What We Can Learn By Thinking Like a Kid with Scott Hershovitz

And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,

how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Scott Hrssevitz, the Director of Law and Ethics Program and Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Michigan. Scott holds degrees from University of Georgia, Yale Law School, and University of Oxford. He also served as a law clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U. S. Supreme Court. Today, Eric and Scott discuss his new book, Nasty, Brutish and Short

Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids. Hi, Scott, welcome to the show. It's really tried to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, we are going to be discussing your book called Nasty, Brutish and Short Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids. But before we get into that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside

of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second, looks up with their grandparents. Is well, which one wins? And the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your

life and in the work that you do. So that's a really wonderful story, and I actually hadn't heard it before, so it's been fun to think it through a little bit. I want to give you two answers. So in my day job, I'm a philosopher who teaches in a law school, and I think a lot about philosophy questions about law. I think especially about the rule of law, what it is and how we can sustain it. And one thing I think it's really crucial to maintaining the rule of laws.

I think people need to kind of shared moral outlook. They need to agree that we're gonna abide by the decision making procedures that we've adopted around here, whether that's elections or hearing the legislation, or following decisions that courts make.

And I think one of the things that I find concerning in our country at the moment is the kind of viciousness of our politics and the reluctance of some people, especially right now, you know, people on the right to accept the results of elections, to adhere to the rule of law, and just generally to talk about their opponents

in ways that are mean spirited and vicious. And so I think that one thing that's Parable sort of brought up for me is I think all of us in our political activities need to think about feeding the kindness even when we're interacting with people that we disagree with. Right, So it's one thing to think, hey, I have different policy ideas than you do, and I'm going to vote

for my preferred policy preferences. But to demonize people on the other side, to treat them viciously, is not going to be a way of sustaining a community over the long term. So that's sort of like the work life professional reaction I had to the parable, I also had a very personal reaction to it. You and I were just chatting a moment ago before you hit record. You said, I'm approaching the interesting years of parenthood and of a

child who's reaching adolescence. My older son, Rex and we definitely butt heads more than we used to, have more conflict than we did when he was little, and I've made a kind of intentional effort over the last few months to really try and orient minor actions with him more towards kindness than towards anger. To feed that aspect of our relationship rather the other one that we so naturally fall into sometimes. Well, I think that's a great place to sort of jump off in the book, which

is about philosophy and children. I mean, I can only imagine you arguing or debating with your children. You have created some skillful adversaries in the way that you have been raising them all along, which is really to think for themselves and really think about their opinions. The book is really fun because you recount a lot of conversations from the children. You say, every kid, every single one,

is a philosopher. They stop when they grow up. Indeed, it may be that part of what it is to grow up is to stop doing philosophy and start doing something more practical. Talk a little bit more about when you say that, what do you mean by philosophy? That's a really great question, actually, and it's a question that I've struggled with ever since I first took a philosophy

class and discovered I really liked this subject. My dad, when I went home from college, you know, and said I was going to major in philosophy, asked the sensible question. He said, what's philosophy? And I realized they just had no way of answering that question. I started to stammer, you know, things that didn't quite sound adequate. And then I thought, well, maybe I can't tell him what philosophy is,

I'll show him. And I started talking about this idea that maybe we're all just brains and vats, kind of like the movie The Matrix, like somebody removed our brains from our head and they'll hook them up to elect roads and they're stimulating us. And so I said to my dad, maybe we think we're at this restaurant having dinner, but actually someone's just deceiving us into thinking so, and he was like, can they do that? And I said I don't know, but the question is how do we

know they didn't? And he said that's what you want to study, with a look on his face that was really not encouraging. And so I was kind of flummixed ever since that moment to explain what philosophy is. And then actually my older son Rex helped me figure it out in second grade. The first day of second grade, actually, and the teacher asked each kid what they wanted to be when they grew up, and she sent home a list. Here are all the things. There were firefighters, there were teachers,

there were engineers. It wasn't hard to pick Rex's entry from the list. He wanted to be a math philosopher. And when he got home, I said, I said, hey, Rex, ms kind says that you want to be a philosopher of math. What's philosophy? And just without even thinking about it, he said to me, philosophy is the art of thinking. And I think that's just a really lovely explanation of

what philosophy is. I think a philosophical problem is one that we make progress on by thinking carefully about ourselves about the world around us, in an effort to understand both of those things better. And so there's philosophy about really every aspect of our lives, right, questions that you can ask about us that require us to think deeply in order to reach a better understanding. That's what I

