Episode 71: Can Values be Objective?

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:07]  Bruce: Welcome back to The Theory of Anything Podcast. Today we have Ivan Phillips with us. Ivan is someone who is frequent on the Many Worlds of David Deutsch page on Facebook, Peter's page. And he makes a lot of really interesting comments, sometimes agreeing with David Deutsch's worldview, sometimes criticizing it. In after episode 56, which was the episode on religion and rationality, he made some comments in favor of the concept of subjective values. Now, David Deutsch talks about the existence of objective values. And that's something that I think a lot of us probably buy into. But I felt like he made a pretty good argument in favor of there are no objective values and that all values are subjective. I don't know if this is necessarily his viewpoint. He's just maybe throwing out the best arguments there, but I talked to him and I said, you know what, I'd actually like for you to come on the show and to make these arguments.

[00:01:10]  Bruce: I know good arguments from bad arguments. Normally when I hear people make arguments in favor of moral relativism or subjective values, it's often kind of sucky arguments and that's clearly not what Ivan's doing. So I found that really interesting. So Ivan, why don't you give us a quick introduction to yourself?

[00:01:32]  Ivan: Thanks for having me on the show. I love the podcast and it's an honor and pleasure to be here. So my training was in theoretical physics. My PhD was about detecting CP violation at colliders. After I left graduate school, I went into the software business, but I was still interested in science and critical thinking outreach. A couple of years ago, I wrote a book on rationality, specifically from a Bayesian point of view, but really noting the fact that rationality is not something that's very visible in society, that we don't, like if I were to ask you, who was your rationality teacher in high school? You'd have no answer to that question, right? There's no rationality section at the bookshop. So this has been sort of a constant interest of mine along with philosophy. And a few years ago, I read The Beginning of Infinity, and then more recently read The Fabric of Reality, which I should have read in the other order probably.

[00:02:46]  Ivan: But it was one of those books that I thought was very thought provoking, and I didn't necessarily agree with everything. But it was one of those things where I need to think about this a lot more. And so, of course, I joined the Many Worlds of David Deutsch forum on Facebook. I was also exposed to The Critical Rationalists, which is sort of a related philosophical doctrine.

[00:03:13]  Bruce: Yes, critical rationalism being the name that Popper gave to his epistemology, although it's branched into all sorts of different ideas since then.

[00:03:23]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:03:25]  Peter: The real Slim Shady? Who the—? What the—what?

[00:03:29]  Cameo: Well, that's Cameo.

[00:03:31]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, okay.

[00:03:32]  Cameo: Cameo, because Bruce is busy being me.

[00:03:35]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:03:35]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:03:36]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:03:36]  Peter: I just wanted to make sure we weren't being... My kids have turned me on to these... Not turned me on to them, but occasionally will show me these Zoom bombing videos online where these YouTubers will Zoom bomb someone. And then I'm like, okay, are we about to get Zoom bombed here or something?

[00:03:57]  Unidentified speaker: Some weird person.

[00:03:58]  Bruce: So Cameo is basically Zoom bombing her own Zoom.

[00:04:02]  Unidentified speaker: That's what she's basically doing.

[00:04:05]  Cameo: Yeah, there's definitely an odd thing happening.

[00:04:09]  Peter: Anyway, before we move into the main topic, I'm just so curious, Ivan, I just have to follow my curiosity here. You are a theoretical physicist, correct?

[00:04:22]  Ivan: I was trained as a theoretical physicist,

[00:04:24]  Unidentified speaker: Trained, I see.

[00:04:24]  Ivan: but it's one of those things where I've forgotten 90% of what I ever learned in graduate school.

[00:04:30]  Peter: Yeah, I did look you up on one of these research sites or something. It looked like you published stuff at least in the 90s or had your name on papers and things. Now, I'm just so curious about the many worlds angle. Is that something that you currently subscribe to or is that what attracted you to Deutsch? Or did you always, going back to the 90s, were sympathetic to this?

[00:04:57]  Ivan: I think that in the 90s, when I was a graduate student, I was more agnostic. There were elements of Copenhagen that I thought were appealing, not the sort of woo-woo features of it, but more the idealistic idea that maybe there are some questions that cannot be answered and we should not be too upset if there really are fundamental limits on what kinds of questions make sense. But I was also, when I would consider the question of which interpretation I thought was the best, most of the time I would go and say, well, I don't see what kind of experimental test is telling these different things apart, that they make the same predictions. But in recent years, I've come to conclude that the many worlds interpretation is by far the best that I'm aware of. And part of that was due to Max Tegmark. What he points out is that every version of quantum mechanics has wave mechanics in it.

[00:06:13]  Ivan: And so as a result, every version of quantum mechanics has many worlds in it. And it's just a question of how the other interpretations want to get rid of these other worlds, and they have to do that by adding something. And so it doesn't seem like the other interpretations really have very much... They don't have any advantage, and they have some disadvantage. They're not as simple as many worlds is.

[00:06:41]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:06:42]  Peter: Well, I think we're all on the same page there. But I'm sure we could spend hours just talking about that. But thank you for that.

[00:06:49]  Bruce: We need to invite Bobby Azarian on the show and ask him about the quantum Darwinism, which I've never actually explored.

[00:06:58]  Peter: Well, he hasn't returned my message. Bobby, if you're out there, return my message and come on our podcast.

[00:07:05]  Bruce: Yeah, he undoubtedly listens to our podcast on a regular basis, but doesn't return our messages.

[00:07:12]  Unidentified speaker: That's exactly right, Peter.

[00:07:17]  Bruce: Ivan, I felt like you made a fairly compelling case in favor of subjective values. Let me clarify one thing that I think sometimes gets confused before I give you a chance to turn it over to you and give me your arguments. But the argument between objective and subjective values isn't generally that either values are all objective or values are all subjective. Someone like me who believes in objective values, I still also believe in subjective values. There is no objective truth to the fact that I prefer strawberry ice cream over chocolate ice cream. I mean, it's subjectively true that that's the case, but that's not what I mean by objective value. That is without a doubt in my mind a subjective value. I don't feel like there's any need to argue in favor of the existence of subjective values. We all have them. We know we have them. That's just an accepted thing.

[00:08:20]  Bruce: And in some sense, the hard part is arguing in favor of objective values, that objective values, if they exist, there should be an explanation for those, where I don't really need an explanation for subjective values because I know I have subjective values. I don't know if that makes sense or not. So in some sense, I accept that those of us who believe in objective values, this is a completely wrong term, but the burden of proof is on us, right? It's really up to us to make the case for objective values. And in some sense, your arguments may be in favor of subjective values is in some sense easier. Still, I found your arguments fairly compelling. Could you maybe take us through some of the things that you brought up and explain your thinking on this subject?

[00:09:10]  Ivan: Yeah, so I think one of the first arguments I would use is Hume's dictum, that you cannot get an ought from an is. So there doesn't seem to be any way to look at morally neutral facts and can get some moral truth from it. So what Hume's argument is saying is not... His argument is not that there could be no... I don't think his argument is that there could be no moral realism, but more like when you do have a moral conclusion that depends on some facts, that you're really just leveraging one moral value to reach another moral conclusion.

[00:09:57]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:09:59]  Ivan: So if we say something like we should limit... Let's say we want to put some constraints or some limits on inflation in the economy, and we could say that this is morally important. Well, why is it morally important? Well, because we can say that if we allow inflation to grow too high, then it results in the following kind of suffering. And then, well, we may be able to put some real measure on what suffering is, but you still have to add the moral premise that suffering is bad.

[00:10:37]  Bruce: The argument, Hume's guillotine, in essence, is there's no way to take a set of facts and turn it into an argument in terms of you ought to do this morally and have a moral duty come out of it. Now, David Deutsch does make a number of arguments against that way of thinking in his books. I don't know if you recall them or not. If you need me to summarize them quickly, I can. I was curious what you thought of his arguments, though.

[00:11:08]  Ivan: I do not recall them, so I would love it if you could summarize them.

[00:11:11]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:11:12]  Bruce: So he would basically agree that you can't come up with a foundation for morality using facts, right? But he calls that foundationalism. He considers that bad philosophy to begin with. And he would argue that just as you can't come up with a foundation for morality and try to explain it through facts, you can't really do that for anything in science. So goes his argument.

[00:11:39]  Unidentified speaker: I'm not sure if I entirely agree with that argument or not, but that's the way I've seen him argue it.

[00:11:45]  Bruce: And that really it comes down to conjecture and criticism, and that morality is a set of conjectures and we criticize them. And then he would say that the way facts tie into morality is that they do adjust what types of moral explanations are feasible. So he uses the example in Beginning of Infinity of slavery, that you might have a theory that there's a divine right for white people to hold black people as slaves or whatever, right? Whatever was used to justify it back then. And then out comes a slave who's escaped from slavery and he writes a book. He's an obviously great writer. And you had this explanation in your mind that people from Africa needed to be in slavery and their lives were better in slavery. And now you have this guy who's actually writing a book about the evils of slavery and you can see he's just as educated as you are.

[00:12:46]  Bruce: And while it doesn't actually disprove the original theory, which was completely metaphysical and so it was completely irrefutable to begin with, it does ruin your explanation you had in your head for how you were justifying that theory. And therefore, that's how facts can play into moral theories without ever actually violating Hume's guillotine.

