Paul Bloom
About
Psychologist, professor at University of Toronto, emeritus at Yale; author and the episode's guest
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Claims by Paul Bloom (20 of 481)
Holocaust Denier Doesn't Merit Engagement
Some views, like Holocaust denial or flat-earth belief, do not merit respectful lengthy engagement because the overwhelming evidence against them means that a person's very interest in pursuing the line of inquiry says something intellectually derogatory about them, independent of the ethics.
Need a Leviathan to Help Us Be Better
Behavior-change techniques from the nudge literature might help shift meat consumption the way they helped with smoking cessation and retirement saving, but in the end legislation would do a world of good because sometimes we need a Leviathan to help us be better people, even though waiting for that law is a cop-out.
Polarization Forces You to Categorize All Evidence to Your Side
A bizarre polarization dynamic forces a person, once they take a side on issues like police killings, to categorize all instances bearing on the debate as falling on their side, even when irrational, because people immediately draw broad implications from any single statement, so the shorter version is that nuance is underappreciated in certain contexts and consequentially so.
Extreme Political Statements Function as Signals Not Beliefs
Many extreme political statements (absolute anti-abortion stances, Obama birther claims) are not meant to be evaluated as factual moral claims but function as loyalty signals or speech acts saying 'boo to my opponent,' which is why politicians can stake out positions that would be monstrous if taken literally without alienating most voters.
Regression to the Mean Heuristic for Online Outrage
A useful heuristic for social media outrage is that when you hear something terrible about someone, the truth will turn out to be less terrible, because time and again when details get worked out people did not say the heinous thing or it was more complicated; social media and human psychology distort this because we like our villains to be appropriately villainous.
Demonization Is Rational When You Have Settled Goals
If your aim is to find the truth you should listen open-mindedly and explore counterfactuals, but if you have already settled an issue and have a policy goal in mind, demonizing your opponent rather than engaging them can be the most rational strategy because it disincentivizes holding the repellent view.
Violence Is Essential to a Compassionate Society
Violence is wrongly likened to a cancer because, unlike cancer, it is inevitable and essential; the threat of violence is necessary to make people honor contracts and refrain from raping, stealing, and killing, and by evolutionary accounts anger and the punitive appetite exist to keep people from preying on one another, so removing the human appetite for punishing wrongdoers would cause society to fall apart.
Cecil the Lion Outrage Lacks Moral Proportion
The outrage over the killing of Cecil the lion shows a striking lack of moral proportion, since if the dentist had shot an African human there would have been far less fuss, and the people enraged at the lion's death are by no means vegetarian and eat animals that die in far more horrific ways than the lion did.
Sadism Is Surprisingly Rare
Sadism - taking pleasure in others' suffering for its own sake - is surprisingly rare, so rare that the most recent DSM does not even list it, and the fraudulent doctor is notably not a sadist but someone driven purely by greed and disregard for consequences.
Psychopathy May Be a Continuum Not a Disorder
The science of psychopathy is highly uncertain, and the idea of the psychopath as a distinct type with his own brain may be largely an urban legend; people may simply vary along three traits - boldness, disinhibition, and meanness - so a psychopath is someone high on a continuum (more like being a jerk) rather than someone with a special disorder like diabetes or schizophrenia, though disinhibition is strongly predictive of bad behavior while the empathy measures predict little.
Betraying Trust Is a Special Category of Evil
Crimes that involve betraying trust - a doctor killing his patients, a priest abusing children - are felt as a particularly special evil distinct from the harms of fanatics or psychopaths who do not betray anyone's trust, connecting to Cass Sunstein's notion of a betrayal bias where people fear and resent harms from things meant to protect them (like being killed by one's own airbag) far more than equivalent harms.
Future Generations Will View Meat-Eating Like Slavery
Future generations will likely view current meat-eating practices as analogous to slavery, because it is easy to imagine what will be seen as monstrous a hundred years from now, with the treatment of non-human animals obvious on that list alongside indifference to the suffering of the very poor; humanity may be causing more animal suffering than ever before due to factory breeding, complicating Pinker's narrative of moral progress.
Continuing to Eat Meat Is Weakness of Will Not Hypocrisy
Both speakers participate in a factory-farming system that is ethically indefensible while knowing the moral case against it, but the right term is not hypocrisy but akrasia - weakness of will - because they know and will openly state the right thing to do, yet cannot do it, which is what it feels like to knowingly do evil.
Moral Slippery Slope Explains Too Much
The moral slippery slope - starting with a small bad act you get away with and escalating step by step, as in academic fraud or abuse - probably explains how the fraudulent doctor escalated to chemo for everybody, but as an explanation it proves too much because we all cut corners yet do not end up killing people or faking data, so something more must be present in those who do.
Killing Animals May Not Be the Wrong Part
The badness of eating animals is not necessarily the killing itself but the suffering and pain inflicted, since it is unclear that killing an animal that would not have existed without your intervention is bad; therefore humanely raised animals, anencephalic brainless animals, or lab-grown meat would resolve the ethical problem because what matters morally is an animal's capacity to suffer or be deprived of happiness, not its death per se.
Utilitarianism Justifies Both Liberalism and Torture
The same consequentialist moral philosophy that grounds liberal commitments like gay marriage and personal freedoms also yields the justification for torture, because utilitarians like Bentham used torture as an example, holding that causing one person suffering to save a thousand lives is rational.
Affluent Westerners Must Carry Moral Guilt
Every person living in the affluent West has to live with a significant burden of guilt for the harms they cause and the good they fail to do, and anyone who does not carry that burden is either a saint who is doing all the right things or a moral ignoramus blind to the harms they cause and the good they should be doing.
Sliming Wins Because of Attention Bandwidth Limits
The strategy of maliciously misrepresenting someone's views succeeds because audiences face a bandwidth problem - they lack the time to understand what was actually said or written, so they see only the loudest sliming, and once people dislike someone's views they will not invest time getting clear on the nuances the target thinks are on their side.
Vegans Right About Eggs and Dairy
Vegetarianism that includes eggs and dairy is not a fully defensible stopping point, because the vegans are right that egg-laying hens and milk-producing cows suffer as much as any animal, though certain shellfish pose no moral issue because they are probably not sentient.
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