#446 — How to Do the Most Good

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I'm here with Michael Plant. Michael, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me on. So we were introduced by Peter Singer. And I think you, was he your dissertation advisor? He was. All right. So maybe you can give your background before we jump into the topics of mutual interest. Well, so I'm a philosopher and global happiness researcher. And I kind of got started on this interest age about 16. I first came across philosophy. My first lesson on philosophy, I came across the idea of utilitarianism, that we should maximize happiness. And I thought, Oh, wow, that's, I don't know if that's the whole story of ethics, but that's a massive story of ethics. You might say it was a waking up moment. And then over the next 20 years, I've kind of pursued two topics as this philosophical question of, should we maximize happiness? I mean, I thought that was quite plausible, but lots of people thought it was nuts. So what's going on there? And then this empirical question of, well, how do we do that? You know, what in fact, you know, how can we apply happiness research to finding out what really we ought to do? And I've been kind of pursuing those tracks and those have taken me to what I'm doing now. So maybe we should define a few terms before we proceed. I mean, a couple will be very easy. And then I think happiness will be very hard. But you just mentioned utilitarianism. How do you define that? And do you differentiate it from consequentialism? And what is the rival meta ethical position or positions that if they exist, I'm uncertain as to whether they actually exist. But we can talk about that. Well, so utilitarianism is or classical utilitarianism is the view that what one ought to do is to maximize the sum total of happiness. And then that differs from consequentialism, where consequentialism is one ought to do the most good. So you don't necessarily have to define good in terms of happiness, you can think of that as desires or other sorts of things. And then these kind of consequentialist theories contrast with what are called sort of down to logical or kind of common sense ethical theories, where those theories will say sometimes you should maximize the good, but also there are constraints, there are things you shouldn't do, you know, you shouldn't kill people to, you know, save lives, perhaps. And there are prerogatives. So there are things you, you maybe would be good for you to do, but you don't have to do. So maybe the utilitarian might say, look, you should give lots and lots of money to charity. And the deontologists would say, well, you know, I recognize it would be better in some way for the you know, for the world for people if I did that, but I don't have to do that. I have these kind of these kind of prerogatives. That's the kind of layer of the land. Now, do you feel that one of these positions wins? I mean, how would you define your met ethics? And in the, I mean, I think I've said this before in the podcast, but perhaps you're unaware of it. I do think any sane deontology collapses to some form of consequentialism covertly. I mean, if you say it's not all about maximizing the good, there's some very important principles that we must hold to like, you know, cons categorical imperative or some other deontological principle. To my eye, what is smuggled in there covertly is the claim that that principle is on balance good. Right. I mean, like if someone knew that the categorical imperative was guaranteed to produce the worst outcomes across the board, I don't think most deontologists would bite the bullet there and say, yeah, that's what we want. The worst out comes across the board. They're holding to it because it is on its face intuitively a great way to implement something like rule utilitarianism or rule consequentialism. What's your thoughts on that? So lots of the objections which you might make it a kind of against utilitarianism that it's taking maximizing too seriously are also problems you're likely to find to a lesser degree in non consequentialist theories. So an example is, you know, sort of a kind of a classic differentiating point would be you shouldn't kill one person to save lives. So you might say, well, you shouldn't kill one person to save five people. And the consequences might say, well, look, you probably should do that, you know, assuming that's just sort of a, there's no kind of extra complexity to it. But then if you kind of up the ante and you say, well, what about if you kill one person to save a million lives or a billion lives, then the moderate consequences might be, well, this is outweighed, these kind of normative badness of killing is outweighed by the kind of the goodness of the of the life saved. So you might think that there's kind of still what's going on under the hood of these dental logical theories is there's there's still kind of some implicit maths going on, like trading off bits and pieces. But so that's sort of an accusation that consequences might make against dentalologists. But I mean, dentalologists will will kind of fight back and say, well, actually, look, you don't mean there is there are kind of conceptions of dental logical theories where you you kind of can't do it exactly like that. And so it's kind of a there's an open debate, which, you know, perhaps we is kind of too much in the weeds, but as to whether you can just reduce dental logical theories to kind of looking at value plus some kind of other normative principles. And some people think you can and other people think that think that you can't. Yeah, the attacks on consequentialism always boil down in my experience to not actually pay an attention to the full set of consequences that