focus on functionality. Pretending that everyone should always be happy puts a lot of false pressure on people. A lot more people would be something closer to happy if we could just allow them to be the way they are and still function in the world, without feeling this pressure of why don't I want to shoot rainbows from my face.IO: it's a lot of fun it's really intense I mean you have these sort of moments of sort of flash intimacy with total strangers or you have some like really intense discussion about you know about what happiness is, and then like they disappear if they just sort of what you know float back into the city. Well I mean you know every time you get, “What's the meaning of life?” For some reason that sort of the the paradigmatic philosophical question.Barry: you got in New Yorkers here's your philosophy short number one: the meaning of life.EP: I'm Emily Parke, I'm a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Auckland. There's no consensus on a single definition of life, a recent paper in 2011 counted 123 different definitions that are out there.Barry: when philosophers talk about meaning, one of the things they talk about is extension: how far does a certain word extend? Like the word “life,” it extends to protozoa, trees, and dogs. Does it extend to viruses? How about the planet Earth? Is it alive? Emily Parke works on this question, the meaning of life. Or to put it another way, the definition of the word “life.” It's a very hard question.EP: our current sample of life is a sample of one. When you look around at the living world it's very very diverse and heterogeneous, but it's all descended from a single common ancestor on earth which is usually called LUCA the Last Universal Common Ancestor.Barry: the latest theory about LUCA is that it was a single-celled organism in the ocean vents of Earth where magma is boiling seawater and releasing enormous amounts of hydrogen, because we all came from LUCA we share certain traits with it and with everything else that's alive on earth.EP: and so all life uses the same set of twenty amino acids one of the main ways today to look for bacteria on earth is to look for ribosomal RNA sequences in the environment.Barry: these are all material definitions of life or definitions having to do with the material that existing life is made out of. They don't seem to do the trick.EP: there's a lot of features of life as we know it that we have good reasons to think are contingent it's perfectly plausible that there could be life forms that don't have ribosomal RNA. If there were slight differences in the way the genetic code originated or slightly different letters made-up DNA, then we would have to look for something different. Barry: We haven't had any experiences of life-forms that are made up of different materials than us but we can imagine, what if something came down to earth and started running around and eating and growing, but the material that it's made up of is nothing like the earthly materials? By using our imagination like this we seem to arrive at the idea that life is defined not by what makes it up, but what it does.EP: you might think that evolution that's something that's common to all life on earth reproduction metabolism, by metabolism we mean something like exchanging material with the environment or chemically processing matter from the environment then arguably a candle flame counts is alive.Barry: there's this episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation which is about whether Data is alive and Data uses fire as his example of like, am I like fire or something?EP: yeah exactly so if reproduction is a necessary condition for being alive then a sterile hybrid like a mule arguably isn't alive.Barry: the definition of life isn't a mere semantic matter, it affects whether scientists can claim success in what they're doing.EP: synthetic biology is trying to engineer life from nonliving materials in the laboratory so trying to start with chemistry like soap and olive oil and lipid molecules and turn them into a living cell. Taking the genome out of a bacterium and replacing it with another bacterial genome and creating a new organism in a sense....so artificial life for example is a major area that tried to engineer living or lifelike systems or harness various properties of life in evolving software evolving computer programs or to build robots that do lifelike things. The aim there is quite explicitly to understand life better through trying to engineer it. Well that's an area where you really can't have a material definition of life because the media you're working in are explicitly not the kinds of things that have DNA. Barry: and metabolic you know that's like not relevant either?EP: one things like metabolism or containers is another sort of thing that people cite is a key feature of life container in the sense of having a barrier separating you from your environment we think of organisms as having those sorts of barriers, you could argue about that with a computer. Is a computer program an entity that's physically separated from its environment? There are a lot of existing definitions of life today on which a computer program could count is alive. Life is something that self reproduces and has variation.Barry: so I'm frightened after this conversation of ours, should I be? Or am I just being alarmist or am i tapping into a folk notion and not understanding the science?EP: yeah I don't think you should be because I mean a lot of this is arguing about how loose or strict we want to