AS287: Atheist Ethics and Implicit Biases, with Alonzo Fyfe

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 287, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. All right, I have to say I'm coming off a great weekend. Myth Information 3 happened. Guys, it was so great. I really, I'm very happy about my talk. It all came together. I was nervous about it, but I, honestly, I think it went really well, and it's something I really want to do again. So if you're having to be a conference plan or a person or something, so many people have commented like, oh, come to this place, come to that place. And it's like, I really, I love giving the talk. I have many billion, million more things I could say, and I will give a talk anywhere if someone pays for me to go travel there or something. I mean, I Really will.

0:01:14 Thomas: So I hope that I can do more of these these conferences, because I loved it. And it just really opened my mind to the possibilities of things I could talk about and things I could do. Because man, I spent six and a half years reading the Bible on a podcast. There's a lot to say about that. And there's a lots to say about all kinds of other topics, too. So it was really fun. Thank you very sincerely to everyone who went to everyone who came and said, Hey, you know, I think good job, or I love your work. It it really meant a lot to me because I was, I was very nervous. It was something I was very scared to do. And it was the first time I've done it. So that reassurance really helped. And I appreciate that. That being said, you know, if I had given a crap talk, yeah, of course you can come up and say, Hey, that wasn't very good.

0:02:01 Thomas: And then I'd be like, okay, I guess I better retire from doing this. But no, seriously, thank you to everyone I met. It was awesome. Awesome. All right, on to today's topic. Joining me is a guest named Alonzo Fyfe. He Alonzo comes from a philosophy background. Has a blog called The Atheist Ethicist. Feel free to search that. I think I mentioned the website later. We talked about some really interesting stuff. Now, Alonzo does win the award for most soothing voice I've had yet on the podcast. It's very soothing to listen to. But we also, we talk about some really interesting stuff like implicit biases.

0:02:41 Thomas: We talk about some experiments that sort of show those, and it's really interesting in how those impact our current election, among other things. We talk third parties. He actually used to be a strong member of a third party and now isn't. I don't want to reveal too much, but lots of fascinating stuff. I want to thank him for coming on the show. And with that said, let's get over to that interview.

0:03:12 Thomas: Joining me right now is Alonzo Fyfe. How are you doing tonight, Alonzo?

0:03:17 Alonzo: Fine, how are you?

0:03:18 Thomas: I'm doing great. Alonzo comes from the blog called Atheist Ethicist, is And I had seen an article of yours, actually a listener, maybe I should give him credit, a listener named David Jacquemotte shared it, and I want to give him credit because, hey, people share stuff, I'll read it, and this was a good post, and that's how I found you. And I thought it was interesting because you explained to me a little bit, if you don't mind how you arrived at the atheist ethicist moniker and what that means to you.

0:03:24 Alonzo: That's right. Mm-hmm.

0:03:49 Alonzo: Okay, well, the reason I adopted atheist ethicist is, you know, I'm interested in ethics, and there is a large prejudice in the world against atheists, basically, on the principle that atheists are unmoored from any type of ethical foundation or moral foundation. So I thought that the title would, at least to some people, be a nice contradiction in terms and might make them interested in curious about what I was doing. If somebody thinks that you can't do ethics unless you believe in God or as an atheist, then this site was meant to show them how it could be done.

0:04:27 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, that in itself is a really great topic. Actually, we could go into that more because it's it's funny. I wonder about people doing ethics, even if they are religious, I wonder how that even factors in, you know, is it sort of a question of, well, okay, we all take for granted that we believe in God and then go from there, or is the belief in God somehow fueling their ethics? Because I don't even know how that would work, where do you even get, you're not talking to God, so where do you, do you go to the books and then just assume you can kind of figure out for yourself what God meant? I don't even know how that is supposed to work out.

0:05:05 Alonzo: Well, For the historical philosophers, people like Locke and Rousseau, people of that era, they approached ethics the same way that Newton approached physics. That is, there may be a God, God created the world, we'll accept all of that, but you should be able to use reason to independently discover moral truths the same ways that Newton was using reason to discover scientific or physical truths. So that's the way that religious people in philosophy have approached ethics. Catholics, for the most part, at least in that tradition, for the last 400 years, of course, there is the religious tradition which relies on scripture, the Catholic tradition. But even the Catholic tradition says you should be able to discover moral truths through reason without reference to scripture.

0:05:54 Thomas: Yeah, well that's what's so interesting. Don't you think that's somewhat contradictory though? I mean, obviously you're someone who believes we don't need to be religious to have ethics, but I find it kind of funny that that myth can even persist because I really would like to know how that's working out for people who are religious. Like I would, I suspect if we really broke down their process, it would come down to the same thing that, you know, you or I might be doing as atheists, which is we're using reasons. And that's kind of how, now maybe there would be some fundamental bedrock where they would say, well, because I believe in a loving God, therefore there's something, I don't know, but it's just, it's curious to me that really, it seems like we'd be doing the same thing.

