How Did Human Morality Evolve? - Victor Kumar

Dr Victor Kumar is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Boston University, part of the Mind & Morality Lab's Moral Psychology Research Group and an author. Morality might seem like something that exists independently of humans. Things are either good or bad, the current evolutionary state humans in in should not impact this judgement. Yet it seems that culture and evolution heavily inescapably each other, and they influenced morality too. Expect to learn why Asian people get red faces when they drink alcohol, which moral emotions can be detected in chimpanzees, why sympathy can be seen as investment advice, how come some people can consume milk and others can't, whether moral grandstanding and performative empathy on Twitter can be explained by evolution, the reason for altruism existing and much more... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy A Better Ape - https://amzn.to/3WZM4qO Check out Victor's website - http://www.victorkumar.org/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - 00:00 Intro 00:32 Is Evolution Relevant to Morality? 06:50 How Dr Kumar Defines Morality 14:10 Features of the Human Moral Mind 19:05 Why Humans Differ to Chimps on Respect 29:11 Are There Bad & Good Emotions? 35:06 When Humans Developed Moral Emotions 43:12 How General Altruism Evolved in Humans 47:55 Evolution of Virtue-Signalling 51:23 Did Religiosity Evolve? 1:06:23 Is Morality Objective? 1:14:33 Where to Find Dr Kumar? - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think the best hope for finding some kind of objective moral philosophy is to think about how and why these progressive changes happen and to think about the psychological and cultural mechanisms behind them and whether those mechanisms can be exploited in the future. We're not going to figure out whether utilitarianism is true or not, but we might be able to figure out how we've made progress in ways that we all agree are progress and how to build on those and to find agreement about other pressing problems that we haven't solved yet.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  Why would evolutionary theory at all be involved in a conversation when studying morality?

• 0:37Speaker 00

  It's a pleasure to be on the show. The reason is because we are evolved beings. We are, we didn't create morality from scratch. We inherited it from our ancestors. We have similar capacities for morality that are shared with other animals like chimpanzees. And so the first step to understanding morality is to understand where it came from.

• 1:00Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Does morality not just come out of culture? Is this not just something that humans create out of the wishy-washy nowhere of interacting with each other?

• 1:11Speaker 00

  I mean, it comes out of culture too, because culture evolved. So culture evolves just like our genes do. We have information, we pass it on. Information that allows us to succeed in our environment is more likely to be transmitted to the next generation. So when we think of morality as being evolved, it's not just genetic capacities to feel pro-social emotions and care about other creatures. It's also a culturally evolved system of norms and institutions. And all of these things combined to produce human morality.

• 1:46Chris Williamson?

  So you call that gene-culture co-evolution?

• 1:50Speaker 00

  That's right, yeah. There's been a huge literature over the past couple of decades trying to explain how it's not just that genes evolve and culture evolve, but they co-evolve together. They influence each other's evolution.

• 2:02Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So could you give me an example of how culture has influenced genes?

• 2:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a great question. So one of my favorite examples of this has to do with the gene that creates alcohol aversion. So there are some populations in different parts of the world that are averse to alcohol. That is, when they drink it, their face blushes, they get kind of sick.

• 2:30Chris Williamson?

  Asian flush, Asian flush. My business partner, my business partner's got it.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  That's right. And the reason for that is that those populations in Asia were among the first people to take domesticated rice crops and turn them into alcohol. And so there was this evolved cultural practice of domesticating rice, turning it into alcohol. And that created a selection pressure on our genes. That is, individuals who were averse to alcohol were less likely to become alcoholics and get drunk and ruin their own lives and those of their family. And so they were more likely to pass along their genes to the next generation.

• 3:11Chris Williamson?

  No way. That's where Asian flush comes from?

• 3:15Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah.

• 3:17Chris Williamson?

  That is incredible. So because the sort of person who would be either neutrally or positively predisposed to consuming alcohol would be more likely to be in situations that would stop their survival and reproduction, people for whom their bodies ended up having this response where they got hot and red-faced and they felt sick, were less likely to do that. They're less likely to take the risks and make the errors, which means that they're more likely to pass their genes on. So Asian flush is an adaptive response to encourage people genetically to not drink in order to not do stupid shit while they're drunk.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 3:58Chris Williamson?

  Dude, you're blowing my mind. That's so interesting.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's tons of examples, tons of examples like this.

• 4:05Chris Williamson?

  Keep them coming. I want to know some more. Give me some of this.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah. So another famous one has to do with lactase tolerance. So, sorry, lactose tolerance. So, you know, most mammals lose the genes for producing the enzyme lactase that allows us to digest lactose in milk. Humans are one of the only exceptions. There are some populations across the world that keep this enzyme and that allows us to continue drinking milk and dairy products, eating dairy products through adulthood. And the reason for this is, and this is just, you know, it seems like the best hypothesis because of where those genes are located in the world, is that those are the places where

• 4:49Speaker 00

  human beings had domesticated cows or goats. And so there was a selective advantage in being able to continue to, to consume dairy without getting sick. And, you know, there's been some new research on this that adds a little twist, but basically, the only twist is that these, this really happened in places that were prone to starvation. And so the key thing was to be able to drink dairy without experiencing diarrhea and becoming dehydrated. So that's, that's another example, though, of a culturally evolved practice, which is raising goats and cows for milk, influences the evolution of our genes to

• 5:32Speaker 00

  produce this enzyme that allows us to eat milk, drink milk, eat milk, drink milk and eat dairy products without experiencing dehydration.

• 5:41Chris Williamson?

  Does this suggest that all humans went through a stage of lactose intolerance, and then there was a remutation, which was adaptive, and the people that were descended from that particular cohort became better? Or does it seem like the, the sort of loss of the lactase occurred all at the same time, and then it was stopped within certain cohorts? Does that make sense?

• 6:09Speaker 00

  I think the idea is that it was the original universal trait is that this enzyme disappeared in after childhood and then just in a few populations there evolved this ability to retain the enzyme in adulthood.

• 6:25Chris Williamson?

  Does mother's milk, is that when you say after childhood, is that because you need to be able to have, is mother's milk, like it's not dairy, but how does that work?

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, I mean, it is a form of dairy that has lactose in it. And so that's why we have this gene in childhood so that we can drink mother's milk.

• 6:45Chris Williamson?

  Okay, very interesting. So women, we're gonna use the word morality a lot. Wha- what are you defining as morality?

