SIO27: What Grounds Our Morals? With Aaron Rabi

Transcript

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

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 27. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Got a really fascinating chat for you today. I loved it. I hope you're a fan of philosophy, or maybe metaethics, ethics, philosophy, morality, all that kind of stuff, because I am, and I had a lot of questions for someone who focuses on that field. However, before we get to that, I've got to make an announcement, which is I have the dates and venues for my meetups in Europe. I'm very excited about this. In Paris, on Friday, March 31st, at 9pm local time, I will be at, oh my gosh, I'm not going to try to pronounce it, I don't speak French in any way, shape, or form, or have I even taken a class, I took Spanish, but anyway, Le Café des Chats, which is a cat cafe of some kind, but that's, definitely, if you're around the area, I would love to meet you.

0:01:27 Thomas: Going to be just a small, intimate meetup, drinks, maybe dessert, something like that, after dinner kind of thing, and I already got a couple confirmed, uh, but, uh, yeah, it would be great to meet anybody who is around the area. I would love to see you, but if not, you know, there's more cats for me. So I, I'm excited just at the cat cafe idea. And then in London, April 5th, that's, it's Wednesday at 6:30. I will be at the Queen's Head in London. That's that, 66 Actin Street, 6:30 is the time on that one, gonna have a few drinks, same sort of thing. I think we might have a few more people from, from there because there are more people around London who listen to the show. But yeah, very excited.

0:02:12 Thomas: I'm thrilled to meet listeners anytime I do. I've had nothing but positive experience with that, because I think it takes a special kind of intelligent listener to enjoy a show as boring as mine. Let's face it. No, just kidding, but not really. Or am I? Anyway, those are the two events. The events are on Facebook, so that's an easy way to know where to go, when it is, facebook.com/thomaspodcast, send me a friend request, the events, I've shared them out, or if you can't find them, if you need any more details, feel free to email me, thomas@seriouspod.com. Okay, on to today's show. So Aaron Rabi has been on the show before, speaking about free will, he's a philosopher, he actually specializes more in ethics, and I have always wondered, for the longest time, I have, I think, my theory is that everything boils down to consequences, that despite the fact that there are these other rights and rules and stuff, I think it all, in the end, boils down to consequentialism.

0:03:10 Thomas: Aaron disagrees a little bit, and so you'll have to find out the results of the discussion. I absolutely loved this discussion. And I hope if anybody's new to philosophy or maybe not as interested in philosophical questions as I am, I hope you'll still enjoy it. It is a little philosophy heavy, but hopefully you enjoy that as much as I do. So with that said, let's get to Aaron Rabi.

0:03:44 Thomas: Joining me right now back for the second time is Aaron, a philosopher you may remember from SIO 11 when we talked about free will. How you doing Aaron?

0:03:53 Aaron: I'm doing all right, Breeder. How are you doing? Congratulations.

0:04:00 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, how many kids do you have? Okay, so you can, you can shame me for, yeah.

0:04:02 Aaron: I have zero, and it's going to remain that way. Oh, I can and will, repeatedly, hopefully.

0:04:09 Thomas: Yeah, okay. OK, but is it but do you have zero out of a choice or is this just accidental? Like you just.

0:04:11 Aaron: Absolutely. No, entirely by choice, pretty much. I mean, you know, we discussed last time that nobody has choice, right? But insofar as anyone has choice. Yes, I think it's not.

0:04:17 Thomas: OK. Oh, OK. Wow. That's true. So there's there's no reason to shame me for my ethics then.

0:04:27 Aaron: No. There's no reason to shame you. You didn't have any say in the matter. Factors way beyond your control

0:04:29 Thomas: OK. Unless unless unless I would. Yeah. Unless I would respond to such shaming and change my behavior. I don't know. So that's it.

0:04:34 Aaron: Right Right. I think it's Yeah.

0:04:41 Thomas: That's interesting right away. So you, you, I mean, this isn't what we're here to talk about, but just for fun, you're a, you have made a conscious choice. When I spoke with Travis, uh, is that, are the arguments he made? Is that anything like the reason you're not having kids or is it a coincidence?

0:04:45 Aaron: Those Are some of the reasons. I also didn't, I don't feel like I'm, um, particularly well disposed personality wise to have kids. I'm, I'm somewhat of a strong introvert, and I was concerned about that, and so there might have been a time where it could have happened and it could've worked out, but I didn't, also just didn't feel ever financially in a place where that would be a functional choice for me. Like, I, I haven't felt functionally stable enough financially to have a pet, much less another human being. Uh, so that was another reason. And then, yeah, I just didn't, I didn't want to, I wanted to do other things. I

0:05:32 Thomas: I'm just trying to gauge how much you actually are warranted and your shaming of me and your breeding shaming at me. That's all.

0:05:39 Aaron: I mean, I think, I think Travis made a good, uh, came to a good middle ground on that one, where he said, you know, the first one's free, you can have that one, and then after that, like, you should really consider adoption if you want a second one. And you should have a second one so that they have one to play with, right?

0:05:53 Thomas: Yeah, exactly.

0:05:54 Aaron: So that someone distracts them. Yeah.

0:05:54 Thomas: Well, and it's so funny, though, Because I still don't, I mean, I haven't read all of his publications and stuff, and obviously I've I'm coming at it from a far more amateur level, but I still would think of it personally in terms of is it right to bring a being in without their permission into the world. And in which case, one kid versus two kids is not going to be as different. I think it still is different because the other concerns still matter. But it's funny that for him, it was all about, it's kind of interesting that the argument is all about you have a right to do this kind of thing. But then when you get to the second one, it is like you have already done it. So, you know, you don't get to exercise that right twice.

0:06:35 Thomas: Twice. But that just goes to show how, I suppose, coming from different moral backgrounds can kind of lead you to different conclusions, which is a great segue into what we wanted to talk about today, which I think it'll be good to do some basics for people, especially me, but anyone else who's newer to philosophy to talk about ethics, which, I'm told, is your area of expertise. Expertise oh

0:06:35 Aaron: I Absolutely. Um, and so I want to try to do this in a way that doesn't, isn't just like a a series of definitions and terms that'll get very boring. Um, so I'm going to try and figure out some way to work through this

0:07:11 Thomas: Don't worry, I'll let you know if you get boring, I'm, I'm yeah.

0:07:12 Aaron: Yeah. Let me know. Let me know when I get boring. It's not, it's on the, if question

0:07:15 Thomas: I will I will, you've already now, that you've already opened it up with the breeder shaming, I can start, I'll just let it fly with it, yeah, you're being boring. You're getting bored, uh, yeah, and then also, um, an open question that I still have, I've had for quite a while, and is actually something that I think Sam Harris has talked about too, is Isn't everything consequentialism, and he gets a ton of pushback for that. And it'd be interesting. I think when I've talked with, oh, who did I talk to? I've, I've talking to another philosopher about this. Oh, I know. I had the guy on who won his essay challenge. Um, Sam Harris did an essay challenge and he did like a, I don't know, 10, $20,000 prize to whoever would write an essay, uh, to kind of counter his Moral Landscape book. Do you remember that?

