Episode 329: Why We Suffer

0:00Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. I said to him, you are aware that I am not really a wizard.

0:23And he said, yes, I am aware of that. What I want you to do is to use your acting skills to portray. The wizard.

0:35The great end of us has spoken.

0:39Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

0:48Who are you? Who are you? I'm a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Good man. They think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to that man.

1:09Anybody can have a brain.

1:13You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston. Dave, March Madness is here. And by that, I mean VBW Madness, our 16-topic tournament for the listener-selected episode. We picked the 16-team bracket last episode, and now the first round is underway. Our beloved patrons are voting.

1:44Who you got in the final four? Okay, my top four. I think you got it right with the number one. I think Apocalypse Now is going to make it out. I also think Solaris is going to make it out. I think Invisible Cities might make it this time around. And then Twin Studies. I think those will be the final four. Is that exactly what you got?

2:09I mean, the numbers are the numbers. Like, we can't. The top four seeds? Is that real? That's so boring. Oh, no, it's not the top four, because Solaris is a five seed. So that's the only slight upset is what you have is Solaris over the Tempest. Yeah. And, like, if I was, like, truly wish casting, I would want the Passion during Salamaris. But I guess we're doing that anyway, so. I don't know. Like, I don't know when we're going to do that if it doesn't work. I will say that. But I think Twin Studies will probably make it out of there at the bottom of the bracket.

2:41I don't know. Actually, here's, I'll pick an upset. Even though I would love to do Invisible Cities and think we should, I think the conversation might get out. Yeah, that's a good one. And that would be a real upset. That would be an 11 seed. I think it's currently beating the overcoat right now. Sorry, all the goggleheads out there. But we will do the overcoat. Nyet! Nyet!

3:05We'll get to the overcoat sooner rather than later, I think. But maybe not. So you better vote. Like, you know, if you like it. Goggleheads, don't wait for us. I was rooting for inventing temperature. Like, I think I want to do that anyway. Yeah, and that's going up against the passenger, Stella Maris, though. But I think, okay, so here's mine then. Apocalypse Now, I do think Solaris could do it. It's been in a lot of tournaments. It's gotten pretty close. So I'm going to say, you know, that'll be one final four matchup, Apocalypse Now and Solaris.

3:36And the other one, I'll go the conversation and Twin Studies. But, you know, I'm not that confident about it. Yeah. I hope people know that Solaris, they've, like, encoded, that it is the film and the book, you know, for those people who want to make us suffer more. Yeah, exactly. I think that would be very cool, though. It would give us a really good chance to talk about, like, adaptation as an art, too. Yeah, yeah. And different media and what it means. Yeah. Yeah. But that's not up to us to decide.

4:06So if you want to join the voting at a certain tier, you will get to vote on every round of this tournament until ultimately we have a winner. And that is a topic that we have to do. We are bound by obligation. We will suffer great illnesses if we don't follow through with that. And so we would likely do it, right? Yes. And what a great segue to saying what we're going to talk about for our main segment. In our main segment, we're going to be talking about a Schweder et al. paper on culture and moral psychology.

4:38I think a foundational paper. But what are we doing first? So first, we are doing a philosophy paper. It's been a while since we've done just a, you know, a recent philosophy article. This one came out. When did it come out, actually? 2018. 2018 in the Journal of Value Inquiry, you know, like a totally upstanding journal in ethics. And it's by Harry Chalmers, who I might have thought was David's less successful younger brother.

5:12But I don't think they're related as far as I know anyway. Yeah. If anything, it would be son, I think, at this point. Yeah. He does look kind of young. Yeah, he's a young guy. Based on the photographs that David has been sending me. From the private detective, yes. Those were of me. That's true. Those were of you. I couldn't. It was hard to tell because it wasn't your face, you know.

5:36You'd think you'd recognize me right now. I always confuse your Johnson and Harry Chalmerses. Harry Chalmers. Now sounds like a dirty name.

5:47Harry Palmers. Well, maybe one reason why it sounds dirty is because he wrote a paper entitled, Is Monogamy Morally Permissible? And you may be surprised and may be grateful to learn that the answer is no. It is not. Monogamy is not morally permissible. Well, shout out, by the way, to whoever error theorist is on Twitter because he's been giving us some gold. This suggestion came from his Twitter account. I think he might be the new neuroskeptic, you know, like, because at least you don't have to go to Blue Sky for error theorist, you know.

6:24I got to follow him. I don't even follow him. You found him and been putting him in Slack, and I think he's going to be a goldmine. He really is. Yeah, he doesn't even, he's not being judgmental about this. No, not at all. Not even, yeah, like a snide remark, like neuroskeptic will sometimes do, you know. Yeah, no, he just says, here's a paper that argues that monogamy is morally impermissible, which is exactly what this paper does. He's not wrong. Yeah, so this is, I think, a paper that, you know, might illustrate a lot of the problems that I have with analytic philosophy.

6:58It reads like, you know, it's a very clearly written paper, and you understand the arguments, you understand the dialectic, you understand the debate. But I do also think there's something a little insane about it, and it's the same thing that's insane, I think, about a lot of analytic philosophy. So maybe as we talk through it, I can get at maybe, you know, what that might be, and maybe it's me, you know. Maybe. You just don't want to accept the truth. Well. But I thought it was interesting that it doesn't, you know, there are defenses of non-monogamous relationships, open relationships.

7:33Like, I've certainly been exposed to a lot of those. Yeah. It's usually not aimed at arguing that monogamy is actually itself morally bad. No, right. It's usually a defense of it. I mean, one of the tricks that Harry Chalmers pulls here is he switches the burden of proof and puts monogamy on the defensive. You know, like, it's a nice rhetorical trick. I'm not sure if it's well justified. I think that might relate to some of the issues with it as well. So here's, like, it seems as if the sole foundation on which this claim is resting, that monogamy might be morally impermissible, is this analogy that he makes to a relationship where you have a friendship and you don't permit the person to have any friendships besides your own.

8:18Yeah. And, like, your intuition, at least my intuition, is that this would be a morally unacceptable thing to require of another friend, even, I guess, if it's your partner in the example. You're in a romantic relationship and you forbid your partner from having just, like, non-romantic friends. And that is, like, the sole source of the—that's the intuition pump for why monogamy itself might be morally impermissible. Yeah, I think the way he puts monogamy on the defensive is he says—and I don't even think you have to be in a romantic relationship.

8:49You could say, here are our two friends, and if one of them said the other one wasn't allowed to have any other friends or, you know, even requested that, that would be impermissible. And, yes, and also with your romantic partner, if you did that with friendships, that would be impermissible. So if that's impermissible, what is it about sexual relationships that would justify that all of a sudden being okay to demand that your partner doesn't have any other sexual partners?

