Below is a transcript of my conversation with Michael Shermer on “Vatsal’s Podcast”. We discuss the nature of morality: Is it relative or objective? Can science and reason help us discover moral truths? Other topics covered include the fact-value distinction, utilitarianism, empirical research on happiness, the interplay between self-interest and altruism in society, and the role of free will in moral decision-making. You can listen to it here or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Introduction and Early Work
Vatsal: Hello everyone. Welcome to Vatsal’s Podcast. This is Vatsal. Today I’m speaking with Michael Shermer. Michael is a very well-known social scientist, founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, host of The Michael Shermer Show, and author of many best-selling books, including my favorite, The Moral Arc. Michael, welcome.
Michael Shermer: How you doing? Nice to see you.
Vatsal: Your dissertation was on Alfred Russel Wallace. What did you learn about human nature and its complexities by studying Wallace’s life?
Michael Shermer: Well, that started off as just looking at some history of science issues about how discoveries are made, and this was in the case of the theory of evolution by natural selection by both Darwin and Wallace. So what did they have in common? Where did they differ? How were their life paths similar and different? Why did they both come up with the same idea pretty close to each other in time? To what extent are ideas like that already in the air culturally? And that somebody would have figured it out pretty soon within that, a decade or so. So I find all that interesting in terms of how lives turn out in general. But in terms of human nature, this is kind of a larger issue, but I think there’s interactive effects between genes and environment and luck or chance or contingency.
Vatsal: They had very different temperaments, right?
Michael Shermer: They certainly did, yes. Wallace was far more open-minded to new ideas, many of which were crazy ideas: phrenology and spiritualism and seances and the paranormal and the supernatural. Darwin was pretty tough-minded and skeptical of all those things. So the characteristics that made Wallace open-minded enough to discover the theory of natural selection also led him to believe a bunch of nonsense, whereas Darwin did not. So I explored those ideas in my biography of Wallace.
The Enlightenment and Moral Relativism
Vatsal: One of the criticisms of the Enlightenment is that when you question all dogmas and authorities, it can lead to subjectivism and moral relativism, where any belief can seem equally valid. You get this question all the time. What response do you find most resonates with skeptics?
Michael Shermer: Well, most, let’s say, religious people believe that there are objective moral truths and right and wrong as handed down by God. So this is divine command theory. Well, I’m an atheist and most skeptics are religious skeptics, and they don’t believe that. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the alternative is pure moral relativism, where anything goes and there is no right and wrong. Although that is what some people conclude, what I’m trying to argue in The Moral Arc and elsewhere, is that there are moral truths. We can discover them through science and reason and apply them. And I’m claiming that, in fact, we have been doing that for centuries. And this is one reason why life is so much better now than it used to be.
Divine Command Theory vs. Moral Truths
Vatsal: You often refer to Euthyphro’s dilemma, which raises the issue of whether morality is contingent on divine command. A similar critique can be made about grounding morality in biology. If human biology were different, would moral facts change? Would immoral acts become moral? I think Thomas Reid raised this question against Hume. What do you think about it?
Michael Shermer: Well, there you’re kind of touching on the idea of deriving an “ought” from an “is”, which Hume famously pointed out is a fallacy. You can’t do that. But I’m claiming that that fallacy is itself a fallacy. In fact, we do it all the time. I mean, the way things actually are in the world: People seek freedom. They prefer health over disease in the same way that they prefer to be free rather than enslaved. That would be an observation about what people actually want and then deriving from that what we ought to do. We ought to defend people’s rights and freedoms because that’s what they want. I spend chapters in The Moral Arc and in other books, making this case and articles too and, I think it’s a bit of a cop-out to just say well we can never derive an “ought” from an “is”. Well, that’s not true, and so I think Hume’s argument was “thin”, as philosophers call it. That is to say, it applies sometimes, but not always.
Utility of Religiosity
Vatsal: I was listening to your conversation with Tyler Cowen and he expressed concern about declining religiosity. If religiosity is strongly associated with positive outcomes like personal well-being and community cohesion, do you think there is a utilitarian case for encouraging belief even if one doesn’t accept religious claims as true?
