https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=40sQ7wEAptk
My recollection of particularly our last conversation, and it was one that I found clarified my understanding of your thought to a greater degree than our previous conversations I had, we had probably because I listened to you more, was that, and so correct me if I get this wrong because I want to use it as a platform to ask you some other questions. My understanding after that conversation was that you were driven to search for an objective foundation for moral claims, primarily because you had become convinced of the existence of, for lack of a better term, of evil in the world, and were looking for a, for solid ground to stand on in your attempts to both understand and combat the most malevolent proclivities of the most malevolent proclivities. We could leave it at that. Now is that a reasonable conclusion? Have I got that right? Yeah, I think my motive will be pretty familiar to you. This came largely out of the collisions I was having with people after I wrote my first two books, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, where I was noticing disproportionately on the left, specifically, I mean, we’ve come full circle now to this moment in the news cycle, but mostly in response to my criticism of Islamic extremism and the urgency with which I was saying that the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad are sincerely believed by millions of people, and these beliefs have real consequences in the world, and they’re not good ones, right? And we should talk about that honestly. What I was getting mostly from the left was, you know, what struck me as pure masochistic delusion, but it was on its own side, a very sophisticated philosophy of post-modernist truth claims about the relativity of everything, which in the minds of its adherents left us with no solid ground to stand on ever when making claims about right and wrong and good and evil. So, you know, the point where it became, and this is something that I, this is actually a scene I wrote verbatim in my third book, The Moral Landscape, which is where I laid out my argument on this topic. I was at the Salk Institute at a conference that had been organized, it was either in 2006 or seven, I believe, and I had said something disparaging about the Taliban in my remarks about the relationship between moral values and our growing scientific understanding of the human mind and human wellbeing. And I said, you know, something that should have been uncontroversial in that context, and I’m at the Salk Institute, this preeminent scientific institution down in La Jolla, which is one of the nicest places on earth, and, you know, with an auditorium filled with, you know, well-heeled people who appear to be enjoying their political freedom and their freedom of speech and freedom of everything. I said something about, well, you know, we just know, whatever remains to be discovered about the nature of morality and human value and human wellbeing, we know that the Taliban don’t have it perfectly right. So whatever the optimal way of living is, we know that the Taliban haven’t found it, right? We know that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags and beating them or killing them when they try to get out is not an optimal strategy for maximizing human wellbeing. And then a woman academic, and she actually happened to be, or was later a scientific advisor to President Obama for medical ethics, came up to me and said, well, that’s just your opinion, right? And so then this led me to realize just how far the rot had spread, you know, that even here is someone who is, you know, a woman academic, who’s enjoying all the freedom of, you know, however hard one they can be found in Western society. Presumably this is a person who would be, who would have responded to the Me Too movement and all its moral urgency with alacrity. She was still open-minded, at least in the context of talking to me about the treatment of women and girls under the Taliban, right? And I, you know, I detail our further conversation, again, verbatim in my book, because I literally, I was so astounded by the exchange that I turned on my heels, literally in mid-sentence, walked straight back to my room and wrote down exactly what the two of us had said, because I just could not believe what had happened. So, so the moral confusion here is that you have many well-educated people who will make very fine-grained distinctions about moral norms in the context of, you know, living in 21st century America, you know, they’ll consider words to be violence and, you know, the misgendering of people to be a profound microaggression, you know, Halloween costumes that culturally appropriate, et cetera, et cetera, or anathema. This is how finely calibrated their moral scruples are over here, you know, in the quad of an American university. But you ask them to consider whether, you know, someone like Malala Yousafzai was badly treated by the Taliban and they become tongue-tied, right? And they will even say things like, well, who are we to criticize an Asian culture? So anyway, so that motivated me to say, all right, the smartest, most well-educated people in our society have become unmoored to any vision of objective moral values, right? They have, you know, worse, they have become anchored to a belief that objectivity with respect to moral values is impossible and certainly science will never have anything to say about it. And so they’ve ceded this ground to dogmatic religion, right? And someone like Stephen Jay Gould did this when he had this conception of the non-overlapping magisteria, right, between religion and science, right? So science talks about facts and what is, but religion talks about what should be and the totality of human values. And I think that’s never been a tenable way of dividing the pie. And it has this obvious defect that where people who lose their religious convictions are then left standing on apparently nothing when it comes time to say something like slavery is wrong. You literally have professors saying, well, you know, I don’t like slavery. I don’t happen to like it. I wouldn’t want to slave, but you know, I can’t, you know, I can’t really say it’s wrong from the point of view of the universe, right? I mean, that’s not what science does. And my point is that morality, and this is perhaps something you’re going to want to disagree with, but in my view, morality has to relate to the suffering and wellbeing of conscious creatures. I’m not even limiting it to humans, but just whatever can possibly suffer or be made happy in this universe is a possible theater of moral concern. And we know that conscious minds must be arising in some way in conformity to the laws of nature. I mean, so whatever is possible for conscious minds is a statement about, at bottom, a final scientific understanding of what minds are and what consciousness is and how those things are integrated with the physics of things.