[00:13:13]  Peter: This idea that explanation, the search for better explanations, unites both science or empirical theories and morality and art, and just all of these areas human beings are capable of making progress in, makes a lot of sense to me. You know, like if you look at science, but if you really blur your eyes, what are you looking at? You're looking at a large conversation, there's arguments, there's debates, there's humans have decided to let their ideas do their fighting and dying instead of their bodies, which is how Popper defines what a rationalist is and could be considered the central insight of the Enlightenment. But you know, it's the same with morality, really, is that what are you looking at this argument that took place about slavery? Is slavery right or wrong? You know, well, there's people try different things. They argue, well, in that case, they actually literally did fight, but maybe that's not the best argument.

[00:14:32]  Peter: But there's plenty of other moral arguments where people are having that don't involve actually fighting and dying. And you know, it's a messy, complicated process where people are coming up with better explanations for how to live. And you know, I mean, if that's not objective, then I don't know what is. Does any of that ring true, Ivan?

[00:15:00]  Ivan: I guess the notion that, you know, we have refutations and people make arguments and so on, I think that that's very fuzzy. So there are lots of bad arguments. There are lots of things where people create rationalizations for things that they already believe. And so it seems a little fuzzy to say that because people are having a debate about something, that either there is something objective about the field, or that, I don't know, it just doesn't seem like there's... So I am not a critical rationalist, I am a Bayesian.

[00:15:46]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:15:47]  Ivan: So I expect arguments that are based on evidence to sort of make some probabilistic prediction about the world. Now, I don't see that as actually being in direct contradiction with what David Deutsch says, because I think that David Deutsch's position on inductivism and on Bayesianism seems a bit strange to me. So obviously, as a Bayesian, it's one of those things, like whatever you think your deepest ideal of rationality is, you're not going to be able to justify it rationally without circularity, right? Because any arguments you apply are going to use those same deep principles. So when I think about Bayesianism and what David Deutsch has to say, I'm usually looking for how do I translate what David Deutsch has to say into a Bayesian view? And you may recall, I forget which podcast number it was when you were talking about justification.

[00:17:02]  Ivan: And I said that as a Bayesian, I approve of this podcast. I feel like when you get down to the nuts and bolts, you're going to end up putting it into a view that's actually something that kind of fits within Bayesianism. So what I would do with the morality picture is ask, how would I construct some Bayesian argument for moral realism? And I don't really see how to do that. In other words, for a Bayesian, it's not just that people have arguments and that there is debate. For a Bayesian, you would say science features debates, and it features all of these sort of human institutions, but that we think that these human institutions are approximating some kind of Bayesian inference. So I would want to say, if you have an argument for moral realism, it should be something where you can phrase it in a Bayesian picture, and I know what you're talking about specifically, that I can be assured that you're not talking about people debating their subjectivity, right?

[00:18:16]  Ivan: And people do change their subjectivity, that the things that we think are moral today are different from things that were thought moral centuries ago, and part of that has to do with the fact that we're no longer under the same mortal threat that we were, right? So in World War I, if you're on the battlefield and you start advocating for animal rights, people are gonna just look at you strangely, right? It's like, why would I even think about that today? I want to survive till tomorrow. I'm not interested in animal rights. And I think that these are the kind of things that lead to what we today would call moral progress. So I think our version of moral progress is we've made the world so much more comfortable and so much safer that now we can expand our sphere of interest, moral interest in the well-being of others. So I have a model for the way morality works.

[00:19:30]  Ivan: And this will involve people talking about abstract concepts like ethics and utilitarianism and things like that. But it doesn't mean that there is an absolutely correct view. And if the world falls into a worse state, we can say that, well, I definitely, you know, I would prefer to live in this more comfortable world, but can I say that a particular moral choice was objectively wrong? I think that's difficult to do.

[00:20:00]  Peter: Well, I think I was, you kind of answered a question I was going to ask you. I was going to ask you, well, what would a world where, an alternate reality where morality was objective look like? I mean, are we really arguing about religion, or would there have to be like a Ten Commandments or something like that? But you kind of said, well, you would have to be able to define probabilities to different moral ideas.

[00:20:33]  Ivan: One of the examples that I've used before is what if stolen gasoline burned with fewer calories than fairly purchased gasoline?

[00:20:44]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:20:45]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:20:45]  Ivan: Or in Harry Potter, the world of Harry Potter, good and evil have different physical effects. There are different spells that work in the Harry Potter universe, and they work in different ways based on this notion of good and evil. And if those spells and moral attributes were fundamental, then you'd have to say, well, moral realism seems to be true. It makes different predictions. It's a fundamental part of the universe.

[00:21:18]  Peter: So in Harry Potter, morality is objective in the Harry Potter world?

[00:21:24]  Ivan: If you can say that magic is an objective part of reality in Harry Potter's world, then I think you would say that moral realism was true in Harry Potter's world.

[00:21:34]  Bruce: Perhaps a stronger example here would be the Force from Star Wars, where you have literally two sides of the Force, the light side and the dark side, and they are a fundamental physical part of the universe. And in that universe, if I'm following Ivan's argument correctly, that's what he sees as objective values. In Star Wars, you literally have a physical good and evil that exist in the universe. It's not just how we feel about it, but it's that they have different impacts on the laws of physics. Am I following what you're... I'm trying my best to interpret you.

[00:22:19]  Ivan: Yeah, I think that's true. I was just thinking about specifically, what is the difference between someone that uses the force for good versus evil? I don't know enough about Star Wars lore to know. Do you only get the lightning if you're evil?

[00:22:34]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:22:35]  Unidentified speaker: Is that it?

[00:22:35]  Bruce: You only get the lightning if you're evil.

[00:22:37]  Unidentified speaker: That's right.

[00:22:38]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:22:39]  Peter: I have to look that up in my kids' Star Wars encyclopedia.

[00:22:43]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[00:22:44]  Bruce: It used to be that you only got the choke if you were evil too, but they've changed that. Now, the good guys sometimes do the choke.

[00:22:52]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, okay.

[00:22:52]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:22:53]  Ivan: So then it becomes a bit more ambiguous. If they both had the same power, then, you know, I mean, some of the Jedi sometimes, I think, seem kind of maybe like to have a neutral alignment anyway.

[00:23:08]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:23:09]  Bruce: And that was actually a part of the story, is that the Jedi, the movies don't handle this as well as it should have, but like the Clone Wars cartoon does a better job of making this clear. The Jedi had in some sense unintentionally become corrupted. They may have individually still been trying to do what they thought was right, but they were making choices like becoming soldiers in a war instead of just being peacekeepers, and it had led to a kind of corruption of the Jedi at a systemic level. So it's a little more complicated than I'm saying, but like the kind of the original three movies, they literally have different force powers. The force, the dark side is seductive because it's more powerful initially, but then in the long run, the light side becomes more powerful. So they have literal physical differences is the way the first three movies describe them.

[00:24:09]  Ivan: Yeah, that sounds like moral realism to me.

[00:24:12]  Peter: Well, I mean, maybe we're asking too much from morality in a way to want to tie it into like physical forces. I mean, if I if I ask myself a moral question, well, should I go out and cheat on my wife today? Well, I mean, there's probably not just one reason why there's that is a bad idea. There's probably think of about 10 reasons and that it just wouldn't be good for me and my marriage and my kids and my life. It just wouldn't be the right thing to do. You know, it's not it's not just that it's written down in a book somewhere or it's a physical law. It's just I mean, why isn't that doesn't that make it objectively wrong in some sense?

[00:24:56]  Cameo: I I'm going to take some some issue for just even in that example. Okay, because I think we're conflating the the sexuality part with it with the the act of the betrayal. So betraying your spouse is obviously not good, you know, regardless of whether or not they were a romantic partner.

[00:25:20]  Unidentified speaker: Well, sure, that's what I'm really talking about.

[00:25:22]  Cameo: But but there is not actually anything inherently wrong with you having sex with another person outside of your your spouse. That is a religious, I believe that's a religious thing that we've adopted and is not actually have nothing to do with the natural human state. So I don't for for me, that example, it shows that that that's not a good example for objectivity.

[00:25:53]  Peter: Okay, but there may be objective reasons why humans tend to get along better in monogamous relationships.

[00:26:02]  Cameo: I would argue that a fair amount of it has to do with the way masculinity has really kind of changed our perceptions of what natural interactions should be like. I personally believe that men in particular like the concept of owning a woman. I believe if we had a society that was predominantly kind of run by women, that there would be a lot more liberal sexuality because I think women actually don't need that ownership quite as much. Those are all just theories that are just mine, but because we don't have any culture that's not driven by men. But generally, the religions that we created have this notion of a dominant male. And we know through the science that we can see on how cultures work right now, the more rigidly adherent to sex roles and to that kind of morality that's driven by the religions that all came out of the Abrahamic roots.

[00:27:23]  Cameo: I think that so much of that is, it's all about the religion and the domination. That's my opinion.

[00:27:33]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:27:34]  Bruce: We could easily go down a rabbit hole.

[00:27:37]  Unidentified speaker: You guys missed me, right?

[00:27:41]  Bruce: You know, let me actually, so I'm kind of withholding my opinions at this point. In fact, I'm to some degree forming my opinions, right? I want to at some future point do a separate podcast where I try to explain my own views of objective morality. And I admit it's a tougher case than it first appears, right? I feel like Deutsch makes a lot of interesting cases, and it opened up a different way of thinking about objective morality that's different than the way Ivan's suggesting it. But I would be probably the first to admit, I don't find his argument as lock solid as I wish it was. But I don't find it to be ridiculous either. Like, I feel like he's on to something, even if he didn't go far enough. The example that I used in a past podcast was his argument for objective beauty, using the idea that Mozart error corrected, and therefore we're moving towards some sort of objective standard of beauty.