0:06:02 Alonzo: Right.

0:06:35 Alonzo: Right. Well, religion, of course, is all an invention. It's invented by human beings. None of the stuff actually comes from a god. So everybody who's doing Right. So, so anybody who's doing ethics from religion is importing into the religion their beliefs. They're not getting anything out of it. It's all going from them into the religion. So in a sense they, you're right, they have to be doing what the, what the atheist is doing, which is trying to come up with moral truths which they then insert into their religion.

0:06:43 Thomas: You don't say.

0:07:05 Thomas: Right. Well, let's talk about this particular blog post maybe. And then I've got some other questions for you. Maybe it'll branch off a little bit, but let's talk about your, your post that was called A Moral Philosopher's View of the 2016 Presidential Election. Now, there's a lot that that could be about, I'm sure. There's a lot going on, but what specifically did you try to tackle in this post?

0:07:19 Alonzo: Mm-hmm. Yes. Me to write the post is typically in a presidential election or in politics, you're talking about things where the left and the right can reasonably disagree. Minimum wage, public public education, public health expenditures, things like that. And can participate in that disagreement. But there's certain things that if you did a poll, you would expect Republicans and Democrats to agree on with respect to ethics, such as honesty, there's an obligation to tell the truth, keeping promises, repaying debts, thingslike that. In this election, those things seem to be tossed aside. I mean, we have the least honest politician running in years, maybe ever, in this campaign, and a lot of people who simply don't care about the fact that many of the things that Trump says are simply not true. And that's what motivated the post is that

0:07:43 Thomas: Let

0:08:28 Alonzo: That's a bizarre circumstance that basic moral principles that everybody agrees on, such as honesty and keeping promises and repaying debts, are just being ignored.

0:08:39 Thomas: Ask you this specifically then on that claim. What leads you to believe that it's people just disregarding that or not caring about it versus having some, some totally alternate set of facts where they think Trump is actually telling the truth.

0:08:55 Alonzo: A disregard for facts of the matter. That is, the people who are supporting Trump are calling Clinton a crook, dishonest, things like that, which suggests that they actually do care about honesty, but they don't care about who's being being honest. So, I mean, it's a contradiction.

0:09:08 Thomas: Right. Hmm. What do you think they're doing? Do you think they are just merely looking away from Trump's lies? Or do you Do you think it's sort of a conspiracy theory thing of like, well, he's not actually lying, it's the media is making it look like he's lying or something?

0:09:27 Alonzo: I'm not much into conspiracy theories. I think that more natural explanations tend to be the stronger ones.

0:09:33 Thomas: Oh, of course, I just meant what the Trump supporters are into conspiracy theories. I just mean what they're thinking, yeah.

0:09:38 Alonzo: Yeah, they are. Well, you mentioned they're into conspiracy theories. They have a number of beliefs that simply ignore the facts. And beliefs about Clinton is one of those sets of beliefs about her basic dishonesty. And I actually don't know what they think about Trump's dishonesty, maybe whether they think that, well, he's dishonest, but Clinton is worse, or whether they're actually believing it. There's good evidence that they're believing it because they repeat it, they cheer it in their rallies.

0:10:02 Thomas: Is worse, yeah, so it's being deflected. It's the kind of thing where it's like, sure, maybe our candidate has his flaws or something, but she is such an evil that it doesn't really matter. Do you think kind of that's what's going on?

0:10:23 Alonzo: That's a large part of what's going on. But as I was saying, they are believing much of what he says. When Trump says that there's this massive conspiracy to undermine his campaign, a lot of them are accepting that. Out. They are now believing that there is this massive conspiracy.

0:10:25 Thomas: Okay. Mm-hmm.

0:10:41 Thomas: Interesting. So far, we've said left and right cares about these three things. You would agree if there were polls that asked, do you value honesty? Do you value keeping promises? Do value repaying debts or something like that? Or as the third one, you would expect the left and Right to have the same responses for the most part, but exactly.

0:10:56 Alonzo: Right. On the right side, there is no philosophical group that's going around arguing that lying and refusing to pay debts are good things and that we should have more of that. That's just not happening.

0:11:14 Thomas: So then from there, it's a question of how is this cognitive dissonance happening then? How is this difference in these realities happening?