be about the criteria for what counts is living. Plenty of the definitions I mentioned like if we just say life is evolution, there's tons of things that evolve that aren't biological like technology or software. I think it's really important to think about life as a gradient or a matter of degree rather than as a dichotomy or the two categories that we can draw a line between. There are some features that are characteristic of life and if you have them all you're living and if you have none of them you're nonliving and in between there's this combinatorial space of possibilities, and I think that way of thinking about it fits really naturally with thinking about it as a gradual transition…SB: meanwhile back at the Night of Philosophy it's 10:30 p.m. and this is Doris. She's telling me about the ethics of Mars exploration, something she wrote about recently and is still obsessing over the little details of the arguments. Like how can we know what life would look like on Mars when life on Earth is our only reference point?D: But we really need to consider this, exploration has some bad…SB: for the first few hours the place was packed so packed that it was impossible to attend any of the talks or lectures at the beginning of the night…like a hundred people just got turned away from I think a magic show? so it's popping over here… So I decided to sit down and do other things, like play chess with retired statistician Jean-Claude...several hours and cappuccinos later the crowds died down enough that I finally made it into a session on cultural appropriation…VO: imagine someone like Mike a white guy from the Midwest in his twenties, moves to New York and he discovers West Africa dashikis, these really colorful shirts and he's like, “That's gonna be my new look I just think those are so cool.” and he buys a bunch, and that's that's how he dresses. And he has friend who thinks you know this is just so wrong, there's something morally wrong with what you're doing, and she challenges him, she like tries to convince him that this is really morally wrong…SB: this session on cultural appropriation was part of the dilemma series.VOX: it is a little wrong for it to be okay generally, you should you should at least have to understand, does he know where dashikis are from in Africa? Does each country in Africa have it’s own dashiki?VOX2: the problem I have with the critiques of cultural appropriation is that where are we going to draw the line? Because pretty much most things that come out of America are a result of borrowing from other cultures. We enslaved people, they came over from Africa, but without that enslavement without that population came over into the U.S., there would be no blues music there being of jazz and we know, no rock n’ roll, there would be no hip-hop.SB: the discussion lasted about fifteen minutes and it went as you might expec,t a lot of defensiveness a lot of slippery slope arguments, but as I'm packing up an older white man rushes over to me…. he seems concerned about the double standard of African black men appropriating Western suitsVOX: It is in a sense a form of appropriation coming from the former colonized peopleSB: I couldn't care less about appropriation if it comes not from a position of power because power is everythingVOX: I'm one of these people gets bothered all the time when people are saying you know “white men this white men that.” I'm like yeah there are white men you do that shit I don't think I'm one of them. It's become acceptable recently to generalize in these ways…SB: But it’s not just that, it’s that white men have been socialized that they are on top and that impacts every single conversation.VOX: It depends on the particular case I thinkSB: Personally I would disagree…Barry: We’ll come back to the conclusion of Sandra's argument at the Night of Philosophy after this message about our sponsor… I've always been curious eager to learn as much as possible and with the Great Courses Plus I'm always discovering something new, there's unlimited access to learn from award-winning experts about anything that interests you: philosophy, history, language, travel and more. There are thousands of lectures to choose from and you can watch or listen to all of it with the Great Courses Plus app. I've been enjoying their course on Mind Body philosophy. In the course, Professor Patrick Grimm guides you through some of the key thought experiments that have given rise to the contemporary mind-body problem and how it impacts the most fundamental ways we conceive of ourselves in science, psychology, and the law. I just did an episode about freewill in the law and I did an earlier episode about the self. You can go a lot more in depth in mind-body philosophy enjoy this or any other fascinating lectures from the Great Courses Plus with a very special limited time offer for our listeners one month free get started today by signing up at the hiphination or just click the link on the show notes that's the hiphinationVO: hello my name is Inigo Montoya you killed my father prepare to die.JG: I'm Joshua Gert I'm a Professor of Philosophy at the College of William and MaryBarry: in our next philosophy short, Joshua Gert is defending something I think needs to be defended, because I don't like it. I mean I do like it, but I don't like that I like it. It's revenge.JG: when I say that revenge is good I'm making the claim that it's good in the way that pleasure is good, good in the way that knowledge or abilities are good. When I say something is good what I mean is that if you make