9:22I think that's the idea. And so, like, the burden is to draw some kind of distinction, and then he considers a lot of different ways you could try to do that. Right. And he does defend the intuition by saying, like, that he thinks that the source of the intuition for why it would be wrong to forbid your friend to have other friends is that, quote, friendships are an important human good, and when we're in a romantic relationship with someone, we should want our partner to have such goods in her life. At least we should want our partner to be free to pursue such goods as she sees fit.

9:53So, like, you're preventing them from acquiring the kinds of goods that are important for a human life. This isn't the same person as the compersion person, is it? No, no, but he does rely, it seems, on that idea. Yeah, instead of being, like, jealous, you should be, like, happy. Yeah. Someone you love is having, like, a really fulfilling sexual relationship. Yeah, who are you to stop that? That's great. Yeah, so this is what he says for monogamy on the defensive. We have seen how monogamous restrictions are prima facie analogous to a morally troubling no-additional-friends restriction.

10:29We have seen it, yes. We've seen it in the, yeah, the couple paragraphs in the introduction. The task for those who would defend monogamy, I love, I really think this is kind of a brilliant paper in, like, the way, like, certain things are immediately assumed. The task for those who would, like, dare to defend monogamy, then, is to find a morally relevant difference between the two kinds of restriction. There are, broadly, two ways in which one might try to find such a morally relevant difference.

10:59One, argue that the no-additional-friends restriction has bad-making features that monogamous restrictions lack. You know, the bad-making features thing is something that absolutely drives me fucking crazy. It makes me want to, like, blow up, like, the APA, like, one time. It is, like, the paper is written, in my mind, like, the equivalent of, like, the latest, the hottest shit on the streets, like, the latest Gen Z slang, but, like, for philosophers. Totally. Like, yeah, the latest shit that people are talking about in these kinds of journals, and bad-making features is probably, you know, like, the latest terminology.

11:35So, that's number one, if you are a monogamy defender. Number two, argue that monogamous restrictions have good-making features that the no-additional-friends restriction lacks. You know, he's being eminently reasonable. He's like, you could do one of these two things. That's right. Those seem to exhaust the possibilities. So, how are you going to go about doing this? And, yeah, so he says, you could say it would be a more onerous burden to say to your partner that they can't have additional friends than it would to say you can't have additional, like, sexual partners.

12:12And so, he says, I grant that, right? Like, I grant that that would be more onerous. Yet, it is a morally relevant difference only in a weak sense. Namely, it suggests that the restriction on having additional friends is morally worse than monogamous restrictions. And this, of course, is not what the defender of monogamy needs. Because it could still be that that's worse, but it's also bad to have a monogamous restriction, right? And to do that, the defender of monogamy will have to go beyond strategy one, which is this, above.

12:48That is, she'll have to go beyond simply arguing that the restriction on having additional friends has bad-making features that monogamous restrictions lack. Right. He tosses in a ceteris paribus in there. You know, some morally impermissible actions, after all, are worse than others. Yeah, which is fair enough, right? Yeah. At this point, the defender of monogamy might say that while both kinds of restriction have this apparently bad-making feature, this is a problem only for the restriction on having additional friends, for this latter restriction seems to lack any justification.

13:21So, like, why would you restrict someone having additional friends? But when it comes to sexual and romantic relationships, there are good reasons why you shouldn't have other romantic relationships. But then, if you do that, you are opting for strategy two, which is a more promising route than strategy one. However, you still have to explain why monogamy is morally permissible, while the restriction on having additional friends is not. You're totally right, by the way, that that's the whole thing that the paper relies on.

13:52Yeah. So then we get to the specialness defense. Yeah. Like, the rest of the paper is just the laying out the various defenses, right? Yes. And, you know, each one of these gets shot down. And we don't have to obviously go through, like, all of this. But I think, like, we should take a couple of them just because I think they share this same problem, which this just sounds like an alien writing about, like, human beings and, like, sending the record back to their home planet.

14:23So the first example of this, I think, is here. So he says, one common defense of monogamy is that monogamy helps one romantic relationships to be special. Many think that there is or can be a distinctive value in choosing and being chosen by just one person. This distinctive value, so this is one of the good making feature, is enough to justify monogamy. The most obvious problem with this defense of monogamy is that it seems to apply equally to the case of friendship. If having only one partner makes for a more special romantic relationship, and if this value of this specialness is sufficient to justify monogamous restrictions, then it is difficult to see why having only one friend would not likewise make for a more special friendship.

15:07And why this specialness would not likewise justify the no additional friends restriction described earlier. So this is, I think, like, you could boil all my objections down to this. It's like, well, if people who are saying it's special to have only one, like, romantic relationship, that should be true of friends, too. It should be just, it should be exactly as much more special to only have one friend. But it's not, like, it's just not, like, this is the problem. It's like, well, what's the relevant, morally relevant difference here?

15:40It's like, it's just that people don't think that when it comes to friendship. And many people do think that when it comes to a romantic relationship. I know. I was reading this and I was thinking, like, you know, having two cupcakes really takes away from that one cupcake that you just had. And it's like, we don't think about all of these things in the same way. Like, one cupcake isn't more special than two cupcakes because, like, I had that second cupcake, right? No. Or, like, if someone would say, you say you don't like eggplant and yet you like sweet potatoes.

16:11But there's no relevant difference between sweet potatoes and eggplant. One might say that eggplant is less healthy than sweet potatoes, but it's far from clear that that's the case. Like, that's what all of these fucking things sound like. Right. Like, it really is a striking lack of considering that people just like different things more. That, like, there is a psychology, that people have a psychology. And in that psychology, most people are perfectly fine with multiple friends and not, right?

16:44It's not, there's no work is being done here other than, like, showing that you sort of weirdly don't get that people don't like this. Every difference in our kind of norms and inclinations and dispositions, they don't all need a kind of rational justification. That's just not how it fucking works. And, you know, I'm sure he would say if he were here, well, that's what people used to say about, like, racism. You know, like, that's why racism was justified or that's why burning heretics was justified.

17:15But the trick is to explain to someone why, like, that's true in one sense, it's like that, but it's not true for everything. It's not true for just these kinds of basic forms of life that we experience. Like, just, it doesn't all have to have some systematic rational justification. Yeah, like, I even think that you could have a systematic rational justification. He's just clearly, like, not looking at features that might provide that.

17:46I think he's giving short shrift to the kinds of features that people might reasonably point out to, like, my sense of satisfaction or whatever, what I favor. But my point is it's a category mistake to think, well, if you think it's more special to have just a monogamous romantic relationship and you don't think that's true of friendship, then you need to find the special making difference between those two cases.