0:07:17 Aaron: Yeah. Academic shaming as soon as possible.

0:07:34 Aaron: Mm-hmm. Yes,

0:08:00 Thomas: Yeah. I, I had, I, uh had the, I have the guy who won that. And one of the things he said was it it falls roughly if you pull all of philosophers, it's kind of like a third, a third a third when it comes to the different moral theories so that he was trying to present more of like, well, it is there is not just consequentialism. There's not, you know, there's it's split. Experts are split on this. And and Sam Harris's response and what I said to Travis when I recorded with him was even when you're talking about these rights, it still sounds to me like you're telling me. About consequences. If we all did X, then, you know, that, that wouldn't turn out great for us or whatever it may be. So that's going to be another question that I would love to, to hear your answer on, which is how isn't, or maybe it is, I don't know how, how is, or isn't every moral philosophy consequences ultimately, but all That aside, why don't we maybe tackle some basics? What do you think, okay.

0:08:00 Aaron: Absolutely. Sure. Yeah, and I think, yeah, absolutely. So here's how, in theory, not all systems are consequentialism, and then we can discuss how, in practice, do they all collapse into consequentialist, which I think is your concern, and Sam Harris's concern, I believe. So in theory, not everything is is consequentialism, because we can take an ethical action and we can divide it up either into its consequences, into the action itself, or into the intentions of the action. And we can assert that what is really important is either the nature of the reaction itself, or its consequences, or your intention, or some mix of those three. And It's quite coherent to have a theory that says an action is good or bad because of the nature of that action, independent of consequences. So I can give you an example that you probably agree with, which is torture. You think torture is wrong even if I could prove to you that torture gives good consequences, I think.

0:09:40 Thomas: Okay. Uh, Yeah, probably, but it, but the reason, I mean, not to start the argument already, but the raison it's wrong is because of, uh, you know, the consequences of how bad it is. I mean, if, if torture were just a walk in the park, it, it would be totally different, um, how we'd think of it. Like, it still is ultimately the consequences are terrible on our humanity and on the person and on everything to me. But

0:10:25 Aaron: So I think the question then becomes, can we talk about the nature of an action as being wrong without, you, in, in the theoretical world, there is consequentialism, right? There's the view that, you, that makes sense straightforwardly to you and most people, which is a good action is one that produces good consequences, and you can define that in a bunch of different ways. And then you have other theories, like deontology, is the term that's most commonly used for, as, like, a catch-all term for all the theories that aren't strictly consequentialist theories, that are, like, saying you can't violate someone's rights, no, no matter how many good consequences it produces, for violating their rights.

0:11:06 Thomas: Right.

0:11:06 Aaron: And then you have other theories that are sort of more minor theories, like virtue theory, which is a theory that right kind of action is the kind of reaction that builds a good character. So whatever action habituates a human being into being a better human being is the kinds of actions that you should promote in that person. So it's sort of a slightly different way to do it.

0:11:25 Thomas: Yeah those are the three major ones that I know offhand.

0:11:28 Aaron: There's also, include, I want to include Um, Divine command theory is is debunked as far as I would say like, there's no one, no one who really holds, I think, reasonably, to a full throat of divine command therapy, but that's a whole separate, I think, problem. Um, there is also the ethics of care, which is a new one that's, um, evolved out of the feminist sort of ethics, that has to do with, uh, an ethics based in empathy as being the the right way to to think about how to to be moral. And that's, um, I think, got a lot of value to it. And then there's also pragmatism, which is, um, sort of hard to pin down, is what exactly it is. Essentially, the the view of do what works, but, you know, that leaves open the question always of what works, and then it sort of falls back into a debate between the other theories.

0:11:30 Thomas: Divine command theory. Sure. Yeah right.

0:12:15 Thomas: Yeah. I think Massimo Pigliucci is a virtue ethicist, if I'm not mistaken. He's been on on the show, and he talked about that a little bit. It's sort of old school, isn't it?

0:12:21 Aaron: Yeah. It's Old school in that it comes out of Aristotle, and and the Greeks, and it comes out of the view that human, you know, a view that I'm actually very sympathetic to, that human beings don't have free will. Again, they, what they have is habit, and that we are made good by habit. And so you have to just put people in situations where they have to make the right moral choice over and over again, and that makes them better if they do it right. So as to your question, you've been asking repeatedly about how to make people better, I think habituation is probably the best answer.

0:12:54 Thomas: Yeah. But I suppose the one thing that maybe to talk about initially is, do you see a problem with, and I see this problem a lot when people talk about these easy knockdown arguments for utilitarianism, that there are an awful lot of concerns that simply aren't actually looking at the consequences properly. You know what I mean? Like, so a common example You'll hear is like, well, okay, what then? Well, then what's, who's to say, you go into the doctor's office and the doctor has like 10 patients and you're unconscious. And he's like, well, why don't I just take all this guy's organs? And I can, I can save 10 lives by killing this one innocent guy at the doctor, you know, surgeon.

And the response that, you know, Sam Harris and anyone who's interested in and, like, maintaining the idea that consequentialism is the right method, is think of the actual consequences of that. Like, think if we lived in a world where that was the norm, like, people just just made these decisions on their own, like, this is going to be the best thing, so I'll just kill this person and, like, I'll, I'll cure all these other people.

I mean, we would be horrified to live in a world where you could send your kid to the hospital and they just might not come back, for, you know, even though it's

0:13:18 Aaron: We Call

0:14:07 Thomas: A routine thing.

0:14:07 Aaron: Those Um, we Call those utilitarian monsters, that's The Term For that, yeah.

0:14:08 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, well, let's talk about that. Do you find, which side of that do you find convincing? I mean do you fine that to be a convincing argument against utilitarianism or do you think, as I tend to, that they're just not considering the overall consequences?

0:14:14 Aaron: Yeah.

0:14:28 Aaron: So I think that's a straw man version of the kind of attack that you can legitimately raise against utilitarianism. So if you have a real thoroughgoing utilitarianism that doesn't admit for any side constraints for what kind of behavior you're not allowed to use, I do think that you can justify certain things that seem morally problematic. And that's why most utilitarians that I see out there will make sense of side constraints one way or another. They may try to do it by claiming that those side constraints are what produce the best consequences, but they're not going to sort of ignore side constraints outright. And I think what you're asking is a good question, because if you sort of want to look at the basics of ethics, I think it's important to start with the fundamental understanding that there is no good answer. There Is only a series of less bad, bad answers, and that none of these systems is perfect, or it would have sort of won the day essentially.

