Transcriber: Carlos García Braschi Reviewer: Ido Dekkers
Thank you. Thank you very much.
It's a great honor to be part of this event.
As was mentioned, I'm a professor of philosophy
and one of the things I do is I teach "Introduction to Ethics".
And when I first started out, you know, I'm an American,
I kind of approach my job with a naive optimism.
I had a kind of grandiose idea that
I was gonna change these students,
change their lives,
shake up their moral belief system to the core.
So I started and I'd say: "Look,
here it's what's distinctive about moral philosophy.
Everybody has moral opinions,
everyone has moral beliefs,
but moral philosophy is the business of justifying those beliefs."
How do we justify our beliefs?
We do it with reasons. We do it with argument.
And then I give a good series of examples.
I try to choose examples that were really controversial,
that people had really strong opinions about.
So, same sex marriage, prostitution or pornography, legalizing drugs.
I've come to the right country for this example. So seems like.
By the way, there's a terrible rumor I heard
that they're gonna start banning tourist from coffee shops.
Don't do it, please. If I can morally persuade you of one thing.
Anyhow, I usually use same sex marriage.
And I ask the class: "Well, what are some reasons that people offer
to oppose same sex marriage?"
Students offer some,
we subject those to scrutiny to see how well they hold up.
Usually they don't hold up so well.
But my point in this is not to convince them of anything
but just to let them know,
to have them see how the method works.
How this method they could apply throughout their lives
will work to change other people's minds.
And also to make sure that their own beliefs
can stand up to scrutiny, that they're on solid ground.
OK, so then we go into the theories,
and you've just heard about some of them.
Utilitarianism, Kantianism, Aristotelian ethics,
and then we get to Peter Singer.
Who you just heard from,
a man I've a lot of respect for, and
students start to perk up.
Singer, for those of you who aren't familiar with his work,
has, throughout his career,
developed arguments, really sophisticated,
clear and compelling arguments
for conclusions that many people, most people
think are absolutely insane.
Now, it didn't sound like that there that's definitely true,
but the "Famine, Affluence and Morality",
the conclusion of that article
is, that as individuals we should be
devoting somewhere like 40 or 50 percent of our income,
never spend any income on luxuries or non necessities,
give all of that to help other people.
And all of us start and
students, their hands start to shoot up.
They desperately wanna reject this conclusion,
and I teach another article on the animal welfare,
same thing, the students just they really wanna resist this conclusion.
They...
they wanna keep eating hamburgers, right? --
and not feel guilty about it.
They don't... They wanna work hard, earn money and keep it,
and spend it on themselves.
And not devote so much of it to
help people across the world they don't know.
And I say: "That's fine, you wanna reject his conclusion,
but tell me which of those premises is false."
Those premises lead logically to the conclusion,
if you wanna resist the conclusion,
tell me which of those premises are implausible.
And man, that's tough to do with Singer.
And the students get very frustrated by that.
But here's what surprised me
and discouraged me a little bit:
Is that, even tough that was true, the majority of students, vast majority,
can't figure out a way to object to the premises,
they still didn't buy the conclusion.
They weren't buying the conclusion.
Yeah, they might admit that didn't have good reason to, but
the fact is, their minds had not been changed,
they had not been morally persuaded.
Couple of years ago, I ran a classroom experiment,
a little classroom experiment.
We were about to re-tune the most famous articles on abortion.
Certainly, the two most philosophically compelling articles that I know of.
Before we did, I ask the students:
"How many of you have really strong feelings about abortion?,
really strong opinion on this issue?"
It's a big class, about 80 or 90 raised their hands.
So then we read the articles,
went over them in depth, considered the objections,
considered the strengths.
And then, this is now about a week and a half -- two weeks later.
I said: "OK, we're done with that, now
raise your hand if you shifted your position on abortion."
And it doesn't have to be from pro-life to pro-choice,
or vice-versa.
It can even be a more subtle change.
Maybe you're a little less certain than you were before.
Two people raised their hands.
Two students out of the 80 or 90.
Now, I was taken aback by this, I have to admit.
I mean, I thought, what the hell am I doing?
What's the point of my job?
What's the point of teaching these articles
if they're not changing anybody's mind?
And then, you know, when I thought of
myself and I thought:
"When was the last time that I changed one of my moral beliefs
because of an argument or a series of arguments?"
And, yeah, it was hard to think, and think yourselves,
when was the last time that happened to you?
I bet it happens a lot less often than we think,
and a lot less often than we'd like to think.
So, again, what is the point of my job?
You might expect that I have a triumphant answer to that question,
but I don't, really.
But I have been doing a lot of thinking about what makes a...
how moral persuasion really works,
and especially the role that reason plays and the role it doesn't play,
looking at a lot of work in the social sciences,
I've come to the conclusion that reason
or rational argument is a lot less effective
in changing people's minds
than philosophers imagined, than I imagined
and I just wanna go through a couple of reasons why that is.