mean by philosophy. Yeah, you quote David Hills, who describes philosophy is the ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children using methods that come naturally to lawyers. That's that's great. Yeah, So that really captures my career, maybe my humanity in a nutshell, right, which is to say, part of the pitch of this book is that kids

are natural philosophers. They arrive in the world and they're confused by lots of things in it, and they don't know what the standard of explanation of things are, and

they're trying to make sense out of it. So they're asking really good questions and they're thinking really creatively about out the answers to the questions that they ask, and then most people kind of leave that behind when they start to understand what the standard answers to things are, or when they start to learn that serious people don't spend time on some of the questions and interest philosophers like am I dreaming my entire life? For what is time? Right?

So as people age, they kind of leave those questions behind. A small group of us, the professional philosophers, get stuck in the endeavor and we kind of use methods that come naturally to lawyers. We you know, make rigorous arguments and separate out our premises and don't exactly trade briefs like lawyers do. But one person writes an article and another person replies, and on and on. But what I want to communicate is grown ups can get back to

doing philosophy. They don't have to do it like lawyers. They don't have to do it like professional philosophers. In fact, it's better if you do it like a kid. Yeah. I love that, And you know, I think that there is an academic element of philosophy of which you're involved in, and then there is very much the everyday aspect of philosophy. And if we really think about this idea of it where it's about thinking, you know, it's about thinking better,

we can all think better, think more clearly. And there's something you say as you're describing what philosophy is, and I love this line. You say, the goal is to get in the habit of treating your own ideas as critically as you treat other people's. And I really love that, just that idea of like, if you bring an idea to me that I don't like, I can just pick

it apart all the time. But my own ideas that I believe, and I'm believing them probably very largely from conditioning and emotional reasons, I don't bring that same degree of scrutiny to my own ideas. And I love this idea and it really runs its way through the book of just getting better at asking questions about things that we might be taking for granted or assuming, and looking just at life a little bit more critically. And when I say critically, I don't mean it in the negative sense.

I mean it very much in the constructive sense, looking at life a little bit more critically and a little bit more deeply. Because one of the things that we explore on this show so much is how when we live our lives on autopilot, they become very shallow, they become very unengaged, They start to feel empty and meaningless to us. Right. It's when we engage more deeply, we go off autopilot and we really start asking ourselves what matters,

what's important to me? And those are core philosophical questions for sure. I think there's really two important things in what you said. The first is like thinking critically about our own ideas. I pick this up from a professor of mine who said, Hey, look, when somebody makes an argument and you've got an objection to it, I want you to imagine that they already thought of it, and that they thought it was so misguided that it wasn't

even worth mentioning. And try to figure out why they might have thought that, where did they think that you would gone wrong? And if you get to the end of that endeavor and you can't figure out where you've gone wrong, then it's time to tell people about your idea. But often, you know, if you put yourself in the other person shoes, you can actually figure out how here's the weakness in this idea that I've got, and I

try to instantiate that in parenting my kids. Right, there's a line early on the book where I say Americans like to say that they're entitled to their opinion, and that's not how my house works. Right. You articulate an opinion, and you should be prepared to defend it. I'm gonna ask you why, and when you give me an explanation, I'm gonna question that explanation over and over again. And

so you're right. I have raised kids that are really adept at arguing because they know that they're going to have to to back up the claims that they make. But one thing I think is important, the second thing I heard and what you were saying. I think it's important to remember that not all philosophy is adversarial in this way, it's not just about having arguments with other people.

And our lives are shot through with philosophical questions. If you're trying to decide how should I spend my life, right like, what's a good life look like, what a good life for me look like? Which career is the right path? Or am I obligated to maintain a relationship with someone who's not treating well? Maybe that person is my parents, maybe that person's a friendship. These are all just philosophical questions. So one thing I like to remind

people is that you're doing philosophy all the time. You may not think of yourself as doing philosophy, but when you're wondering how to be in the world, how to act in the world, those are some of the most central philosophical questions. And I do think you're right that it helps a lot of times just take a step back and to think about them that way, and to talk to other people about them rather than just move

through on autopilot. And you know, you've got another line that I love, And you say you believe our humanity lies partly in our capacity to distinguish what we ought to do from what we want to do. Say more about that. That's a really powerful idea. Yeah, so this comes up in a conversation. There's chapters about revenge and punishment in the book, since those are some of the