0:15:13 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Right.

0:15:21 Aaron: Um, and I'm not, that's not just, you know, an argument from disagreement kind of fallacy. What I'm saying is each of these, I believe in a kind of value pluralism, like ethics is about a bunch of genuinely competing ethical preferences. There are real needs out there that are, um, seen in the different theories. So utilitarianism has one really strong moral moral intuition behind it, deontology has another, and it's not that one is better or worse, it's that they are naturally in tension, and that what we as ethicists have to do is figure out how to balance those tensions in our day-to-day lives.

0:15:56 Thomas: So deontology would be more along the lines of like you have certain rights or people have certain rights and you can't. But OK, so let me ask you then.

0:16:01 Aaron: Autonomy Thing Questions of autonomy, things like that. Yeah.

0:16:06 Thomas: OK, OK. So let me ask you, I guess, basically, what is a process that whoever is doing this work through the through the ages, whatever philosopher, how how are these rights determined? Like how did somebody like was there some argument where like here's a right that we have uh, and here's why, you know, like how, where did these come from? Cause they can't, we're all agreed here.

0:16:25 Aaron: Yeah. I Mean That's Hard Like There's

0:16:28 Thomas: They're not coming from

0:16:28 Aaron: A Whole big history Of rights, and it's, yeah, like it's crazy, because There Are Some people Who Think That The rights are totally made up. For example, there's, there's a great quote that one person described rights as nonsense on stilts. Like, this is just a completely, like, they're like saying we don't have rights, we're making the idea up and all pretending that it's true because it's functional.

0:16:28 Thomas: God. Yeah. We'll talk a little bit about it if you can.

0:16:47 Aaron: That's a good form of pragmatism right there.

0:16:47 Thomas: Yeah, that's, that'S what I, thatS kind of what I believe, but

0:16:51 Aaron: Other people come from like a natural rights view where they think that you start with like a state of nature, is the Lockean or Hobbes view. And in that state of natural, you have certain natural rights and freedoms, freedoms, and then you choose to give up some of those rights and freedoms when you engage in the social contract so that can be where the rights so

0:17:10 Thomas: I still want to know where these came from and then how we know what they are.

0:17:16 Aaron: This is starting to branch into like a meta ethics question where you want to know, like, what is the, where does morality come from, right?

0:17:18 Thomas: Sure. Well, yes and no. It could be Because still under the, I mean, there's a certain things that I think you and I can dismiss because, you know, I think we're both atheists and it's not really worth talking about. Like, it may be an interesting question to somebody else. Like, you know, where do these rights come from? Is it God or is it something else? I don't care about that because I don't believe there's God. So I think that the, if they come from anywhere, they have to come from us, right? Or would there be, let me, let me ask you this. Would there be an atheist or at least a non-religious way in which rights could come from nature?

0:17:23 Aaron: Sure.

0:17:50 Aaron: So That's a complicated question. Yes. The same way that math can come from nature and not from us.

0:18:03 Thomas: Okay, so it would have to be a function then. There would still have to be a process then of figuring out. We've got some mathematicians doing some work and discovering calculus and stuff. So what is that process? What is the equivalent of that process morally. Can you, I mean, can you give examples or just, right.

0:18:06 Aaron: Right. Yep.

0:18:47 Thomas: So, okay. So I guess what I'm getting at is again, once again, coming from my angle, which is that I think it all ultimately is tied to consequences. I would like to know if I'm wrong, there should be a way that people just, just let me know if you agree with this premise of what I'm trying to say here. If, if I'm wrong, there should be a way that philosophers, that humans can reason about rights we're agreeing they're not coming from anywhere externally. So they could reason about rights in a way that doesn't appeal to consequences. Does that sound right? Like if it's not, if consequentialism isn't ultimately the end all be all, there must be some way to speak about. And it sounds like.

0:18:55 Aaron: Mm hmm. Mm hmm, sure.

0:19:36 Thomas: Sure. Yeah.

0:19:55 Aaron: And I, yeah.

0:19:56 Thomas: Well, let me let me attempt at what I thought was an answer, which is and from my limited knowledge into this seems to be the answer, which is you appeal to instincts. You appeal to intuition. Like there's these that when I've taken, you know, like the one class I took on this, a lot of it was here's here's a here's a situation. Now here's another thought experiment situation. Use your intuition to kind of see which makes sense. And then that's sort of, honestly, from what I've seen, that's how a lot of this moral reasoning takes place. And what's interesting to me about that is that we know that human intuitions are nonsense in a lot OF cases. Like we know THAT our intuitions ARE BAD for a lot lot of things. And I'm wondering if that has had any impact on philosophy, on this type of reasoning. I mean, when you're up there in your tower philosophizing, I assume you have a tower,

0:20:09 Aaron: Mm-hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, I

0:20:54 Thomas: Right? All philosophers have a Tower. Okay. And You've got your armchair there, your comfy armchair. When you're philosophizing, are you, are we still relying on human intuitions as though they're like this sacred thing that that that will yield us answers, yeah?

0:20:55 Aaron: Do. It's ivory.

0:21:11 Aaron: Right. It's a good question. I think the answer we want to say is no. And I think that way that ethics has evolved is that we've moved, I think a lot of people have moved from a kind of an ethical absolutism to a more pluralistic view that takes into account a bit of epistemic humility about our understanding of the full nature of morality and that sort of thing. And so says that perhaps there are multiple moral systems that could all be, while inconsistent, could all be correct, that there could be a spectrum of correct moral systems. So I think there are ways in which we recognize the fallibility of our own perspective, for example, that I know that I'm growing up within a Western privileged position, and that deeply affects my own ethical perspectives.

0:22:01 Aaron: But we can also try to weed out what is that confirmation bias stuff and try to test our intuitions over and over again through thought experiments to the point where we hopefully find somewhat consistent principles that we can tend to work with. And I think, you know, this goes back, like you were saying, to the beginning, where it's like, I'm not going to be able to give you a great answer. There's no good solution to any of these problems. And I think any ethicist that suggests that there is a good solution is probably over zealously promoting their own perspective.

0:22:35 Thomas: Well, What problem do you mean, there's not a good solution to, just the fact that all of of the kind of three uh branches of moral philosophy, or whatever ethical systems that you've mentioned, uh, that there's challenges to all of them, is that what you mean?

0:22:49 Aaron: Yeah, there's challenges to all of them, and that those challenges relate to the fact that there are irreconcilable conflicts between certain basic moral necessities, necessity of autonomy versus necessity of community, for example, and that the best we're going to be able to do in ethics is never going to be a perfect solution. It's more often going to be a solution where we give up a little bit of one and a little bit of the other and try to find a compromise position of some sort.

0:23:23 Thomas: Interesting, yeah.