[00:28:42]  Bruce: And then I pointed out that that argument is intriguing, but it doesn't really work on its own, because you can make the exact same argument using waffle love recipes, which is something that we know is just parochial. And so I feel like Deutsch is like on to something, and it's going in a good, interesting place, but I don't feel like he quite gets there, if that makes any sense. And so I've been trying to figure out how would I improve upon his formula. Let me just, in terms of Cameo's comment, let me just say that I've actually researched this. So I read the book Sex at Dawn, which makes that case, basically. And let me just say that the book is absolutely a polemic. It doesn't mean that it isn't sometimes correct, but it is clearly making exactly one side of the argument and hiding evidence against itself. It uses the example of there was one small scale society that's well known and has been well documented that considers itself matriarchal, and they are in fact openly sexually promiscuous.

[00:29:48]  Bruce: There is no concept of marriage in that society. Actually, that's not quite true. Let me get back to that. But the idea is that the women simply pick up a guy at the bar every night. It's a different guy each night maybe, and then the guy leaves before morning. And because you don't know who the children are, the father has no incentive to try to raise his own child. So they compensate for that by instead having the brothers of the woman raise the child, play the father role, because the brother knows, just as the woman knows for sure, it's her child and therefore genetically hers, the brother knows it's his sister and therefore genetically related. And so they're able to actually organize their society in a different, interesting way. Now, they've never gotten past a small scale society.

[00:30:42]  Unidentified speaker: And

[00:30:43]  Peter: this is science fiction or is this a real...

[00:30:44]  Bruce: No, this is a real society.

[00:30:48]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:30:48]  Bruce: And they do consider themselves to be matriarchal.

[00:30:52]  Unidentified speaker: And where is this?

[00:30:53]  Bruce: I forget. It gets mentioned in the book Sex at Dawn, but it's also mentioned in other completely legitimate science books. Nicholas Christakis talks about them. And because they get mentioned in all these other books that I've read, I know the things about society that the author of Sex at Dawn is intentionally cutting out to try to make his case. For example, as much as they have tried to get rid of monogamy in that society, it's such a natural part of the way human beings think that that society has a problem with rebels who run off and become monogamous and leave the society behind so that they can be monogamous. He completely cuts this part of the story out, but it's a huge part of the importance of the story, where they have all these institutions in place to try to enforce polyamory instead of monogamy, and they actually have the inverse problem, where people will run away from the society and set up their own monogamy because that's what they really wanted.

[00:31:58]  Bruce: And the other thing that's interesting is that this is the only society I think we know about that has done this, and it's small scale. It's not large scale. There are no large scale societies that have ever done it. And Cameo raised the idea that it comes from Abrahamic religion. Well, Abrahamic religion has had huge influence all over the place. So I can see why she would raise that as the possible influence. But there are societies, large scale societies in the east, China, for example, that have had something like zero influence from Abrahamic society early on. And they also are monogamous. And so it's interesting that every single time a society became large scale, they almost immediately adopted monogamy. And it's so consistent that it's difficult to explain it purely. I mean, religion clearly played a role. And her argument, ownership of women, may well have played a role.

[00:32:56]  Bruce: That's such a big part of a lot of that early thinking. The early small scale societies prior to agriculture were egalitarian. And it's really only after agriculture comes and you start building large scale societies that you suddenly start worrying so much about monogamy and this idea of women being owned in some way suddenly springs up. And it does in every single society, even ones that weren't talking to each other.

[00:33:22]  Cameo: So that agreed. But does that mean, are you equating the fact that humans have a preference for monogamy on a large scale, or at least performative monogamy, right? Because given the opportunity, a lot of people will choose not to be monogamous, regardless of what they state they believe in.

[00:33:43]  Unidentified speaker: That is correct.

[00:33:44]  Cameo: However, all of that being an aside to, is it right or wrong, just because we have both culture and religious inclination to doing it? Those are very, very separate things, right? Just because we, as a society, think that monogamy is the right way to structure our society, on the surface, at least again, does that mean that it's wrong to choose to be non-monogamous?

[00:34:13]  Bruce: So that is the question, and that is a difficult question. I think what Peter is getting at is that, let's say that we throw this scope out further into time, right? You have to explain why is it that monogamy keeps coming up, right? And maybe this is going to turn out to be a bad example, right? But is there something objective about the fact that societies have so consistently structured their societies as monogamous? Or is it just something entirely parochial? I argued that you could have something objective but parochial.

[00:34:54]  Cameo: I'm going to flip your statement back on you, like why does infidelity or polyamory keep coming back up?

[00:35:03]  Bruce: Well, I think it's not too hard to explain that. It's because we have both impulses, right? We have both a monogamous impulse and a polyamorous impulse, and that's fairly typical of how evolution works, is that it will wire complete contradictions into us like that.

[00:35:20]  Cameo: Yes, but why does either one of them need to be right or wrong?

[00:35:28]  Cameo: If somebody chooses, kind of coming back to Peter's example, if Peter and his spouse had an agreement that it was okay to have outside partners, then it wouldn't be bad for him to go and have an outside partner, right? They, as adults, made an agreement to have a relationship that worked that way. The thing that would be sneaky would be to have a relationship where you had agreed to a certain standard, in Peter's case, monogamy, and then sneak around that agreement to do something else, to have an affair on the side, to try and have your cake and eat it too. But the actual act of monogamy or polyandry do not have to be inherently related to good or evil in any way.

[00:36:25]  Peter: Well, I think it's an interesting question on a more meta level. Would a society based on polyamory rather than monogamy be as psychologically healthy for children and women and men, too, over the course of a life? Maybe monogamy is just kind of this arbitrary thing that just came out of this arbitrary religion. I mean, that's a possibility, but I guess I just like to see these societies where it works out so well. And, you know, I mean, I do have some experience with, I have friends that are polyamorous and all this. And I mean, I think there are probably good objective reasons why monogamy tends to work for human psychology for most people over in most places, most times. But, I mean, I could be wrong, maybe not.

[00:37:33]  Ivan: I think that morality can be objectively described, but not objectively prescribed. So I think that we're not blank slates, that evolutionary psychology has some valuable insights, and that we can point to facts about human evolution that say, this is why we have these impulses. And maybe this is why we have both of these impulses, even if they're contradictory, right? Like Bruce said, that evolution will give us contradictory, what seem like contradictory principles, especially if they operate in different contexts. So I think that that all makes sense. What you just said, Peter, about, you know, does this contribute to psychological health or something like this? We could probably say that given, I think that first of all, we should note that humans, the great evolutionary advantage of humans is that we can adapt to new environments. And by environments, I include culture, right?

[00:38:57]  Ivan: That we can adapt within a generation, right? We're not as well adapted to any single environment as, say, a crocodile is to its environment. But our advantage is that we have people that live in the Arctic Circle, and we have people that live in the desert, and that we found ways to adapt to live in those environments. And so we're also very flexible in what kind of society we can live in and under what kind of rules we might want to live in. So I don't think those things determine, you know, just because this is the environment in which we evolved, doesn't mean that this is the way that we ought to live in the future, right? That we can't, we can say objectively that as humans are today, given the economic constraints around pregnancy and the costs and other societal factors, we might say that today, the best thing that you could do along these metrics is to be monogamous.

[00:40:05]  Ivan: But that's, first of all, it's just an average. It doesn't apply necessarily to individuals. And second, it's just relative to those metrics. So one of the examples that I probably brought up in our conversation, Bruce, was imagine that the planet Mars has been terraformed, and now it's like a twin Earth. And so there's a human society there that's much like ours. But they get infected by some random virus that causes everyone on the planet to think that assassination is just the coolest thing. It's the most beautiful, awesome thing. And we could say, like, wow, this is really bad. So obviously, assassinating someone might feel really good to you, but if you're the one getting done in, that's not cool. And we can also say, well, it's going to be bad for GDP. And it's going to be bad for their well-being, but this is what they value. Like, the virus has changed their values.

[00:41:14]  Ivan: So what can we do to change their mind? Like, we can't argue them out of this. And there doesn't seem to be any, I mean, if you say, like, well, your society is eventually going to go extinct, if the most valuable thing to them is killing people, then they'll be like, well, yeah, well, I'd rather do this than live forever. And then you don't really have anything. It's sort of, you no longer have any, any moral argument has to weigh on values that they already have. And if they don't have that value in common, you can't make the argument that, well, this is what's best for society. So now whether this is really practical, a practical value is another, is another question. You know, how, how important is it that morality be objective in the first place? Like, why do you even want morality to be objective?

[00:42:13]  Peter: It sounds like you're kind of making an argument for human universality applied to morality in a way that we are unique in nature and that we're basically infinitely malleable in how we can shape our own, our own morality.

[00:42:35]  Ivan: I think human morality comes from, as it is today, a lot of it is caused by the value of non-zero-sum games. So if I go out and catch a meal and I share it with you, I actually, even though I'm giving up my resources to you now, the next time I go out and I don't catch anything and you do, you'll share with me. And so on balance, it's non-zero-sum. And so I think this is the origin of a lot of human morality. Or, when we are—our morality around kindness and treating family well has to do with spreading our genes. So we can talk about the causes of why this is. We can talk about non-zero-sum games. And non-zero-sum games are extremely powerful. I have flown around the world, and I've flown around the world because other people found value in making airplanes and refining metals and all this stuff. So non-zero-sum games are really powerful.