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I mean, ultimately, the idea is to understand morality in the same way that we understand our agricultural practices as this co-evolution between culture and genes. But what is it that we're trying to explain? Um, I think there's lots of different things that fall under the category of morality. But some of the main things we'd want to explain is our emotions, the feelings that we have towards mother, one another, like sympathy, caring about other people's suffering in and of itself. That's one aspect of morality. Another aspect of morality, and this is something that we don't seem to share with other animals, is humans have social norms.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  They have rules that prescribe how we should and shouldn't behave and that we enforce on other people as well. So these are two of the key elements of human morality, emotions and norms. We want to understand how these things evolved through biological and cultural evolution.

• 7:54Chris Williamson?

  All of the examples that you've given there are social in one form or another. They involve multiple people. Is there such a thing as individual morality in your view?

• 8:06Speaker 00

  I think that people do develop moral codes that apply to themselves. You know, people think that I have an obligation to keep myself healthy and that has nothing to do with other people. But I don't think that that is an evolutionarily ancient tendency, the tendency to apply morality to yourself. The thing that's evolved is the social, the social aspect of our thinking and our behavior. And the more individual stuff, that just comes later. That's sort of a byproduct of evolved social morality.

• 8:41Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so most traits that have stuck about, except for some strange byproducts, are here because they're adaptive, right? They help us to survive and/or reproduce. In what ways is morality adaptive?

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, so morality is adaptive in that it enables cooperation. You know, one of the things that we have in common with other animals like chimpanzees is that we live in social groups that, in which we rely on another, one another, to survive. But the thing about humans is that we have lived in richer cooperative groups than other animals. So we cooperate in a wider range of ways. We cooperate when it comes to childcare in ways that other animals don't. We cooperate when it comes to fighting other groups in ways that animals don't. Our cooperative schemes are much richer, and so we need a richer morality in order

• 9:38Speaker 00

  to cooperate with one another.

• 9:40Chris Williamson?

  So in this way, is morality just a set of inbuilt guidelines and rules that create effective, more effective cooperation under incredibly complex and crisscrossing situations?

• 9:57Speaker 00

  That's right. I mean, that's part of it. Part of it is that it's these inbuilt tendencies. But remember, because morality is the product of gene-culture co-evolution, it's also this culturally transmitted set of rules and practices and institutions that in each generation, combined with our inborn inheritance, produce the morality that different societies construct.

• 10:21Chris Williamson?

  Presumably, this must mean that over time, progressions in culture unlock particular genetic progressions, and progressions genetically unlock particular cultural progressions.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  That is definitely the case when it comes to the long view of human evolution over the course of tens or hundreds of thousands of years. It's a much more difficult question to know whether that is continuing to happen, whether different groups across the world are changing the morality in terms of their genetic inheritance in response to different cultural conditions. You know, it's very hard to study, it's easier to study evolution over the long scale. It's much harder to know how humans are evolving now or in the last few decades or centuries.

• 11:05Chris Williamson?

  You say that received wisdom has it that just because a trait is biological does not mean that it is inevitable. But another piece of wisdom, not yet widely received, is that just because a trait is cultural, does not mean that it is optional. What does that mean?

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Uh huh. Yeah. So I think that a lot of people think that if something's merely cultural, if it's not part of our genes, it's not part of our built-in biology, then it's something we can change. But that's not necessarily true. I mean, there's many aspects of our culture that we need for development to unfold in any kind of normal, predictable way. I mean, think about, for example, one aspect of culture that we take for granted, which is care by child, by caregivers in very early, early childhood. I mean, often historically has come from mothers, but of course can come from other

• 12:05Speaker 00

  parents as well. This is something that is cultural, at least in part. But it's not optional. That is, human beings cannot develop in a normal, functional way unless they have this important cultural input in their childhood.

• 12:24Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. So it's that's that's an interesting example because it's not optional for the child, but it is optional for the parent.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  Hmm. It's, yeah, optional for the parents, but not optional for

• 12:40Chris Williamson?

  The genes.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  The child and for and and well and for the and for future generations to continue to exist and to flourish.

• 12:46Chris Williamson?

  Yes. If you're a if you're a grandparent optimizing machine, it's no longer optional. Yeah, that was that's more about the reproduction rather than the survivability part. Is there any are there any other examples of this about the sort of the optionality or lack thereof of of cultural stuff?

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so one of the lessons that has come out of working cultural evolution over the last decade or two is really the important way in which human beings are social learners. We don't come up with our ideas from scratch. We don't mainly experiment with the world on our own. We learn ideas from other people. We learn ideas especially from peers who are a little bit wiser than us. And so

• 13:30Speaker 00

  learning from peers is having peers that are social models that you can learn from is a part of culture that's necessary for humans to develop properly to raise the next generation. But it's not optional. We need social learning from peers in order to succeed in our environments.

• 13:51Chris Williamson?

  Without social learning from peers, you would be at a severe disadvantage when it came to survival.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah.

• 13:59Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. Yeah, that is interesting. It is very strange to consider that there are elements of culture that are non optional as a part of proceeding forward. Okay, so what does the human's moral mind consist of?

• 14:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there, you know, human minds, moral minds are incredibly diverse across societies. But I think there are some features that each human being has in common, at least as long as they've had proper caregiving in their early childhood.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  So one aspect is we have a rich set of moral emotions that we feel toward other people, especially within our family and our social groups. So these are emotions like sympathy, but also trust, respect. This is, respect is a good one because it's something that other, other primates don't have, you know, in chimpanzee groups, respect only flows in one direction. It flows up to the dominant male in your group. But humans have mutual respect. We, we, we don't try to, I mean, we don't always try to dominate.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  We have an impulse to have relatively egalitarian groups where we can, we stand on the same, same level as other people in our group. So this is one aspect of, of evolved morality. Another aspect is moral norms. So norms like not hurting other people, helping people when they are in need of help, norms about respecting other people's autonomy.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  There's quite a wide set of norms, but they all, human societies all tend to have some similar types of norms in common. So we have norms, for example, about not causing harm to other people. We have norms that are about respecting other people's autonomy, norms that have to do with fairness. And these are interpreted in wildly different ways across societies. In some places fairness is about equal distribution of resources. In other places, it's about giving people what they're owed, depending on how much effort they put in or what their social status is. So these are two aspects of human morality. And the third one, and this is one that I think psychologists don't pay enough attention to, is the human capacity for moral reasoning.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  This is another thing that sets us apart from the apes. We have the ability to change what our moral views are. And we don't do it in the way that philosophers generally reason about morality. We don't start off with first principles and apply them to specific cases. A more typical way that humans reason about morality is we do something called moral consistency reasoning, or treating like cases alike. You know, somebody in your group, somebody that you trust, might say, well, listen, why are you treating him that way? You wouldn't want to be treated that way yourself. Or to think of a more modern example, many people come to be vegetarians or vegans or reduce their meat consumption because they think, somebody in their social group pointed

• 17:16Speaker 00

  out like, hey, you really care about dogs, you wouldn't want dogs to be tortured in that way. Why do you think it's okay to torture pigs or cows in that way? So, moral emotions, moral norms, and a capacity for moral reasoning, these are the main ingredients of evolved biocultural morality.