0:23:25 Aaron: And so, I'm sympathetic to your your question about it. Does everything collapse into consequentialism? Because I think in practice, human beings aren't going to do ethics that isn't including including consequentialism, there's no, and this is maybe my own personal bias again, I I do think that most things break down to maximizing pleasure and avoiding pain for people that we consider people who we need to protect and take care of, and that You know, utilitarianism says that should include everybody, and that's, I think, not an unreasonable position, especially when you apply certain side constraints about, you can't violate people's autonomy in order to maximize utility for, for example. So I think, yeah.

0:24:04 Thomas: So, It's Those side Constraints that you think are the the reason that you wouldn't go all in on consequentialism, you know? Is that what You're saying, so

0:24:12 Aaron: Yeah. Yeah, Sort of like you would say that any deontology that talks about the nature of a good action versus a bad action is going to inherently have to talk about the consequences of that action. I think any fully functional utilitarianism is going to accept certain side constraints for what can be done in order to maximize utility. And while while they might claim that those side constraints in turn actually maximize utility, like the hospital example, right? If you don't cut people up and everyone knows that, more people go to hospitals. So it's a valuable side constraint. But I also think that you can make cases where even if the side constraint would produce greater utility, you're not going to violate the side restraint.

0:24:57 Thomas: I suppose maybe, um, challenge that you and I are having right now is that it sounds like you, I should have found somebody who's like strongly, uh, deontology kind of advocate, like just thinks that's The be All End All because Because Because I think everything boils down to consequences, and you think that, um, it sounds like you're, in something like a high percentage of agreement, except with these certain side constraints and yeah.

0:25:08 Aaron: Yeah, and I don't even know if, I mean.

0:25:21 Aaron: I mean, I believe in the sort of irreducible complexity of moral reasoning. I don't think that you can, and like, I've had people sort of call me out and say, look, when you reduce everything to pain and pleasure, you're ignoring certain real complexities of consciousness and why people might be choosing to act in the ways that they act. And so I think, you know, to defend the deontological position, I think you don't want to say that all of it is really just consequentialism. You want to saying, look, we shouldn't violate people's autonomy, no matter the consequences, even if you can prove that there would never be a situation in which violating their autonomy produced good consequences.

0:26:04 Thomas: Yeah.

0:26:04 Aaron: You don't wanna reduce it.

0:26:04 Thomas: Okay. So I guess let me, maybe, maybe what we should do is I'll try to give you my view. Cause this is something I think about a lot and then you can just poke holes in that and that would be, that would be excellent. Cause I, I think that ultimately, I think things like rights and things like, I suppose, these side constraints you're talking about, I think they're just approximations for consequences. I think there are things where our instincts are that the consequences could be so bad that we don't even want to mess with it. So it's something where it's like, sure, even though it appears as though in this situation X that every consequence will end up being okay, okay, I don't know whether it's through evolution or through whatever it is.

We think that it's so risky, like it's so fraught with kind of danger. Like when you talk about killing someone for the benefit of others, it's such a gruesome thing and it's such a high cost thing that we don't want to commit to there being a situation where it could be okay because of all the times that it is horrible.

0:26:13 Aaron: Sure. That's my skill.

0:27:10 Thomas: You know what I mean? So my theory is that it's sort of an approximation for consequences. It's like a rule that works out most of the time. And so therefore, some people think of the rule as the thing in itself, when in reality, in my view, the rule works because the consequences almost always line up.

0:27:26 Aaron: Yeah. Uh-huh. Well, I mean, it's an interesting question. The etymology of deontology is actually that it's rules. It's what the word means is that it's rule-based or duty-based. And then you can sort of wonder, well, isn't all of ethics in a sense sort of like that? And there are – within utilitarianism, there's rule utilitarianist versus act utilitarian. So there are consequentialists who think the best thing to do is adopt a bunch of general rules that produce the best results over time versus ones that think –

0:27:58 Thomas: Yeah, because you could take an even more meta view of it and say, even if it were the case that the rules aren't right all the time. Like, let's say, hypothetically, if we accept a utilitarian view, we accept consequentialist view, just hypothetically. We could then, which I think is kind of what you're saying, we could still look at the situation, look at the world and say, well, you know what? We have a, we got a lot of people on this planet and most of them, if not maybe all of them, are not qualified to be making these judgments all the time on what yields the best consequences for the most people. It's just too complicated.

0:28:02 Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. Mm

0:28:41 Thomas: So Therefore, we have general rules that in general are pretty much always going to be the case. And we want to make sure another good, another potential consequence is reliability. I want to know that you're not just going to knife me in the back because you might do some calculation that it's better for the world or something. So all those kind of external goods could then yield you to a view where you think it's best that we all have these rules that we follow that kind of approximate these good consequences. Does that make sense?

0:28:42 Aaron: Hmm.

0:29:17 Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that's a reasonable one, one reasonable explanation for the way that this kind of this thinking in this debate has evolved. One of my favorite stories from grad school, one of my Eastern philosophy, I did Eastern ethics a lot as well. And we talked about the ethics of Buddhism. And in Buddhism, in many of the major paths, you start out as a rule utilitarian before you're enlightened. So up until the point that you achieve enlightenment, you have to follow the rules of Buddhism, like non-violence, all that sort of stuff. Once you become enlightened, you switch over to an act utilitarian and you can do whatever you want as long as you believe because you're perfect and enlightened, You're not going to be wrong. You can do whatever you want, knowing that it will produce the greatest enlightenment for the greatest number of beings.

0:30:05 Thomas: Right.

0:30:05 Aaron: So, yeah,

0:30:05 Thomas: So it's like in their philosophy, you've kind of graduated to the ability, the level to where you're able to make those complex complex calculations.

0:30:13 Aaron: And I think there's some view within ethics that like, for a lot of normal human beings, heuristics and rules are the way to go. And then the more you dive into it, the more kind of particularist you get, the more you start to focus in on, like, situations and get a little bit more fine grained and things.

0:30:14 Thomas: Yeah. Right.

0:30:33 Aaron: So, yeah.

0:30:34 Thomas: Well, I, so just to, just to cover another area that I think about a lot on this and get your thoughts on it. Um, one once again, coming from my perspective that everything boils down consequences, there's a counter that there are these rights that we have that are not ultimately maybe tied to consequences. And the counter to That is always, why are there these rights that are good consequences? Like, no one ever talks about a right. You have a right to be run over on the street. Like, nobody ever talks about rights that are bad. Bad There are only ever things that for the most part yield good consequences, and that seems kind of curious if in

0:31:17 Aaron: Well, We preserve the right for terrible free speech. That's a right to something terrible.