[00:43:50]  Ivan: And so you may say any species that evolves that is going to be able to learn a lot about the universe and develop advanced technologies is probably going to benefit from non-zero-sum games. And so statistically, we would expect species that are highly successful to have certain moral values in common with us. I think that statistically you could say that. We can imagine peculiar scenarios, right? We can imagine peculiar scenarios where there is maybe one giant life form on a planet, or an AI becomes so powerful that it doesn't need anybody else. And it can do everything itself, in which case it's only playing non-zero-sum games sort of internally. That maybe we can imagine scenarios where this is not the rule. And for that reason, it's not an absolute. It's not something that I consider to be objective. It's more like, well, statistically, this is what we would expect.

[00:45:07]  Peter: Could that be a form of objective morality, that it's better to cooperate than to, you know, where species who, the wolf pack that collaborates to hunt is more likely to survive than the species that just wants to tear each other apart?

[00:45:24]  Ivan: I think, let's say, we wrote that down. We'd say, yes, species that do this statistically are more likely to survive. Does that make them morally right for surviving?

[00:45:37]  Bruce: So let me get back to something that Cameo said. She actually made a carve out, and this is actually what I wanted to ask her about. The carve out was, well, I'm not talking about the betrayal. I'm just talking about the sexuality. Okay, well, let's talk about the betrayal, right? What exactly is immoral about betraying your spouse? So at some level, the way Cameo said that, there was an assumption of an objective moral there, that you should not betray your spouse. But there are people who betray their spouse. There's people who get away with it. There's people who justify it morally. I once came across a comment on the Internet, you can find anything you want on the Internet, where a woman was explaining that she cheated on her husband and he didn't know. And it was just better for everybody. It was an objective good in her mind, that she was cheating on her husband, because they didn't have a happy marriage back before she started cheating.

[00:46:39]  Bruce: And once she started cheating, she was happier. That made him happier. So everybody was better off, objectively, in her mind, because she was now betraying her husband. And he wasn't going to find out, and so it wasn't going to do him any harm, so there was no harm involved in her mind. This is her argument, anyhow. So even that carve out, okay, I'm not talking about betrayal, couldn't you make the exact same argument around even something like betrayal?

[00:47:14]  Cameo: And I guess it comes down to what we expect in our relationships with other humans. Because you, of course, don't have to be romantically involved with somebody or have a sexual relationship to be deeply betrayed by another human. It requires only having given trust and a high level of vulnerability in some way or another, and then having that trust be violated. So is it wrong to do that to each other? I honestly don't know. I think it's difficult to continue to maintain a relationship with another human if they do that to you. You see it in business a whole lot. One of the most common reasons start-ups fail is because somebody essentially betrays the other person or does something kind of awful to them as business partners. So I think we as humans choose to continue to interact with other humans who don't treat us that way. I don't know that that necessarily makes violating somebody's trust wrong.

[00:48:41]  Bruce: So let me... I don't want to put words into your mouth, Cameo, but it does seem like regardless of whether we call it right or wrong, there's an objective effect.

[00:48:53]  Cameo: There is, of course, an objective effect because human relationships, we use a sliding scale of trust to decide how to interact with other humans. And the sliding scale goes from a complete stranger, and I have very low trust, to our most intimate relationships, where we're willing to share our deepest, darkest fears, thoughts, etc. And every new human interaction or every continued human interaction, we utilize that scale to decide how to show up in that relationship or what portion of ourselves to present. So I think that for different people, their scales are different, which is why I think it is subjective. There are people who will willingly be betrayed over and over again and continue to come back to a relationship. That doesn't necessarily mean that they believe it's right. It just means that they choose to tolerate it in their relationships.

[00:50:04]  Cameo: And that probably says something about them too, but I don't know that right or wrong are necessarily the guide points of objectivity that we use to evaluate our interactions with other people.

[00:50:20]  Peter: I'm kind of reminded what Sam Harris and the moral landscape wants to base morality on. And I think probably most Deutsch people would see this as sort of reductionistic. But I still like it as a thought experiment where he says, well, if you think that all morality is just subjective, you would have to say that the greatest possible suffering [for?] all conscious creatures for eternity, is no different than anything else, I guess. That's how I interpret what he says. And I mean, that really rings true when he says, well, if you say it's no different, I don't know what kind of word games you're playing here, but it seems preposterous. I mean, if you want to go down, if you want to just accept that that one thing is objective, in the area of morality, then you kind of have to accept that there are some objective truths in morality. What do you think, Ivan?

[00:51:36]  Peter: Is the worst possible suffering for all conscious creatures for eternity no different than anything else?

[00:51:45]  Ivan: So when you say no different, I think that's the thing that's slightly deceptive about this idea, right? So for humans, obviously, it makes all the difference in the world. So we probably care more about avoiding that scenario than about reason itself, right? I mean, even of all the moral values that I think that, one of the moral values that I feel like at my core is that one ought to try to be rational. And it is a moral value that you can't, you know, we find it, we have a compulsion to be rational most of the time, okay, to the extent that we're able, right? That is in some sense a moral value. Like, can you argue that you can't create an argument that you shouldn't have this moral inclination to be rational because you'd have to use reason to do it. But I still don't think that even that is truly objective. Like, is a rock evil for not being reasonable?

[00:52:58]  Ivan: Or is a life form that is not making good inferences, is it being evil for not doing so? I think that if someone were to say that it makes no difference whether humans encounter the worst suffering forever, like what you mean is it makes no difference to the laws of physics or no difference to the universe if that's the way it turns out, right? Obviously, it makes a difference in the details, and it makes a difference to humans. We care about that more than anything. But I think that when people are reaching for this idea of objective morality, they want to say that it's more than just what humans care about, and I don't think that that can be justified.

[00:53:52]  Peter: But humans are part of nature, right? I mean, of course it's going to be what matters to humans. I mean, it's not going to matter to Jupiter. That would be asking too much, I think. I mean, who else would it matter to? This aspect of nature that is our knowledge creators. [Wording unclear.]

[00:54:15]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I mean, that's fine.

[00:54:17]  Ivan: But then it doesn't... If you're asking, you know, is it objectively true that we care about avoiding suffering, then statistically speaking, you know, there are a few people that don't care about it, but the vast majority or what you might call a normal human does care about it. And so you can say, objectively, it exists, or objectively, there is this pattern in nature where we care about this thing. But is that objective morality? I don't think that it is. I don't think that's moral realism. That's just saying, like, moral realism wants to say that moral values are not only objectively describable, but also objectively prescribable. And I don't think that's true.

[00:55:03]  Peter: Well, what about something more like verisimilitude applied to morality? So it's not something you can say, oh, well, this, this, this is moral, but we can, through our explanations and discussions and conversations and experiences, we can move closer to something that's more moral.

[00:55:23]  Ivan: I think that you could say, you could, through discussion and, well, there are two levels to this. One is suppose that we freeze our moral values for some period of time, and then we discuss, okay, what can we do about immigration policy, for example, to be more humane and to best satisfy our values? I think that kind of question is objective, right? We could say, look, if we employed this policy, it would satisfy more people's values and more people's values better than some alternative policy. That kind of question is objective. But the question is, what if we don't, like if we were to go back in time 500 years, we would find people with moral values that today we think are abhorrent, right? And so we think that values need to be updated in order to get to where we are today. And we can do that to some extent by leveraging the values we already have.

[00:56:32]  Ivan: Maybe we held certain values because we didn't think about things or because we were fearful of something. But I think that frequently, like I say, moral progress comes from the fact that I live a very comfortable life, and I'm not afraid of the kind of things that would terrorize the average person 500 years ago. And so I have time to consider the rights of LGBTQ community and so on that maybe in the past, somebody would have been like, I don't know where I'm getting my meal tomorrow. What are you talking to me? Why are you talking to me about this subject? It may not be that, it could be that if they lived as life [wording unclear], you prop them down into a situation where they were living the same life that I am now, that they would be like, oh yeah, I never thought about that. Now I'm relaxed. I can kind of accept that that's a good idea.

[00:57:29]  Ivan: So I think that you can have progress and you can have intellectual discussions about these things. You can talk about how do values get formed, how do values get updated. But if one of the examples, the other arguments I was going to bring up about why is moral realism even useful is to make this what I think is an important distinction between morality and legalism. So imagine that I have a book that has moral commandments in it. And we know that this book, because it was handed to us by some omniscient AI, that it contains the real moral truth about what you ought to do. Are you going to do what the book says without having read what the book, you know, would you commit to doing what this book tells you to do no matter what it says? Like, do you want to be good for the sake of being good without knowing what goodness entails? And my claim is that you don't know what's in the book.

[00:58:41]  Ivan: It might tell you to do the most horrible things you can imagine. And just because this AI knows that it is objectively good, like, why not be objectively evil? If good and evil are determined by what it says in the book, then it's sort of like a legalistic framework. It's like, do you want to follow the law? Do you want to be a lawful person or do you not want to be? And if you didn't know what society you were living in, you'd go like, well, what does the law actually say? Like, we don't value being lawful without knowing what being lawful entails.

[00:59:19]  Peter: Well, I guess I'm kind of hung up on this idea that an AI could really produce a book like that. I mean, I don't think an AI could always be operating under false assumptions, just like anyone else. [Wording unclear.] So I guess I would be highly skeptical of any conclusion it would make.

[00:59:39]  Ivan: What if it was an NI a natural intelligence, instead, then? If we want to set aside the AI debate.

[00:59:46]  Bruce: His argument's not going to change if it's a natural intelligence. What he's saying is that this is a critical rationalist point of view, that there is no theory that can't be criticized because it's impossible to ever know you've arrived at the truth. I think that's what he's really getting at here, is that, of course, if this book said this is the objective moral truth, and for the sake of argument, let's say it was the objective moral truth, okay? It would still be the case that he wouldn't know that. He would need to have it explained to him. The book would need to explain to him this is why this is the objective moral truth, and he would have to see that it is correct before he would be able to adopt it. I think that's what you're trying to say, right, Peter?