• 17:33Chris Williamson?

  Are there any emotions that aren't moral?

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, plenty of emotions. So, fear is not, doesn't need to be a moral emotion. I mean, sometimes you can feel fear towards other people that are trying to exert their moral power over you, but many times you feel fear towards, you know, non-human objects or in situations that don't have anything to do with morality.

• 18:01Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. So, are there primary moral emotions? Are there the most moral emotions that we've got? Are there a little bundle of them?

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, this is like, you know, it's an open question, what falls in here? But I think some of the main contenders are sympathy, reciprocity, or rather, the trust, the emotion of trust that underlies reciprocity, respect that we've already talked about. And there's another one that doesn't get much play in Western ethics and Western thinking too, which is, is connected with loyalty, but it's like the emotional bonding that forms between people, not just because we're part of the same group, but because we're bonded as mates or as close friends or coalition partners.

• 18:58Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to respect, you said that typically, in terms of primates, respect flows one way, which is from the subordinate to the person that's in charge, the chief ape or chimp or whatever.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:15Chris Williamson?

  What is the difference between humans and chimps that makes us require mutual respect as opposed to one-way respect?

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it again has to do with the richer and more egalitarian forms of cooperation that humans have relied on for hundreds of thousands of years. So chimpanzee groups can, they don't have to, they cooperate, but not very much. And so they can get away with one dominant ape hogging all the resources if that's what they want, hogging all the mating opportunities if that's what they want. But this kind of has, this limits cooperation in a way. Like, for example, if you and I are in an ape group and you're taking all the food,

• 20:06Speaker 00

  the fruit or the meat when we get it, then I have kind of less of an incentive to give it my all on the next, on the next cooperative run. But if, you know, we're in circumstances which humans found themselves in, where they really desperately need to cooperate in order to fend off their territory from attackers, in order to access new forms of food, like for example, scavenging and hunting other animals, then we need to operate on terms of relative equality if we're going to really, both of us, give it our all and cooperate to do these harder, more complicated tasks.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  So we have to give up dominance relationships in order to cooperate in a more complex and reliable way.

• 20:59Chris Williamson?

  I had David Putz on the show not long ago, and he was talking about how chimp societies are 100 times to 500 times more violent in terms of the number of violent incidents than humans are, but they are 100 times less lethal.

• 21:16Chris Williamson?

  So he said that interestingly, one of the one of the outcomes that you get from that is a huge predisposition amongst humans to avoid conflict. As soon as you move on from it being a pushing, shoving match, that's actually going to take quite a while for you to kill somebody else, to you with a heavy rock, or a sharp stick, or a spear, or a gun, or a, you know, progress on with your lethality of weapon of choice, you end up having an incentive to very, very much avoid that kind of physical interaction. And I suppose that this is where dominance versus prestige from a leadership perspective comes in.

• 21:56Chris Williamson?

  Why in a human society would you want a complete tyrant at the absolute top unless it was somehow helping you? And that means that the only way really that tyrants in human society can stick about is if they have a little cohort of sycophants or whatever around them that can help them to kind of keep everyone, and then they need a military arm and they need a bunch of sort of supporters below them as well. When it comes down to sympathy, I remember reading, I think it was Jonathan Haidt or Robert Wright, maybe, who said, they put forward, they thought sympathy was investment advice. They said that sympathy suggests to humans which other humans will be the most appreciative of their efforts toward them.

• 22:38Chris Williamson?

  So I'm going to guess that sympathy helps us to redistribute resources in a more efficient manner. Is that right?

• 22:48Speaker 00

  I think that's certainly part of it. I mean, part of this view of sympathy that you just suggested seems to be about the communicative function of sympathy. Me expressing sympathy for you communicates something to you about who's worth reinvesting in. But I also think that another aspect of sympathy is just that if we are really bound up together, if my interests are bound up with yours, then it behooves me to make sure that you have enough food, that you're happy, that you're not going to run off and join another cooperative scheme without me. So when, you know, the, to, when...

• 23:30Speaker 00

  When social interaction becomes less and less of a zero sum game, when your positive outcomes are really bound up with mine, then it benefits me not just in a communicative way, but it benefits me to act in ways that serve your interests because your interests will, serving your interests will benefit mine.

• 23:52Chris Williamson?

  Okay. What I've got in my head here is the fact that in a small scale society, sympathy makes an awful lot of choice. If you were to start to scale that up a little bit more, where you are less reliant on the others in your group, less reliant on the others in your group surviving, that would suggest to me that sympathy would start to get turned down. Does that, does that seem to make sense?

• 24:16Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And I mean, the thing about human societies for hundreds of thousands of years is that we've lived in very small groups where you, you know, other people, you really are bound up to them in, in terms of all kinds of cooperative activities. And, you know, this, this may be true at least for tens of thousands of years, but certainly in the last few hundred and thousand years, we live in much larger societies where there aren't the same cooperative dependencies between people who are living in the same city or the same village as you. And so here, I think there really is, uh,

• 24:58Speaker 00

  there, there isn't the same incentive to feel and express sympathy towards others. And what we've seen, I think, in, in societies that have persisted is that we've seen that there have evolved cultural institutions that manage the work of cooperation for us. So we don't have to rely on you and I having a personal relationship. We've got a system of laws that will punish me for, for hurting you. And, you know, A bunch of people who will enforce it in less or more reasonable ways.

• 25:36Chris Williamson?