0:31:20 Thomas: It's not a right to, we don't think of that in terms of, I have a right to have somebody say something terrible to me. We think of that in terms of, we all have this right, which is a good thing, which is free speech, and a potential downside of it is you have have to hear something you don't like. Let

0:31:39 Aaron: Well do we have the right to let somebody sell us cigarettes? So I'm trying to think of a particular behavior that produces no good consequences, but you could argue on the rules of autonomy we have a right too. Do I have a right poison myself with cigarettes if I think that cigarettes are bad, but I want to smoke them or something like that.

0:31:57 Thomas: Interesting. So in trying to find, well, this is instructive. So that is something I would want to know. I would wanna know, do we ever have rights that are all bad? And I think that the examples that you're coming up with sound to me like a broader right of which there is sometimes a downside. Like, that's what it it sounds like to me.

0:32:16 Aaron: Sure. Yeah. And I think that's a lot of what's going to be the case Is that the deontologist, if they want to push back on your consequentialist claim, is going to say, look, I can come up with examples where you have to respect someone's autonomy, or you have to respect a certain law or rule, because that is what is essential to society, even if it produces bad consequences. And you could argue that that preserving that rule produces better consequences. But I could argue that even if you could prove to me, like Brave New World's a great example, right? Have you ever read Brave New World's?

0:32:20 Thomas: Sure.

0:32:49 Thomas: Oh, a million years ago. Sure, yeah.

0:32:51 Aaron: That's a world in which everyone is programmed to be happy. So from a utilitarian perspective, it's sort of a successful utilitarian monster. You know, no one has any free will or any control over their situation. People are born into different castes and some of them are, you know, you know, slaves and other ones are free in a sense, but everyone is programmed to like their own particular role in society and to not want a different role. And the question then is, is that morally acceptable because it produces the most happiness, even though it's depriving everyone in that society of any autonomy?

0:33:26 Thomas: You know, something that occurred to me, back to the rights that you were talking about, is it's funny that I think both examples you picked are things that we kind of make exceptions for in the law. So, like, when we talked about right to free speech, you don't have an unlimited right to speech, at least in our our country. Once you go a certain level too far, once you threaten somebody or motivate violence, we actually do restrict that. We say, never mind, you don't have the right to do that. And with something like cigarettes, sure, for now you have the rights to buy cigarettes, but that's been restricted to hell. It's been taxed. And there's a lot of people who think if cigarettes didn't exist and then were invented right now, we wouldn't have allowed people to to sell them because they're too dangerous.

0:33:48 Aaron: Yep. Sure.

0:34:10 Thomas: They're only grandfathered in. So it's interesting that both examples, we are still legislating rules on the, we don't, as a society, we don't say, yes, you have this unlimited right to free speech, an unlimited right to buy whatever, be sold whatever. We don't says that. We say, in general, you have this right, and then where there are bad consequences, where the consequences are are clearly just too bad, we don't say, no, it doesn't matter. This rule must exist independently. We say, oh, well, you know what? I guess for those specific circumstances, we'll kind of give up this right. We'll restrict this right, and yeah, go ahead.

0:34:27 Aaron: Yeah.

0:34:47 Aaron: And for people who think differently than you and I, this applies to abortion as well.

0:34:52 Thomas: Hmm, what do you mean?

0:34:53 Aaron: Right to autonomy is a valuable right, but people who disagree with us about abortion think that there are increasing numbers as science gets better at preserving, you and younger fetuses that the right of that mother to have the abortion is sort of necessarily morally receding as we gain more knowledge about how they can how the child could survive, for example, okay.

0:34:55 Thomas: Yeah, well yeah, Let's talk about that. That's actually something I really wanted to talk about, because one question I had and and something along the way that made me think of this is actually back years ago when I spoke to Massimo Pigliucci, I tried to make the argument. I think I had a more naive view of the abortion debate at the time, and I thought it was just a matter of personhood. I thought he was like, whenever it's a person, you know, you can't kill it. And therefore, and we don't consider fetuses people. And I and I had kind of a simplistic view of it. And he said, well, check out this Judith Jarvis Thompson argument.

0:35:27 Aaron: Sure.

0:35:49 Aaron: I mean you had the opening moves of the argument, yeah,

0:35:57 Thomas: Even if it was a fully formed person, these arguments would still apply. And in looking at that, one question I have is when two rights are in competition, how do we evaluate that? How do we, and again, to me, this is more evidence that it boils down to consequences because what I think is happening is we have two rights, which are an approximation of consequences, which is autonomy and a right not to be killed. And those are in conflict. Even if you don't want to grant that the fetus is a person, if we speak about the violinist or whatever, uh, sure.

0:36:14 Aaron: Future.

0:36:33 Aaron: Like ours is a good way to do it and avoid the personhood

0:36:36 Thomas: Well, well, or to just assume personhood is another good way to do it. I mean, you could could just say, and maybe I should review for anyone

0:36:36 Aaron: Problem. Sure. Sentience is another good way that do it, yeah.

0:36:44 Thomas: Who isn't familiar. It would be hard to explain quickly, but the violinist, I thought experiment is, well, you could probably explain it better than I could if you want.

0:36:53 Aaron: So you wake up and you've been attached to a violinist, and you're told that if you disattach yourself the violinist is going to die, so you have to sit there for nine months next to the violinist while it gets a blood transfusion from you every day. Do you have a moral obligation to sit next to the blood, to the violinist, and and the general view is that only works in rape. That doesn't really deal with situations where you have any responsibility for the violinist situation, yeah.

0:37:08 Thomas: Right. And yeah. Yeah. Where you like voluntarily took on a violinist. That was something I brought up at the time.

0:37:22 Aaron: Where you poisoned the violinist or something. Mm-hmm.

0:37:23 Thomas: Right, right. Yeah, but if we look at it from that angle, I still think what's interesting is all we're doing to evaluate that is using our intuition and saying, yeah, I don't, that doesn't sound right. Like there's no, there's still no math happening.

0:37:29 Aaron: Yep.

0:37:40 Aaron: There's nothing. There's no there's no, there's no better system. There's a machine you're going to invent that's going to measure it for you. There's nothing better than our brains for figuring this out, unfortunately.

0:37:48 Thomas: Well, but with our, with what we know about how bad our intuitions can be, I wonder if that, like, how can we rely on that as a, as a proper way of reasoning about these things.

0:37:49 Aaron: Yeah, sure. And and it's the answer. There is the same way that we have managed to get rockets into the air, is that even though we're not very good at this, if we do it enough repeatedly over a long enough period of time, we work it out and get a little better. That's the sort of answer.

0:38:14 Thomas: Okay, but I don't think, I would argue that you can't even, without some sort of, here's what I think, when we're drawing parallels to math on something that a lot of people argue is not a science in any way. So let me, let me ask you that. Do you think there's, there are scientific answers to moral questions in anyway?