a sacrifice to get that thing, that makes sense.Barry: Gert’s case that revenge is good is really an investigation into the nature of “good,” and how we can know what things are good and what things are not.JG: for some things you can offer a proof that they're good in some sense of proofBarry: one way to prove that something is good like exercise is the show what else it gets you that's also good, like health.JG: but you can continue to ask questions about the things that are used in an argument like health, well why is health good?Barry: to prove that health is good you show what else it gets you that's also good like pleasure or pleasurable feelings, but at some point you have to ask a question that goes no further, like why is pleasure good? To answer that Gert agrees with John Stuart Mill.JG: Mill thought that if you desire something, then that's kind of like perceiving that it's good.Barry: Mill wanted us to think of human desires as goodness detectors just like our eyes are color or shape detectors or our ears are sound detectors. Human desires are a form of sense perception, they sense what's good.JG: you could be wrong in the same way that you can see things that are blue when they're really green and the lights wrong or something’s wrong with your eyes, but the only evidence that something is blue is that people see it as blue. If you try to figure out any other reason for saying to something is blue it's gonna bottom out in, look normal people see it that way. Desire is like that when it comes to getting justified belief that sounds good.Barry: so now connect us back to revenge nowJG: the conclusion has to be that revenge is good because normal people do desire it, it's a it's just a standard human desire. Everybody has that desire probably, even if not everybody acts on it.Barry: do you think the goodness of revenge ultimately depends on whether the individual desires it?JG: I think that evolution just has equipped people with a short list of things that are the kind of things that normal human people have as possible objects of desire. And my view is that the word we have for those things, that the word for object of normal non crazy human desire is “good.” JG: not every human desire is a desire for something good for Gert but the human desires that are close to universal and normal were understandable are, and even more interesting is that Gert may well think that revenge is good even if it doesn't get us anything else like pleasure or happiness unlike Mill, Gert doesn't think that all good things have to lead to happiness to be good. Happiness is not the only fundamental good, maybe an act of revenge brings you no pleasure and brings you no happiness, but it must be done. Gert has a second argument for the goodness of revenge and it has to do with the kind of desire it is. The philosopher Bernard Williams noticed that there are some desires like wanting to see your grandchildren that are very different than other desires, like wanting to get an appointment with your doctor. Wanting to see your grandchildren is a desire that keeps you alive, it gives a mortal life meaning, Williams called these “categorical desires.” These meaning giving life-sustaining desires or the archetype of the good. The desire for revenge Gert argues, is just like that.JG: there are people whose life is shaped, “I'm gonna stay alive until I get this revenge.” They're not happy people because something terrible happened to them but once that thing happened to them then they have a real not only a desire, but it's a desire for a categorical kind of a good, the kind of good that can give meaning to a life or a big stretch of a life...one of the things people want when they read stories or go to movies is to see people, they want to care about the main characters, and they want to see them pursue something that's worth pursuing, and they want to see them get it. It only makes sense that kind of a movie even within the failure of revenge if people are regarding the goal as a good for the person they care about.Barry: here's the caveat, good for Gert doesn't mean morally good, something being good doesn't imply that it's morally worthy of obtaining, or even that it's morally okay to do it.JG: money power or those things are good it's not controversial that they're good but of course a lot of immoral behavior is motivated by the desire for money and power.Barry: In fact, Gert thinks that morality probably always prohibits revenge it's the one good that requires the suffering of another, so the view has this strange consequence that there are these goods that happen to be morally wrong to pursue.Well then let me ask you this strange question then, what good is revenge as a good if they can't ever justify seeking it?JG: my answer is that moral assessment is just one kind of assessment most people you know if you're lucky most people you know care a lot about morality, most of them care about it up to some limit, but not everybody does. It's not rationally mandatory to care about morality. If you happen to be like some powerful person rich super rich person in the United States then look if you don't care about morality you're a bad person, but that doesn't mean you're crazy at all, you you can totally understand how somebody who has so much power that they're not going to get punished even if they're caught is not irrational for being immoral it's but it's still the case that nobody wants to act irrationally.Barry: so in your view the question, “why be moral?” is an open question, but, “Why be