  If I was to steal your property, if you were some down and out person who lived in a on benefits in some house somewhere and then I came in and stole your final tin of beans or whatever it was, there is the potential that you would use laws which are like legislative, written down norms that would then be enacted by a wing that is an exterior enforcer of those norms, the police, who would then come and say, give that tin of beans back. Not only is it theirs, but there is then this sort of cultural sense that somebody who is down and out is deserving of not being pushed around. That's why seeing videos of two guys fighting in the street feels

• 26:21Chris Williamson?

  very different to seeing a video of a guy pushing over granny.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  Uh huh. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's right. I think that's the way in which some of the functions of human morality have in recent centuries and let it have been outsourced to political legislative enforcement apparatuses.

• 26:41Chris Williamson?

  What about, are there less moral but still slightly moral emotions?

• 26:50Speaker 00

  Did you have any in mind?

• 26:51Chris Williamson?

  Well, I, I, I'm not sure. I'm thinking about the, you've got those four across the top, but there's a whole list of emotions that humans, that humans do have. I'm wondering whether there are secondary, if there's a secondary set of them as well.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, there. So there are another set of emotions that are not really specific to, that, that, that motivate a specific kind of behavior, like helping people or not taking advantage of them. There's another second order set of emotions that are things like guilt on the one hand, or shame, and resentment or moral anger. So these are emotions that kind of keep you in check by getting people, by motivating people to follow the moral rules that are around because you'll impose some emotional cost on yourself. You'll feel guilt or shame if you violate the rules, or other people will experience anger and retaliate against, against you if you, if you

• 27:49Speaker 00

  violate the rules. So I think of these emotions like shame and resentment, these are, these are. Fully, fully moral emotions, they're just a little bit different than the ones we've been talking about already.

• 28:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's, that adds in another area here that I think I was missing. Shame being self-flagellation about transgressing a moral norm that maybe even nobody else knew about, perhaps even something that didn't affect anybody else, a promise that you made to yourself about the kind of person that you would be. I am going to get up at seven o'clock in the morning tomorrow morning and I woke up at nine o'clock and I feel like a piece of shit. Or guilt around eating a cookie or about stealing that tin of beans from granny. It's a, an internal police system that helps, that doesn't require the law and the legislation and the police to come around. You do it to yourself.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  That's right. And I think that's because even in modern societies, we, we need both internal morality and the morality that's externalized onto our institutions. Because of course, we still have these close personal relationships with people around us who depend on us and that's the kind of thing that shame regulates. And when it comes to things about which we're shameless, that's when we need the external institutions.

• 29:10Chris Williamson?

  In your opinion, is it right to say that there are good or bad emotions?

• 29:16Speaker 00

  I think that emotions can be used in good and bad ways. I think that it's, there are philosophers who argue that some emotions are inherently bad, like anger or disgust. Disgust may be one of those that you had in mind that is kind of halfway moral. But I think all of these emotions have their place. I mean, anger of course can lead to violence. It can be self-stultifying because expressing anger may lead other people to distrust you or avoid you, but anger is also important as a motivator. I mean, it can motivate people to fight against injustice.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  It can motivate people to hold. People responsible in their interpersonal relationships, if you don't feel anger at your wife or your husband, unless they're a perfect moral being, you're probably not going to have a functioning relationship where you are holding each other responsible and, and, and, you know, developing and developing your relationship in positive ways.

• 30:28Chris Williamson?

  Moral disgust is an interesting one because drawn into that is all manner of bigotry and prejudice and predisposition and stuff like that. What, what role does moral disgust have? I understand the reason why looking at rotting meat or the smell of feces or open wounds, stuff like that. I understand why that would create a sense of disgust. First off, is the moral disgust system, I don't know whether you've ever looked at it from like a neurobiological, neuroscientific perspective, is it the same system that's activated?

• 31:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is, this is an open question. There are people in the literature who argue on, on different sides of this issue. I don't think it's been solved yet. There does seem to be things in common between basic pathogen disgust and moral disgust. So for example, there are studies suggest that, that similar parts of the brain, the insular cortex are activated when people experience disgust towards rotten food versus towards people who are dishonest or exploitative. There's also research that suggests that when you,

• 31:44Speaker 00

  when you're experiencing moral disgust, people, people make the gate face. They do the disgusted facial expression. That's typical of pathogen disgust. So that's some evidence that suggests it's one and the same emotion or similar variation on the same emotional system that's responding to pathogens and moral issues. But I think this is maybe one of the best cases for an emotion that is a moral emotion. It's related to morality, but it's not good. It's a bad emotion. I don't think that's right because I think that disgust has its place too. One of the things that people feel moral disgust towards is, is a class of violations that have to do with reciprocity. So things like cheating.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  Dishonesty, exploitation, people experience moral disgust towards those things. And one reason disgust is useful as an emotion is because of what it motivates. It motivates us to withdraw and avoid and engage in distancing. And that can be a really effective form of punishment. That is, in a cooperative species like ourselves, when people are avoiding you or withdrawing from you, that is a very powerful indirect punishment because it deprives you of social connections. So I think that even moral disgust has its place too.

• 33:04Chris Williamson?

  I saw a study that came up recently that looked at the greatest status affecting criteria for attractiveness. Most status increasing criteria, and this is on a scale of nought to eight, how many points it increases or decreases. So being a trusted group member, three point zero five. Being intelligent, nearly three. Getting accepted at a prestigious university, being an exceptional leader, having a wide range of knowledge, being creative, always being honest, being able to speak well in public, having a job that pays well, having a good sense of humor, having an executive position, being inclined, being brave in the face of danger, having a college education and being a hard worker. So that goes from like five to two and a half.

• 33:50Chris Williamson?

  And then the reverse, the most status decreasing criteria, failing to perform a group task, getting dismissed from school, being lazy, being unable to control one's sexual behavior when drunk, being unreliable, acting immature or irresponsible, being mean or nasty to others, expressed racist remarks, bringing social shame on one's family, having bad manners, takes illegal drugs, getting a sexually transmitted disease, being stupid, being unclean or dirty, and being known as a thief. Being known as a thief by twenty percent is the biggest status decrease in criteria. And that made me think about what you were just talking about, that it is inherently,

• 34:30Chris Williamson?

  it is inbuilt with the trust within the group, the moral disgust that you would have toward a thief, somebody that can't, by their very nature, cannot be trusted to have the group's interests at heart. So we need to move away from them.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's fascinating. I do think that this study indicates that morality, being a moral person continues to affect your reproductive potential. And I think that disgust can underpin this exact kind of response that people have towards immoral people, which is to avoid them.

• 35:05Chris Williamson?

  You've mentioned that our closest relatives in the primate world do not have these moral emotions. Have you got any idea at what point humans would have evolved these?