0:38:15 Aaron: Yeah. Uh-huh. Oh, not in the ways that we're going to want, like you're not going to ever build a machine for it. Um, I don't, I mean, maybe not, maybe you'll build a machine that has consciousness, and once it has consciousness it can start to try to do ethics, I think, but I think ethics is an activity of conscious beings, and it necessarily involves a balancing of intuitions and experiences and things like that, um, and we're not

0:38:55 Thomas: Well, let Me, okay. Let me put the question to you this way, because I think it's an important distinction. Do you think that ethical problems are problems that have correct solutions that we just may never be able to evaluate, or problems that don't have correct solution.

0:39:09 Aaron: Yes, the first one, I think that there are ethical truths that we can grasp, and sometimes we succeed in grasping them, yeah.

0:39:18 Thomas: So, that's a very important distinction because I think there are a lot of people who think, no, there are no right answers. There's just, okay.

0:39:24 Aaron: No, I'm an ethical realist. I just don't believe you have free will. I'm very weird. I think that moral truths are real, but you're not

0:39:34 Thomas: And my view is that they are... There's, there is data, which is sentient experience. As a result of that, we can form rules around it, sort of like, like chess or something, like there's no, there's no reason why chess has to be the way it is. But once those rules are given, like once we decide on the rules of chess, from then on it's all math, like it's it's science, like they're very, there are very real answers. We, the analogy being, we never would have thought maybe a hundred years ago that we could just build a computer that'll just do all this for us and do the right moves, but eventually that turned out to be true, like we we we are to the point, and we will go further to the point where we build a machine that could play chess perfectly. They would always know the right move.

0:39:42 Aaron: And I think if we, from my understanding of, um, computer science, one of the hardest things to get out of a machine is flexibility, and I think ethics is a very, is not a great, it's not like a the kind of science that we think of as the hard sciences, because it involves a lot of intuitive thinking and flexible thinking and non-quantitative thinking. Am not saying that we will never invent a machine that can do those things. I think at some point, you know, if we don't kill ourselves first, we could manage to invent a sufficiently complex artificial version of our consciousness. I'm not saying that's not true. And I think if we did, we'd have to give, have it right, so I'll throw that out there yet.

0:41:10 Thomas: Just as another another issue. Yeah, I would agree.

0:41:13 Aaron: Another yet another problem in the endless string of problems, ethics is all problems and no solutions, by the way, yeah.

0:41:15 Thomas: Yeah. Well, yeah, but to get back to what I was trying to say earlier, which I know this has been a bit of a convoluted discussion, but when I looked at that, you know, thought experiment with the violinist, I thought, what is to stop me from saying, no, I think the fetus has the right. I think in the competition of autonomy versus the right not to be killed or whatever you would say the competing right is there. I don't know. I'm not sure. I mean, I don't know. But I think it's a good thing. I think, no. The right not-to-be-killed always trumps the other one. How would you argue me out of that, I wonder?

0:41:22 Aaron: First,

0:41:57 Thomas: How would one who is motivated to... Yeah.

0:41:58 Aaron: Of all, I might not necessarily like, like I said at the beginning, I think ethical pluralism, because of the nature of this very problem you're stating that there are but

0:42:06 Thomas: You're taking the easy way out. But you still, you still are pro-choice, right? Because, yeah, but are you pro- choice?

0:42:09 Aaron: I but I do think certain positions are wrong. I'm not a a relativist, so

0:42:14 Thomas: Yeah. Well, let me ask you this. Let me clear it up. Are you pro choice? Okay. So clearly if everybody in the country thought this way, you would think, hmm, maybe we need to argue this. You know, like if I, if everybody in the country was like the ultimate right is the right to life that trumps, despite the fact that I'm very sympathetic to the concerns of your right to autonomy, like I totally, that sucks. However, if I take a view that no, the right to life always trumps that, that's going to be problematic. And how would you argue with somebody who thought that?

0:42:16 Aaron: Yeah, yes, yes. Yeah, I think you could argue about, uh, why that view seems to be. So, I mean, first of all, there's the easy answer, which is I can just give them your answer, which is my version produces better consequences, but you don't want that, you want the deontological argument. The deontological argument.

0:43:06 Thomas: Aha. Well, you're right. Yeah.

0:43:08 Aaron: I think would be something like, um, they're, you're prizing quantity of life over quality of life, and that there is a certain fundamental quality of life that shouldn't be violated for the sake of maximizing quantity of lives. And so the true deontological position is to respect autonomy, not the addition of another possible life into the quantities of life. You can make an argument like that and thereby avoid.

0:43:36 Thomas: Yeah, but So what, so how would you say that argument is functioning? Because it sounds to me like it what it's doing is appealing to some more intuitions, and I think that is ultimately, in my view, I think that's ultimately all you can do if you don't appeal to consequences, which is why I ultimately think all everything is consequences, because you're stuck saying, well, you're you're stuck repeating the question. Okay.

0:43:46 Aaron: Yes, yes. Yes. Well, but consequences is also intuitions. So here, let me attack your position for a second here. Okay.

0:44:04 Thomas: Yeah, I'd love you to.

0:44:06 Aaron: Right. So your position is everything boils down to consequences.

0:44:08 Thomas: Ultimately, yeah.

0:44:10 Aaron: How do we have any knowledge of what's going to be the more likely consequences in a lot of these cases?

0:44:10 Thomas: Well, that seems easy. That's it's just empirical, right?

0:44:19 Aaron: But if it's empirical, you'd think that we would have solved this question right now, but there's still all these competing views of ethics, and there doesn't appear to be obvious empirical evidence to point to in a lot of these cases to solve this problem, right?

0:44:31 Thomas: Well, there's always going to be the problem that we don't know the future. I think that, well, let me, let my pose this to you to kind of answer that question.

0:44:37 Aaron: That's one problem. Sure.

0:44:42 Thomas: If we had a perfect ability to predict all consequences, do you think that we would ever, oh, this is a, this might be an interesting hypothetical. Do you think we would choose a worse state of consequences? Consequences, like with full knowledge of what they are, do you think we would ever look at a situation, and maybe it's, uh, that that's, maybe it involves rights or something like that, do you think we would ever say you have a right to this, and then we plug it into the machine, and the machine's like, well, we know all, we have an understanding of all the consequences, and and the world, check out the world under this decision, it's going to be a lot worse, do you you think that we would say, no, it doesn't matter. We need to go with the first choice because there's some sort of right involved. Does that make sense?

0:44:54 Aaron: Yeah, I, do I think so, yeah, I think, um, John Rawls's original position is a really good way to sort of, I I think he makes a good case that people wouldn't buy into a system that might theoretically produce the best consequences, or even if we knew that it was going to produce, like, you know, if the consequences are like overall aggregate utility, for example, right? So we imagine a world in which the vast majority of people never have to do laundry again because the tiny minority are laundry slaves for their entire lives. And it's their job to do the rest of our laundry for the rest of our lives. It might produce the best overall consequences in terms of utility, but it would violate the rights of certain individuals. And so no one from the the original position would buy into that because you might end up a laundry slave.