0:11:22 Alonzo: Well, in the article, I explained one of the major differences or major reasons why people People adopt beliefs that are so contrary to evidence, which is relevant in this case, which is the implicit biases of sexism. People base their beliefs partially on their feelings. You tell somebody a proposition, and it would be nice if they evaluated that proposition on the basis of other evidence, but that takes a great deal of time and effort. It's much easier to give a cursory look at the proposition and then to measure it against one's feelings. Has the disadvantage of being fallible and the advantage of being quick.

0:12:01 Thomas: Right. So you think sexism is a big key. So what about the people who say, ah, but look at Benghazi, look at the email thing, look at I don't know, the Clinton Foundation. What do you think is happening there? Have you looked into all these alleged cases of dishonesty and you're unconvinced? And therefore, that's why you're concluding that people are merely checking those claims with their emotional desires and then saying, yeah, they must be true.

0:12:30 Alonzo: Right. Yeah, actually, I have looked into Benghazi and the emails and Clinton's basic honesty, and there is no real evidence in favor of the positions that people are adopting. So then if they're not basing their positions on the evidence, then you have to ask on where are they getting their positions? What's causing this? There's definitely a cause behind it somewhere. It's coming from something. And one of the things we know is that people get their evidence in part or get their beliefs in part from their feelings. And so why would they want to feel that Clinton is responsible for all of these things. And one of the reasons, and this is supported in a great deal of evidence, is that if a woman seeks a position of power, that makes certain people uncomfortable.

0:13:19 Alonzo: They tend to view that person as less likable. Of course, if they then find Clinton to be less likable, then Clinton is, they need a reason for that. And even even though the actual explanation is because Clinton is a woman who is seeking power, that makes them uncomfortable. That's not an acceptable explanation to them. So they need some other explanation. They see the stories that Clinton is involved in this terrible thing with Benghazi or the email server or claims that she's lied about this or that. And they say, "OK, that must be it. That's what's causing me to feel this way." Therefore, I'm going to accept those claims as being true. Now, that is a gross oversimplification of the whole process.

0:14:05 Alonzo: That's not everything that's going on. Clinton does lie from time to time. There are problems with the email server. So there is a grain of truth in those, but that just helps the person effectively blow those things out of proportion in order to adopt that as the the explanation for their feelings.

0:14:21 Thomas: Right, right. I liked what you said about like the resume experiments and what you said about choosing a candidate with a male versus female name. Could you talk about those a little bit?

0:14:32 Alonzo: Well, sure, that's one of the major studies that have been done. There's actually a large number of resume studies, but one in particular that I found to be relevant to this particular case. What the researchers did is they gave a bunch of reviewers resumes for the job of police superintendent. And there are two types of person that had a great deal of education, but very little street experience. And the other resume was a resume of a person who had a lot of street experience, but barely little education. And they randomly assigned male or female names to the name of the applicants that they put on these resumes.

And they gave these out to their reviewers to determine what the reviewers thought thought of these individuals. And what this particular study revealed is that the reviewers would change their criteria based on the gender of the applicant. That is, they use gender itself as a reason to accept or reject somebody. But they saw the resume of the male who had had education and no street experience, and the resume of a female with street experience but less education, then they said, education is what matters, therefore we're choosing this person.

0:15:37 Thomas: Right.

0:15:53 Alonzo: And if they got it backwards, if the male had the street experience and no education and the female had the education without the street experienced, they're saying street experience is what matters, that's our qualification, therefore, we're going for the person with the street experiences, which happens to be the male.

0:15:53 Thomas: You know, so interesting. And I really loved reading about that for many reasons. For one, because I think there is a bit of a straw man of, oh, you don't like Hillary, it's because you're sexist. And then people on on the right will say, well, no, that's not why. I've got these other reasons here. Look at these other reasons. It has nothing to do with her being female. But I really like this bit of evidence you've given us because it makes sense to me.

It makes sense that maybe, I don't know if it's the voters themselves or maybe it's somewhere and starts with Fox News or something where they blow little things out of proportion because of this thing, because of this emotional reaction they have to a woman being in power, they start blowing these things out of proportion, and then that gives other people kind of plausible deniability to just follow it and say, "Yeah, well, we've seen 24 hours of Fox News coverage a day about how she's so awful," like so and she must be, and so it's this big giant machine that gets built out of something that I think starts, I don't want to say like innocently, but it's not outward. Someone didn't think, "I need to put a stop to this woman."

0:16:31 Alonzo: Right. Right.

0:17:20 Thomas: They probably just had some unconscious feeling that kind of led to that. Does that make sense? That's what went through my head anyway.

0:17:28 Alonzo: Well, there are people who are saying we need to put a stop to this woman, but

0:17:31 Thomas: You know what? You're right. But I don't know if that's like everybody.

