https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FPPkV3TiSmo
people who lose their religious convictions are then left standing on apparently nothing when it comes time to say something like slavery is wrong. I mean, 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 mean, 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. And so there have to be right answers to the question of how to navigate from the worst possible suffering for everyone to places on the moral landscape that are quite a bit better than that, where there’s beauty and creativity enjoyed of a sort that we can only dimly imagine. And the question of how to do that and what that landscape looks like, those are, it’s a fact-based discussion about science at every level that could be relevant to the conscious states of conscious minds. So it’s a discussion about genetics and psychology and neurobiology and sociology and economics and sciences as yet uninvented with respect to causality in this place. And so that’s my argument that there’s, we need a spirit of conciliance across the domain of facts and values. And yeah, there’s more to say there, but I’ll stop. Okay, well, so I’m gonna pick up a couple of themes there. So one of the things that you pointed to was the incoherence manifested by this woman and like people in relationship to micro narratives and macro narratives. So you said that it was in your opinion that she or the people who she might represent would be perfectly willing to be upset about some relatively minor issue that might represent a certain issue. That might arise on a university campus like the wearing of inappropriate Halloween costumes but are incoherent in relationship to making broader scale moral claims. Now, one of the claims of the postmodernists, this was put forward most particularly by, who was it now who said that there were no meta narratives. The postmodernism is fundamentally disallowance of the idea that any uniting meta narratives are possible. I’ll remember his name momentarily. It could be Derrida or Foucault or. Yeah, no, it’s not. He is the guy who generated simulation theory, another Frenchman. No, and? No. Baudrillard? It’s a rogue’s gala. Yeah, Baudrillard, it’s Baudrillard. It’s a rogue’s gallery. Yeah, yeah, it’s Baudrillard. Okay, so here’s the problem with that. Well, the problem with that in part is that there’s no united action and perception at any level without a uniting narrative. So for example, if I just move, if I pick up a glass to move my cup from the table to my lips, I have to organize all those extraordinarily complex actions, right? Which cascade up from the molecular level through the musculature of my body. I have to organize that into something that’s coherent and unified in order to bring about any action whatsoever. And what that implies is that there’s a hierarchy of uniting structure. And what the postmodernists do is arbitrarily make that halt at a certain level. It’s like, so you’re allowed a uniting narrative or structure up to a certain level, but beyond that, you’re not allowed it at all. And that’s the point at which the meta-narrative emerges and those are now forbidden. And I don’t understand that because I think that it’s a distinction between a narrative and a meta-narrative. It’s an arbitrary distinction and you can’t attend or act without a uniting narrative. So now you seem to be pointing to something like that. So let me walk through your argument. You pointed to the Taliban. I’ll add one other, which I think is a simpler defeater, which is that the claim is that there can be no universal values, right? And a universal truth claim with respect to right and wrong and good and evil. And yet they tacitly make the universal claim that tolerance of this ethical diversity is better than intolerance, right? So the demand is we need to find some space in our minds to tolerate the difference of opinion offered by the Taliban or Hamas or some other group of that sort. But that doesn’t make any sense. That’s an appeal to tolerance, one that the Taliban and Hamas don’t share, right? So we’re tolerating their intolerance. But it’s also the tacit claim that tolerance is better. Tolerance on our own side is better. Tolerance is the uniting narrative, sure. Well, you see the same thing with the postmodern insistence, and this is particularly true of people like Foucault, that nothing rules but power, right? Because Foucault saw power making itself manifest everywhere. And the fundamental postmodernist claim is that there’s no uniting metanarratives, but that didn’t stop the postmodernists for a second in making the claim that you can find power relations underlying every single form of human action and social interaction. But now this uniting narrative, see, you point to it in a way that I think that points out to me a very fundamental element of agreement between the positions that you and I have taken, even though we’ve had so much apparent disagreement. You point to the Taliban and you say, at minimum we can say with some degree of certainty that what the Taliban are doing is not optimal. Okay, and you said that’s a claim that’s so weak in a way that it should just be self-evident, right? You know what I mean by weak? It’s like, isn’t that obvious? Well, I started in my investigations at a more extreme point, I would say. I looked at the camp guard in Auschwitz who enjoyed his work and thought, I don’t know what good is, but at minimum it’s the opposite of whatever the hell that is. And so that was a starting point for me. And it seems to me that partly what you’re doing is that you put your foot firmly on the head of evil and say, well, this is a starting point. And even though we can’t define good, we can define it as the opposite of whatever this is. And so does that seem like a reasonable point of agreement between us? As far as you’re concerned. Yeah, although I think this is perhaps a different topic, but it’s certainly adjacent to what you just said. I think there’s some ethical paradoxes here which would be interesting to consider because I think most of human evil of the sort that you and I are now describing doesn’t require the presence of actually evil people, right? I think there are evil people. I think there are true psychopaths and sadists for whom it is true to say that if evil means anything, it should be applied to their conscious states and their psychology. But so much of what we consider to be evil and so much of what produces needless human misery is the result of otherwise normal people psychologically behaving terribly because they believe fairly crazy and unsupportable things about what reality is and how they should live within it. So I would by no means ever want to suggest, in fact, I’m at pains to say otherwise whenever I can remember to, that all jihadists or even most jihadists or all Nazis or even most Nazis were psychopaths, right? I mean, the horror of these belief systems is not that they act like bug lights for the world psychopaths and you attract a lot of people who would be doing terrible things anyway and they just happen to start doing it in this new context, let’s say under the Islamic State. No, certain ideologies attract totally normal people who would otherwise be totally recognizable to us psychologically and socially as good normal people but for the fact that they got convinced that whatever the relevant dogma is, in the case of- Okay, well, so I would say that’s another point of agreement. It seems to me that the pathological, the systems that produce rapid movement towards social and psychological pathology both facilitate psychopathic behavior and attract the psychopaths, I would say. It’s both of those. You can have both of those operating at the same time, right? And so then what we have are people, we have systems of ideas working in the background and those systems of ideas draw people into their orbit and motivate them to do things that under the influence of other systems of ideas, they might not be inclined to do. Seem reasonable? Yeah. And also, I just know, and you might wanna leave this aside, but your description of a guard at Auschwitz who enjoys his work, I think it’s tempting to imagine that that guard is incapable of all the ordinary forms of happiness and life satisfaction that we would recognize in ourselves because of what he is spending his time doing. And I would say that’s obviously not the case. And there can be virtues expressed toward evil ends. I mean, just unpack the meaning of that phrase, the guard at Auschwitz who enjoys his work. [“The Star-Spangled Banner”]