18:16And it's like, no, you don't. Like, certain things you find special and certain other things you don't find special and you're not going to justify it. You might not even be able to explain it. It's just what it is. Yeah. It would be one thing if he said yes, but you punish people for having affairs and stuff like that. And if that was the case, then, you know, like, there's separate issues, but I would be more okay with it. But in this case, it's that monogamy is impermissible because you can't justify the fact that nobody except some weirdo would think you can only have one friend and that that makes it otherwise the friendship isn't special.

18:51But that's just not true in the case of monogamous relationships. Yeah. So, like, what bugs me about this argument, well, a couple things. One, what you said, I, like, also totally agree with. But you could easily imagine this structure of this argument flipped to say, you know how people have multiple friends? Well, I'm going to argue that it is morally impermissible to have multiple friends. So let me give you an example. I have a romantic partner. I think they should not be sleeping around with other people.

19:22I think that's obvious to everybody's intuition that, like, we should be not cheating on our partners. So what is there to, like, why would you think that it's permissible to have multiple friends? And that's as strong an argument because they both rely on a fundamental intuition to begin with. Yeah. Well, but I mean, he would be like, yes, exactly. Right. Like, you could make that argument. Well, it's the opposite. Yeah, except that, you know, like, it would be your reductio is another person's modus tollens or whatever. Exactly. Modus tollens is another modus tollens.

19:52Like, but you just don't have to justify the fact that you value one type of thing more than you value another type of thing. You don't have to find the relevant difference. It's just kind of how it works. So, like, this is a good example of, I think, the disconnect. He says, I can think of only one reason why one might think that monogamy helps one's relationship to be special. Like, it doesn't need a reason. It's just, like, how do people view it? It's like, so the one reason, he says, if one understands special to mean exclusive, under this understanding of special, monogamy indeed helps one's relationships to be special.

20:29This, of course, follows trivially, but surely there is more to this defense of monogamy than the trivially true claim that monogamous relationships are more exclusive than non-monogamous relationships. It's like, nobody would say that because they wouldn't have thought that they would have to justify that because it doesn't have to be justified. This is over-intellectualizing the facts more than P.F. Strawson, like, ever dreamed philosophers were capable of, I think. I do think, like, in that sense, like, he was reacting against exactly this temperament, and that paper is somewhat prophetic in predicting that this is where philosophers were heading.

21:11Yeah, I agree. I mean, I do think it's worth talking about, like, primarily because the knee-jerk rejection that people have of non-monogamy. And, like, I think there are people for whom it is obvious that a non-monogamous relationship is what they want and what they want in a partner. And then that's fine, right? It's just that, like, for most people, these are the things that they want, and you don't need to call this one impermissible just to defend the other one. Like, we can say both cases, like, hey, it seems like a reasonable thing to have just, like, a, like, what are you looking for in a romantic partner?

21:43And the things that you are looking for seem, like, very reasonable ways with which to select the person you want to be with. And the value of being with one person and all of, like, the good shit that we think, like, happens in a loyal, monogamous relationship. You don't need to tear it down with this, like, weird intellectualizing. Like, it's not even just, like, abstracted too much. It's stripped of all psychological meaning when he makes these arguments. It's, like, weird. It's completely stripped. That's what's insane about it is it pretends that there is no, like, human psychology, and we're all just figuring out how to get all of our tastes and values and beliefs,

22:22and we're just all trying to make it into one kind of perfectly consistent framework. And it's just, like, that's not how it works. Like, if it would work like that, it should work like that for the kinds of movies we like and the kinds of, like, the fact that we like this friend better than that friend. Like, there's certain things that don't permit of rational justification, as Strassen said, about, like, is it ever okay to blame somebody? He's like, now, that's a lot more controversial claim than for something like this. But I think the point is the same.

22:53Like, it neither calls for nor permits rational justification to think that having one friend is less special than having one romantic partner. It just doesn't. Yeah. Here's where, like, I also resist, like, I agree with you, like, justification, you know, serious justification, but that also doesn't mean that you don't have reasons, you know? Like, your reason can just be I don't like it, and I like it, you know? Like, that's, it's not, you see this when he gets to jealousy, where his way of dealing with a jealousy defense is simply to say, yeah, but, like, it's dumb to be jealous.

23:29So, like, let's not be dumb. Yeah. Like, it's essential. Like, that's all we have to do. Well, he says, like, because he asks, like, why would you feel jealous? You know, like, here your partner is finding joy. You should have compersion instead of jealousy. Like, it's right there. And he says, the answer, I think, can only be that we feel jealous precisely because we are less rational and less mature than we could be. Were it not for certain unreasonable fears and preoccupations that burden our minds, we would react to our partner's new love in the way that is so evidently called for by simply being happy for him.

24:02I hate this because it's this way of talking about emotions that put the cart before the horse where it's like, no, the very reason that you're jealous is because there is something that you value that is being threatened. It is not that, like, the jealousy is kicking in and you're like, oh, man, if only I could truly endorse the things I value. No. Like, it's, you're jealous because it's reflecting that you do not want something to happen that you fear. But see, he's already attacked the justification for the value of, like, as the specialness of the monogamous relationship.

24:37So, unfortunately, it's not clear that that defense will hold. You should also, yeah. Yeah.

24:43Yeah. Just, like, taking a step back, I've noticed that there is a weird divide in the psychology of people who are totally fine with non-monogamy and the rest of us. And I'm okay with that. Like, maybe that's a deep divide. Maybe that's, like, fucking inner voice levels of divide. And if that's the case, then I want everybody to be happy. But this does read as if there's somebody who just fundamentally does not understand what's going on in the mind of people who, like, are, like, into monogamy.

25:14I mean, it's just, it is. It's almost like you wouldn't know, like, if you had to respond to this, like, in print, like, how to go about it. I know. I don't want to tackle those stupid arguments. So, like, when he's talking about the practicality defense, this is very funny. He says, there is an improved version of the practicality defense. Specifically, one might propose that not merely time and energy management, but considerations of people's emotional limitations can justify monogamy. Given the emotionally demanding nature of romantic relationships, along with our own emotional limitations, it is entirely legitimate to focus our attention on developing one relationship at a time and to expect our partner to do the same.

25:56But, he says, this won't fly. Even if we grant that a single romantic relationship will leave us emotionally exhausted, allowing casual sex on the side seems just as much a solution as opting for full-blown monogamy. But surely this won't do, some will object, for what starts as a bit of casual sex on the side can easily become something more serious. If we wish for security and stability, we must stick to monogamy. This maneuver, I must say, this maneuver, I must say, strikes me as – that's great, actually.

26:27I actually really like that. Strikes me as tenuous.