[01:00:30]  Peter: Oh, yeah, yeah. I think it's just... It's sort of, I guess, pushing back against this idea that there could even could be an infallible anything in principle, because there's always misconceptions. I mean, isn't that kind of one of Popper's central insights that our ignorance is infinite? Why wouldn't an AI have infinite ignorance as well?

[01:00:54]  Bruce: So obviously, when Ivan raises a thought experiment like this, thought experiments aren't meant to be realistic.

[01:01:03]  Unidentified speaker: Fair enough.

[01:01:03]  Peter: I just said I was hung up on this.

[01:01:05]  Bruce: Right, but I'm trying to find a bridge here, though, because I think a bridge exists, okay? Popper does not say that you can't have objective truth. Now, I do think Deutsch says that, but Popper doesn't. In fact, Popper would strongly disagree with Deutsch on that. And so you can have a theory that is true, okay, under Popper's critical rationalism.

[01:01:26]  Peter: Objective, you mean objective true in the terms of, like, justified true belief?

[01:01:30]  Bruce: If I were to get, okay, in fact, it's not even that hard to see why this has to be the case. Like, there has to be an objective truth. Like, let's say I have a theory that George Washington was a real person, okay? That's a legitimate theory for me to hold, right? Well, it's either objective. I'm either objectively right or I'm not. I've formulated the theory in such a way that there's no... It's not a matter of verisimilitude. I'm either right or I'm wrong, okay? It's not that hard to formulate theories that way. So a theory can be correct, objectively so, but you can't know that it's correct, okay? I can never know for sure that George Washington is in fact a real person and that he wasn't just some made-up fictional entity that we have since forgotten. And for reasons that are absurd to us, people tried to create all the different evidence that exists for him because they needed that to win a war.

[01:02:31]  Bruce: We could make up some sort of story, right? I can never know for sure that that isn't the case. I can simply have a best theory on the subject, but I could be objectively right. So I think what Ivan's trying to say is, okay, set aside the fact that it's absurd that this AI could ever really exist. Let's say that there's this superintelligence. We're assuming a superintelligence is a thing, but this is part of the thought experiment. And it has actually worked out what is objectively correct morally because we're assuming moral realism is a thing, right? And so it's worked it out, and it has. And for the sake of argument, it's correctly worked it out, okay? Now, under Popper's epistemology, it can have objectively worked it out if moral realism is a thing, okay? It may not be able to ever prove that beyond doubt, and you can never know for sure beyond doubt that that would still be the case.

[01:03:30]  Bruce: But I think Ivan's arguing it contains the objective moral truths, okay? Even if it's just by chance, maybe it did its best, it criticized it, it got to the objective moral truths, okay? Now, however far-fetched that still is, and it is pretty far-fetched, because unlike the example with George Washington where I intentionally made it that it has to either be true or not, even if there was moral realism, it seems unlikely that it would just be a straight theory that is either true or not. It would be far more likely it would be some sort of verisimilitude, right?

[01:04:03]  Unidentified speaker: Just like physics.

[01:04:05]  Bruce: All of our physics theories, they're useful because they have verisimilitude, but they're all false, right? And that's really what David Deutsch is getting at when he talks about, we should talk about all our theories as misconceptions. I realize this is like a massive stretch, but I feel like he is getting at something fair here, which is, if just by chance, we could have, it's at least a possibility that there is a true physics theory and that we'll someday possess it. We may not know that we possess it, but it's, life does, you know, physics does something. I don't see any particular reason why we couldn't stumble upon the one true theory of everything for physics, right? If that was impossible for us to do, there would have to be a reason why it was impossible for us to do. Now, Frank Tipler has argued that it is impossible for us to do, and he has this argument based around the fact that it requires an infinite number of parameters.

[01:05:00]  Unidentified speaker: I'll buy that.

[01:05:01]  Bruce: I'll buy that it could be physics is completely impossible to specify as a single theory, and it's a true theory. But you could imagine, like, us living in a simulation, it's running on a computer, and somebody comes up with what the algorithm is for that simulation. It would be an objectively correct understanding of their reality, okay? So with the right sort of reality, you could have the one final theory. Now, I know that Deutschians, Sam, for instance, Kuypers, immediately argues with me, no, that's, like, not likely to happen because then you couldn't make progress.

[01:05:39]  Unidentified speaker: Well, that's not true.

[01:05:39]  Bruce: Even when you have an objectively correct theory, like, let's say, let's use Euclidean geometry. Now, it's actually not an objectively correct theory physically, but let's say it was, okay? You could have an objectively correct theory, that is, you have the axioms, and then you can spend the rest of eternity working out the implications of the axioms. So there is a difference between having the theory, the idea that once you have a final theory, you can't make progress is not true. So I'm going to remove that from the argument.

[01:06:11]  Peter: Okay, but even with the simulation environment, if you know the algorithm of the simulation, doesn't that just open up a whole new set of questions?

[01:06:20]  Unidentified speaker: It does.

[01:06:21]  Unidentified speaker: It does.

[01:06:21]  Peter: About where that algorithm came from.

[01:06:23]  Unidentified speaker: It does.

[01:06:24]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:06:25]  Ivan: So I just wanted to say, the omniscient AI is, you can substitute for that whatever plot device you want to assure you that what the instructions in the book say are morally...

[01:06:38]  Unidentified speaker: So it could be God.

[01:06:39]  Unidentified speaker: Objectively.

[01:06:40]  Unidentified speaker: We're talking God.

[01:06:41]  Ivan: Well, if it's God, it could be... Yeah, I mean, let's say it's God, right? So God writes down these rules that say, these are the things that you must do if you want to be objectively good. Do you want to follow what's in the book without knowing what the book actually says? Or would you prefer to be evil? I mean, this is setting aside, you know, what is God going to do as retribution if you don't follow what's in the book? But even then, right, if the book says that you must torture people for eternity or something, and that's what it takes to be good according to what God says, would you rather be good or evil? Like, if you would like to be objectively evil, but subjectively good and be kind to people, like, it's difficult to say that you would be wrong or that this would be a va- like, this book wouldn't be valuable to you, right? It doesn't tell you it's not, because it would only be valuable to you, if you wanted to be good, no matter what the contents of the book were, but I argue that nobody actually wants that.

[01:07:55]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:07:55]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:07:56]  Ivan: We could imagine some peculiar version of utilitarianism, right? Let's say somebody could prove some bizarre version of utilitarian was true, but it meant that it had some bizarre consequence, like we have to kill off the unhappy people or something like this, right? To raise the average. Like, do you then care about this objective morality? Like, you don't, right? It's not something that you value. So I wonder, like, so I'm sort of getting at a meta angle here. Like, why do we want morality to be objectively true anyway? Isn't subjective truth the only thing that matters in any case?

[01:08:44]  Bruce: Okay, let me ask you a question. This is something that you actually, I'm going to quote you from Peter's Facebook page. So in episode 56, I did argue that if values are subjective, then I guess I perceive nothing particularly wrong with believing a lie if it comforts you and you find great utility in it. And you really strongly reacted to that. Let me actually read what you said. You said that, you quote me making that argument, and then you say, we might as well do nothing at all or join the millions of epistemologically irrational people and trick ourselves into believing fantasies in which we would live forever. This seems like a weird sort of pathological consequentialism that attempts to maximize a hedonic impulse at the expense of epistemic rationality. It is absolutely horrifying to me. Admittedly, I am a moral subjectivist, and you may take that route if you truly value the fantasy above epistemic rationality.

[01:09:52]  Bruce: However, I feel very different. Okay, so I guess when I read that, though, I kind of shrug. Like, if I'm taking the subjectivist moral view, which I was, which is why we were having this discussion. I don't actually believe that myself. I'm intentionally taking what I understand the subjectivist moral view to be, okay? It seems to me that the fact that it horrifies you means nothing. I mean, it's like you saying, I'm horrified that you prefer chocolate when chocolate ice cream, when strawberry ice cream is what I like. And I'm horrified that you prefer chocolate ice cream. And I kind of shrug. It's like, okay, great. I mean, I can see that that's the subjective value of yours. I can't think of any particular reason why the irrational religious person who is getting value out of their false belief that they're going to have an afterlife and live forever and things like that.

[01:10:50]  Bruce: I honestly can't see why it matters in the slightest that they're being irrational because of this reality of subjective values. Would you like to maybe respond to that?

[01:11:06]  Ivan: I can see your point of view there. I just think that I wonder to what extent... I mentioned in that quote something about consequentialism. And for the longest time, I was someone who was a thorough consequentialist, that I was really personally upset whenever tradition or deontological ideas that caused injustices would occur. And so I was very much consequentialist. But lately, I've been a little bit more deontological and maybe virtue ethics oriented myself, where I think that what I would find myself doing online, of course, I love to get into it in debates online. But why do that? I wrote a book on rationality. Do I really think that tomorrow, people are going to buy my book and go, oh, OK, and then they'll start teaching rationality in schools? What is the probability that this will happen? You've put a lot of zeros after the decimal point, and then a one.

[01:12:30]  Ivan: So then was it a complete waste of my time to write this book? I spent a lot of time writing it, or I go online and I argue with people, how effective would you say I have been in changing people's minds? Probably not very effective. But I think that this is something important, and I'm especially concerned when I... If someone has a false belief, I don't find myself that offended by the fact that they have a false belief. But if they start teaching the false belief, then it really bothers me. And it occurs to me that where this is coming from is not just a consequentialist argument. It's not just, okay, they're doing this, and if they do this, it will have this negative consequence. It's also that I think that rationality and believing the truth is virtuous. That believing something that is much less probable than the alternative is in some way profane.