follow from any action. So when someone says, well, if you're consequential, as you should be happy to have your doctor come, you know, you show up to the doctor's office for a checkup, your doctor knowing that he's got five other patients who could use your organs, he should could just come out and, you know, anesthetize you and kill you and transplant your organs and his other patients. And that's a net benefit for the world. You know, five people get organs and one person dies. And that's often put forward or examples like that are often put forward as kind of a knockdown argument against consequentialism. But what people are not adding on the balance there is all of the consequences that follow from such a callous and horrific practice, right? I mean, if everyone knew that at any moment they might be swept off the street and butchered for the benefit of others, what kind of society would we be living in? And what, you know, what would it mean to be a doctor? And how would you feel about your doctor? And how would the doctor be able to, you know, sleep at night, etc. And so the consequences just propagate endlessly from a practice like that. And it's just obviously awful. And no one wants to live in that society for good reason. But again, this is all just a story of consequences. It's not the story of some abstract principle. But anyway, we don't have to get wrapped around that axel. I just wanted to touch that. So if you're a consequentialist of whatever description, what should you care about in the end? Well, there are kind of a few options as to which kind of consequences you're going to say matter. So one which I think any consequences is going to buy into is well being. So well being term of art and philosophy for what ultimately makes someone's life go well for them, kind of three canonical theories of well being, you've got hedonism. So happiness is what matters, you've got desire theories, we're getting what you want is what matters. And then you've got this thing called the objective list where it's usually a few things, maybe it's a happiness and desires are on there, but it might also be things like truth, beauty, love, achievement. And I think there's, you know, so any, that's going to be kind of one of the key consequences you might also think maybe there's, you want to account for kind of equality or justice, it's kind of a, you might think it's a bit of an open question as to whether those are kind of delinological principles or sort of value based principles. But when I think about this and what kind of kind of motivates my thinking is that it just seems that I find it very compelling that when we're thinking about what makes someone's go life or let their life go well for them, it's their happiness and their suffering. It's the kind of the quality of life for them. It's how they, how they feel overall. And this is, I guess it's a, you know, there are some bits of philosophy that think that this is kind of a mad theory and kind of no, no sick in the experience machine. You know, would you be, you know, if you, if you really believe in happiness, would you plug yourself into a matrix style scenario? But I think in kind of weighing up the three theories of, of wellbeing, I just think the, the hedonism, the idea that what makes your life go well for you is how you feel overall, I think that's got the, that's kind of got the strongest arguments behind it. And that motivates lots of the other things that I do. Yeah. I mean, I think so to take no sick's experience machine, refutation of consequentialism here, utilitarianism, it's again is what, what he's pressing on there is the intuition, which I think is widely shared by people is that, that we should have something like a reality bias, right? That you don't want to be, you don't want your state of subjective wellbeing to be totally uncoupled from the reality of your life in the world. You don't want to be in relationship with seeming others who are not in fact others. So you don't want to be hallucinating about everything, right? So this is why you wouldn't want to be in the matrix. If you, in fact, you wouldn't want to be in the matrix. Now I would grant that there's certain conditions under which the matrix becomes more and more tempting and reality becomes less and less so, right? I mean, we can imagine just some forced choice between a very awful universe that is real and a simulated one, which is perfect, in which case we might begin to wonder, well, what's the point of reality in that case? But I think it's again, that this is, it's a story of yet more consequences at the level of people's experience. I mean, to know that you're, I mean, just imagine, you know, having the best day of your life and, or years of your life and you're in a relationship with people who are incredibly important to you, who you love and to find out at some point that all of this was a hallucination, right? And there was no, which is to say not merely that it's impermanent, which any experienced empirical reality is, we'll all discover that at death, but, or even just the end of any hour, but there would be this additional knowledge that it was fake in some sense, right? Like the person you thought you were in the presence of sharing meaning and love with was not a person, right? They had no point of view on you. It was all just a hall of mirrors. I think that we get an icky feeling from that, and it's understandable, and that icky feeling translates into a degradation of the well-being we would find in that circumstance. But again, I don't think we can press that too far. I think having a loose reality bias makes sense. But I think that you could easily argue for ways in which you would want your view of yourself or the world to not be the most