kinds of issues that arise early on in parenting. You know, your kids might take revenge at somebody they think is wronging them, or you know, certainly parenting involves kind of pervasive questions about whether one should punish, how one should punish, what you're trying to accomplish when you punish, And and in the course of that punishment chapter that I say this line that our humanity lies partly in our ability to distinguish what we want to do from what we

ought to do. And there I'm actually particularly interested in, like what's the difference between a person and another central character in their book is our dog Bailey. And Bailey has once and she pursues her once and whatever she thinks is the most effective way. You know, she's been trained, so she doesn't just always do immediately what she wants to do. She knows that sometimes sitting and waiting for the treat is the way of getting the treat, not

jumping for the treat. But she's driven by her once and I think something that is maybe unique among human beings is that we don't just have to be driven by our wants. We can see this distinction between what we want to do and what we should do, and we can act on it, or at least I should

say most of us can. I think that's one of the tasks of parenthood is to help your kids appreciate this distinction right, to reflect on what they should do, to recognize that it may not be what they want to do, and to cultivate the habits of mind that will let them, as they get older, act on what they believe they should do rather than to satisfy their immediate ones. Yeah, I'm gonna jump right to the chapter on Bailey. I could go a thousand directions in this book.

This has been a difficult one to prepare for. But I can't resist going here because you do bring up Bailey and you say, what is it like to be Bailey? We spend a lot of time talking about that in our house. You know, Bailey is your dog. And I love this because I do the exact same thing you say. Rex loves to narrate her life, but he doesn't do it like a sportscaster. It's not Bailey is in hot pursuit of Sammy Squirrel. Rather, he talks as if he's Bailey.

You know. And my partner and I do this all the time with one of our dogs, Lola, like one of our dogs Beans, she's like a bat. I don't have any idea what it's like to be Beans. I can't fathom. She's so animal, but the other dogs seem so human in her way. And so, you know, Lola will facilitate conversations between us. You know, well, i'd really like to have, um, you know this or and so

that part really struck me. But why I had to jump to this is a I love to talk about dogs, but be there's a fact in the book that made me stop and turn to my partner and go, you've got to hear this. And it's a section where we're talking about consciousness and we're saying what's it like to be a bat or a dog and how we can't

really fundamentally know. Then you go on to talk about how bats echo locate, they put out sound to create a picture of the world around them, And then you go on to tell a story about a person who can do this and it blew my mind. You want

to share that? Yeah, So this is a story about a guy named Daniel Kiss, who people sometimes call the real life Batman, and Kiss, as a young child, lost his sight and he just started to make clicking noises and was clearly using them in something like the way about would use them that like they'd reflect off surfaces back to his ears, and he would develop a kind of understanding of what was around him that allowed him

to move through the world in really astounding ways. So he can, for instance, ride a bike and not just a little bit like, but like ride a bike around town. He's getting so much information through echolocating. And you know, Kiss is an interesting character in his own right because he thinks a lot of times folks that are disabled or held back by other people's stereotypes about what they're

capable of. He thinks that, you know, many more people who lack site would be capable of the things that he does if they were encouraged and given the training in an atmosphere that that didn't take them to be as limited as we often take them to be. So I think Kishes is really important to listen to for that reason, but also it connects up with this bigger question philosophy that you were alluding to earlier that really

interests me. It's a question about the inaccessibility of our minds, right, and the inaccessibility of other people's minds, of other creatures minds. So one of the most famous essays in twentieth century philosophy was by a professor named Thomas Nagle called what is it Like to Be a Bat? And he was observing that bats have this ability that that most human beings don't have anything like, and observing the distance between

our external understanding. We know what a bat can do, but we don't know what it's like to be a bat doing it. We know what a dog can do, but we don't know what it's like to be a dog and to experience, say, the rich sense of smell that they have. And then what is really interesting for me is I think just actually true of the people I live with two It was starker when my kids are younger, But we would look at you know, are six month old, are two year old and think like,

what is going on in his head? We don't really know. Actually, I feel some fel I have better idea what's going on? With the dog than I do with my children. And they're older now, so they're more like me. And I think I have a better guess, but I like to remind myself that there really are limitations to my ability to understand what it's like to be inside of someone else. Yeah, I just had to get that fact about a guy who can ride a bike by echolocation, because it's just stunning.