0:17:34 Alonzo: It's not everybody. Right. The people who want to put us up on on Clinton have used this to their advantage, whether consciously or unconsciously. And one of the ways that that it that they can use it without even actually knowing that this is what's behind it is they will do a focus group. They will tell people, here are claims that we can make about Clinton. What has the greatest resonance with you? And the focus group, being affected by this type of bias, looking for a reason not to explain their uncomfortableness at the idea of Clinton being president, says, OK, we can accept this explanation here for the reason for my uncomfortabileness, be it she's dishonest or she has done something with respect to email or something like that. So the reasons come out through the focus groups, but the focus group have an explanation that even the people asking the questions might not be aware of.

0:17:35 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:18:32 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah, and it really makes sense to me because I picture that resume test, and I, I picture someone reading the resume, not really even knowing that that's what's happening, you know, to them, they're like, well, I just value experience or I value education or whatever. And it's funny that this is sort of almost exactly what happened between Obama and Clinton in some ways. Like first we had Obama in 08 and the whole thing was, well he has no experience. And to be fair, it's kind of true. Like he didn't have much experience.

0:19:06 Alonzo: It pretty much was true. Yeah. I mean, he had one term as it's a senator and that's it.

0:19:08 Thomas: Yeah, totally true. Yeah. And that was the reason why he was so bad in '08, according to Republicans. And now in '16, it's too much experience for Hillary. And it's and it's kind of funny that it's a weird little mirror of that resume thing, you know. But the same time, I suppose you could argue that liberals were doing the same thing in reverse in some ways and saying, you experience didn't matter in '08 because we wanted this candidate and now experience matters in '16 because we want Hillary and we don't want Trump. What do you think about that?

0:19:41 Alonzo: Well, one of the things that we need to be honest about is that there are a lot of Clinton supporters, liberals, also don't like Clinton. I mean, she has fairly high unfavorability ratings, even among Democrats. And so there are Democrats who are doing the same thing. I don't like Clinton. What's the reason? And they're also latching on to, to, well, she's dishonest, but not as dishonest as Trump, or she's done these horrible things, but they're not horrible enough to disqualify her for being president. But, I mean, biases are not— They're part of human nature. They are part of how we work. In fact, can I give a story of my own implicit bias that showed up just a couple of days ago.

0:20:07 Thomas: Right. Right.

0:20:26 Alonzo: I was going through Facebook and I saw this video of a person who had brought in a piece of artwork to be appraised. I mean, there's these television shows that appraise artwork and let you know if you have anything great. According to the caption, piece of artwork was worth about a million dollars. And I was watching it and there were captions. I had the sound off and I was watching the captions. There was a tall elderly man and a shorter female who were talking.

And I'd made the assumption that the tall man was the appraiser and the woman was the person who brought in the artwork to be appraised. And, I was listening to her or reading the captions, watching the woman trying to figure out what her reaction is going to be when she discovers that this was a million-dollar piece of art, and when it got to that part in the captions, she had no reaction. I was fully confused for a while until I rewound it and looked at it, and then I had made an assumption based on gender, which was entirely inappropriate. And, I mean, it's a wrong thing to do, but, I means, I have the evidence there that I did it. And biases, like I said, are not limited to one party or the other.

0:21:22 Thomas: Yeah. Sure.

0:21:44 Thomas: What do you know about, how do we fight this on either side? I mean, what's the best way to try to keep these in check?

0:21:49 Alonzo: Well, for lots of things like in resumes, and it also happens when you're reviewing articles or reviewing people for promotion, one of the best things to do is to have a blind review, if you can possibly do that.

0:22:04 Thomas: Yeah, that makes sense.

0:22:05 Alonzo: For example, there was an orchestra that switched the way in which they auditioned players and had them audition behind the screen that the reviewers didn't get to see the genders of people who are coming into audition. And after doing this for a while, they discovered that they had increased the rate at which they were hiring female players by 33%. So obviously, Obviously, they were judging their players according to gender without realizing it.

0:22:27 Thomas: Yeah, I think I read about that, yeah.

0:22:34 Thomas: That's so interesting. I wish there, I wish everybody was on board with trying to do more things like this to eliminate bias. Because that made a huge difference. I think there was so much bias going on. There were very few female members. I remember I read that story on that. So that's very interesting. So are we left with in terms of how this is functioning in this election, in terms of the things you care about, ethics and everything? I think that's kind of where you left off. Implicit bias, you believe, is the best explanation for why so many conservatives are ignoring these really bad qualities about Trump, focusing more on the same qualities of Clinton, even though there's less proof for them.