[01:13:42]  Ivan: Now, when I say profane, I don't mean like in an objective sense that there's, I'm an atheist, so I don't think that there's anything to lay down an objective idea of what is pure or what is good. But that part of the reason that I'm interested in what Deutsch has to say or that I follow the critical rationalism forum or that I'm a Bayesian is that I think good epistemology is virtuous.

[01:14:12]  Bruce: So it seems to me that you're now talking about an objective moral. And there's a... I still see what you're saying. You're saying, I'm not really claiming moral realism here. And yet, you're kind of... it seems to me you're kind of sneaking it in the back door, that there is in fact this objective moral that we should be rational. By the way, the name of his book is Textbook Rationality, Rationality and Why We Should Teach It in Schools by Ivan Phillips. 4.6 on the reviews, so that's the book he's referring to. And I guess I have a similar question about the fact that you talk about moral progress. I mean, what does it even mean to refer to moral progress in a purely moral subjective world? I mean, you're describing to me what we mean by it, where, well, we have this chance to stop and think, and then we think, oh, I now have the ability to stop and think about animal rights, for example.

[01:15:18]  Bruce: But there's still even just the word moral progress is baking into it, an objective morality that we're progressing towards something, right? In a purely subjective world where there just are no objective values at all, I'm not even sure the word moral progress is a meaningful term. It almost strikes me as it must just be an incorrect term.

[01:15:44]  Unidentified speaker: It's a complete…

[01:15:47]  Peter: It seems to me, I think David Deutsch said something similar, that if you really are saying that morality is subjective, then what is moral progress in that universe? So you're really saying that a society where slavery is practiced is morally equivalent to one where slavery is abolished and applied to a thousand different other things.

[01:16:20]  Ivan: When you say it's equivalent, you mean it's equivalent if the only consideration is objective moral justification.

[01:16:30]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:16:31]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[01:16:32]  Ivan: That's embedded in that statement.

[01:16:35]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:16:35]  Ivan: If you're saying, but is it equivalent given subjective moral justification, then of course it's not equivalent at all.

[01:16:46]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:16:47]  Ivan: So I think that there's something that maybe subtly begs the question there when you say that there's... The same thing really for moral progress is that we live in a society now where we still have plenty of problems that we need to solve. But most children make it to adulthood. So we don't... Most people are not... Okay, well, okay, yes. Parents do worry about their children making it to adulthood. But for the most part, those worries are maybe sort of overblown. We live in a society where we have medicine, where we have public education, where we have access to health care, not as much as we'd like. But we have a lot of things that make the quality of life now, we live today, better than kings lived 500 years ago.

[01:17:46]  Peter: And that sounds like moral progress. I mean, it's intertwined with technological progress, but it's still moral progress. I mean, one feeds off the other.

[01:17:55]  Ivan: But it's subjective moral progress, right? It's subjective moral progress in the sense that if you start with human, like our evolved baseline values, that we have these propensities for non-zero-sum games where we care about our children, and we care about families, and we care about friendships, and we care about good health, and all of these things, which we cared about before. But when we were making decisions about who we're going to punish, we were sort of relying more on intuition and on our fears and on our lack of options previously. And now that, okay, well, if the world were to fall into some sort of disaster, there's some meteorite strike or something, and civilization collapses, I think that we would make the reverse moral progress. That because we need food, like I don't know where my next meal is coming from, I'm willing to take more risks, and I'm willing to care less about what kinds, I'm going to care less about animal rights if it means that I get a meal.

[01:19:26]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:19:27]  Ivan: And so in that sense, I think that you can have, even if our values that were instilled in us are a result of our evolutionary history, which is partly accidental, there may be common other species, social species may share some of the same things, like evolution is, there are going to be some, like, convergences in evolution. But even if some of those things are subjective, that we can still have progress.

[01:19:58]  Peter: And in that world, we probably wouldn't care about scientific progress either. I mean, those consider, we wouldn't, who cares about the behavior of subatomic particles? We're just trying to stay alive.

[01:20:10]  Bruce: So, I think that, this goes back to kind of my initial statement, I don't think we need to ever explain subjective values. And I think that Ivan's definitely right, that in some sense, we come pre-wired, at least on average, probabilistically, due to evolution, with certain values. So I can see his argument that, when he talks about moral progress, that perhaps one could interpret moral progress as, well, we happen to have these subjective values that are wired into us by our genes, by evolution, and it's entirely possible to make objective progress against those parochial values. And if that's what we mean by moral progress, then, okay, I guess I can see his point there that moral progress exists in the same sense that you can make progress towards a better recipe for waffle love, waffles that taste better to more people or something along those lines.

[01:21:17]  Bruce: Is that kind of what you're getting at there, Ivan?

[01:21:21]  Ivan: Yeah, I mean, I think that the problem is really more like if a species had different values, it would have a different idea of what moral progress is and that how would we be able to convince them using reason that they were wrong.

[01:21:45]  Ivan: That to me seems to be the problem. So while we've been talking here, I've been thinking, okay, so what would it take for me to say, you know what, I do think that there is a moral realism and this is the way you could get there. Like, let's suppose that you did something where you said, well, we're going to create AIs and all AIs will converge on this idea of what is right and wrong. Then, and by AI here, I just mean something. So in other words, you'd have to accept that rationality or some form of rationality was like a moral axiom. But if that is all you needed, then you could reach all these other objective moral facts. Then I would be more inclined to say, well, okay, well, maybe I might call that moral realism. I just have a hard time. I mean, if I just make a statistical thing and say, well, statistically, we think that societies like ours, that you have these non-zero sum games, so we expect that those societies will want to respect similar sorts of moral values.

[01:23:01]  Ivan: But then it's just a statistical statement.

[01:23:05]  Peter: Well, my mind's going to aliens here. We've been talking a lot about aliens. So when the aliens come down and visit us, I mean, I think the most people would probably be quite afraid that they would decide to eradicate us or maybe just blow up our planet or something. But I actually find it, I think because I am more sympathetic to this idea that morality, that there are some objective basis for morality, I think it's far more likely that the aliens would come down and see us as fellow knowledge creators and want to help us, maybe cure death or whatever. What do you think, Ivan? Do you think that it would be more likely that aliens, like a completely different species, totally unconnected from us in an evolutionary sense, would want to help us or hurt us or would be completely unconcerned about us?

[01:24:09]  Ivan: I think it depends on... I think it's difficult to say, right? So one of the concerns we have about artificial intelligence is this alignment problem. So that what the AI wants may not be aligned with human morality. And so maybe we make an AI that is in some way pathological. Maybe it's got some basic form of utilitarianism in there, but it's maybe pathological in some way. Maybe it has interests in preserving its own civilization, and it sees other civilizations as threats to that. I don't know. I feel like I don't know the answer. I think that if it's something where humans end up going into space, and we develop warp drive, and so it's some spin-off of human society, then I think your scenario is much more plausible, Peter, that the aliens are going to want to help us. They're going to be sympathetic to us, just as the same way that humans are sympathetic to animals that we see, that we think are maybe intellectually less capable than ourselves.

[01:25:37]  Ivan: It doesn't mean that we don't have compassion for them. But if it was an AI, and the AI has some objective that was put into it, either deliberately without understanding what its consequences would be, it's difficult to say what the aliens would do.

[01:25:58]  Bruce: So I was going to make a comment, and it was a while back, but I wanted to insert it in. Ivan took a moment to try to work out under what circumstances could moral realism exist. And what he was describing was fairly close, or at least on track for how I understand Frank Tipler's Omega Point, which is why I do one of the things that I find fascinating about Tipler's Omega Point. Keep in mind that I don't endorse the theory. I think it's wrong. But just kind of wrapping your mind around the theory on its own terms is that he actually had, in my opinion, worked out a true theory of moral realism. So I actually do believe it is entirely possible to work out a theory of moral realism, but I think it's a very difficult thing to do, which is why I guess I at least somewhat agree with Ivan's critiques here. I think without the right type of cosmology, you simply cannot have moral realism and you are stuck with moral subjectivism, or really not just moral, but all values.

[01:27:03]  Bruce: So, but, we would have to go back and listen to it again. The way he was, Ivan was going about that, saying, well, in this case, maybe I could buy moral realism, that was fairly close to how I interpret Tipler's Omega Point. And that was actually what I was trying to say back in episode 56, is that I do believe that you need some sort of Omega Point-like cosmology to get to moral realism and that you can't actually have it without that special kind of cosmology. So just wanted to clarify my own thoughts back from episode 56 and also point out that there might be a point of agreement between me and Ivan on that, possibly.

[01:27:45]  Peter: Most people don't quite take Heat Death as seriously as you do, Bruce.

[01:27:50]  Unidentified speaker: I agree.

[01:27:55]  Peter: Can we loop this back to the is-ought distinction that was brought up initially? Tell me if you guys think of this as a fair way of framing the debate. What I kind of hear Ivan saying is that Hume's, Hume, right? His is-ought distinction is a sort of just separate ideas. There's is and there's ought, and these aren't going to meet. Whereas I actually think a more realistic way of thinking of it is these are intertwined ideas. I mean, why do we, you know, whenever you get into like a scientific truth, well, that opens up a whole can of worms in terms of ought. Why do we care about reason? Why do we care about science? Why do we want to be right? Why do we want to tell the truth? And I guess I just see it as a false dichotomy. But is that another way of saying it? Is it a real dichotomy or a false dichotomy?