You also say that, like, not only that, but the scans of his brain suggests that he is processing visual information. That's right. So one question is what's it like to be Daniel Kish echo locating? And he says he's having a visual experience, And when they put him in an r M R I machines, it seems like the visual cortex is at which makes it plausible that his brain renders the information that it's getting in something like the way that cited people's brains are rendering the light that

their eyes are gathering. Still leaves open the question what's it like to be a bat? Right? So, like, we have a better idea what it's like for Daniel Kish to be echolocating because he can talk to us and tell us about it, and the bats can't yep. I often say if I could have one wish, and maybe this is just thinking too small. I'm like, I would just like to be in my dog's head for like an hour. I just or an octopus is, you know, like,

what is it like to be an octopus? Right? I've got thousands of suckers that I can independently control, and I can change the color of my skin. And I mean, now, I might say they are not very useful questions, you, as a philosopher, would probably say, actually they are, so

I think they're really interesting questions. Actually, I quote a similar line from a famous developmental psychologist I think his name is John Flavel, who said that, you know, he would trade all of his degrees and honors to experience just a few minutes inside a two year old, just to have the insider understanding of what it's like, rather

than the outsiders understanding that he's spent years cultivating. One thing I think is actually really interesting about that is there was this famous British philosopher in the twentieth century, a J Air, who was pondering this question of you know, what's it like to be other creatures? And Air thought there's a way which it didn't make sense, and part because he was trying to imagine, like what it would look like to fulfill your wish that you like to

be an octopus. You'd have to give up yourself, right, you don't want to be yourself inside an octopus, observing that's not what it's like to be an octopus. And so Air thought like there's actually just a limit. Even if a genie showed up to grant your wish, this is not a wish that really can be realized. Yeah,

it doesn't make any sense. I will say. Back in my addiction days, someone once told my brother and I that if we drank a bottle of robotus and cough syrup and don't know what else it was, we took with it like ten other type of cold medicine pills. They called this the lizard. And I will say it is what I imagine it might be like to be a lizard. That I I've ran this experiment. I don't recommend it. I don't recommend it all right, So I

want to go to another area. I'm kind of going into the deep end of the pool here, obviously, but I want to talk a little bit about identity. I explore ideas of identity on this show a lot, and some of them from a pretty basic level, like, you know, can we identify less as you know, these roles in our lives, and all the way down to the really profound experiences I've had of sort of the dissolving of self through some of my different spiritual practices. And you

talk about the ship of Theseus? Could you explore that real quick? And then I want to go from there to a really profound thing that I think you said that was really mind opening for me. So let's start with Theseus. The Ship of Theseus is a very famous philosophical puzzle that dates back thousands of yours really. So the original version of the story goes like this, Theseus's ship has been put into port in Athens, and over years, people, you know, people come and they see it and they

venerate it. But over the years starts to fall into disrepair. And so when a board is rotting out, they remove that board, that plank, and they replace it with another one, and then you know, they do that again, and they do that again, and eventually on down the line, you know, maybe decades have gone by, they've replaced every single plank

on Theseus's ship. And then the question that people want to ask about this is, well, is it still Theseus's ship if it doesn't have any of the original would? And well, let me ask you, what do you think is that still Theseus's ship? Uh? I can't answer that question without spoiling the payoff that we're headed towards here. So I've already persuaded you of the answer I want to give to this. It sounds like maybe a little bit,

a little bit okay, So so here's the thing. If you say, yes, that's not Theseus's ship anymore, then then the next question is, can people when did it stop being Theseus's ship when the first plank was replaced? Right when there was just a slight deviation? That doesn't seem like it could be true. Like you know, if the tail light on your car gets knocked out, you get a new tail light, but you don't think, oh cool,

I got a new car. You know, so you can change a little bit without changing the identity of the ship, right, But is it when a majority of the planks were changed? People and think that sounds very plausible either, because it suggests that, like you know, right up until percent plank, like, we we had the same ship, then when we tipped fifty, we suddenly didn't. That doesn't seem right. So it doesn't seem like we can identify easily a spot where it

stopped being the same ship. And so some people say, well, okay, it's still the same ship. Right. Well, then enter Thomas Hobbs, the famous English philosopher. He added a little bit onto the puzzle. He's like, well, just imagine that each time they replaced one of these planks, somebody carries it away, put it in a storage garage, the original and you know, stores it in case it ever needs to be used again.