0:23:16 Alonzo: Right. And actually, the evidence that Clinton is dishonest or whatever is actually quite poor, particularly with respect to the honesty claim. PolitiFact is an organization that fact-checks the claims that politicians make and ranks them as being true or half-true, or pants-on-fire, which means that it's completely and absolutely false. If we look at Clinton's overall score, Clinton was ranked as, of 3,300 politicians and political organizations, conversations, she was number 10 in terms of honesty. I mean, that's not the top 10%. It was number 10 out of 3,300 in terms of honesty.

0:23:57 Thomas: Yeah.

0:23:58 Alonzo: Trump is pie from the bottom.

0:24:01 Thomas: I want to find the people who are below him. That would be a pretty interesting list.

0:24:05 Alonzo: One is Michelle Bachman. I don't remember the rest of them off the top of my head. She was at the bottom, but Anyway, like I said, the evidence isn't even close that she's guilty of being dishonest, and yet people have migrated to this. Now, sex bias is one of the explanations. There are other explanations. Like I said, human beings are complex creatures. Anybody who says that I have the one true answer to this is oversimplifying things. Another one is simple tribal beliefs. You have people in a Republican culture surrounded by other people who are in the same culture. And it would be very difficult psychologically for them to give up that culture and adopt a set of beliefs that aren't shared in that community. They'd be outsiders. They would lose their connection to that community, so they adopt the beliefs of the community.

0:24:07 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Oh, man.

0:25:02 Alonzo: And that community has to support Trump. That's one of the reasons Trump's going going to get a large number of votes, in spite of the fact that all that's come out about it is because people need to belong to a community.

0:25:16 Thomas: Yeah. That's part of I've talked a lot on this show about the normalization of Trump. And I think that's that's part of what you're saying. I think it's the idea that because there are these things as Republicans and Democrats in these major parties, I think there's been a lot of ignoring just how truly rotten Trump is as a candidate because we start to fit him. Even I think even people on both sides do this to a certain extent. They start to fit them, Trump and Clinton, into these little categories of, well, here's the Republican, here is the Democrat, kind of. And we start to lose sight of just how abnormal he is as a candidate. And I think that kind of goes with what you're saying. What do you think?

0:25:58 Alonzo: Well, yeah, he is the Republican nominee. So if you are a Republican, he effectively is your tribal representative. And to abandon Trump is is to abandon the tribe, and that's just too costly for somebody, for certain people to do.

0:26:13 Thomas: Right. Not everyone, though.

0:26:15 Alonzo: Not everyone.

0:26:16 Thomas: Some people have abandoned the tribe, or at least kind of, or decided the tribe actually is something else now. It's not it's not being represented by Trump, I guess.

0:26:25 Alonzo: Yeah, well, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party both are actually a mixture of several tribes, or several groups. On the Republican side, you have your libertarians, you have your evangelicals. On the Democratic side, you have union members and the educated elite. And they form subgroups. And there's a subgroup of Republicans that are abandoning Trump. And effectively, those are the elected politicians. Those are the people who are in government. They know how government works, and they look at what's Trump going to do when Trump gets in here, and they don't like it.

0:26:30 Thomas: Mm hmm. Yeah.

0:27:01 Alonzo: So they don't want Trump in their playground, as it were, causing trouble.

0:27:06 Thomas: Right. So another topic that's been really interesting to me throughout this election is the people who are insisting on voting third party. And I'm wondering if you as an ethicist, an atheist ethicist, have any thoughts on that because it's a complex question but for me, I just to clear up how I want to talk about it, there's of course, there may be a difference between for example, I live in California a state that's definitely going to Hillary there may be a difference between me saying, okay I'm going to vote third party to try to get a third party going or something, you know, to try, to try to a third-party into the next election, maybe, or something like that. Difference between that, but let's assume people who are even in swing states or regardless of where they are, they insist that, no, these, these two candidates are terrible. I want to vote for somebody else. There's so many interesting ethical questions there. Well, I'll just start off in general. Is that something you've thought a lot about or have any general thoughts on?

0:27:35 Alonzo: Well, I used to be a very active member of the Libertarian Party when I first started. So, I mean, I put a lot of work into that and, of course, voted for my share of Libertarians. I campaigned for the Libertarian Party. Drove around.

0:28:08 Thomas: Uh-huh.

0:28:17 Thomas: Ooh, you sound like a a good person to ask.

0:28:19 Alonzo: When I was in Montana, I drove around with the Libertarian candidate for governor. I ran his office. Now, the Libertarian Party in Montana wasn't the biggest party in the world, so we're not talking about a huge organization. But, yeah, I put a lot of work into the Libertarian Party. So, yeah. I do know something about participation in our political system.

0:28:43 Thomas: I suppose now I'm curious as to what changed. Or, are you, do you still consider yourself a libertarian, or have you shifted into Democrat or somewhere else entirely?