rational? is not.JG: that's right it's, I would agree emphatically with the second claim you made. I think there the the question, “Why be moral?” you said it's open, what I would say is there are plenty of reasons to be moral, it's just that it's not rationally mandatory that you care about those reasons. So here are some reasons to be moral, you're much less liable to hurt people, it's just that some people rational people even don't care that much about that.Barry: putting it all together then when we're cheering on for the person in a movie to get revenge, we're in fact cheering on immoral actions.JG: yeah most of the time that's probably true.Barry: we last saw producer Sandra Bertin she was in an argument with a guy about cultural appropriation, pretty quickly it became about whether you're allowed to make generalizations about white people. Here's a conclusion of that argument, but notice in the background there's a party going on ,lots of Whitney Houston…SB: No offense, but if I’ve had probably a hundred conversations with white men telling me the exact same thing, I get to generalize and say that white men have a problem with being called out.VOX: I guess what I'm saying is I was raised, I was raised to at least be mindful not to generalize about other groups and to at least be mindful and so it does feel very funny to me to suddenly see because it wasn't always the way…SB: this conversation I had went right back to what George Yancy talked about in his keynote and explained why he got such a vicious response. Discussions of race always seem to devolve into whether anyone is allowed to say anything general about white people. It was 1:00 a.m., for the rest of the night I was in a weird funk from that conversation, even though walking away he seemed to feel much better. Though I felt like I did the right thing I couldn't help but think of all the millions of other things I could have said, better things, way smarter than what I actually said. Instead I watched acrobats with a woman named Fabian and had more conversations about philosophy that sprung up naturallyBarry: While Sandra was walking around the library trying to get some white people woke, I was taking things a lot less seriously and decided to play a game, I went and found quotes from famous philosophers and I then paired them with quotes I got from bullshit generators across the internet where some algorithm puts words together randomly to generate deep sounding thoughts. I went around asking people if they could tell the difference. I was testing a theory about my own field.So what’s your name?B: BuddyBarry: Buddy, all right Buddy as I told you before half of these are internet generated pieces of bullshit and half of these are famous philosophers and you're gonna try to tell the difference between the two. “The world is made up of the sort of things one can think.”B: that's a good oneBarry: bullshit or famous philosopher?B: could be HegelBarry: that is indeed a famous philosopher, that is from the philosopher McDowell. “Imagination is only possible in subjective knowledge.”B: That sounds bullshitBarry: that is definitely bullshit, you are you are two for two. “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”B: Wittgenstein?Barry: absolutely! You got it! “The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.”B: That’s probably a real philosopher.Barry: that is a philosopher, god you're good at this, that's Deleuze. “Greed is born in the gap where faith has been excluded.”B: doesn't sound like a philosopher…Barry: so you're going bullshit?B: yeahBarry: five for five, because you're amazing at this.This wasn't looking good for my theory. I was hoping that people would be roughly 50/50 on deciphering bullshit from philosophy on the nagging suspicion that a lot of philosophy is indistinguishable from pseudo profound randomly generated buzzwords. Psychologist Gordon Pennicock and his colleagues released the study in 2015 that asked people to rate the profundity of statements that were randomly generated using New Age buzzwords like “manifestation.” He found that people who accepted bullshit statements as profound tended to be worse at math, engaged in conspiratorial reasoning, were more religious, and believed in the paranormal. On the other hand people who are really good at rejecting bullshit scored higher in what you might call analytic thinking logical reasoning, the use of statistics in math. I wanted to test this from the other side what about the people who are supposed to be producing profound work, is their work distinguishable from randomly generated stuff? My new friend Buddy made me a little more hopeful, then I noticed some professional philosophers across the room, really prominent wants to probably there to give talks. I decided to test my theory on them. Alright introduce yourselves philosophers:CD: Alright I'm Cian Dorr professor at NYU KS: and I'm Kieran Satya professor at MITBarry: okay, “democracy is what it is only in the difference by which it defers itself and differs from itself.”KS: and I'm afraid that sounds like philosophyCD: yeah I mean what why did you say bullshit or philosophy? What about bullshit and philosophy? It does sound like a fair enough not made by an algorithm.Barry: not made by an algorithm? but maybe still?CD: that sounds like human human productBarry: that is Jacques Derrida okay, “Man is in the frequent state of being, ruled by discontinuity without realizing.”CD: Is there a comma between being and man?Barry: okay sorry, “Man is in the frequent state of being ruled by