And then an industrious shipbuilder comes along takes all the original old planks and reassembles them and just the way the original ship was built. Right, Well, that sort of sounds like it's Theseus's ship. It's the original planks in the original pattern. So if that's Theseus's ship over in this storageyard, what's the ship in the dock. So you know, there's like endless iterations of this puzzle, but it raises this question, you know, how much can you change something

before you've changed its identity? Yeah, and this gets too very central questions about who we are? You know what am I? And again, these questions can be asked at different levels. And that was the insight that you said that I thought was really really good. And you said answers to questions about identity I think depend on the

reasons we're interested in them. Or I would add the context in which we're asking the question, and people get hung up on this and spiritual circles between, like, on one hand, there's a teaching this as well, there is no self, and yet we know absolutely Eric is sitting here to walking to Scott, right, And so the context in which I ask that question has everything to do

with the answer. If I'm asking about the ultimate core of life from a Buddhist perspective, perhaps the answer in that light is very different than the answer when I'm standing at the d m V and they say, who

are you? Yeah, So let's just back up one moment and think about, like how we apply this ship of theseus idea to ourselves, because nobody actually cares about the ship of theseus, right, But we can ask the same kind of question about our own personal identity, which is to say, what makes me the same person I was last week? Or last year, or I tell stories about my childhood in this book, the same person I was

when I was dropped off a kindergarten. And it's a puzzle because I'm not made out of the same stuff. My planks have changed, like pretty much every cell in my body has turned over since I was in kindergarten. And it's also not arranged the same way, right, Like, my brain is wired up wholly differently than it was when I was in kindergarten, and I'm bigger, my body is different. So that raises this question, like how do we have continuity across time? Or do we have any

sort of continuity across time? And as you say, I'm inclined to think that the answers to these questions are highly purpose dependent, and I like your addition to this highly context dependent. Right, we need just understand, like what's at stake about our identity? Why do we care? In

what situation are we asking about it? And ultimately, I'm inclined to think that for some purposes, I'm the same person that my mother dropped off at kindergarten, like that we kind of share a life story that little kid in me. Right, for other purposes, I'm a holy different person than that little kid, right when it makes sense to be angry at me for things that five year old had done. But we do write like you. No, nobody's probably getting angry at the five year old, but

we are getting angry at the person from two weeks ago. Right, that's right. And there's a really interesting conversation among philosophers who think about punishment. John Locke actually had things to say about this. You know, if I'm punishing you today for something you did last week, last month, ten years ago, right, how can I be confident that I'm punishing the person who deserves it. Locke thought that when it comes to punishment, what matters is that you remember having done the thing,

and I think that may be a necessary condition. Actually, sometimes people remember things they didn't actually do except as a blackout drunk. There's huge amounts that I don't remember that I'm sure I did things that are morally offensive. That's really excellent, actually, because it suggests it's not even a necessary condition. And as soon as you said that,

I think that's obviously right. We don't give people a pass, say, if they commit some serious crime when they were blackout drunk, and the standard story we tell in the criminal law is so long as the intoxication was voluntary, it was done knowing the risk of of this kind of misbehavior when one was blacked out. So I think that's good. I'll give you one more story actually, which was kind

of challenging for me in recent years. There was a kid in elementary school that I thought of as my nemesis, was like a little bit, a little bit of a boy, and like five years ago maybe I just got a

Facebook message from him. Hadn't been in touch with him since elementary school, and the Facebook message said, hey, you know, I know that I didn't treat you very well, and I feel bad about that, and I want you to know, like, you know, me and the other guys like we actually we liked you even though we didn't treat you very nicely. And you know, I was super appreciative of the message.

I thought it was like really like a courageous and kind thing to do for him to reach out and to say that, But I had kind of complicated feelings about that. One thing I said to him when I wrote back is hey, I can tell you're not that guy anymore. Like I don't feel like you need to apologize for what you did in elementary school. It's just

obvious that you've changed as a person. But the other thing I wanted to say, which I think was maybe a little more challenging, was I don't need an apology either, right like here, my life is going fine. I don't feel like you owe me an apology. But what I kind of left unsaid was that you know, there was a person who did need an apology. There was a person who did need better treatment. He's not around anymore. So I do think that these are really interesting, like

his question about it, and you're really interesting. They arise in all sorts of ways, and sometimes the person to whom you owe your apology or your amends isn't actually around anymore to receive it. Going back to the ship of theseus, if we assume that childhood being a formative part of our overall development, there is some part of you in some way that, as we're saying, is still a kid who was bullied and that had some we

don't know what impact. We can't say, we can't tell which plank was affected, but we can say, you know there's something in there. And so I love these questions because they do get to the ways in which we define ourselves. Do I define myself as the kid who's bullied in school? And what does that say or mean about me? Do I define myself as a Republican or a democrat? What comes along with that definition? I mean,