0:28:53 Alonzo: Right now, I'm an independent. I gave up on the libertarian philosophy, and it was a philosophical reason why I gave it up. Up. I mean, at the time, like people tended to be, I was a diehard libertarian. There is no way that any rational person could reject these ideas. They're obviously true. And yet I had to square that with the fact that there are a lot of intelligent people out there who seem to be rejecting these ideas.

0:29:19 Thomas: Yeah.

0:29:19 Alonzo: So I went to one of my libertarian friends and said, what type of arguments are they using against this? And he gave me an article which contained David Hume's is-ought argument. David Hume's argument is, if you start off with a bunch of is premises, man is a rational animal. That's what the libertarians use. And then you switch to a bunch of ought conclusions. Man ought to behave rationally. You need to explain that gap between is and ought. And there are a lot of moral systems who don't do that. I took Hume's argument, went back to the libertarian literature. I found exactly where this gap took place. There is premises, there are conclusions, and there's this gap in the middle that they don't cover. And within 24 hours, I'd given up the libertarians.

0:30:05 Thomas: Oh, wow. Because I am well familiar with the problem, but I've never thought about it as regards libertarianism. Can you tell me where in there you thought there was a disconnect.

0:30:16 Alonzo: Ayn Rand, another libertarian, started off with the idea that man, qua man, man is a rational animal. That's how human beings, that's what makes human beings unique. It's their essential nature. And then it makes a leap, which I can't justify because it can't be justified, that man ought to behave rationally, that this is just, which for them means a rational self-interest, this is what human beings ought to do, and just can't go from the is to the ought. I started questioning, I started questioning the whole man is a rational animal thing as well.

0:30:47 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say, because that's actually where you lose me. It wasn't in the is-ought problem, but I don't, yeah, I think government is precisely, can be helpful when humans aren't acting rationally, or maybe when, even when they are, but it's bad for other humans, you suppose. So now you consider yourself independent. So that's interesting that for you, where you're sitting, it sounds like it was pretty easy to say, oh, I know who I'm voting for in November.

0:31:22 Alonzo: This November, yes, I have. I've switched

0:31:24 Thomas: Maybe not always, but in this November.

0:31:27 Alonzo: Back and and forth on the presidential election. I voted for Reagan and Papa Bush, as I call them. And I actually considered that they were good presidents. And then I switched to Clinton when Clinton ran because I thought Clinton did a better job or had a better position than

0:31:42 Thomas: Well, you only vote for the winning presidents, it seems like.

0:31:46 Alonzo: Until I voted for Gore, yes. And he did win, in a sense.

0:31:47 Thomas: Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your perfect record was almost intact.

0:31:52 Alonzo: He did win the popular vote. So I consider myself as still having a perfect record. And I hope I can. And actually, no, the second Bush election, I didn't vote for the one. I voted for Kerry and I lost. I'm Both sides. Anyway, so you asked about the ethics of voting third party, um,

0:32:01 Thomas: Oh, okay. So close. Yeah, in this particular election, especially where the danger, because let me put the argument that everybody keeps giving to me. They're saying, look, we always are faced with the lesser of two evils. We're always faced with a lesser of evils, there's always you got to vote for this person to stop this person, etc, etc. And, and, and we're tired of it. I don't want to vote for, you who I need to vote for to stop someone else. I want to vot for who I think is the best candidate. Let's assume for the sake of argument, just to talk about the ethical dilemma in this, let's assume there is a third party candidate that a particular voter finds better than the other two candidates. What do you think about the ethics involved in that? Is it right to vote, to maybe throw away your vote essentially. It strikes me as the difference between a rights-based philosophy and a consequentialist philosophy. I've talked a little bit about that, but what do you think?

0:32:09 Alonzo: Sure.

0:32:25 Alonzo: Well, A third party candidate gives the advantage to the major party candidate that least represents your views, so it's a pretty foolish thing to do.

0:33:13 Thomas: Can you explain that more? Why do you look at it that way specifically? Whereas I might come back if I were this hypothetical third-party person and say, no, I'm supporting the candidate I want.

0:33:14 Alonzo: Right.

0:33:24 Alonzo: But what is it, what would it take for that candidate to win, in order for that party to win, in our type of political system? Now, in a parliamentary system, like they have in England, this isn't true, but we don't live in England, we're assuming that we're applying this to the American electoral system, and this is where whoever gets the most votes wins. You have your third party candidate, at this point isn't going to get the most votes, that means, um, the candidate that's the major candidate that you would have voted for Is Put It, the

0:33:55 Thomas: So you're saying second best, maybe like second closest to your views.

0:33:58 Alonzo: Lesser of the two evils, And Right.

0:34:00 Thomas: Sure. Under your view. Yeah.