26:32And then goes on to bring the friendship, like he always does. I mean, I am convinced that you should have no other friends than me. You've often made that demand on me. Like God says, I am a jealous God that shall have no other gods before me. Since I'm so committed to monogamy, I guess I got to do it, right? I like that. I like that somebody is going to read this and be like, I've been irrational this whole time. Honey, go ahead and fuck that really hot guy with a huge cock. Or they'll be like, hi.

27:03Like they'll go down their list and they'll be like, call all of them except one and say, I can't be friends with you, can't be friends with you, can't be friends with you, can't be friends with you. Like I guess you could really do either. You know what, one of the objections that he doesn't consider, I think is a good one, is whenever this happens, like say a couple is monogamous and they're like, let's say that they're like, yeah, we're being irrational. Let's open it up. It's always one of them that's going to get all the action and the other one's going to be like, ah, shit. Well, this is what we've always talked about with these kinds of paper.

27:35And it's always the one that's kind of defending it. I think that's usually the one that's not going to be able to take advantage of it.

27:45I don't know what the psychology is then. I don't know either. And I've seen plenty of stories where somebody is like finally convinces their wife to be non-monogamous and then she's just getting laid every weekend. And it's usually, I would say, the woman. I think that's how it works. Because they don't respect the guy for agreeing to it. Like that's the thing. Also, they can just go get sex. Yes, exactly. It is much easier. Yeah, it's a very interesting contrast, this paper with the next paper.

28:17Like I would say they are on two opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of like how much respect to give to people's actual practices and actual like emotions. Right. That's right. But you know what? Good for you, Harry Chalmers. He has a substack where if you want to read more about the back and forth with other philosophers that he's had regarding non-monogamy, it's called Noetic Pathways. And to be clear to all the VBW female fans, I don't think either of us are saying that we're opposed.

28:51No, no, cheating is okay. This wasn't about cheating. This wasn't about cheating.

28:57You're such a dick. All right. We'll be right back to talk about Richard Schwader and colleagues' paper, The Big Three of Morality and The Big Three Explanations of Suffering. We'll be right back. I'll see you next week. Bye.

29:21Bye-bye.

29:23Bye.

29:35Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh

30:07welcome back to very bad wizards this is that time of the episode where we like to remind you how much we appreciate you may get repetitive for you but we always like to do it um because we do appreciate all of the ways in which you keep us going um we would not be here without you if you want to engage with us you can email us verybadwizards at gmail.com again we read

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33:23as tamler said a paper called the big three of morality autonomy community and divinity and the big three explanations of suffering by richard schwader nancy mooch i'm assuming manamo and mahabatra and lawrence park um this is a paper that was published in 1997 in a collected volume that was edited by brant and rosin paul the paul rosin who we've discussed before on a volume about health and so this paper is focused on how humans across cultures make sense of suffering and it does so by analyzing

33:54the systems of explanation for suffering that humans seem to rely on across cultures they refer to these systems of explanation as causal ontologies and they focus on what they see as the three most widespread ones that we'll talk about in the process of presenting this cross-cultural work on how we deal with suffering they also introduce this big three of moral ethics autonomy community and divinity and they argue that there are different moral systems that privilege different kinds of explanations for suffering so in the west that is focused on autonomy the causal story that we rely on

34:30is the biomedical one where we treat disease and distress and death as explained by physical or biological causes of affliction but in moral systems that emphasize community and divinity they rely on different causal explanations for suffering such as interpersonal ones and moral ones so this paper what i really wanted to get to in this intro is an explanation for why i think this is one of the most important papers in moral psychology and why i was excited to read it because it's really been influential and it's been cited a couple thousand times but that doesn't really track how influential

35:05it is because this introduction of the idea that there might be different moral foundations across cultures is what jonathan hight and jesse graham really built their moral foundation theory on they took this notion that you might have something like an ethics of autonomy of community and divinity and they expanded this to create their moral foundations but they brought along with it the idea that's introduced in this article that these are intuitive systems that are emphasized more in some cultures rather than

35:38others but that they are part of human universals we all have these intuitions and we just rely on some more than others depending on the culture that we're brought up in and the other thing that i'm sure we'll talk about is that this paper is just chock full of just interesting anthropological data this is built on work that was done in india by interviewing people across the span of months with locals playing a role in translation and helping them understand what's going on there's just nuance and richness to the way

36:10that culture is discussed and the way that these frameworks for understanding cultures is discussed and it's a nuance that i think that has just been lost in the modern incarnations of these ideas where we're focused on like distilling these down to some sort of essential belief that can be put in a statement and inserted into a measure and i think in doing all of that we've really lost the richness because like at the end of reading this paper i'm struck by the richness and the complexity and the dirtiness of what human

36:42psychology is in a way that i just am not by modern psychology yeah like it just respects and recognizes the complexity of our beliefs and the different ways we try to make sense of what happens to us in a way that you know obviously i agree that social psychology has strayed from and you know in its own way i think analytic philosophy has strayed from and the paper we did in the opening is a great example of that and i guess i agree with you that he thinks the biomedical explanations are predominant for us in

37:17the west as opposed to india but i think he also thinks kind of moral explanations well two things number one that it does sneak its way into our folk psychology and the way we talk about in ways that aren't kind of officially licensed by our scientific and naturalist way of trying to understand the world so it sneaks its way in number one and number two i think he thinks like we're really like losing something like i've read a bunch of schweder papers and i've never seen him place the thumb on the scale

37:49so much kind of against our way of understanding and conceptualizing and and approaching illness and health and like i think he really kind of lays his cards pretty heavily with you know some of these other cultures that are willing to engage you know metaphysical supernatural moral kind of karmic ways of explaining certain ills you know there are times he sounds downright contemptuous of like americans and their market-driven way of trying to explain all of this and i really enjoyed that too

38:24you know i can imagine it might be controversial but i fully enjoyed it and you know it's rare you see that much like laying your normal cards on the table that you do in in this right yeah absolutely like i knew you would enjoy that end part i mean that at the heart of this is this view that what we're doing really like you said is we're trying really hard to ignore all of the natural ways of explanation that we engage in anyway and so what we're doing by focusing solely on the biomedical is trying to endorse

38:59something that's inconsistent with what we fundamentally believe about the way things work and he has like a nice discussion of what he means or what they i should say they mean by causation here because when they talk about folk causation they're really not talking about you know the way that scientists understand causation and they say look like when people are talking about causes they're often talking about interpersonal causes who's responsible who should be blamed and he says in folk psychology the idea of causation does not rule out the possibility of influence at a distance it does not rule out

39:31influence by unobservable forces it does not demand attention to all necessary conditions does not treat all necessary conditions as equally relevant or as of the same kind and again like this is the kind of nuance that i think is important where even if i like my in my sort of cold rational science tells us everything it would be short shrift to say that that's not a deep part of my psychology to think about like what did i do to deserve this or you know what unobservable forces might have caused this and