0:46:21 Thomas: Yeah. That's an important point. I think that's an, uh, I can't remember if, if it is Rawls, is that who said that you want to form systems to where if you're a random person in it, then exactly.

0:46:34 Aaron: Yeah, exactly. That. Yeah. So the original position is another thought experiment. So your question is, how do we do this? We do this through thought experiments, and Rawls is a great one. His goal is to show he's trying to define justice and to define injustice. He tries to define it as fairness and to explain what's fair. He says, imagine that you don't know anything about what you're going to be when you're born. What kind of society would you be be born into in that situation, and so it's, yep.

0:46:56 Thomas: Yeah, that's certainly a A concern. So I guess to go back to my, would we ever choose worse consequences, I suppose a good counter to that, which I think you're making, is it might be better overall, but worse for a few slaves who are like, their, their, their job is to kind of absorb all the badness and they get a real short end of the stick. But overall, consequences are better.

0:47:24 Thomas: And I think that that that makes sense. However, if we're, if we're looking down the road and we're making that analysis, don't you think we would be able to say, well, this is, this is better overall, but, but because we don't know who our descendants are going to be, or we don't know who anyone is in this future world, that we wouldn't want it because of how bad it's going to be for these couple people who are, who are getting the short end of the stick. I mean, I still think, do you think that that is above consequences or separate than consequences, I

0:47:23 Aaron: I mean Think that ultimately these are abstract distinctions, and that analytic philosophy does a lot of breaking things down into different categories to try to talk about those different categories, but that to talk about any ethics that's universally leaving out one or one of the other kind of these intuitions, I think you're always just talking about a flawed ethics. Like, you, Deontology that has no consequentialist side constraints is just as useless to me as a fully consequentialistic system that has no deontological side constraints.

0:48:30 Thomas: Feel like it's less useless, but still ultimately might not cover everything.

0:48:35 Aaron: Maybe.

0:48:35 Thomas: It's interesting because I still am settling back into the fact that I think these rules are around because they yield ultimately the best consequences. And that's why, in my opinion, when you're trying to argue between two rights, you don't have any, any way to resolve that, that doesn't appeal to consequences, I don't think. And, but, yeah, that's

0:48:59 Aaron: One way you could make the distinction, though, is you could say the rights have value in and of themselves. But when those two rights are in tension and can't be resolved, consequences provides a useful tiebreaker. But the fact that it's a useful tiebreaker doesn't mean that you can reduce the rights themselves to consequences.

0:49:18 Thomas: An interesting way to think about it.

0:49:20 Aaron: Yeah. So I mean, I think that you're on to something that's not entirely wrong. I think that when we talk about how murder is always wrong, no matter what, no matter the consequences, what we really mean is that there is something to do with the nature of how murder ends the life of an individual and deprives them of certain future consequences. So I think deontology gets cashed out in consequentialist ways a lot of the time, and then in turn, when we try to visualize the consequences, we use certain deontological principles like autonomy to give us a basic idea of what might be likely to work in the future based on what has worked so far, you know, like slavery, it turns out, doesn't work, and we shouldn't do that, so let's never ever do that again. No matter when someone starts to think, oh, well, maybe the consequences will be better this time, right? If we do it just right, we'll have better consequences from our slavery. That's the kind of reasoning that we want to avoid, uh,

0:50:03 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. But I think, and remind me the term, is it moral ontology if we're talking about where these things come from? Is that right?

0:50:28 Aaron: Sure. Yeah, our meta-ethics, moral ontology, yeah.

0:50:32 Thomas: Well, what I was going to say, yeah yeah, what I was going going to say is ontologically, It would be easier for me to explain to myself, going back to your original question, which I think was great, which was, you know, our consequence is just a tiebreaker for these rules. It's easier for мне to explain where rules came from if they're approximations of consequences, and then you're using the you're using consequences to kind of battle it out and evaluate which is better. That's an easier world for me to explain than one where there's just these rules, there's these rights that exist somehow, and then we use consequences as a tiebreaker to battle in between, you know, like that

0:50:32 Aaron: The ontology is the study of what exists. Yeah.

0:51:16 Thomas: World is harder for me to explain, unless there is like some God giving us these rights. Maybe I don't understand where those rights came from, if not from consequences.

0:51:23 Aaron: So So rights to me are not like, they're not like a a thing you carry in your your backpack, they're more like the law of gravity. So to say that Thomas Smith has rights is to say there is a moral law that says I shouldn't violate his freedom to use his body in the ways that he wants to and not in the way he doesn't want to. And that's a moral truth about you as a conscious being. And the way that I ground my moral truth metaethically, given that I'm an atheist and don't believe in God, is that I think the nature of consciousness, just like the nature of physical particles for physics, has certain features to it that determine certain moral truths that, for what it is to be a conscious being, there are better and worse quality of states to exist in, and that it is wrong to put a conscious being into a negative quality state for no reason, for example, but these sorts of fundamental truths, truths, a lot of which are fairly consequentialist, to be honest.

0:52:24 Thomas: I was going to say that's, that's what it sounds like. Yeah,

0:52:25 Aaron: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, like, yeah, you're not wrong that you and I are very similar in how we cash a lot of this out. But I do think that when you start to build the structure up from those consequentialists foundations, there is some useful places in which you want to include those deontological side constraints. So, yeah,

0:52:42 Thomas: Absolutely. And that, and that's something, it sounds like we largely agree. We're just coming from different sides of it. Maybe like I, I apps, I think you could have a completely consequentialist worldview in which you realize that the best consequences are achieved by having rules, by having rights and by having, you know, like it's it seems like completely consistent, but one more thing I want to throw at you before we go here, uh, because I, I think this is, this is a bit dense for a lot of people. I don't know how much longer we can we can try to do it

0:53:01 Aaron: Rules Bull's consequentialism, yeah. Sure. Yeah, it's such a problem because it's there's just it's such a sticky wicket, right? It's a thick, thick knot.

0:53:16 Thomas: Yeah yeah but one more thing I would throw at you is I think that in the battle of rights versus consequences, that rights will, or or consequences will always trump everything. And what I mean by that is you only have to up the stakes and keep upping the stakes and upping the stakes before virtually any choice could go the other way. If I say I have a right to live, it's not hard to envision a thought experiment where eventually you stack more and more lives against me. Like, well, if someone shoots me, then a hundred thousand people will, will not die.