Michael Shermer: I mean, in general, I think we should believe things because they’re true. They should be believed because they’re facts about the world. In other words, I don’t want to believe in things that have to be believed in to be true. Although sometimes that may not always be the case. Maybe for democracy to work, we all have to believe that democracy works and participate in the system. Maybe. But religious people make claims that they claim are empirical. They’re not politically true or convenient or culturally true or metaphysically true or mythically true. They’re actually true. So just take the resurrection of Jesus, which Christians claim they believe actually happened. Not metaphorically or mythically, but actually literally, empirically happened. A man named Jesus was crucified and dead for three days dead. Dead dead, not in a coma, but dead, and then was brought back to life. Okay, so, of course I have all kinds of problems with that empirically, but what they’re after there is saying that they want to play religious claims on the same playing field as scientific claims. I just think that’s a mistake.
Utilitarianism and Moral Calculations
Vatsal: And what do you think about utilitarianism more generally? Do you find the idea that everyone’s happiness counts equally convincing?
Michael Shermer: Well, I’m mostly a utilitarian or a consequentialist when it comes to morals, although not always. There’s basically three different moral systems: utilitarianism or consequentialism, and then deontology or rule-based or rights-based morals, and then Aristotle’s virtue ethics. So if we just take, say, the trolley problem, which everybody’s familiar with. The trolley is hurling down the tracks about to kill five workers. You’re standing at the switch. You could throw the switch and kill one worker down this other track, would you do it? Most people say they would. They make the utilitarian calculation to sacrifice the one to save the five. But, of course, there’s alternate versions of this. You’re a doctor working in a hospital and you have five dying patients and there’s one healthy person in the waiting room, would you sacrifice that person in the waiting room? Call him in and anesthetize him, cut out his organs, kill him, and then save the five patients. Well, no, you wouldn’t do that. Well, why not? It’s the same utilitarian calculation. And the answer is because people have rights. They have a right to their own bodily autonomy and choice and control over what they do and what’s done to their bodies. And so there’s an example of where utilitarianism doesn’t work. Although I wouldn’t make the case that it’s better for society in a utilitarian way if we don’t sacrifice individuals and have that kind of utilitarian calculation like in the trolley problem. That is, by granting people rights that no one can enslave them or kill them and so on, then society is better off. I mean, just in a utilitarian way. So I hesitate to make too big a distinction between those two systems using that as an example.
Fact-Value Distinction in Morality
Vatsal: We were just talking about the fact-value distinction. Many philosophers and scientists who are otherwise committed to naturalism argue that there is an unbridgeable gap between values and facts and that we can’t derive values from facts. And you disagree, of course. What point do they raise in response to your arguments that you find most difficult to refute?
Michael Shermer: That a lot of this is very context and time dependent. So, for example, had I lived three centuries ago, or maybe even two centuries ago, I probably would have made the case that slavery was acceptable based on some rational, allegedly rational argument that black people are inferior intellectually and morally and all the justifications that people used, including, and especially Christian theologians that that’s perfectly okay, or the way women were treated or Jews were treated and so on. I can’t say for sure that the beliefs I hold now I would still hold if I lived two centuries ago. If you put me in a time machine and went back, how would I think? And so much of what I argue may be grounded in 21st century moral thinking, the way people today think and who knows maybe centuries from now we’ll talk about artificial intelligence morals and rights and values. So that would probably be the biggest criticism, and that’s true, I mean that’s true for all of us. Everybody has that same problem. We’re all embedded in a culture, in a time period in history, but what else are you going to do? There’s no time machines and I can’t live forever. And I can’t be, I’m not going to be chronically frozen and brought back 500 years from now. I mean, it’s just not going to happen.
Predictions in Morality
Vatsal: When there are disagreements in science, we often rely on demonstrations and predictions. If we want to ground morality on naturalistic foundation, do you think we should be able to come up with some kind of predictions?