40:04as they point out later like this isn't always irrational like we might actually be ignoring important causal chains by trying to focus solely on the physical the bio like the biophysical yeah and he notes that like when we're talking about causes for accidents like if you're talking about something bursting into flames you don't say you know oxygen was a cause of that but instead like it's just your practical considerations is going to orient what you will think the cause of our car is skidding off the road because the person was driving too fast from one perspective you

40:40blame the person that's what caused the accident from another explanation you could blame the road because you know like it wasn't skid proof enough you could also blame the car and focus on those causes and his point is all these causes are there's no one that is more kind of rational to believe than the other so it's often just like the emphasis you know the practical considerations or you know spiritual considerations might lead us to focus on certain causes as the cause and not even

41:12recognize the other ones it's not that you would deny that they were part of it it's just that you don't think of it as like the cause cause you know this is the one that you would use to explain what happened to somebody else you know right yeah there's so much in this paper that ended up sort of like having this influence on future moral psychology like as you were talking about that like there is you know the graham and height stuff is attempting to point out that like maybe this diversity of

41:43thought should be understood as not superior or inferior but you also have like the like all of the weird stuff the joe henrich stuff that that it's such an important part of the point that they're making here is that most of the world and they even present some data like most of the world doesn't think in terms of the causal ontology of the biomedical but rather they think in in terms of interpersonal and moral so you know like most people in the world still think about envious neighbors or dominating relatives or ancestral spirits or witches or the evil eye like all of those

42:17things are playing a heavy role in the causal ontologies of most people in the world and our little slice of the world is an exception yeah and even us you know like how often do we think in terms of jinxes or absolutely knock on wood yeah knock on wood and and like oh this is what i deserve you know like yeah they had it coming he talks about karma like we talk about karma in like ordinary life like we think about it and you kind of have to force yourself not to think in those terms even

42:48for us having been brought up you know in this western culture that values science and looks skeptically at any kind of either supernatural or not fully like evidence-based kind of explanation and yet we're still drawn to them like in just our ordinary thought and the way we talk with people a lot of the time yeah even medical doctors like in some ways there's just no way to get around like that there's a causal nexus that is a person right and that that person makes choices and that they're responsible

43:20for their health in some way and so obviously that's truer in some cases than in other cases but i also just love the way that you know there's this complexity to the way that they present these three like ethics of autonomy divinity community that you also don't see in more modern takes on this where they're talking about like look it's not as if in south asia so in these communities in india in oria where they're studying these people it's not as if they don't have notions of autonomy and individuals and rights but you really have to take into consideration that what they mean when

43:55they're talking about an individual isn't as they refer to it like the western transcendental ego like the self that is you know within the boundaries of this time and space that say i believe in but rather the self is a spiritual entity that has an existence across multiple lives yeah and so when they are talking about autonomy it's under that lens as well and also that you know ultimately this is all part of some underlying like formless reality and individuals and their actions are just

44:27expressions of this larger you know whatever they call it brahman or atma or whatever like this ultimate reality that these things are so even the individuals and even the karmic connections between individuals from life to life or even within a individual life are still also connected to everybody else and ultimately everything that actually exists so yeah like their metaphysics which i don't like like with us doesn't really play i don't think it may be a huge part in the big three

45:03explanations um it's just very different than our understanding okay so i have one question about like the structure of this paper and then also its importance in the way you described it so this isn't the first time that he's presenting the big three autonomy and harm community and i think it is no because the height 93 paper talks about this and references schweder yeah it does so i'm not sure what they cite of schweder so

45:33there's a paper in 1987 uh schweder mahapatran miller that reports on some of this work as well like there it's more focused on moral development and their notions of moral development but every moral foundations paper at least since this paper cites this one because it's the most like maybe fleshed out yeah and with all those different kinds of moral violations but what i initially thought was oh he's taking his three which height then expands to five or six i think at some point of these kinds of

46:06foundations and he's applying it to suffering but then it's a weird structure of the paper that the bulk of it the middle of it is focused on the big three and really doesn't talk about suffering at all suffering only gets brought back into it later into the papers but yeah like uh there is a height paper that's schweder is not even on where he talks about the big three you know you know what i'm talking about uh no because i know the height and joseph paper that's like their first one affect culture and

46:36is it wrong to eat your dog that one yeah so it's that one is citing the original schweder 1987 paper so in like this data collection that schweder did in these people in uh oria um india he published a few papers on it and one was in 1987 where they like it has a like really full account of all of the moral violations of people in two communities in india and in two communities in the united states and there i do think they talk about the different ethics of autonomy and community but this is the one that

47:10lays it out most like formally that there are these three and that they are linked to these causal ontologies these interpersonal moral and biomedical and so this is the paper that gets cited nowadays by almost every paper on moral foundations that is published okay yeah yeah really they're talking about like these in-depth interviews that were done like by park i don't remember like i don't know who the other authors are and so they reproduce a list of like purported moral violations that are

47:42coded by whether they're violations of autonomy divinity or community here's actually one of the things that i love about this because even here in this paper you see like this list of 39 moral violations or purported moral violations such as a widow and an unmarried man loved each other the widow asked him to marry her right a boy played hooky from school at night a wife asked the husband to massage her legs i love those a woman is playing cards at home with her friends her husband is cooking rice for them that's like a moral

48:15violation i want to live in this culture in a family a 25 year old son addresses his father by his first name yeah and what they have in this table where they list these out isn't even like ratings of whether they're you know how wrong they are but rather to what extent they are like hitting on one of these ethical codes of autonomy community divinity and so they actually just give like low medium or high rating for each of these violations so some of them are low in terms of like how much they're about

48:49autonomous violations like harms and rights and justice and high in the other two some of them are high in all three some of them are medium in all three like this already is more nuanced than the way that we study moral foundations where like they take these statements and they just assume that it is one or the other yeah and that's just not how people think and this has actually been a problem in measurement where you're just like well that's actually hitting on a couple of different things but you're just saying that it is a measure of yeah whatever purity because there would be way too

49:19much noise and there would be too many confounding factors if you admitted that like a lot of these things might be working at the same time in ways that are not easy to isolate yeah so here's an example he says using the one my favorite a given stretch of text could instantiate more than one category for an example if an informant expressed her moral condemnation of the events in incident four a woman is playing cards at home with her friends her husband is cooking rice for them by stating the wife is the servant of the husband the servant should do her work the rationale would

49:51be coded as both hierarchy and duty and this is again these are like in-depth interviews where they get and this is what i love about the 1987 paper as well where they like list out all of these moral violations they don't just list them and leave it at that one sentence they all have stories attached to them and rich explanations that they asked people about so that they can really assess what's going on in their psychology at least in the psychology that they're able to report yeah so that they can get a better sense of what it means to think in terms of community or divinity and how it