It's, you only have to keep stacking that up and keep stacking it up until it looks like the right choice, you know, and I, I think it's, I think any moral rule, any any right or anything like that, I, I would argue that there's always a breaking point. If you, if you stack up consequences high enough, if it turns out our planet is going to explode and extinguish life as we know it unless we kill a guy or something, like it's all of a sudden, you, you can break any right that way. Do

0:53:43 Aaron: Mm hmm. Yeah.

0:54:29 Thomas: You, would you agree with that or no?

0:54:30 Aaron: I mean, I think that that's certainly, yeah, I think you're right. I do think that the problems that can be raised against deontology, where, you know, you have someone like, as a true deontologist like Kant, who says you can't lie no matter what, no matter the situation eat right even when the Nazis are at the door, like that's, it's a, it's a very hard case to make to be, to stay a fully thoroughgoing deontologist and if you can find one and get it on your show, I would love to hear that conversation because I mean

0:54:42 Thomas: No, even to save your, your, what is it? Yeah.

0:54:53 Thomas: Yeah. I'll try to find Kant, I guess. Maybe he, yeah.

0:54:57 Aaron: Yeah try to I mean, and the truth is, Kant tries to do it by basing, you keep having the issue of intuitions. Kant also thought that intuitions was a bad basis for morality and wanted a purely rational morality, and the purely rational morality that he comes up with is pretty crazy. I mean, it's interesting, and it has some good moments to it, but it doesn't solve the problem. And I think, you know, the important thing to point out here is that none of these systems by themselves can stand alone. So even if everything does reduce to consequentialism, acting and living as a thoroughgoing consequentialist is probably going to be problematic, problematic.

0:55:39 Thomas: Yeah. And, and that would be where, in my view, those rules as approximations really help as approximates and as things that we can rely on other people to do. I think overall produces the best consequences. Anyway, okay,

0:55:45 Aaron: Right. So maybe what we could say is meta ethically, you're a consequentialist, you think that the nature of ethics breaks down to consequentialism. But when it comes to your actual normative, or your your systems of what how to act to be good and bad, you think that it's a mix of consequential ism and deontology.

0:56:11 Thomas: I could go with that. I think that might be a good way to summarize it. So I thinkthat's probably about as much of this as we can safely throw at people.

0:56:12 Aaron: That makes no sense.

0:56:21 Thomas: Yeah, I mean, I can talk about this all day because it's really fascinating to me.

0:56:20 Aaron: Any human being should I don't know how Andrew makes it so interesting because it's just like, God.

0:56:28 Thomas: Yeah, and also he makes it interesting by just referencing it for, for a little bit and talking about it for about a minute and a half and then moving on. I thinkthat's a great way to know. Uh, I could seriously, I Could talk about this all day, but I, I do, uh I do worry that maybe not everyone has the kind of appetite for philosophy, the philosophical problems that I have. I don't know. So yeah,

0:56:49 Aaron: I think we always have to try to keep grounding it in things that are applicable to real human lives. I think ethics is the easiest of all the philosophies for that because we go around making moral choices all the time. So it feels more applicable, but it's certainly, you can get people to glaze over pretty quick.

0:56:54 Thomas: Yeah, I'm I would be curious though, if I can find somebody more, more willing to stick up for, you know, deontology as sort of, I don't know, in some ways better than consequentialism, I would still be curious to ask them how they would argue against someone who's pro-choice because they just believe that the right to life trumps everything. I think your answer definitely took a stab at it, but I don't know how it fully resolves the issue if I just keep asserting that, no, my intuition is that the right to life is just more important than anything else. But anyway, I wish we should we should try to draw it to a close because. Oh, and the reason I said that, though, is because, the right to autonomy, the pro-choice, pro-life debate is is a very real thing to people. And it's certainly a place where I think these these things matter. But yeah,

0:57:40 Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. And Where both sides, I think, have a good argument. Like, I'm, I'm strongly pro-choice, but I think we do ourselves a disservice if we pretend that the pro-lifers don't have an argument. I think we have to recognize that they have an agreement, and then make the case that our, our method is a better solution. Yeah.

0:58:16 Thomas: Yeah, I would agree with that. All right. Well, Aaron, thanks so much for coming on again. I seriously lots to think about. Out. I love this topic. It is really a favorite topic of mine and you've given me a lot to consider. So thanks for coming on.

0:58:28 Aaron: I'm happy To Happy To come back on and uh do This Anytime. I

0:58:32 Thomas: Oh, and hold on. We didn't even talk about it. Are you, uh, you, you are now a podcaster. You should talk about that. Plug it.

0:58:37 Aaron: Am now A podcaster. I've followed in your footless footsteps and have started a podcast with a good friend of mine named GW. It's called Embrace the Void. And we're doing every other week right now until we can get enough support that we can try to go to once a week. We got it on iTunes, we've got AVoidPod.com, and uh, we're on Twitter at ETV pod.

0:59:00 Thomas: What sorts of things are

0:59:02 Aaron: We It's, it's a dark philosophy, it's um, the The premise of the show is that it's sort of a survival guide for living in the worst of all possible timelines, that um, the recent events have convinced me that this is a very dark world that we live in, and so, yeah,

0:59:02 Thomas: You talking about? Oh, wow. Are we in a, are we in the dark simulate simulation?

0:59:23 Aaron: We've moved into the bad one. Yeah, we're not in the, the good world anymore. And so, um, it's gonna be, you know, comedy, philosophy, discussion about politics, a lot of, we did a, we did the health care episode.

0:59:33 Thomas: Are we sounds pretty unique. So it's a, it's a little bit tongue in cheek maybe, but it's still talking about, uh, real philosophical problems.

0:59:35 Aaron: Yeah, we're trying to mix it up some. So some of the times I'm gonna try to give actual philosophical advice, and other times we're gonna make jokes about, you know, demons. So, mix it balance, yeah.

0:59:49 Thomas: All right. Well, uh, embrace the void. You said it was, Oh, plug that into iTunes. Go find it. Everybody.

0:59:54 Aaron: Embrace the Void. Thanks very much, man, yeah.

0:59:59 Thomas: Hey, no problem. Thanks for giving me your time. And, uh. That's that is the least I could do is, is plug your podcast. So, uh once again, embrace the Void and I'll have a link in the show notes and thanks for coming on.

1:00:03 Aaron: Yeah, Enjoy your baby moon. Good night, everyone.

1:00:27 Thomas: SIO pod coming at you soon. I just had an interview today that I'm really excited to share with you from someone who lived in Syria. I think that'll be next Monday's episode. Learned a ton about the situation in Syria, which is really welcome to me, someone who lives in America. It's not an easy thing to learn about. Out. But anyway, that was really cool. That's coming up and just thank you for listening and thank you so much for supporting me. Those who do at patreon.com/seriouspod, uh, keep the, keep the good stuff coming. Thank you for pledging, but not another hard sell. I'll do that on Thursday. So with that said, I will see you then.