Michael Shermer: Well, certainly, yeah, certainly, and I do. That is to say, if you do more of X, you’re going to get more of Y. So if you grant more freedoms and rights and voting rights, say, and spread democracy and free trade between countries, they’re going to have fewer conflicts. There’ll be fewer wars between nations that trade with one another, for example. And democracies are less likely to go to war with other democracies. Not perfectly, not 100%, there are exceptions, but on average, it’s better to be a democracy for a whole bunch of reasons than it is an autocracy or a theocracy. And there’s reasons for that, but the larger point is that if that’s true, then we should do more of that. And my prediction is if we do that, on average, the per capita GDP of a country is going to go up if the people are allowed to have trade with one another in between states, between nations, if they are democracies, and if they have rights, if they have the rule of law, they have property rights, if they’re allowed to form businesses and make contracts, all the stuff that we take for granted. There are countries where they don’t do those things, and those countries tend to be fairly poor and dysfunctional, and crime rates are high, and poverty is high, and so on. And so I predict that if we did those things, the crime rates would decrease, prosperity would increase, and so on. Again, not perfectly every single time, because there’s so many variables at work, but on average, I would make that prediction.
Vatsal: So you’d say that revealed preferences serve as a demonstration of what is right and what is wrong.
Michael Shermer: Yes, yes, absolutely.
Vatsal: People voting with their feet when they migrate to certain countries.
Michael Shermer: They do. Where would you rather live, South Korea or North Korea? Quick. Yeah. And everybody knows the answer and they know why the answer is the way it is. People already know this. You don’t have to make a rational calculation and prediction about that. But if you want to, okay, then I predict, if Kim Jong-un lowered the wall and just said, okay, to his fellow North Korean citizens, you can do whatever you want. Go ahead and leave if you want. They would leave absolutely. There’d be nobody, almost nobody left, and so the reason dictators have to have no free press, they have to build walls, they have to build concentration camps, and so on is because they know that the people living in their country don’t want to be there, that they don’t like that system. They’re making a prediction: If I don’t build a wall, my people will leave. They know this. That’s a prediction. And they would. Look what happened after the Berlin Wall fell. People just left. Okay, goodbye and good luck. Until East Germany got its shit together and started becoming more of a Western democracy and industrialized nation. Anyway, that’s an example.
Self-Interest vs. Altruism in Society
Vatsal: You write that combining self-interest and sociality with impartiality, we can derive a principle of interchangeable perspectives that is embodied in the golden rule. Are you sympathetic to the idea that we cannot help but increase our own good, even when we desire other people’s happiness? This view is associated with Thomas Hobbes.
Michael Shermer: Yes? Oh, was there a question there? Sorry.
Vatsal: So there is this conflict between self-interest and increasing the general happiness.
Michael Shermer: Well, of course, since by human nature, we have a selfish side and an altruistic, cooperative side, more competitive and cooperative. We’re selfish and we’re greedy, but we’re also altruistic and giving and caring. So the whole point of a civil society with a rule of laws and, protection of property - property rights - and criminal justice and all that is to attenuate the inner demons, the selfish side of human nature and accentuate the positive side, the better angels, bring out what’s best in us. How do we do that? You do that through choice architecture as it’s called. That is to say, you have policies that encourage people to be giving and carrying and so on. Now they could do this voluntarily but it doesn’t hurt - for example, in the United States, when people make a donation to the Skeptic Society, which they do, they can deduct it from their income tax. Whatever you make every year, let’s say you make $100,000 a year, and you’re taxed at 30%. If you give the Skeptic Society $10,000, now you’re only going to be taxed on $90,000 rather than $100,000. So you get to deduct the donation to a nonprofit. And this is true for churches and charities and so on. So that’s the government’s way of saying, we would like you to be more giving and cooperative and nice. And they do that, same thing with marriage. I’m married, I get a tax break. I have children, I get a tax break for having kids. I own a home, so I get to deduct the interest on the mortgage of my home from my income tax. So this is all the government’s way of saying, we would like you to be married, have kids, own a home, give to charity. And now I don’t have to do it, any of those things, I can opt out. But it’s a way of society saying, these are the things we think are good for our society, we want our citizens to do it. Now, the fact that we do it and get pleasure out of it also means that there’s something inside of us that is good and people willingly do those things.