0:34:01 Alonzo: Is put at a disadvantage because you've taken that vote away from that person and put it someplace else. Or that even applies to the decision not to vote, which means that the candidate who least represents your views is the candidate that you're putting at an advantage. And that's simply a fact of the system. Getting back to the, you have your third party, you want your third body to be the party that starts winning elections, Right? In our type of political system, the only way that's going to happen is if that party grows to represent a substantial portion of the population, 40% of the population. So that, you know, you're going to have the other, you've going to get your other 10% from the moderate, from the middle, people who don't belong to either party. Now, in order to grow your party up to that percentage, you are going to have to start making alliances.

You are going have to try to bring in groups where you don't don't agree with everything that they say. But you're going to say, we're going to work with you even though we don't agree on these matters because by working together, we can actually start to win elections. So now you're going to form a larger group that has 40% of the people, and the voters in that group now are going to find that group supporting policies that they don't like.

0:34:19 Thomas: Right. Okay. Right?

0:35:16 Alonzo: Just like the lesser of two evils. Now your third party is now becoming the lesser of two evils. And the more like the greater its chances of actually winning the election, the more it's going to be the lesser of two evils rather than the party, the narrow party that you originally liked and supported.

0:35:17 Thomas: Like what? Right, right.

0:35:35 Thomas: That makes sense. Just mathematically, the broader you have to make it, it's always going to have things that, you know, that you don't like because it, because the number of people who support all of your exact views is going to be not a majority ever, really, most likely, unless you just line up exactly with one of the major parties.

0:35:54 Alonzo: When I was a member of the Libertarian Party, the strategy, that is the correct word for it, that the libertarians adopted was that we're going to convert huge quantities of people to our philosophy, and that's how we're gonna win elections. And that's not going to happen. You look at the world, the diversity of beliefs in the world today, and the idea that you're gonna convert a huge portion of the population to this one narrow philosophy, that's not the way human beings work. So the only other option is to start bringing people into your libertarian party who don't fully share libertarian views. You don't want the ones who are close, but aren't fully members. And to do that, you're going to say, we're going to abandon these libertarian principles and adopt those things instead, which we don't agree with, but we want your vote.

0:36:49 Alonzo: But now you're abandoning your libertarian principles by definition in order to win elections. And then, like I said, then you become the lesser of two evils rather than the ideologically pure party that you liked at the beginning. But the ideologically pure party will remain perpetually small and ineffective.

0:36:58 Thomas: Right.

0:37:08 Thomas: It almost sounds like you think it's merely a consequence, a reality of our system that it just has to be this way. Essentially, we're kind of stuck with two major parties one way or the other. Is that right?

0:37:20 Alonzo: Right. And that's an effect of the fact that we live in our political system, 50% of the votes plus one, a majority, or actually a plurality in many cases, is the party that's going to win the election. And if you have three parties, let's say three parties each getting between 30% and 40% of the vote, then all it's going to take is for two of those parties to unite, and then the third one is perpetually out. Out.

0:37:20 Thomas: Yeah.

0:37:46 Thomas: Yeah. Do you think we should change our voting system to kind of get rid of that? I mean, would you, is that something you think we should do? Or is it better to just have this two party system?

0:37:56 Alonzo: So I would argue that it would be a good idea to change our system, whether it's realistic or not. I don't know. There are advantages to the parliamentary system in that it does allow minority parties to have a voice if the minority party is large enough. So you can get Greens elected in England because they only need 5% of the vote. So now our system anything that's below like 30% has absolutely no chance. But if you say, if it becomes a system where if you get 6% of the vote, you get representation, well, in this election, the Libertarian Party probably would have gotten representation in that system because right now they're pulling around 6%.

0:38:16 Thomas: Hmm.

0:38:40 Thomas: Right. What about something like the ranked voting where that would allow me to say, well, I'm, if for example, I was a libertarian, I can say, Well, I most in line with that, but then second, I'll go for Clinton. And then, you a hundredth, I'd go for Trump. Maybe I'll write in 99 candidates for 98 candidates. What do you think about something like that?

0:38:58 Alonzo: Yep, those possibilities for altering the party system. California has an interesting system for running for the Senate. That is, everybody runs in the primary regardless of their party affiliation. I mean, you're in California, you know this. And, right,

0:39:12 Thomas: Sure, I'll pretend I knew that. No, I did at one point and then I forgot. So you'll have Democrats running against each other for the for the main election.

0:39:20 Alonzo: It turns out in this election, in the primary, both of the first and second vote-getters in the primary were both members of the Democratic Party. So the Republicans don't have a candidate in the November election. It's one Democrat against another Democrat. And in that type of system, it may be possible to get a third party, party into that position.