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I do think that chimpanzees and bonobos have some analog of moral emotions. They do have emotions like sympathy. The key one that I think distinguishes us from bonobos is respect, mutual respect. And so it's, you know, it's, it's very hard. The evidence is so depleted and scattered to figure out when these things evolved. I think the best way to think about it is to piece together different kinds of evidence, genetic, archaeological evidence, and just try to figure out when forms of cooperation evolved that would have required more equality between primates compared to the kinds of cooperative activities that chimpanzees

• 36:03Speaker 00

  and presumably our common ancestors with them engaged in. One thing, this is something that Michael Tomasello points to. One thing that you see in the archaeological record is that humans, around the time of when our genus evolves, two million, two million years ago, this is a period of time where humans are starting to rely in a regular way on meat. You know, initially probably scavenging meat, maybe even just finding bones and breaking it open and getting the marrow from them. But eventually cooperating in a way to chase off other predators, bring down prey ourselves.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  And this was the kind of thing that we needed to do. We need to cooperate in order to do it. We needed to cooperate in a more dependable, fine-tuned way to carry out a hunt. And, you know, Lions can do it without human morality, but they're much fiercer predators than us. We needed to use our intelligence rather than our bare strength or speed. We also needed to use something you mentioned earlier, the more elaborate tools that humans had begun to create around this period of time. So this is, this is one form of cooperation among others that seems to have arisen around

• 37:29Speaker 00

  roughly 2 million years ago, when our genus Homo was evolving in Africa. And so this is likely the period of time where a more complex and richer set of moral emotions, including mutual respect, probably evolved.

• 37:45Chris Williamson?

  I'm thinking about the relationship, the sort of gene, culture, co-evolution element of emotions. Have you looked at any particular cultures or subgroups of people that have unique blends of emotions where maybe one particular group shows a particular emotion way higher or lower than others based on whatever pressures or environment is happening around them?

• 38:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, one of the great studies of this, this is by psychology psychologist Richard Nisbet and his co-author Doug Cohen. So this has to do with honor cultures. So there's traditional honor cultures in different parts of the world. And these are places where people in these cultures are more likely to feel anger in response to perceived insults or threats. So this is, these are distinct populations where people are, experience more intense anger and experience it in response to these insults and threats that kind of had a more of a hair trigger.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  And the explanation, and this is a cultural evolutionary explanation that Nisbet and Cohen give, is that these are parts of the world that, in which people had portable property. They had, they were, for example, goat herders whose property could be easily stolen. And they also lived in places that didn't have that institutional apparatuses, those kinds of institutional apparatuses that we talked about, robust legal and political institutions that would enforce property rights. And so what you needed to be like in these, in these honour cultures is you needed to get angry when people insulted or threatened you because if you didn't, people would think

• 39:42Speaker 00

  you're weak and they'd take your property. So this is, you know, human morality is flexible and it can, can and continues to change in different places and times, but this is one clear way in which moral anger seems to have been heightened in response to the, this adaptive problem, which is keeping your property in a world where there's no institutional support.

• 40:07Chris Williamson?

  I learned a couple of weeks ago about a law in Texas, which is where I currently am, that allows any two willing participants to legally fight as long as a police officer is present to act as a referee. So this is, this is completely permitted. Both of them don't even need to give verbal agreement, although I think Washington is somewhere else that this is permitted to, but you do need to have a police officer present, you need to say this is what we're going to do, and this is completely legal. I also found out that the distance between the two benches in the House of Lords in the UK is one sword held out at arms length. So if you were to hold a sword out at arms length, and that's the distance between the

• 40:52Chris Williamson?

  two, and I'm going to get, I mean, the British thing is much more vestigial, I suppose, in that it's, no one's taking a sword into the House of Lords anymore, but you can still see there, right? It's like, here is a transgression, and here is one solution, which is an outlet, which allows people to use this honour culture and enact it in a particular way. And then another one is a protective mechanism to ensure somebody who tries to enact on a culture can't get too carried away and chop the head off their political opponent.

• 41:22Speaker 00

  Yes, and one of the things that Nisbet and Cohen talk about is the way in which honor culture is typical of the American South and has persisted there, in part because the first settlers of the American South came from parts of the UK that relied on herding animals. Same conditions, property was portable, no institutions to enforce it. I wonder, I mean, I don't think that Cohen and Nisbet talk about this, but you have to wonder whether this is the ancestral condition, that these are the conditions that humans tended to live in throughout most of human history. Property was portable, no robust institutions.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  And really, it's the absence of honor cultures in various parts of the world that is historically unusual.

• 42:10Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, so I mean, that would play, it's kind of hard to prove, I suppose, but that would play very much into the Jonathan Haidt theory around the progress that we're seeing at the moment. You know, if you were to live at any time in history, even going back, and everybody has this idea, you know, when you've spent way too much time on your phone one afternoon, you think, God, I just wish I was a nomadic caveman. This would be way easier. I wouldn't be distracted by all this technology and I'd get enough sun on me and all the rest of it. But maybe you would be living in a human society where there is three times the amount of anger that we have now, because you don't have the external

• 42:51Chris Williamson?

  institutions or apparatus to be able to enforce norms. So it's your job. Somebody transgresses, it's your job.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  Right. Right. And of course, Steven Pinker's been another person who's written a lot about this and about the ways in which violence was much more a regular part of our lives until the last few centuries.

• 43:10Chris Williamson?

  What's your thoughts about altruism here? You know, it's commonly spoken about in the evolutionary psychology literature, and we've mentioned sympathy, we've mentioned sort of cooperative resources, hunting, so on and so forth. What have you come to believe about how altruism came about?

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think that we've been talking about altruism. These moral emotions are forms of altruism. There are cases where people, at least in to some degree, care about the interests of other people in and of themselves, and not just as a means to their own happiness or their own interests. So, you know, sympathy, it's not just sympathy for you as long as you can do something for me. It's, you have to be able to do something for me over the long history of time for this sympathy to evolve. But sympathy now in human beings is caring about other people for their own sake. And we also even, you know, think about the norms too,

• 44:15Speaker 00

  enforcing norms, punishing people for violating norms. That is a kind of altruism too, because it involves making a personal sacrifice and maybe exposing yourself to retaliation. But you care about making sure others are doing their part in various kinds of cooperative activities.

• 44:39Chris Williamson?

  What ways do norms differ from emotions in that case, or even culture?