50:26often happens that it's all mixed together yeah so after listing all that for them and stating that for them divinity and you know the hierarchy community duty that those play a much bigger role than they do for us how can we try to understand this without just kind of dismissing it and you know he says at the one hand we're not going to try to get you to adopt the metaphysics of you know an

50:56indian brahman but we do want to like call attention to the fact that there are these neglected ideas that are in our own cultural history that manifest themselves in ways that make more sense in terms of our own norms rather than the hindu norms and that's the thing that i am going to try to get you to do and here's where i think he gets kind of contemptuous so one of the things he tries to say is they have a more feudal society where there's kind of a man at the head and the man has

51:27obligations towards the people under him that he has to like take care of them and he has to legitimately do that but then the people under him also have obligations this is why something that seems unobjectionable oh i'm gonna you guys want some rice you're playing mahjong or whatever like sure i'll make you some rice but for them that kind of violates i guess that kind of feudal ethics metaphor and he says of course we are going to bucket that not because we're too science-pilled but because of

51:58our you know like legitimate worries about uh people being oppressed and rights and things like that but what you lose when you abandon that whole way of thinking is this idea that people should care about each other like at all and that they might have actual obligations to care for people who are less powerful than you that it's not just like every person for himself so he says like most americans ideologically recoil at the idea of feudal ethics because a feudal ethic does not fit well with the

52:32philosophical underpinnings of our historically evolved political culture and our free market mentality we shall try to explicate a few major principles of feudal ethics in terms that americans who underplay this aspect of experience in their dealings with persons quote can understand uh so i love that he's like i'm going to try to explain it to you like in ways that you like money worshiping like mcdonald's eating like 48 ounce soda like guzzling fat fucks that you are i'm going to try to

53:05explain this in terms that you'll understand this is where i think he does get kind of contemptuous almost of the way that we handle it in part because i think he thinks it's impoverished and also in part because he seems to think that it's like we sometimes talk about making us more atomized and then also it's very like market driven you know it's that we're so focused on like money and the freedom to get money and acquire it and keep it you know yeah so my more positive spin on that but i agree with you um is that when he's then saying like i'll explain it in a way that

53:39you might understand like this is a part of your thinking that you've like neglected but that nonetheless is available to you yeah i wanted to read like this description that he has of how to think about these discourses of of morality where he talks about them as culturally coexisting and so he says discourses are symbol systems for describing aspects of experience more than one such symbol system may be applicable to any area of experience such as individuals psychological development ethics health or suffering there is no reason that one must select one and only one

54:10discourse to represent an area of experience indeed there may be some advantage in possessing multiple discourses for covering the complexities of such an important area of human experience as ethics no discourse corresponds so tightly to facticity that it cannot be separated from it all discourses described through interpretation and inference and this is the part that i love that i thought you would endorse as well experience is often so complex that its facticity is sometimes better described by one discourse and sometimes by another although different discourses in the social

54:42sciences and elsewhere say behaviorist cognitivist and object relations schools of psychological development often seem to be in competition for one definition of a realm of experience this is usually a sociological effect more than a logical one it is often advantageous to have more than one discourse for interpreting a situation or solving a problem not only alternative solutions but multi-dimensional ones addressing several orders of reality or orders of experience may be more practical for solving complex human problems and in that is just like an acceptance of the complexity of human

55:14life and human culture there's so much said there like about how when we compete for soul explanation what we're doing is basically a sociological fact not one that's truly capturing reality yeah and there's also something in there that i like i seem to be reading about how you need to understand this through all of the other lenses of your culture like when you think about autonomy and somebody else in a different culture thinks about it you know there's different content to it there's a whole bunch of different cultural assumptions that might go into it but nonetheless you know these are modes of thinking it's just not easy to

55:48say oh isn't it crazy that indians believe that a husband can't cook for the wife like if you say that and leave it at that yeah then it is just like what the fuck yeah no that's right that you have to consider it in the like a holistic context to truly understand it never mind be like charitable and not just think oh this is like a deeply patriarchal and oppressive society which it may ultimately turn out to be but you can't just do it based on like isolating certain norms or beliefs or codes out of its context uh he says

56:21the policies of the feudal system are not necessarily easy for democratic-minded americans to appreciate the contemporary american mistrust of hierarchy and ready-made association of hierarchy with tyranny exploitation and overreaching entitlement seems to reflect what happens to hierarchy in a democratic market society where take care of one's own is replaced by survival of the fittest so he's saying like yes hierarchy in a free market capitalist society is bad but there are you know

56:52you switch the cultures and you switch the whole structure of how people relate to each other and it might not be as bad all things considered but you have to take it all you can't just take part of it that's right you know similarly you can't celebrate our like love of like process and procedural justice and genuine at times respect at times for people's like individual rights you can't take that out of context either that's right you can't even take some of the cheap shots he put like the fact that we're

57:23so money worshiping and like yeah like even that has to be considered in terms of what it does allow people to do even if it cuts away at some of our communal bonds and relationships so it's really great stuff in that way yeah and you know on that note about like hierarchy it might seem that this free market democratic society is a bit allergic to hierarchy but like damn if it isn't just rearing its head that that deep down a lot of people still desire hierarchy and that this scratches an itch that

57:54like humans have right and it's like the battle to eliminate modes of hierarchy that are unjust like on our ethic have had to do a lot of work to disabuse people of like these very deeply instilled notions about how society should be organized and it's still there like we are yeah like clearly right and i think his point is is that even if we could squash it like entirely and we're not doing a good job of that right now but even if we could like there would be costs to that the costs probably coming in

58:30terms of people's sense that you should give a shit about other people like that those two things are sometimes inextricably bound and so like again i'm not sure if he's right about that but i see what his point is is that when you focus all your attention on one aspect of morality without examining what effects it has on other aspects of morality that that's short-sighted and you could almost argue as i feel like he sometimes is here that it's a big failure of like liberalism like political liberalism that

59:01they don't recognize some of the costs they're so tunnel vision focused on like harm and justice and rights and especially procedural rights that a lot of the other stuff that's genuinely good like communal bonds and sense of obligation and emphasis on building and cementing interpersonal relationships uh that that is a good thing and i've you know you see in this paper that he thinks we are losing that to a degree and then he does a similar thing with like the stuff about divinity i think i was wondering

59:32what you thought about like that part of the paper yeah i mean i find it fascinating so like so much of like the discussion here about like the hindu worldview and karma specifically is so i'll just say this like i i think that it's absolutely makes sense that the notion of karma has entered our vocabulary because i just think it's picking up on like metaphysics aside it's picking up on such a natural way of thinking about the