brutal, high contrast, right at all times view if in fact that would prove dysfunctional and corrosive in other ways, which I think it's pretty easy to see that it might. Yeah. So, in addition to that, I think a reason not to get into the experience of seeing this, I think we have more responsibilities if you're just stuck in the experience machine, you can't make a difference to anyone else. I also, a couple of thoughts, I also think it's sort of amusing that the experience machine is taken as a sort of a slam-dun conjection to hedonism when if we look at how technology is changing, we are increasingly living in something like the experience machine. I mean, there are some days where I don't leave my house, like I interact with people the whole day through the magic of the internet and so on. Am I in fact in the experience machine? Right. But anyway, leaving those bits to the side, I think a point that's really substantially overlooked is when there's this question about what wellbeing is, it's often, okay, the argument is happiness is the only thing that matters. And then there's this sort of cognitive mistake for thinking, well, if happiness isn't the only thing that matters, then it doesn't actually matter very much. And so, I often find I have to remind people even if they are not hedonists and few people are and that's fine. But look, even if you don't think it's anything that matter, you do still think that it matters. If you didn't think that it matter, you would think that people's suffering and misery didn't matter in and of itself. And that's a very peculiar thought. So it's at least got to be one of the things that matter, or it's going to be very important to whatever it is else that matters intrinsically. So if you're engaging in morality, and you're not taking happiness seriously and taking suffering seriously, then you're missing a major part of what really matters. So what do you do with the fact that happiness and wellbeing are these elastic concepts that are really impossible to define in any kind of closed way? Because there's their frontiers of happiness and wellbeing that we are gradually exploring and presumably, there are experiences that we would all recognize that are better than any we've yet had. And they're sort of out there on the horizon. And we can't really close our accounts with reality at this point and say, wellbeing, ultimate human wellbeing is this, because a thousand years from now it may consist of something that we can't even form a concept around presently. And what do you do with the fact that, and this is explicit in many of the objections to the concept of happiness, because it somehow seems thin and doesn't somehow capture everything that's worth wanting. What do you do with the fact that there are certain forms of suffering and stress that seem integral to the deeper reaches of wellbeing, so that it's not, it can't purely be about avoiding pain or avoiding stress or maximizing short-term pleasure, right? I mean, we all know what it's like to, or many of us know what it's like to go to the gym and work out hard. And if you could experience sample that hour, it would be true to say that much of it was excruciating. And if you were having that experience for some other reason, like if you woke up in the middle of the night and felt the way you felt, you know, doing a deadlift or whatever, you would run straight to the hospital, you know, convince you're about to die. But because of the context and because of the consequences of spending that hour that way, most people learn to love that experience, even if it's negatively valenced as a matter of, you know, sensation and physiology while having it. How do you define wellbeing or flourishing or happiness to encompass those wrinkles? Yeah, so I think the definitional problems are maybe not so sharp. I mean, in kind of philosophy, we just sort of nail them down one way or another. So wellbeing will make your life go well for you overall. And then happiness, I just understand is feeling good overall. So it has this intrinsic quality of pleasure. If you don't know what pleasure is, sorry, I don't think I can tell you what that feels like. But that's sort of the, you know, the kind of end of the line, we just sort of recognise there is an intuitive kind of pleasantness, kind of positive or negative valence in our experiences. So then this is a question about the causes of happiness and, you know, what does happiness consist in? So what I think happiness consists in is positive valence experience. And then what are the causes of happiness? Well, you know, that's a that's an empirical question, you're absolutely right that, you know, are what we can possibly discover lots about what are the causes of happiness? How do they compare to each other over time? And what, in fact, are the best ways to promote happiness, which hopefully we will we will come to it due course on the bit about suffering. Yeah, this comes up quite a bit as well. You know, but if you only live the happy life, wouldn't you, this is a bit like the point you're making about consequences and people say, well, if you only experience happiness, that would in fact not maximise your sum total of happiness over time, because you need the misery to have some happiness. But I mean, I think that's, you know, sort of fine as a fact of the matter. If you're looking at your experiences over time, then you you do want some kind of good stuff and and some bad stuff. If you're going to, you know, have the greatest area under the line. I mean, we, you know, we know this, we, we do things like we take ourselves camping, because we know it's going to be a miserable experience so that then we can go back to civilisation and enjoy the fruits of civilisation. Some of us