• 44:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. So one thing about norms is that they can have a really specific content. They can, you know, emotions are kind of broad in general. They're like, care about this other person in some way. But norms are much more specific. They can say, well, listen, if you have cooperated to take down this bison, then you get these parts and the other person gets these parts. That's what the rules say.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  So, you know, this, this kind of follows the, one of the developments we've been talking about in human evolution, which is cooperation becomes richer and more complex. And the more complex cooperation becomes, the less you can rely on fuzzy emotions and the more you need concrete norms with very specific instructions about what you are and are not allowed to do.

• 45:39Chris Williamson?

  Okay, are there categories of moral norms? Have you lumped them into particular buckets that are commonly found?

• 45:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Jonathan Haidt, who you mentioned before, is somebody who has tried to come up with a set of categories for moral norms. And I've offered a similar kind of classification in my work. So we both think that harm norms are one category. These are norms that tell us harm norms that not to hurt other people or to aid them when they're in need.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  Fairness norms are another category. We've also talked about, which is things like equal distribution, giving people what they're owed.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  Reciprocity norms are another kind. These are like tit for tat. You do your, what you do for me and I do what I promise to do to you. Promises kind of fall under this category. And then another really important one is autonomy norms, which I think Haidt talks about, but not, not, not quite in, in the way that, not, not quite emphasizing this aspect of being free from interference and domination from other people. So these are some categories of norms and each of them kind of fits with an emotion. You know, harm norms fit with sympathy.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  It's because we feel sympathy, sympathy helps us conform to norms prescribing harm.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Respect is the emotion that leads us to fulfill autonomy norms. It's because we have mutual respect for each other that we're not going to interfere in each other's projects or try to control what, what each other do. And so there are these different categories of norms. And I think what other people haven't noticed yet is that there's also these, these categories of emotions. And it seems like how they all arose is that they co-evolved. The emotions are part of our genetic heritage. The norms are part of our cultural heritage. And it's because we've had both of them for so long that we have this system of emotions and norms that fits together.

• 47:54Chris Williamson?

  What I'm fascinated about talking about this is the

• 48:00Chris Williamson?

  How would you say most recent prevalence of moral grandstanding, scapegoating, performative empathy and stuff like that, it's been enabled by the internet and social media for people to be able to take positions which are socially praised, but it has removed most of the cost of somebody having to have a hard signal of authenticity that they've actually done it, right? That's the performative part. Have you considered how stuff like moral grandstanding and scapegoating and performative empathy kind of fit into this broader worldview? And how all of the incentives work and stuff like that?

• 48:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, virtue signaling is another example in the same category that you're talking about. I think it comes down to this difference that you pointed to earlier, which is that for most of human history, we've lived in these small groups, maybe 50 or 100 members, and we really had reliable information about other people's character and what they do in hard times. And now we live in much larger societies where you don't, you know, there's not the same opportunity to know what's really behind other people's words. And so we've had to, people can engage much more in cheap talk, because, you know, we don't have the same awareness

• 49:21Speaker 00

  and intimacy with one another. So I think that the phenomenon of grandstanding and virtue signaling

• 49:33Speaker 00

  arises in this society where we can't, we have no firmer way to track people's reputations and their behavior, and we have to rely on what they say. And so this opens the door for people to perform their moral commitments and garner sympathy and prestige and all kinds of other social goods by talking a big game.

• 49:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, seeming like you do good rather than actually doing good, because at the moment, most people are assessed by their opinions rather than their deeds. You know, we don't get to see what, nobody gets to see what happens when you get off the conversation. And this is an incredibly rich, deep version of what most people put out on the internet, right? Which is either just images or just text. And yet, it's kind of funny that... In a world in which you can get obligation-free status and goodwill, the incentive is always going to be there for people to overplay their hand about how moral they are.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, this is exacerbated by the internet and social media, which, you know, makes all turns so much of our interactions into a communicative game.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  And it's unclear, you know, what the solution to this problem, because, you know, there are occasional instances where people

• 51:05Speaker 00

  are demonstrably engaged in behavior that's inconsistent with the virtues that they've been signaling. But it's so rare, it's so rare that it doesn't change the incentive structure. There's still a massive incentive to virtue signal.

• 51:22Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so what's religion? Is religion a norm? Is religion a culture? Or is it, there must be, it's evolved independently in tons and tons of places all over the planet. How have you come to believe religion's development occurred?

• 51:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so this gets at thinking about, we've been talking about gene-culture co-evolution, but now the issue is more strict cultural evolution, independent of major changes in our genetic heritage. So over the last, you know, we've talked about the moral mind, emotions and norms and how they fit together. But this moral mind also fits with our social institutions that have evolved culturally over the last 10 or 50,000 years. So we have various kinds of social institutions, political institutions, military institutions, family institutions.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  And one of the most important institutions in human history is religious institutions. So religious institutions have shaped our moral mind, not just in terms of religious ideology, but religious practices and rituals have changed and expanded our moral minds to encompass people who are from the same religious tribe. So Joe Henrich and Naran Zian have done some really important work on this. And one of the ideas that they put forward is this idea that religions, religious institutions, the way that I would put it, so this is a bit of my spin on this, is that religious institutions

• 53:00Speaker 00

  have been really important in the cultural evolution of morality by expanding our moral circles. You know, generally, who you feel sympathy and respect to in human history has been your group, your band of a hundred people. And one thing that religious institutions did is that they allowed us to see other people who share the same religion as members of the same extended family, brothers and sisters. And so they, this kind of cultural adaptation, interacted with our moral minds to expand our moral circles, to encompass the whole religious tribe and not just our local bands.

• 53:42Chris Williamson?