1:00:04world but here's what i love is there's always like this narrative attached to these like lessons you know like there's this story about like you mentioned the the person that becomes made into a dog like there's just a rich narrative that's weaves together the way that they understand how karma works so when you ask what i think about it like i'm jealous of having like such a rich spiritual worldview because i just don't have that yeah and you know he kind of goes back and forth

1:00:36between these things do pop up we do talk about this but then like the officially we're not supposed to accept these explanations but then other times i think and especially with this he thinks that often what this does is actually less rational even by our own lights because so for example with our focus on biomedical explanations we often just ignore the fact that the in an individual uh might have brought about their own illness you know like if i get like liver disease yeah it'll you can explain it as

1:01:12some biomedical thing like some uh but like if somebody says well you shouldn't have been drinking so much like that would be uh and and people would say that about something like that but maybe they would be hesitant to say that about someone with diabetes who was obese or something like that and so what he says is the focus on just that level of explanation often just blinds us to the fact that we do have some control sometimes over our health and sometimes although we don't like to say it like this it is our fault that we are sick and it's not just victim blaming to acknowledge that

1:01:49like this is a very proto i don't know like uh no i know this would not like i feel like he would have trouble saying this in a modern journal yeah it does feel like in social psychology they would find some uh objections like moral objections with this yeah not like woke or whatever yeah so i will say like i i don't know rick schrader well um but proto anti-woke i think is a good way of describing him but in a much better way than like any modern anti-woke but this is all yeah like much better like

1:02:22again i think that the richness and like the nuance that is presented here is just lost in in the modern ways yeah i agree let me tell a quick story about like our our last episode that where we discussed uh schrader's paper on shame an acquaintance of mine like a listener of the show uh shameless power worked with schrader and sent him our episode and schrader listened and reached out and said that he really liked it and he ended up assigning it for one of his seminars like they had to listen to our discussion of very bad wizards but i will say like what i knew about him from before

1:02:56was that he was always willing to say shit that like people might not have really wanted to hear well this is his time again you know this is his time to shine right now uh no that's not fair to say because he is just a much you know it might not even be fair to say like i almost regret even bringing it up but there are a lot of things where he seems to be pushing back against like victim culture you know without denying that people are oppressed and exploited and he couples that with a very kind

1:03:28of it seems like skepticism about free market values and all of that yeah but so like can i just read a little part where he talks about that victim part because like he even has more nuance here than than most people nowadays do he says there's a problem when victimization becomes the dominant account of suffering and when it becomes quote unquote politically incorrect ever to hold people responsible for their misery the problem is that descriptions of agents as victims ironically depersonalize the sufferer the sufferer is described and encouraged to envision himself or herself as a

1:03:59passive victim which is hardly a more health inducing description than villain if the victim has no fault neither has he or she any control over or responsibility for remedial action the victim's only recourse is reliance on the intervention of experts quote unquote and on people with resources of power and knowledge that constitute the means for remedial action the sufferer is seen as possessing no resources and capabilities of his or her own that could ameliorate present conditions and future prospects it's like there's some compassion there absolutely and i think he's pointing out like it's a little

1:04:32like taking the objective attitude towards something by saying oh you're just a victim you're kind of stripping away their agency and because of that even if it's not your intention you are stripping away their sense that they have any control over what happens and then he also points out that often it's the people who are sick that are least likely to totally embrace that kind of explanation i love this like he says what is ironic about the rhetoric of not quote-unquote blaming the victim is how often the victim is the most difficult person to convince of this position yeah therapy may be necessary to

1:05:06provide the intensive persuasion needed to make sufferers agree that they are not to blame the no blame position this objective seems in fact to be somewhat counterintuitive to sufferers after all suffering feels like punishment and that's just i think whether it's right or wrong that somebody causes their own suffering is independent of the psychological fact that the person suffering often feels like they are wrong yeah like that they did something wrong and i remember even as a little kid if like i hurt myself i would think like oh did i do something like that like was it was it me i i rarely think that i

1:05:42feel like i think that i'm being very unfairly treated by the world you have the like long karma samsara version yeah yeah no i i think we all have that sometimes and i think that's a deep psychological thing and it's just a you know again this is like objecting to liberals being compassionate for people in ways that they don't actually want and they might even be offended by or they might find disrespectful and that part of it is interesting and in some ways connected to this idea that we need

1:06:20to respect the richness and the kind of interconnections of all the different aspects of morality rather than focusing on just one kind because that's going to lead us to make both moral and even just rational mistakes yeah that's right um he says what is surprising is the insistence with which so many secular scientific scholars in the west choose to analyze that commonplace mental association as some kind of problem or pathology or primitivism rather than asking what kind of wisdom might be

1:06:51expressed by such recalcitrant human thoughts and attitudes and that notion that we want to shuffle some of our intuitions into like the primitive or when we see it so explicit in another culture to call them primitive is something that like this is communicating well that this is probably the wrong way to approach it yeah and you know they say at the beginning i think it's kind of their mission statement they say uh related to what you just quoted towards the end it is our assumption that ideas about human experience that persist long or are widespread or become invested with social

1:07:27meaning and established as folk theories in a major region of the world are not likely to be merely primitive or superstitious it is our assumption that such ideas illuminate some aspect of mind experience or society and can be put to use not only to construct a valuable cultural psychology but to extend our moral imagination so like the kind of guiding core belief here is that if if there's an idea that's been sticking around forever in a big part of the world it is illuminating something about the human mind

1:08:02and you can't just dismiss it yeah yeah so you know like i want just to give maybe some parting thoughts about what this says for modern social psychology yeah um because i've been thinking about this well a couple things one schwader wrote a book in 1991 called thinking through cultures which is sort of his manifesto of cultural psychology and i remember reading it in college and liking it it was influential but i remember thinking that he was too much on like the relativist side of things whereas

1:08:35i was more drawn to kind of the nativists and like the you know the universals and contentism yeah exactly and i think that if i revisited it i would understand a bit more what he was trying to say it's like i i feel like i probably didn't do it justice in my 19 year old mind but when i read a paper like this and i think about the kind of work that we're doing in social psychology and this is the stuff that we you and i have talked about like so so much like talking about like ash and rosin and like those sort of like critiques of what modern social psychology has become um i was just having a

1:09:10dinner with a guest speaker uh social psychologist actually dave dunning of the famous dunning kruger effect oh wow yeah he used to be here at cornell um and he asked like what do you think is the future of of social psychology and one of the people at the dinner was saying well i hope we get back to like actually doing studies with people like interacting with people and not just collecting data over the internet and you know people agreed but then i you know i said like but we're in a kind of catch-22 because we know through methodological reform that like doing studies with you know 15