all these identities shape who we are. And so I love your formulation because the thing that I've arrived at with identity is it's a useful tool. The more loosely we can hold it, though, the more flexible we can be with it applying on an identity when it's useful. So, for example, there's lots of studies that show someone who says I'm not a smoker and takes that identity is less likely to smoke again then somebody who says I'm

not smoking right now right. So there's a positive use of an identity there, but we know there's negative uses of identity. I label myself a certain way and I start living into that, And so anytime I can slip the ship of theseus into this podcast, I do it. But secondly, I really thought your idea about the reasons that we use them and that context was a really

helpful way to think about these ideas. So I think that for me, like, the really helpful thing in what you just said is this idea that we should be flexible about what we want to incorporate into our identity and think of it as a tool that's sometimes appropriate to use and sometimes not. So I think you're absolutely right.

There's a lot of discussion about this in the philosophical literature that you know, say, if I see myself as an honest person, right, Like, part of what it means to take that on board as a part of my identity is that I'm just going to see myself as set against dishonesty. I'm not gonna on each occasion, right, Oh, Look, is there a good reason to tell ally here is they're not like committing that This is how I see

myself in the world. Is a way of structuring or forestalling deliberation that you may not want to get into, and that I think can be really constructive. But then, as you say, I think that sometimes people often incorporate things into their identity and make themselves too rigid, right, Like the tool can be overused, right, So that like there might be occasions for making commitments in this way,

and there might be occasions for maintaining flexibility. As much as I want to segue into cleverly disguised donkeys, I'm not, although I'm teasing that out for listeners. What you just said and what we're talking about, I think leads really

into the idea of us talking about relativism a little bit. Particularly, I want to talk about this idea of I'm not sure i'm going to say this word right, epistemic bubbles and echo chambers, because I think this gets a little bit too How attached are we to our ideas are a form of identity. So let's talk a little bit about relativism in general, and then epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. Yes, the conversations about relativism starting a really interesting way in

my house. And they started just after the attack on the Capitol on January six, and we were sitting around the dinner table and Rex said that Donald Trump is a bad president, sort of thinking about how he had encouraged the attack. And Hank, our younger son, said, well, Donald Trump is a bad president to us, but he's a good president to the people that like him. And I said, Hank, do you mean that we think he's

a good president? And they think he's a bad president, but that one of us is right and the other is wrong. And he said, no, we think he's a good president and they think he's a bad president, and there's nothing in the middle that says who's right right. This was very much the idea he was articulating was we each get our own truth. Like, here's a judgment,

is Donald Trump a good president? And he thought for some people's truth, the answers yes, and for other people's truth, the answers no. And I wanted to see how far I could push this with him. I said, hey, Hank, if I take you outside and I say it's raining and you say it's not, is one of us wrong and the other one right? And he said it's raining for you, but not for me. I thought it was just kind of wild right that he was, like, I mean, he's a tough cookie sometime right like he is, he's

willing to stick to his guns. And you know, I think most of us are not relativists about the rain, right. We think it's either raining or it's not. And you know, we usually think there's a reason somebody is mistaken if they disagree with us. Maybe they just haven't gotten drops or maybe they're being difficult, right, But a lot of people I think are inclined towards a kind of relativism about evalued of judgments, like was that a good or bad movie? Is Donald Trump a good or bad president?

You know his Mozart better than Beethoven. I'm not inclined towards relativism. I think there are truths of the matter about questions like this, or at least many questions like this, And even though the truth can be hard to find out, we sh have some humility about whether we've identified the truth, and we should be open minded and listen to arguments, and like we were talking about earlier, we should wonder

whether we've got things wrong. But implicit in the idea of wondering whether you've got things wrong and being open minded to the evidence and listening to people that you disagree with you is the possibility of getting it right. Yeah. So the stories in the book reports some of my attempts to argue hank back into the idea that some things can just be true. But then one of the questions that I ask in the book is, well, if I'm right about that, if there's truth of the matter,

about some of these questions. Why is it that we disagree so much? Why do we have so much trouble settling on the truth? And I think, especially in the media environment, we have now two concepts that people find really helpful for thinking about this are epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. Let's pause for a second before we jump

off this point. I want to go back to a few things you said, and I also hopefully we remember to work in how you broke Hank, But I want to explore this a little bit more because I am someone probably is somewhat inclined towards relativism, but I'm not sure it's a well thought out opinion. So, except among our classical music aficionados, let's take a less charged topic than abortion. Let's start with is Boch better than Beethoven? Or Beethoven better than Bach? You believe there's a way