  Yes, because we already had the capacity for sympathy to people. But because we were in a Dunbar number group of whatever, a hundred, that was usually what we were used to. Then we said earlier on, you get into a big city where you don't rely on other people, especially in a modern agricultural world, where if you have sufficient resources, you don't actually care how everybody else is getting on. You know, even your farmer dies, there's another farmer probably not too far away that you can go to. So religion, in your view, opens up the scope of this to re-engage with a broader group of people.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, and I think it's been, I think religious institutions predate out agriculture and have been around for a really long time and are responsible for the way in which humans, possibly starting fifty to a hundred thousand years ago, started to live in tribes. That is, not just the band, but a group of bands that are linked together via ethnicity and dialect and religion. So this again relates to an idea in Henrick, which is, and something that we maybe didn't talk enough about, which is the really way, the important way in which morality has covalved with our knowledge and technology. So roughly a hundred thousand years ago, you see this explosion in the fossil record of tools and

• 55:08Speaker 00

  technology, things like spears and spear throwers and bow and arrows, but also things like sewing needles and various kinds of craft work. And what seems to have arisen

• 55:23Speaker 00

  during this period of time is that humans are beginning to live in religiously unified tribes, groups of groups. And the key thing here, this is something that Henrick talks about, is that what that, what living in a tribe does is that it expands our collective brain. It creates a larger number of people who are communicating with each other, generating ideas, filtering each other's ideas, and becoming more intelligent because of our intellectual cooperation. So there's a, you know, religion along with other social institutions has been really important in human history because it's allowed us to cooperate on a larger scale, which allows us to do things like farming and agriculture, but it also

• 56:08Speaker 00

  allows us to be smarter and generate more ideas and more technology. And so morality, institutional morality, that's expanded our circles, has been really important for the evolution of our brains, our minds and our intelligence.

• 56:24Chris Williamson?

  I'm just thinking about the fact that religion as a cultural response to the difficulty of coordinating large groups of people.

• 56:38Chris Williamson?

  And that 150 or 200,000 years ago, if you're in a familial tribe of maybe 25 to 50 people, you probably don't need religion. Like, you know, you might have ideas and stories that you tell about the sun rising and so on and so forth. But the more, I don't know, like pro-social human element of religion, I would imagine, doesn't really need to exist. There would be no adaptive reason to have that. And you already feel such a strong sense of kinship,

• 57:18Chris Williamson?

  especially if it is like just a pan-generational group, you know, you and 25 of your family. You don't need to layer any more on top of that. That's not to say that someone wouldn't have said, you know, we are the chosen ones and we have been placed here and blah, blah, blah.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:33Chris Williamson?

  Some proselytizing caveman. But do you know what I mean? It seems like-

• 57:38Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 57:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  And there's a clue in the archaeological record that I think supports what you're suggesting, which is that, you know, up until about 50 or 100,000 years ago, humans are confined to small portions of the African continent. And it's perhaps only until we can cooperate in a larger tribe that we have the manpower to extend out of Africa, to not just make some incursions into Eurasia, but to overpower the other human species that lived there at the time, and ultimately to rely on each other in our tribe to colonize the entire world.

• 58:19Chris Williamson?

  This would suggest, then, that the bigger that a human society gets, the more religion would be useful.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think that that I think that generalization is likely to have been true until some point in human history. I mean, I think we can think of counterexamples like China is a huge country and has not been as religious as other countries in recent recent century or so. So I think that there I think that I mean, here's the thing to think that religion was a very important institution in organizing society, determining the size of an effective cooperative population. But in more recent times, there are other

• 59:12Speaker 00

  kinds of institutions that have been able to do the job just as well or better. And so, you know, you think of very authoritarian kinds of political institutions that can control people's behavior in a way that's just as or more effective than religious ideologies and practices. Other institutions have been rising in relative prominence compared to religion, I think, over the last few centuries.

• 59:39Chris Williamson?

  What have you come to believe about the place that religion has then, you know, the collapse of grand narratives and the listlessness and the existential dread of the modern world, despite the fact that we're more convenient than ever, people are feeling lost and alone and so on and so forth. It seems like religion independently arose all over the world. That would suggest that it is an incredibly useful adaptive response to the issue of being human. Now, presumably, it's humans smeared across humans, but also will give you some individual existential comfort about the malaise of just being a, you know, a fallen creature. What have you what have you come to believe about the the role and the reason that religion?

• 1:00:25Chris Williamson?

  Is here and sort of its current position and lack thereof in the modern world and what that means kind of for individual happiness and group cohesion?

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think you're right that historically, religion has given people a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose that has answered these deep philosophical existential questions. And it's really interesting to know why it has been fulfilling that purpose less and less effectively for more and more people over the last few centuries. I mean, you know, philosophers like me, me might think, well, the arguments against religion are so strong, things like, you know, religious, religious theory was supposed to explain why we have plants and animals and human beings on the first place. And now we have

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  a much better explanation in terms of Darwinian evolution. So maybe it's the arguments, maybe it's things like the problem of evil, but maybe it's something more practical, too. I mean, I think that people have noticed the ways in which some major religious denominations have not really been out for their own interests, have been exploiting and abusing members of that religion. And so it's not really the, the abstract philosophical arguments, but the like, you're, you're not taking care of me, and therefore I don't trust the account

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  you give of who I am and why I matter. But I think there's this real emptiness now. I don't know that we've found anything that can effectively take the place of religion.

• 1:02:12Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting that religion and the church, churches served a, like a practical purpose, right? Like they created a foundation for Communal belonging, sense, ritual, connection to yourself and not only people around you, but the world around you, so on and so forth. So like it did things, right? It needed to create a story around that. And what we lost really was faith in the story, not faith in the things. It was the story of the rebirth, or of the ascent to heaven on a winged horse, or of, you know, the path out of Israel, whatever like different culture

• 1:02:57Chris Williamson?

  it was that you came from. But what was lost was something that was like pretty undeniably good practically because of issues that people had narratively.

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think you're identifying these two important aspects of religion. One is the belief aspect and the stories and what the afterlife promises. And the other is not, is it's not belief element of religion, but a practice element of religion. It's what we do together, how we come together, how we engage in rituals that mark important events in our history. And that part still matters. And, you know, and they can, those practices and rituals can still matter, even if, even if you don't believe in the stories anymore.

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  And I'm not sure, though, that we've got other new institutions that, that engage in those kinds of rituals or practices that really resonate with people.

• 1:04:03Chris Williamson?

  No, I would say as well that I wonder whether part of the commitment to the practice inevitably comes out of an element of belief, that you, what happened, the baby and the bathwater both go out together, and that trying to create a quote unquote, like secular religion, you talk, I have a friend who's a cultural Christian. So he likes to go to church on Sunday and do the sacrament and sing the songs. And, but he doesn't believe. And he is an incredible outlier. I have one friend that's like that, as far as I can tell. And whether it's CrossFit, or yoga, or psychedelics, or, you know, whatever your new practice of choice.

• 1:04:50Chris Williamson?

  Every single time, there is usually some sort of story that gets put on top. And the stronger the story or the more narrative based it is, the stronger the belief. You know, some people really love CrossFit, but they don't love CrossFit as much as they love yoga. And some people that really love yoga, really love it, but they don't love it as much as people that like psychedelics like psychedelics, you know, because there is more story, there is more drama and narrative around it that seems to support the practice. I don't know, maybe that's just bro science, but it seems right to me.