0:39:43 Thomas: So I've been very worried about I would say, you know, a year ago or something when Bernie was in it and when it was looking I was sort of thinking, oh, what if we had another viable party? And then something I heard or read, I can't remember which, made me really stop and reconsider that desire to the point where now I'm glad we have the two major parties. Because I feel like Trump's 35 to 40 percent of supporters are so diehard that if we split off at all, it'll allow that really motivated kind of 30, 35, 40 percent of people to assume power. And I'm kind of glad that that's not the case.

0:40:30 Thomas: So it's I'm also glad to hear you say that, it's sort of reinforcing that belief in my mind now, that I hear you say this about the two parties we're kind of stuck with.

0:40:39 Alonzo: Okay, so is that a confirmation bias, or are we actually being objective here?

0:40:43 Thomas: Could be, could be just a confirmation bias. Well, did we get all the way through the blog post before we went into the third-party questions, or is there anything else we should go over from that?

0:40:55 Alonzo: A final concern with it. Back To your question of the original reason that I wrote the blog post is that we have people who are effectively ignoring moral principles that people agree with, but they're tossing them aside, for the case of effectively political expediency, which is we have a candidate who is fundamentally, every three minutes he says something that's false. That doesn't mean he's lying. He might actually believe what he says is false, given Trump that he obviously believes some fairly strange things, that's fundamentally destructive to society. We need honesty in order for society to function. We need people to of an attitude that repaying debts is important, that keeping promises is important.

0:40:57 Thomas: All right.

0:41:42 Alonzo: That treating other people with respect is important and without these things, we're losing a basic foundation on which society is built. And right now, Trump is a sledgehammer to those foundational principles. That's worrisome.

0:41:56 Thomas: Yeah. Absolutely. Any more? So closing thoughts before we call it a day here? I was very persuaded by the blog post. Especially those resume experiments that you mentioned, it makes a ton of sense, and it's really interesting to see how our implicit biases are affecting potentially our politics here. Any closing thoughts from you?

0:42:17 Alonzo: Right. Well, it does relate to what you said about the people who say that I'm not sexist, that I am basing my views of the candidates, my opinion of the candidate, on these other criteria, but I'm adopting the criteria that actually supports a sexist conclusion. And there is another thing that shows up in these studies that I think is worth mentioning, is that it turns out that the more objective that a person believes themselves to be, the stronger their biases are.

0:42:47 Thomas: Oh, no way. Uh-oh. I'm in trouble then. We're all in trouble.

0:42:47 Alonzo: Yeah. So the person who looks at the resumes, and then one of the questions they asked is, did you base your decision on objective criteria, rank your objectivity from one to nine, and the people who gave the nine showed the greatest bias, and the people who were on the other end actually had the least bias. The people who were were aware of their bias and admitted it, were able to combat their bias and make a more objective evaluation of the candidates. And the people who denied that they had a bias, that it was affecting their decisions, those are the ones where the bias was strongest.

0:43:32 Thomas: Wow, that's fascinating. I am glad you added that. So let that be a lesson to us. I guess we all better work on our biases and work on recognizing them. And then that sounds like that's, well, maybe this is causation versus correlation, but it sounds like that could be a good way to fight those biases.

0:43:46 Alonzo: Well, Think of scientists. Scientists know that they have a confirmation bias with respect to observations, that they will interpret what they see in a way that supports the hypothesis that they want to defend. And scientists don't go around saying, I'm a scientist, therefore I'm objective, and we can take all of these observations at whatever I assign to them. They say, scientists say, I know I'm a human being, I have confirmation bias, so I need to design my experiments in such a way to eliminate these biases. They don't say that they're unbiased or they don't have to worry about this. They admit the bias, and they use that fact in designing their experiments. Now, what these conclusions say about evaluating the resumes is that we should do the same thing.

0:44:36 Alonzo: We shouldn't deny our biases. They exist. They are of different strengths and different people, and there are some people who measure as having no biases. That does happen. But we should be aware that we have a potential of thinking this way, admit it where it exists, like I admitted it with respect to that video that I saw, and then try to make certain that you're overcoming your biases when you make these evaluations.

0:45:00 Thomas: I like it, that's a good point. Alright, thanks so much Alonzo Fyfe, That is atheistethicist.blogspot.com you want to point people to?

0:45:05 Alonzo: My pleasure! Well, that would be it for now.

0:45:12 Thomas: Awesome, atheistethicist.blogspot.com. Thanks for coming on, really interesting conversation.

0:45:17 Alonzo: My pleasure.

0:45:39 Thomas: All right, that's it for today's episode. Don't think I have anything significant to announce. I'll just say I got another great one planned for Thursday, and I'll see you then. Thanks for listening.