to arrive at an answer to that. To me, that seems completely subjective. Yeah, I should confess I have limited classical music knowledge, all right, So I'm not prepared to defend the view that Bach is better than Beethoven or that Beethoven. And I'm not even actually committed to the idea that there's necessarily an answer. I think one possibility is it's indeterminate. They're good arguments on both sides. But let's take arguments that people probably have their friends all

the time. It's Michael Jordan better than Lebron, or is Lebron getter than Jordan? Or Serena Williams the greatest woman's tennis player of all time? Or is it stephie Graff or is it Martin de rat Alova. These are the life blood of lots of drinking sessions, right, the things

that people love to get together and argue about. And I think the fact that we have arguments, and the fact that the arguments are passionate, tells us that we all presuppose that there's a right answer to this question, even if we right now disagree what it is, because we're treating it very differently than we treat different kinds of conversations. If you and I go get ice cream, I might be like, Hey, what kind of ice cream do you like? In? What kind of ice cream do

you like? Well? I like I like all kinds, But if I had to put it into a category, I'd say chocolate. Okay, So you like chocolate ice cream. Actually I like chocolate ice cream too, But I wouldn't think that you and I are objectively right as against the people who prefer vanilla or the people who prefer salted caramel or whatever it is. I would just think, okay, like, this is how taste works. There's the thing that tastes best to me, and there's the thing that tastes best

to you. And this is not a disagreement. But when we're having an argument about Jordan or Lebron or Serena Williams or stephie Graph or Beethoven versus Bach, we're not usually treating it that way. We're not saying, hey, I

like Beethoven, you're saying, hey I like Bach. We're thinking there's some criteria of excellence here, whether it's basketball excellence or tennis excellence or musical excellence, and we're trying to evaluate these people's bodies of work against those criteria of excellence. And I think that project assumes that it's possible. There's

an answer, here's an answer. Was Beethoven better than Scott? Yes, right, Beethoven is a lot better than me, And I suspect that Beethoven was a lot better than a lot of very famous pianists or composers. Was he better than Bach? I don't know. We need somebody with some classical music knowledge to pop in and help us start that out. Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting the word you use there is taste. You know, what's a matter of taste and what's a

matter of objective fact? And I think the reason that I would take art generally off the table as there being a objective answer, And this gets to how we define art. To me, art is about making people feel something, and that is extraordinarily subjective. Is Steve v I a better guitar player than my friend Chris, who's also the editor of this podcast. The answer to that, if anybody was looking at technical prowess, would be Steve I, hands down.

But I would argue that I would much, rather much rather here my friend Chris play guitar than Steve I because it moves me. I am Chris and knows I love his guitar playing. So let's move away from art though, But I think now Lebron James versus Michael Jordan is good. We're assuming a standard of excellence. So now let's move into something slightly more emotionally charged, which is like, all right, I'm gonna I'm going to regret this, but let's just

wander right into the abortion debate. That's that's here because I often when I look at this, I'm like, Okay, if I look at this from the perspective of someone who is anti abortion, and if what I believe is that an embryo is a fully formed human being equal to what a five year old is, in whatever my belief structure is, I'm going to argue fairly, vehemently that we should not kill five year olds. Right. If you came to me with that proceed and you're like, you

know what being a parents a drag? If you know, if you got a five year old, you want to get rid of them, get rid of them, I'd be like, well, hang on, and I think most of us would. On the other hand, there are plenty of great arguments for why we should respect a woman's right to choose, and it's her body, and there's there's all these things. How do we get to right there? That's where I get stuck. I'm like, well, I know what I believe, I know

what my moral framework is, but that's not everybody's. And should it be everybody, So tell me how you think about that. So I just taught a class here at the University of Michigan called Life, Death, Love and the Law, and it was some law students and some philosophy students, and it was really wonderful experience. I had students across the political actrum with differing views about the moral permissibility

of abortion. I'm certain, though, you know, people didn't share their personal stories, that some people in the room probably had personal experiences, you know, with making those choices, whichever way they might have made them. But I set up front that there's places in the world where you know, people shouted each other about these issues, and they try and drown each other out, and they talk to each other in ways that are really nasty. And that's not

what we're going to do in this seminar. Right, if you want to be in this seminar, we're going to listen to each other really carefully. We're going to share our own thoughts and our ideas, and we're going to hear what other people have to say about them, and we're gonna display the sort of virtues of inquiry that we talked about earlier. Wondering how we might be wrong right, and inviting other people to help us think about how we might be wrong. And the students really rose to