[01:29:03]  Bruce: So I've actually given Hume's guillotine quite a bit of thought. And first of all, I really don't buy Deutsch's argument against it. So I tried my best to summarize his argument. I do think there's something to his argument.

[01:29:18]  Unidentified speaker: There often is.

[01:29:19]  Bruce: Deutsch happens to be a rather smart guy. So even when I think he gets something wrong, he's almost always kind of on the right track to something interesting, if that makes any sense. But I've always felt a little suspicious of his argument, and let me see if I can explain why. It's true that we solve problems. I think what Deutsch would say is you have a problem, you solve it, that problem's solution is often going to include moral content, and that's part of your solution. That's an objective fact for how you solve the problem, and that's how morality comes into the picture, into a universe that's full of just facts. I think that's all true, and I think that's a really interesting point, but it seems to me that when he tries to lay out, this is no different than science, because in science, I just conjecture things also. It seems to me that we're playing a shell game, because science, when I'm doing science, and let's say I'm coming up with new laws of physics, or I suppose I made the theory of Newton, came up with Newton's theory or something like that, I am explaining things, right?

[01:30:29]  Bruce: I'm explaining what it is that's going on, and that's my conjecture, where with morality, there's almost always competing moral views, and they're both right in some sense, right? Like I've got these competing moral values, and I've got one that says I shouldn't harm people, and another one that says I'm going to take care of my family, and then we come up with a scenario where, and Hollywood is great at this, where those two come into conflict, And now there literally is no objective moral answer to the question. And depending on how they portray the character as sympathetic or non-sympathetic, Hollywood can get you sympathizing with either viewpoint fairly easily, okay? So I've always felt like Deutsch's explanation misses the fact that morality is, in some sense, a different beast. You can't really just simply compare it to physics. There is often a lack of explanation that exists with our moral explanations because there's often two moral values we're trying to go after at the same time and they're in conflict.

[01:31:33]  Bruce: Okay, so that was all kind of background as to my view. Now, is this a false dichotomy? I don't think it is. I actually think Hume's guillotine, and I know this is gonna be a really unpopular opinion, so I'm gonna just throw it out there for people to consider. I think it has to be solved. I think that there must be a way to get an ought from an is. And in fact, you can get an ought from an is. It's not actually that hard, okay? If I were to go to Peter, and Peter were to say to me, you know, Bruce, I want to be really good at chess. And so I were to tell Peter, okay, since you wanna be really good at chess, this is an idea that comes from the book After Virtue, by the way. It's not my idea. Peter, one of the things you need to do is you need to not cheat in chess, okay? You ought to not cheat in chess, and that's a fact now. And the reason why you ought not to do that is because if you do cheat, you're not actually gonna get good at chess.

[01:32:38]  Bruce: That's also a fact. And so it's not that hard to derive oughts from ises. Now, of course, I'm cheating a little. For one thing, there's clearly a subjective value that we took as our starting point that he wanted to be good at chess. But it does clarify the fact that the idea that you can't get ought from is is just not true. The real reason why it seems like you can't get ought from is is because there's a slipped in additional assumption in the way Hume is posing it that we're somehow ruling out the existence of subjective values, that they don't get to count. Okay, the moment you actually accept that people do have natural subjective values and that a lot of them are derived from evolution, things like that, right? It actually becomes quite easy to derive oughts from ises. Just factually, you look at facts, you have different things that you care about naturally, and then you can figure out how to derive them.

[01:33:41]  Bruce: So I've never felt like it's a true dichotomy at all. I think that it only becomes a dichotomy if you're starting off with the assumption that people don't have values. Now, that's not necessarily an argument against Ivan's subjective viewpoint. On the contrary, one might say it's in favor of his point of view. But I do want to make that clarification right off the bat that I've never really bought that it just, that there is absolutely no way to go from ought to is. In fact, you can't [possibly “can”], and we do it all the time.

[01:34:12]  Peter: So it sounds like you're agreeing with me. Or are you disagreeing?

[01:34:15]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[01:34:16]  Bruce: It's an agreement with you, but with some caveats. There's still a problem to be solved, which is, can you get around this outside of subjective values? And I think that's the problem Ivan's raising, is he's saying, I'm not sure you can, right? That the only way that you can ever actually derive an ought from an is, is by starting with subjective values. Okay, now, that may be a fair point. In fact, I would love to follow, I mean, this is outside the bounds of this podcast, because we're probably coming up on time anyhow here. But that's like an interesting thought to me, right? Okay, so we accept that you can get from ought to is, from is to ought rather. I keep saying it backwards, don't I? But it requires subjective values. Okay, does that mean that we're limited to subjective values? Or are there objective values? If there are objective values, then it shouldn't be that hard to go from is to ought for objective values either.

[01:35:16]  Bruce: Okay, do you see where I'm coming from here?

[01:35:18]  Peter: Are subjective values oftentimes another way of just saying we don't really know the reason behind them? I mean, of course there are unknowns. There's unknowns everywhere.

[01:35:29]  Bruce: My ultimate example of subjective values is your preference for ice cream, right? I mean, sure, there's a reason behind why I prefer strawberry over chocolate and you prefer chocolate over strawberry. And I have no doubt that we could get down to some reason about how our brains are wired or what happened in our childhood. There's some sort of reason behind it that we're unaware of. Whatever that reason is, I don't think it matters, right? The fact of the matter is that I prefer strawberry and you prefer chocolate. And we're not really... There's not even an interesting... Whatever that reason is, it's not even going to be interesting, right? In some sense. Because it's just going to be some happenstance of the way we happen to develop as human beings through our lives.

[01:36:15]  Peter: Some people might have a hang up for things that are brown or something.

[01:36:18]  Bruce: Right, right. I mean, like, it sort of just doesn't matter, right? What the reason is. Because I'm intentionally picking something so completely subjective that nobody doubts its preference.

[01:36:31]  Ivan: Or even if you talk about evolution having this, you know, advantage for non-zero-sum games, you can say, well, this is why we think altruism is good. Like, we have a natural impulse for it, because evolution saw this as useful. And those, you know, those people with this impulse ended up surviving because it's a non-zero-sum game. So now we have a reason. We know why it exists. It is an objective fact that it exists, and maybe we could know it so well, know the evolutionary psychology so well, that we were very highly confident that this was a fact about the world. But just because evolution has programmed us to do something doesn't mean to say we ought to do it objectively. We might be able to point to, oh, evolution caused us to do this, and this is why we like to do it, and this is why we value it. And so now we can use these facts to help us better satisfy these values.

[01:37:29]  Ivan: But if we find something from our evolutionary past, like there's evidence that rhesus macaques will commit these sort of genocides the same way humans do, maybe it's in our evolutionary history that we do this, that doesn't mean to say that, oh, well, because we have this value and there was an evolutionary real reason why we have it, doesn't mean to say we ought to have it. So subjective morality is saying that we can objectively describe our moral choices and our moral values, but there's nothing, we cannot objectively prescribe it. We can't say that, well, because we have it, that's what makes it objectively right, that if there was another society that didn't have those things, we don't actually have a good reason within our framework for objectively saying that they're wrong. We can say that objectively we would be displeased by it, but that's not the same thing.

[01:38:32]  Ivan: And I think the thing about Hume's dictum is also that even in Harry Potter's world, even if you said, okay, well, it's objective, we know that good and evil have these different properties and they can cast different spells or you've got the force, right? The force is employed in different ways if you're good or evil. Does that then tell you whether you should be good or evil? I think Hume would say that even in that scenario, even if you could show that objectively the universe actually does care whether you do one thing or the other, like it results in a different outcome, does that mean that you ought to be dark side or light side?

[01:39:11]  Bruce: So the fact is, though, is that I can imagine a universe where objective values exist. I can imagine that the cosmology is such that eventually everybody comes to regret their actions that are evil and decides on their own by their own preferences, by their own subjective values to change. At that point, I don't think, even though they may have started as subjective values, in some sense, they really are objective values now, right? Because you use the example of a society that disagrees with us. So let's say that they do change and they end up preferring it. They go, oh, wow, we were wrong. Even by our own way of thinking, once I finally came around to seeing what that other society was saying, this really is our preference after all. We were mistaken in our preferences, okay? It's not that hard. I can see that cosmologies like this are special.

[01:40:12]  Bruce: They're certainly not the heat death cosmology. They're certainly not the popular cosmologies of science. But one could imagine an omega point like cosmology like this, where it just is the case that everybody eventually changes their mind, because that is the way the universe is. And I think in this sense, you absolutely could have objective values. But I think it's hard to get to those objective values. It requires a special kind of explanation, it requires a special kind of cosmology. And I feel like when Ivan makes his arguments, they're very good arguments, but they're always kind of sneaking in the assumption we don't live in such a cosmology. Which is maybe even a decent starting point, because we're told over and over again heat death is the preeminent cosmology. And I would agree that if heat death is, that Ivan's arguments all make sense to me, right?

[01:40:59]  Bruce: And that I actually agree with what he's saying. And I know I'm the only one who cares about heat death in the entire universe. But you see what I'm saying though, right? I do believe it is entirely possible that subjective values could in fact be objective given a certain cosmology.

[01:41:17]  Peter: No, I actually just want to say that you have convinced me that heat death is at least an incredibly compelling way to put it. I mean, it's kind of like the logical extreme of this stuff, really.

[01:41:31]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, it is.

[01:41:33]  Peter: But I mean, it doesn't really keep me up at night, I wouldn't say.

[01:41:36]  Unidentified speaker: But yeah, it is interesting.