1:09:4420 people per condition is just not enough to tell us anything like that's how like p hacking runs rampant and we know that we need way more people to do the kinds of statistics that we that we now realize need to be done and so it's like yeah we can go back to like interviewing people like undergrads and not having enough statistical power or we can go do like the studies with like 1000 people on the internet and when i read something like this where what you get is like what was it 39 people yeah over the span of months yeah in-depth interviews asking them about all kinds

1:10:19of stuff they're like the statistics like they they actually report statistics here that were done to like come to like these three foundations like it's not as if they weren't statistically savvy and looking at ways of organizing the data that they collected but the richness like that they have and the way that they present their findings like what would even be the statistical question here like it's it's just a different form of learning and a form of learning that i think we should just integrate more yeah or switch to because like honestly like i was thinking this is

1:10:56actually great news because i thought oh social psychology is just irreparably fucked you know like with all the the various problems and not just the replication crisis but the you know the measurement problems all that all the stuff we've talked about forever and then it's like oh no you could just go back to doing this and it would be great you know like and you know i think part of the problem is i don't think he feels the burden of presenting some kind of hypothesis and then experiment that tries to refute the no that's you know that's not that like that's not the method here

1:11:28and it's just i think basic coding right like you code that you know and then the ultimate thing that you report is low medium or high for these different kinds of vignettes but in exchange for whatever you're supposed to get from all those statistics in exchange for not getting the power and whatever it is that is supposed to come of that whatever the benefits of that are supposed to be which are often unclear besides just seeming like science uh you get the richness of just being with these people for months and talking with them and actually getting to like ask them questions

1:12:01and it's not just mechanical like m turk people responding to if they even are responding to it honestly and not having like some ai do it like it just seems such an easy trade but not easy institutionally uh and like structurally yeah and these are methods that require a lot of care and training themselves and social psychologists just like that's not what they're trained to do schwader is obviously like a big exception he's somebody who's trained as an anthropologist and like just to note like there's a lot of collection of these data but like some statistics

1:12:37are used so it says on the basis of the theme profiles for the 39 incidents mooch or however you say her name utilize various statistical procedures including cluster analysis and stepwise discriminant analysis to distinguish three clusters of conceptually linked themes and to identify the degree of saturation from each cluster but this is like qualitative work so this is what you do when you collect enough qualitative work and you're trying to just like find overall themes like then it just seems like a fair thing to do but like i find myself just agreeing with you like i and this is the

1:13:08challenge that i would give anybody who's suspicious of this read this paper and then read like the latest greatest paper on moral foundation theory read those two and tell me do you feel like you knew more about human psychology like from this one or that one and like i would put money on that you feel like you have a richer sense of what the mind is like um yeah but it's hard to be schwader right now as a working social psychologist like who's gonna say yeah like pizarro go ahead go to south america for like

1:13:42six months and interview 30 people and it's not even disheartening to me anymore to think that there is more valuable information about moral psychology in this one article than there is in like 20 of my own articles like it's more inspiring at this point yeah because it's not like when we talk about william james and it's like well everything is so different back then that you know like you could just be this one guy who writes these massive volumes on psychology that contains long quotes of like

1:14:15doctors that they've talked to or something like that like here it's like this is a guy who's still working today and wrote this paper like 25 years ago or what i guess 28 years ago and like wrote a lot of stuff in this vein and using these same kinds of methods it's just like it's not an easy fix it might even be impossible structurally but like it does seem like yeah it should be inspiring yeah and of all people who should be willing to take a bit of a risk on this stuff it's full professors already yeah you know we're not risking our job we're not at university of texas i know you know like it's a

1:14:51similar kind of thing for when you read something like by thomas nagle or something you know like in philosophy and you're just like why don't we go back to this you know yeah well because you don't have four objections to the monogamy defense yeah like about whether i'm going to focus on the bad making features of non-monogamy or the good making features of monogamy like it's just like oh wait we could just do it this other way on the one hand it's like clearly better but then it's like but okay how are you going to actually do it is the problem yeah well i'm going to commit to doing

1:15:25in-depth interviews about disgust and purity um because why not why not exactly yeah uh good i totally support that i guess we didn't really get into the details of the three foundations that he talks about but we've certainly talked about that before we've talked about moral foundations theory in the past so if you want to get a more of a detail about that aspect i would refer people to when we've talked about moral foundations theory yeah and i i highly recommend anybody reading this to read this paper if you're interested yeah it's very cool paper and it's kind of it wanders you know

1:15:58it wanders yeah sorry that's why we're wandering exactly yeah yeah uh any final thoughts gonna go watch my coogs uh try to make the elite eight no go watch your elite eight and may the ethic of community be with you and as you celebrate your sports teams yeah like uh how do you justify rooting for houston and not rooting for iowa it's like the good making feature of rooting for houston what is the morally relevant difference i think you know what's wrong is watching only one porn star

1:16:31it's morally impermissible to watch only one porn star wasn't there someone that said we're like morally obligated to watch porn of people we're not attracted to or something like that we did a paper that you're morally obligated to date people who you don't find attractive yeah yeah yeah which i objected to and you're a little more sympathetic to no no i don't think i i don't think i was sympathetic to that i think i shared the view that you're attracted to who you're attracted to you got uh right you were saying that it's okay to only be attracted to someone of like a certain race

1:17:07yeah that's right yeah i mean like uh the one thing i just maybe wanted to say that we didn't get to is like he gets very normative about the health stuff at the end and worries about a kind of neopuritism where the state is going to control medicalized life practices and at this point it's so normative like where he says um informed by moral metaphors of south asia we would prefer a future

1:17:39scenario in which individual persons adopt a discourse in which their own health was considered a life goal a personal duty and a good to be achieved like a satisfying career economic security or a satisfying network of community relationships we would much prefer this to a horrific alternative of a centralized medical hegemony in which individuals and even local communities lose the capacity to define the limits of a moral way of life so i mean like you don't see this in a like psychology or uh

1:18:13you know someone who's just making like political theory claims in a way but but ones that he thinks follow from just understanding the richness of our moral psychology and our moral lives yeah i think that that given that this was an edited volume you know and i've on record been disparaging volumes there are advantages yeah yeah it gives you the freedom and you know paul rosin was one of the editors so he's gonna say go crazy and so here you get to speak a little bit beyond the data but in a way that's

1:18:46just fundamentally interesting i also find it really interesting that such a foundational paper on you know these like moral foundations is in a volume on health yeah you know like the psychology of health yeah like yeah very cool yeah like uh and i think has implications i don't agree with all the his prescriptions uh but i appreciate them and i'm glad like i think like yeah it just makes it all much more interesting and just a richer experience to read it so i agree with you i urge everybody to

1:19:17read this paper all right that's all from us this time join us next time on very bad results who are you who are you i'm a very bad man i'm a very good man just a very bad wizard