The first reason is that reason is sort of a double agent,
yeah, we use it sometimes as a dispassionate judge
to try to figure out what the best course of action is,
the most morally correct course of action is.
But we also use it,
we do this a lot,
we use it to justify what we already believe post hoc.
We're really good at post hoc rationalization,
we're really good at finding reasons to justify
what we want to believe.
So you know, Singer,
might offer great arguments, reasons to be a vegetarian,
but you can't be there
when you're coming up with your own reasons
why it's ok for you to eat that steak.
Second problem with reason or rational argument is that
it's abstract, it relies on general principles,
general ethical principles,
and so it's impersonal.
And we're not motivated by general principles,
we're not motivated by abstractions.
And if you think about it, this makes sense:
"Why did moral norms evolve in our species in the first place?"
It evolved to get us,
to motivate us, to cooperate in real life situations.
To take care of our relatives.
To be loyal to our friends.
To punish people that try to harm them.
And to punish people who violate moral norms within the community,
all of this in real life situations.
Right? And
the mechanisms that motivate behavior of this kind
are the emotions.
Emotions like empathy, a sense of shame,
a sense of honor,
moral outrage, moral indignation,
these are the emotions that do that work,
and they're triggered by real life situations.
The closer, the more familiar,
the more we feel it, the more we're gonna act.
So, that's a real problem with rational article,
rational argument and general principles,
and you know, Singer, although he's been
doing a lot of research now on psychology
and it's trying to adjust his views to this,
but he's always taken a very different approach,
he leads off his book "Animal liberation"
by saying that what motivated him to get so
involved in the animal welfare movement,
is not that he loves animals,
he's not really that interested in animals,
he just wants to put a stop to the suffering of
sentient beings in general.
Now, I believe him.
I think he's sincere but I think that's exceedingly rare.
And in fact, he himself once said that
what made animal liberation so profoundly influential
was not in the end his elegant utilitarian arguments,
that he gives in that book.
But instead,
the vivid descriptions of what goes on in factory farms
and in laboratories.
And importantly, the pictures in the center of the book.
You read those descriptions, you see those pictures
and you say: "Oh my god, this is awful,
this is terrible, this has got to stop."
Our sense of shame, our sense of outrage
is triggered by those things.
You know, this is why factory farms
now in America and across the world
do their best to make it so that
nobody photographs or videotapes what goes on there.
Because when you see, when you see these pigs,
they're just as intelligent as dogs or more,
and just as social,
and they're confined for their whole lives
in these narrow cages.
Well, that's when your empathy is triggered,
that's when you say: "I've gotta stop".
Not suffering in general,
unjustified suffering of sentient beings in general,
but this, we've gotta stop this,
and that's why they don't want you to see it.
But it's not because you're gonna learn any new facts, right?
We all know in the back of our minds
that is not pretty what goes on in
laboratories and in factory farms.
But when you see these videos and
read an especially vivid description,
you start to appreciate those facts.
In new and significant ways.
Now, it's true that our emotions can be manipulated.
And this is why philosophers since Plato
have distrusted our emotions.
Plato saw our emotions as distortions of our moral judgement.
And he thought reason informed our moral judgements.
And that's absolutely true,
emotions can be manipulated
a sense of disgust, for example,
is often used to get us to hate other people,
or to withhold rights and privileges for them.
But what I think Plato and his followers
were wrong, or at least they didn't emphasize enough
how much emotion can inform our moral judgments as well.
And I'll end by giving an example of that,
and it's an example that I started with,
the same-sex marriage debate.
So does everybody know
what the greatest predictor of whether you're for
or against same-sex marriage is?
It's not, as you might expect,
whether you're a conservative or liberal,
it's not whether you're religious or
non-religious,
it's just,
someone get it?
It's how old you are.
Right?
The last time that they did this study,
it was over 35, you're more likely to be opposed,
under 35 you're more likely to be in favor
and the older you are, the more vehemently
you're disposed to be against same-sex marriage.
Now, why is that?
Have younger people just been exposed to
some new and really
persuasive or compelling moral argument or rational argument?
A far more plausible explanation is
that the gay community is so much more out in the open right now,
in the popular media, in films, in television, in books,
and also younger people are far more likely to know somebody who's gay.
And when that happens,
for the younger generation,
gay people, the gay community
they cease to be something alien,
they cease to be a threat,
they cease to be a cause,
they just become real people.
And our empathy is triggered, you start to think,
you start to really feel
what it must be like to have certain rights,
basic rights
denied.
I mean, my students they're conservative bunch,
I teach in Texas, right?
But they barely even understand why this is an issue.
They barely even understand why anybody is against
same-sex marriage.
And this has nothing to do with an argument,
this has nothing to do with reason,
it's pure empathy and familiarity.
And that's why I think as philosophers
and as people
-- and philosophers are people,
contrary to popular opinion.
We need to stop giving short shrift to the emotions
and start figuring out how to use them effectively
and responsibly,
both as a means of moral persuasion
and as a way of obtaining a deeper and richer understanding
of the issues that we care about.
So, thank you.
(Applause)