[01:41:39]  Bruce: There's a Star Trek episode where these kind of eccentric geniuses are spending all their time worrying about heat death, and everybody just thinks they're strange. And the writing is such that you're clearly meant to laugh at them for being so ridiculous.

[01:41:55]  Unidentified speaker: That's me.

[01:41:56]  Unidentified speaker: I'm the eccentric.

[01:42:00]  Peter: Is that the original series or next generation?

[01:42:03]  Bruce: It's Deep Space Nine, which by the way is the best Star Trek. Yes, I do understand why people often consider next generation better, and they're not entirely wrong. There's some good and bad on both. You know, next generation has some advantages over Deep Space Nine. But in terms of the actual writing, if not, you know, the actors are all very good in Deep Space Nine, but nobody's on the level of Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner, because nobody is.

[01:42:31]  Peter: I don't know, I kind of like the original. It's the campiness of it. The mini skirts and Captain Kirk having love affairs with aliens and stuff. I don't know, that's just more...

[01:42:42]  Bruce: I'm watching the original right now, and it's fun. I'm enjoying it.

[01:42:46]  Unidentified speaker: You know what?

[01:42:47]  Bruce: Let me just actually take an aside to, since I love Deep Space Nine, to plug Deep Space Nine, since it actually has some relevance to what we're talking about. Deep Space Nine's whole plot, and this is why I loved the show so much, is the Star Trek, the Federation was intended to be a utopia. And one of the things that made Star Trek a difficult franchise to write for was that Gene Roddenberry wanted to portray this optimistic future of humanity being more rational, having better values than us, they've made tons of moral progress, and these people are living in this utopia. And it's really hard to write for. You can't have interpersonal conflicts. Like literally, he didn't allow interpersonal conflicts, because he wanted to portray a society where everybody, they may have a conflict for an episode, but they always work it out at the end because they're more rational.

[01:43:43]  Bruce: And it's a really tough thing to write for, although it's interesting in its own right. And I do feel like the original series did a great job within that. And part of the reason why the show is so popular and it turned into a whole franchise was because it was difficult to write for, but they pulled it off. And so you ended up with this optimistic worldview that people find attractive, okay? Now, Deep Space Nine turned that all on its head, and it started off with the Utopia, and then it presented a villain so terrifying, you know, really honestly worse than the Borg, which was the best villain up to that point, but subtly so, with the Dominion, that was so terrifying that it forced the Federation members to really get serious about how much do I believe in my values? And in the end, they come up with a kind of... It's not a dark show. It's still an optimistic show, just like all other Star Treks, but they are pushed to the edge of their values and sometimes break them before finally coming back around to following their values.

[01:44:53]  Bruce: And it's actually a really good, interesting study in objective versus subjective values. How does that work? And of course, it's being done with interesting science fiction plots and things like that. One of the big reveals, this is a big spoiler, is that the Federation, in fact, has a Dirty Tricks Division, Section 31, that has existed since the foundation of their society they never really had faith that their utopia could exist without somebody who was willing to bend on, break all the rules. And so they have this interesting idea that comes out of that. And it was one of the things I really loved about Deep Space Nine is they put these characters in so many interesting circumstances where they just have to really think hard, okay, how can I best implement my values given that I'm in a completely ridiculous situation where my values are actually going to be a negative if I implement them entirely.

[01:45:52]  Bruce: And so it was one of the things I really loved about the show. And I do think it does a great job of making you think hard about just how objective are your values.

[01:46:02]  Peter: That kind of leads into what I was thinking could be a final question here, if that sounds good to you guys.

[01:46:09]  Unidentified speaker: Sure.

[01:46:10]  Peter: So there's this idea that I sometimes think about that people will really tell you what they believe more effectively through their actions rather than what they say. I mean, it's pretty maybe a common kind of belief, and I can see it in a lot of different contexts. I'm curious, Ivan and Cameo, and Bruce, I mean, would you say that you, regardless of how you feel intellectually about subjective versus objective morality, do we live in terms of your actions as if morality were more objective or subjective? Or does the question not make sense?

[01:46:54]  Bruce: Oh no, that makes perfect sense. You know what, I don't want to answer first. I'll let somebody else go first, but I do want to express my opinion on that.

[01:47:02]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:47:03]  Ivan: So I am a I'm a physicalist. I guess I'm treating the question as, you know, how do my actions differ if I think moral realism is true versus subjectivism? I don't think it does matter or can matter. It's very difficult to come up with a scenario where that happens. Because even if you are a a subjectivist, you're still going to have some theoretical model of what you think is optimal. You know, something, maybe not optimal just for yourself, but optimal for friends and family and society at large, right?

[01:47:48]  Unidentified speaker: So

[01:47:51]  Peter: So you have that optimal framework, but you just, you don't think objectivity plays a role in it.

[01:47:58]  Unidentified speaker: I don't, I think that there are some,

[01:48:00]  Ivan: I think that when we're creating public policy, we should be more, we should more carefully try to measure what are the outcomes of the policies, because I think there are a number of policies that get put on the table where this policy, it feels right to some people. It feels like, yeah, we should do this, but the bottom line is, it will actually make things worse. It's just like it, or, you know, and it could that could be on both sides. It could be that, hey, you know, it seems like if we did this policy, we're just causing this policy is just causing needless discomfort to people. We should change this. But what if, you know, sometimes it does make sense to be cruel, to be kind in the long run, right? That there may be policies like that, that we should measure those things more carefully. And I do think that there are, objectivity of morality just seems kind of useless.

[01:49:02]  Ivan: Like it doesn't really have any bearing on it. The real more useful kind of question to ask is, you know, we have very people may have very strong opinions about abortion or about public policy in various areas, but I think it's very helpful to isolate values from your is and your morally neutral questions. So if you have a strong opinion on let's say, you know, religion in schools or something, right, that you may say, well, is there some set of circumstances in which you would say that you would relax your opinion? And once you start to think about that, you can actually become more, you can become less fearful and more flexible and more clear headed about policy decisions. I guess if you're talking about personal decisions, which is probably the direction you wanted to go, I don't know where to go with that. I think still people are much more likely to make decisions from a point of view of fear or conflating values with the facts.

[01:50:26]  Ivan: People very frequently rationalize that, you know, the way the world is because they have some moral agenda. And so I don't think that realism is helping. I think if anything, realism is hurting.

[01:50:44]  Unidentified speaker: Interesting.

[01:50:44]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:50:45]  Unidentified speaker: I can see that.

[01:50:48]  Cameo: I think my answer is kind of a lot the same. You know, earlier Bruce was talking about kind of the pretty lie that if even if there is no god, is there harm in somebody going through their life and believing that there is a god? I'm sure I'm paraphrasing that poorly, Bruce, but it's kind of the same, I think, about whether morals are objective or subjective. I'm not completely certain it matters at all. You know, if Bruce and I probably operate the same on a day to day, even if his morals, he believes are objective and I believe mine are subjective. I'm not, I still am choosing a set of standards to operate under and my behavior is not substantially different than his, I would assume.

[01:51:43]  Peter: Yeah, I mean, I think about people I know and most people, I think most people, at least in the environment where I live, if you press them, they would probably say that most morality is relative or subjective. But it doesn't really seem like that's how they live. I mean, they take care of their kids, they go to work, they work hard, they try to tell the truth, and I just see sort of a disconnect there that I think is interesting.

[01:52:13]  Bruce: So, I agree with what Peter's saying. And it's again, I cannot possibly explain my viewpoint quickly enough before this episode's going to end. So, we're going to have to probably do this in a separate episode sometime, and I'll try to back up what I'm about to say rationally. But I actually fairly strongly disagree with Ivan and Cameo on this. I think that everybody believes in objective morality, whether they claim they do or not. And I think that there's really no other way to make it work. I think we can talk about subjective morality, and I think we can see that there's a strong argument for it rationally. And I feel Ivan's done a fantastic job making a strong argument for it rationally. And I think it even could be the case he's right. And yet it would still be the case that at the end of the day, morality, for it to function and for society to have it useful, that we have to act and at some deep gut level believe it is in fact an objective thing.

[01:53:21]  Bruce: That we have moral duties, that moral duties objectively exist. I think that that would be true. Now, that doesn't really prove objective morality, to be honest. It really only proves that you need the concept, even if it's false. And this gets back to the happy lie or what I call the high utility falsehood. I think what I'm arguing here doesn't really argue for or against objective morality. I think it's an argument that it's really important and was necessary that human beings think of morality as objective and that there's such a thing as a moral duty. And that the moment you actually do away with that concept, basically everything falls apart for society. And again, I know I'm making a strong claim here that I have in no way backed up up to this point. And so I would have to do a separate podcast to try to back up why I feel that's the case.

[01:54:16]  Bruce: But I think that's precisely why people act as if morality is objective, is because there really was no alternative but to act as if morality was objective.

[01:54:27]  Unidentified speaker: Well, well put.

[01:54:29]  Peter: Seems we'll have to do a part two if Ivan is willing to come back.

[01:54:34]  Unidentified speaker: I'd love to.

[01:54:35]  Unidentified speaker: Any final thoughts, Ivan?

[01:54:38]  Unidentified speaker: No.

[01:54:39]  Ivan: This has been a fantastic discussion. I really enjoyed it, and thanks for having me on.

[01:54:43]  Peter: I have too.

[01:54:44]  Bruce: Ivan, I would like to invite you back for a episode on Bayesianism.

[01:54:50]  Ivan: I would love to participate.

[01:54:52]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:54:53]  Cameo: That's going to get spicy is what that's going to do.

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[01:56:12]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.