do. I've stopped camping. Well, but you've had the camping experience and maybe that, you know, you can remember, oh, thank God I'm not doing that. Yeah. Well, so, but do you actually think that my intuition kind of runs the other way? I don't think we need awful things to compare our happiness to, to recognise that we're happy. I think happiness or human wellbeing could become increasingly refined such that the thing you're comparing the best experience to is like, is still a very good experience. It's just not nearly as good as the best. So there's some version of camping that is better than what 99% of people experience on a day-to-day basis, but which could become the, the reference point of when we're needed of comparison to some yet future state that's even more blissful and expansive and creative and beautiful and encompassing of depth and intuitions that we, you know, very few people ever experience. Yeah. So I don't think I agree with you. It's not sort of logically necessary, but if you look at how kind of happiness seems to work for people, it's, it's highly comparative. And there's some kind of oddnesses about the things we choose that could compare ourselves to and not others. So I kind of a case in point that's kind of relevant for the moment is in the kind of the west of world, you're signed upon my side of the point, we're talking about a cost of living crisis. Okay. People are sort of feeling like they're, they're feeling the pinch, incomes are going down, things are more expensive. But look, here's sort of another perspective on this. If you earn the median salary in the U.S., which is something like $40,000, you're in the top 2% of the global distribution. And if you think about how many people, I think it's more than that. I thought the, or you said median, but I think the mean per capita GDP in the U.S. is like 65,000, something like that. I think it's, it is higher than that, but it's higher than the UK. Yeah. I'm thinking, I'm thinking of the median. I don't, I don't know the mean, the mean, I guess, I guess the median way is considerably lower because there's some very rich people. Yes. Yeah. And then if you're looking, not just at the moment, but across time, I mean, you know, how long have, when did Homo sapiens become Homo sapiens? But if, by one estimate, there's like 120 billion people who have ever lived. So if you put those together, if you're alive today and earning a median salary in the U.S., you're in the top 0.1 to richest people, 0.1% of rich people who have ever lived. And yet what are people talking about? They say, ah, it's the cost of living crisis, things are so expensive. And when I, when I make this point to people, they'll look at me like, I'm strange. And well, you know, of course that's not relevant. Like that's not how I think about my life. But you know, that's the, that's the kind of curiosity there is that how there are certain things we compare our lives to, and sort of naturally, intuitively, but we could make different comparisons. And so relating to your point, you know, we could, you know, bring ourselves to think of the misery in the world that we are otherwise avoiding. And that would give us greater happiness. But in fact, you know, we, we're in quite narrow tracks and the kind of, we just compare ourselves to the things which are salient, the people near around us. And so in practice, maybe you do need that reminding now and then of some misfortune that can make you grateful for the rest of your, for the other parts of your life. Well, this issue of comparison, I think runs pretty deep because given that so much of our judgments of our own well-being and, and in fact, our experience of whether or not we are flourishing is based on comparison, is based on context, it's based on the, on the cognitive framing that is laid over the, just the, kind of the raw sensory experience of being oneself moment to moment. One could ask, what is the, we're going to get into effective altruism and what is, you know, what, what problems on earth are worth solving and how we prioritize those things. But if it's a matter of alleviating suffering and alleviating the most excruciating suffering first, presumably, and maximizing human well-being, maybe it's in fact true to say that the homeless on the streets of San Francisco are suffering more than the poorest of the poor in sub-Saharan Africa or in an Indian village or somewhere where objectively they are more deprived, right? Because there's no one starving to death in San Francisco, whatever their condition. I mean, they could, they might be dying of fentanyl abuse or something else, but there's no one starving to death in America. That's just not a thing, because there's just so much food and you can go to a shelter, you can go to a pantry or you can go to a dumpster, I mean, you can get food, but either places on earth where people still starve to death, happily, that's less and less the case. And yet, if you imagine the experience of being homeless, you know, right outside of the Salesforce Tower or wherever you are in San Francisco, the prospect of comparing the unraveling of your life with the lives that seem to be going on so smoothly all around you suggests to me that it's least conceivable that that suffering, that mental suffering, the experience of being in that bad condition is worse than much or maybe everything that's going on in objectively poorer parts of the world. How do you think about that? Yeah, I find that extremely plausible and very probably true. Having walked through the streets of San Francisco and also visited some of the poorest bits of the world, yeah, I would imagine that. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. 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