discontinuity without realizing that-”KS: I think it's true it's yeah it's true if that's bullshit then bullshit is good, that's really to hit upon a profound truth to it, who is that?Barry: that is internet generated bullshit KS: I need to find this website this could save me a lot of timeBarry: this is gonna be this is going to be easy but all right, “Experiences themselves are states or occurrences that inextricably combine receptivity and spontaneity.” CD: sounds like my colleague John McDowell my ex-colleague John McDowell I'm afraidKS: He was my colleague too Barry: That is John McDowell that is right. “The friend is not another ‘I’ but in otherness imminent in selfness, a becoming other of the self.”CD: That sounds that's real that's philosophy yeah Jean Luc Nancy or someone, I don't know are we wrong, are we wrong again? You're giving us a look...Barry: That is Giorgio Agamben. “The subject is interpolated into a textual paradigm of discourse that includes culture as a paradox.”CD: it also sounds like philosophy to me, you think we may divide on this one, you're lookingKS: I'm gonna say seemed like it would be a really good algorithmic CD: I think it's just I’m incredulous and I think it's all philosophy, have I said no to anything yet?KS: I think I’m also gonna go with philosophyBarry: that is internet generated bullshitCD: we have an astonishing level of interpretive charity and we can find some truth even in even an internet generated bullshit KS: with me is it's the opposite of charity, it's like we're like it all in all sounds like babble to me. Barry: well let's ask a serious question now is the difference between bullshit and non bullshit just a matter of interpretive charity? I mean couldn't we just be incredibly charitable just about and is bullshit not in the content or the very sentences?CD: I'm gonna like Kieran handle this oneKS: bullshit is well being but bullshit has got to do with a state of mind if the person producing it, if it was a that was produced by a person at all, so I guess even this this random stuff that is generated by random number generators is only sort of bullshit by courtesy, you have to raise to a certain level before you even count as real bullshit. Classifying something as bullshit is already a certain level of charity since you're thinking well at least the person, the person had some desires or other with regard to add the production of this stuff, albeit they were kind of ignoble desires.CD: it is true that in context I will be willing to get, run with almost any sentence or sentence fragment given a suitable context of philosophy I would give it almost anything a chance to make some kind of senseBarry: but you know if we're interested in helping people become better bullshit detectors as like Harry Frankfort you know our teacher was concerned with, you know it's it's a it might be a you know one of the barriers to our job is to making people better bullshit detectors right?CD: I mean I would stand by the thought that bullshit detection is not going to be as sentence-by-sentence thing and there's going to depend on context seems right to me, so I think if you were the kind of person who's prone to dismiss stuff as bullshit to given just one sentence out of context you probably would be dismissive of a lot of philosophy because if you went to Journal of Philosophy and picked out the worst sentence out of context in many articles, it would look it would look pretty bad and I think that the thought the right response is to think I won't make a judgment about whether this is bullshit until I have some sense of the of the context seems reasonable to me so in that sense I stand by my my failure on the on the bullshit test.Barry: Philosophers Cian Dorr and Kieran Setiya. Kieran Setiya was actually on two episodes of Hi-Phi Nation hear more from him on episode one of season two “The Bottom of the Curve and episode ten of season one, “A Better Love.”In our final philosophy short of the day we're going to look at moral relativism with one of its most prominent defendersBarry:I'm David Wong I'm a professor of philosophy and the philosophy department at Duke University. I agree with most moral relativists in holding that there is no single true morality but in addition I want to say that there's only bounded plurality of moralities that are true.Barry: in other words, there's no one true morality but not all moralities are true. DW: One example that comes to mind is a doctor has found that the patient has a pretty serious illness perhaps terminal. In places like China, Hong Kong, you would be regarded as fairly normal for the doctor to go to the family first and say, “Well what should I tell your loved one, the patient?” and his family says, “Well it's maybe best not to tell our father or mother, oh we just want our loved one to be comfortable and whatever time is left.” Whereas I think in the West the tendency would be for the doctor to go directly to the patient and break the news. Barry: it's not just the tendency it's actually written into the code of ethics even in federal law in some cases.DW: I think that is a matter of there being a higher value placed on personal autonomy in the West whereas in in East Asian moral traditions such as Confucianism who we are as persons is seen to inherently involve our closest relationships, that who I am very much is the son of these people, the husband of this person, the the father of this child. Those are central to my identity and my welfare is very much bound up with the welfare of these other people