Vatsal: David Hume famously said that reason is inert and in order to get us to move we need some kind of motivation from our desire or passion. So is that a, do you think that’s a limit to rationality?
Michael Shermer: Well, not really, because really what Hume is saying there is that we use reason to achieve our goals, but what should the goals be in the first place? That’s rather subjective and emotional. But even there, you can kind of lay out the landscape of different jobs, careers, marriage partners, business partners, whatever it is you want to do. And you can assess the risks and benefits of each choice and then make a rational choice. Now, ultimately it may come down to just the way you feel about whatever career you want to choose. What kind of makes you feel good and productive and like a whole person because you like doing that or you’re in love with somebody and maybe you can’t quantify exactly what you like about them, but it’s an emotive feeling. So that’s what Hume was really talking about there.
The Universality of Desires and Happiness
Vatsal: Within the sentimentalist tradition of Hume and others, there is this idea that there is some universality in what we desire and what makes us happy. So is that a good argument for universalism?
Michael Shermer: I think so, yes, because we have research now on what makes people happy. In the same way we have research on what makes people wealthy or productive or whatever. And in the case of the happiness business, maybe the right word is fulfilled or purposeful, something like that, a fulfilling, purposeful, happy life, something like that. We know what that involves. Meaningful, purposeful work. A relationship of some kind. Close relationship with someone you’re in love with. Having children, having family, having friends, having a social circle of people that you hang out with. Doing something productive every day. Moving your body, exercising. Eating a relatively healthy diet. These are all things that we know through longitudinal studies over decades and decades, even a century long in the case of the Harvard study. These are the things that people do and the outcome is measurable. They live longer, they’re healthier, they’re happier, self-report happiness, and all that. And you can see that across countries. There’s tons of data on this now. Countries that are higher in trust, they have a more trustworthy economy, stable economy, stable political system, stable banking, financial system, and so on. The people there, and they make more money, they’re happier. We know what leads to that, so we should do more of that.
Free Will and Moral Responsibility
Vatsal: Final question. What do you think about the relevance of free will to this topic? Sam Harris denies free will but he is a moral realist. On the other hand, Immanuel Kant thought free will was absolutely essential for the existence of morality and he believed that free will must be assumed for morality to make sense.
Michael Shermer: Of course. Of course, morality depends on somebody choosing to do good or do evil. And so we have to assume free will. Now, let me comment on determinists. They don’t actually believe it. I mean, they say they believe it. They have arguments. They write books about it, but they don’t act like determinism is true. They act like everybody else acts like, like I’m making free choices and I’m going to take credit for the good choices, and people are going to blame me for the bad choices, I will be punished if I do bad things, I will be rewarded if I do good things, and even though they deny that any of that is actually happening, of course it’s happening. Just open your eyes, you can see how people behave. But in any case, that’s not my solid argument for compatibilism, that is, we live in a determined universe, but it’s not predetermined. That is to say, the future is unknown and you are part of it. You are part of the causal net of the universe. The choices you make alter what’s going to happen next. And therefore what you do really does matter in your life, other people’s lives, in your circle, to the world at large, no matter how small your influence might be. You just don’t know. And so why not act as if you’re making free choices? Because you are. That is to say the future is not predetermined. You are part of the causal net. Your choices alter the future paths. Think of the metaphor of, I call this Heraclitus’ principle, you can’t step into the same river twice because the river is not the same and you’re not the same. Or just think of it as “the garden of forking paths”, as the poet and novelist Jorge Borges wrote, The Garden of Forking Paths. With each choice, each bifurcation point along the path that you go, it’s going to have a different outcome. And at each of those bifurcation points, you go left instead of right. You took this class instead of that class. You married this person instead of that person. You went to this party instead of some other party or whatever it is. There are millions of these little bifurcation point, choices you make in your life, determines the outcome. And you’re doing that. This isn’t happening to you like you’re a pinball in a machine just randomly bouncing around and who knows how it’s going to turn out. So that’s my argument for volition. It’s a compatibilist argument.
Vatsal: Thank you so much for answering my questions.
Michael Shermer: You’re welcome.
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