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  No, I think that's right. I mean, I was drawing this distinction between the belief and practice elements of religion. And I think you're right that these two things go together, that the beliefs can can really attach you to the practices and imbibe them with more meaning and significance. I mean, I think so much of so much of modern culture is practiceless, you know, it is belief and exchange of information and ideas and communication on the internet, but it it doesn't, there isn't any practice or ritual that it goes along with.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  And there's certainly none that seems to unify people. I mean, you mentioned a few different things here, like yoga and CrossFit and psychedelics, and we could find others, but these these things are so fragmented, you know, it's very small disparate communities that are engaging in each of these things and nothing that really binds large members of our culture or country together.

• 1:06:21Chris Williamson?

  In your opinion, is it possible to have an objective moral code? What you've suggested here is that morality kind of is this emergent adaptive solution that humans have to the problem of cooperation at scale. And you have culture that comes along for the ride and you have norms and you have emotions. Like, is there a first principles, this is moral, this is not moral solution?

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we've been talking, I think, largely about the science of morality. And now we're getting to more clearly into moral philosophy.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  So I think that's the first first natural place to go when you're thinking, is there an objective morality? Can you give me an objective moral code that gives me the fundamental principles that justifies everything else? And the thing is philosophers have been working on that for thousands of years and they've got approximately nowhere. We have gotten very little agreement about what the fundamental moral principles are. But I do think that there has been serious agreement about some moral issues. Not fundamental principles, but certain kinds of social changes in our society that everyone or everyone that we want to have as part of the conversation thinks of as progressive.

• 1:07:36Speaker 00

  Things like the elimination of chattel slavery, greater equality between men and women, reduced prejudice towards ethnic minorities, towards gay and lesbian people. There are progressive changes that I think we should be far more we should be far more confident that these changes are progressive than we are in any abstract theory that explains why these things are right or wrong. And so I think the best hope for finding some kind of objective morality, objective in the sense that

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  we think that it's not it's not we not we don't just agree, but we think other people were wrong and that we are getting we are coming to this view from more information about ourselves and what the world is like. I think the the their best hopes for an objective moral philosophy is to think about how and why these progressive changes happened, the kinds that I mentioned. And to think about the psychological and cultural mechanisms behind them and whether those mechanisms can be exploited in the future to bring about future progressive changes.

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  Things like addressing massive social inequality, thinking about anti-trans prejudice, thinking about global injustice, the way in which People from developing countries are going to suffer from climate change and other kinds of disasters. I think that we're not going to figure out whether utilitarianism is true or not, but we might be able to figure out how we've made progress in ways that we all agree are progress and how to build on those and to find agreement about other pressing problems that we haven't solved yet.

• 1:09:28Chris Williamson?

  What could you imagine as overshooting when it comes to that particular type of dynamic?

• 1:09:34Speaker 00

  That's interesting, overshooting. So, you know, addressing some of these outstanding problems, but going too far in one direction. Is that what you have in mind?

• 1:09:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's interesting. I mean, I think that there, you know, one of the, one of the things we see in human history is expansion of the moral circle, coming to care about more than just your tribe and not just your religiously unified Uber tribe. I think that it is possible to go too far into this cosmopolitan direction and to think that other people, that strangers, matter just as much as your loved ones and your friends do. I think that this is probably a tendency on the left to minimize the importance of

• 1:10:32Speaker 00

  intimate connections between friends and family and to overestimate the degree to wish you have an obligation to strangers that aren't part of your family or your, your tribe.

• 1:10:45Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting, yes. And I do, I do understand the, the dynamic that you're talking about where the sort of de-pedestalization of motherhood, the de-pedestalization of the family almost being seen as some sort of privileged or oppressive institution. You know, we've seen this in like those once every couple of months insane news article titles that come up about like the family is a patriarchal institution. I saw one a little while ago, the myth of motherhood is, is a myth that men created in order to keep women down and stuff like that. And you think, well, It would have been very, very difficult for motherhood and for humans to have survived

• 1:11:30Chris Williamson?

  without motherhood having been there. And it is a, the subtext behind that is, motherhood is a myth. You should care about everybody the same amount that you should, that you would care about your children.

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think that there are aspects of family institutions that are worth preserving. The bonds that people have towards family members, the important relationships between children and caregivers that can't be replicated, can't be outsourced to our institutions. So I think those parts of family institutions are worth preserving. I guess I also think that there are aspects of our historically evolved family institutions that are oppressive towards women, that force them to occupy subordinate social roles within the family and to assign low status to motherhood.

• 1:12:22Chris Williamson?

  Just to interject, that's one of the fascinating things that I've noticed is, I don't disagree that, you know, for a good chunk of time, there wasn't parity in education, employment, freedom, autonomy, voting rights, you know, bank accounts, ability to drive. I remember reading this article about the concerns in the early 1900s that the bicycle would emancipate women to be able to go out on their own without the supervision of their husbands, because typically women would only be able to go out like linking up, presumably linking arms with their, with their partner or whatever. So I do get that. However, what you have seen, and that was what that article showed, is that if you push the progressivism

• 1:13:05Chris Williamson?

  too far, you end up, how would you say, like demonizing some of the inherent beauty and wisdom that the feminine brings into the world, right? In order for you to say that... Motherhood, the maternal instinct is a myth that men created. It inevitably puts women who are mothers back into that second-class citizen role that they only just got emancipated from. You know what I mean?

• 1:13:33Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think a kind of feminism worth having is one that expands up options and possibilities for women and that doesn't say that only the new possibilities are worth having and traditional roles as mothers and caretakers aren't. I mean, I think that what's really the key, the key part of the feminist movement that I think many people should agree is worth preserving and continuing is expanding liberty,

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  expanding freedom of people of all genders to occupy social roles and economic roles that they are interested in doing. You know, I think that new options doesn't mean we should devalue the old ones.

• 1:14:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I would agree. Look, Vic, I really appreciate your time today. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the work that you do?

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  Well, they can read my new book called A Better Ape with Richmond Campbell. They can also check out my website for links to new articles that I've written. I have an essay in the Boston Globe, for instance, which you might like to read.

• 1:14:48Chris Williamson?

  Very cool. Thanks, Victor.

• 1:14:51Speaker 00

  All right. Thank you so much. It was great to talk to you, Chris.