and theirs with mine. Then when it comes time to apply this to a concrete situation, there I think is a much greater perceptivity to treating a person's welfare as very much tied up with the welfare of those who love that person, that would be one example I think, where I would be inclined to think there isn't a single correct answer as to what's the right thing to do…Barry: moral relativism is a pretty strong term, almost everyone accepts that in some circumstances there may be more than one right thing to do, that happens all the time. That shouldn't be enough to make you a relativist, relativism is supposed to be more than that.DW: I think that one should arrive at a position on these matters through concrete consideration of particular disagreements and differences we have.Barry: I want to use an example just to help me think about it vegans versus meat-eating omnivores arguing about the morality of killing and eating animals.DW: some differences and disagreements are one set are based on disagreements about the facts that don't involve basic values and in those cases our job is to try to get straight on the facts.Barry: OK there are facts about whether non-human animals are intelligent emotional creatures who suffer bodily pain and have cognitive abilities similar to humans.DW: other kinds of disagreements may be based on our tendencies to believe what is the advantage to us, so we may benefit from a certain kind of social arrangement, the moral arrangement, and tend then to consider the evidence that argues in favor of the that arrangement and ignore the evidence that undermines it.Barry: meat-eaters do benefit from an arrangement where non-human animals are subservient, exist for our interests in their flesh, so we are motivated not to consider evidence of their moral status.DWL if that's the case then we we have to examine the disconfirming evidence, but what led me to my limited form of relativism are certain kinds of disagreements such as the one I described initially about differences in the way people prioritize autonomy versus relationship, where I don't see that there's a some kind of error that's based on getting the facts wrong or people having a certain position and refusing to consider other positions because they benefit from that particular arrangement.Barry: this would be the case where a person is knowledgeable about all the facts about non-human animals, they don't disagree with the vegans about any of the facts, they simply value their pleasure that meat-eating brings over the value of animal lives and comfort.DW: I think there are some things that stem from the fact that there are many different things that human beings can most prize, most value, and there's not just one way of prioritizing those things so that's one way that I arrived at this kind of more limited version of relativism, by way of considering the particular kinds of moral disagreements we have and realizing that some disagreements are resolvable other disagreements I think aren't, and the way they aren't tends to me to indicate that they stem from the pluralism of value that human beings can recognize there's just one more than one thing that is most important to us.Barry: that's the difference between David Wong's moral relativism and what you might call moral absolutism. Wong thinks that when the values are fundamentally different, both are right, they both have true moralities. An absolutist thinks that one of these people has some screwed-up value,s one of them is wrong.Why not go full-blown relativism right? why not go there's the morality of here and the morality of there and anything gives there's when you say that there's no true morality?DW: I think one theory and it's a kind of a possible explanation of why we have something we call morality which is that we human beings our kind of life depends on cooperation. It's my theory that morality is that part of human culture that developed to help facilitate and regulate cooperation between human beings. It's that kind of way of regulating facilitating cooperation that is not supposed to depend on force or coercion or deception, it's supposed to be that way of regulating cooperation that can get the largely voluntary compliance of people, because it's it's a way that they can come to accept as fair and that advances their interests as human beings and by interest I mean not just the nakedly material benefits, but things that we can see is meaningfully contributing to a good life for human beings. With that conception of morality, I argue that just as there are different ways to construct a good bridge given the materials you have available, and given the particular geography of the situation you're dealing with, you have to design it for that situation and you have to design it with the structural properties of the material you have available. So it is with morality it's it serves a certain purpose. The purpose constrains the kind of thing that can fulfill it, not anything can fulfill that purpose.SB: it is 6:30 a.m. and people are for real filing out, and finally the last event ended too tired claps and groans as people peeled themselves off the floor. Oh I guess that's it, everyone is leaving arm and arm passed out on each other's shoulders. Alrighty then.Barry: Special thanks to the Brooklyn Public Library and the cultural services of the French Embassy look for a night of ideas in a town near you. Sandra Bertin is a freelance podcast producer you can find her at . ................
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