the occasion. We had really deep and insightful conversations about abortion, about euthanasia, about lots of these sort of like beginning and end of life kinds of questions. And you know, it's not the case I think that we arrive at agreement about what the truth is in the course of those conversations. I think we all got a much deeper

understanding of the issues. We saw that some arguments that we might have thought were good were actually not so good, and some arguments that we hadn't entertained before we felt attracted to. And so I think the question of like, how does one seek truth in these really fraught issues is right through this kind of shared inquiry, through this kind of shared deliberation to kind of turn the temperature down in a way that our culture makes really hard.

If you only think about this stuff by watching cable news or by going on Twitter, you're not going to think it through very carefully, you know. I like to recommend there's a philosopher named Kate Greasely who teaches at Oxford, who I think is the most thoughtful person writing about the morality of abortion today. She has a book that she co authored called Arguments about Abortion, which is a

kind of accessible introduction. And then also she was recently on the az Reclin podcast is actually a really great place um to get her help in thinking through some of these issues. So podcasts, actually this one others are a really great place to dive deep and think in a slower way than you can. But the point of all the thinking is that we think we might reach

the answer, right. So you said, well, look, if you think that an embryo is just the same as a five year old, then of course you're going to think abortion is impermissible. We don't kill five year olds. We know that we shouldn't, and I think that's right. But then I want to put that view right, that an embryo is the same as a five year old under a microscope, and I want to find out whether you really think it right. And I'm gonna present you with,

you know, scenarios to consider. And here's one. You work in a hospital and there's embryos that are frozen in the hospital, and there are you know, five year old children around in the hospital, and the hurricane is on its way right, and you realize as you're about to grab the embryos that there's one and five year old who can't walk themselves out. You know, that's why they're in the hospital. There's one five year old that's still in the hospital that didn't get evacuated. And now you've

got a choice. You can carry the five year old out, or you can carry a dozen embryos out. Which one are you going to take? That's the trolley question framed up for abortion debate. I mean, I know what I

would do. I grabbed the five year old. I actually think I sort of first encountered this scenario through Kate Greasely, and I think it's a really great way actually of revealing to a lot of people that even if you care about the embry even if you value the embryo, even if you think God has made an investment in that embryo and we should protect it, most people actually don't think it's on a par morally with a five year old. Given the choice, they're probably gonna save the

five year old rather than several embryos. And so I think it's through this kind of reflection, that we can start to get a deeper understanding of the issues and our own views about them, and work towards views that we think we can defend this truth. Your whole approach here is really kind of what I wanted to get at, which is this idea of how do we talk to each other more civilly but also more deeply inquiringly, you know, how do we ask good questions of ourselves and of

the people we see things differently with. And you've got a line I want to read because I love it. You basically said, we should talk to people who think differently, and we should be open to revising our views in light of what we learned, but we shouldn't give up on the idea of truth or the search for it. And I love that idea that again we could debate which things you could come to objective truths on which you couldn't, but the search for it, you know, and

the attempt to try and investigate. I would have loved to have set through your course, and I wish that we could, you know, have you lead the national debate on all these things, because more than any policy that I see happen, and there are plenty that concerned me. It's our structure of conversation that is just so disheartening to me these days. Yeah, so I think that's right.

It's the structure of our debates, especially our public debates, you know, Like it's possible in a quiet seminar room to have conversations with good will, but we haven't really created public spaces and which we're accustomed to having those conversations.

Is actually one of the reasons that I suggest towards the end of the book, like we should talk to our kids about philosophy at home, but it's also something we should incorporate into their education that in other parts of the world, grade schools have a philosophy quork film, or high schools have a philosophy curriculum, And I think that those are really terrific ways of getting kids trained to have civil conversations with one another, to get them

in the habit of listening to each other, thinking carefully about what other people are saying, hearing their objections, and thinking about where you might have gone wrong. I think that it would be wonder if that was a more regular part of the way we taught children. Yeah, so let's go back to how you broke Hank of his relativism. Yeah,

so we'll remember Hank's relativism was super thorough going. It applied not just to evaluate of judgments about which many people are tempted towards relativism, but it applied to you know, matters of like, you know, is it raining outside. So I was putting Hank to bed that night, and as I kissed him good night, I said, good night, Hank, you're the sweetest six year old I know. And he said angrily, He's like, I'm not six, um eight? And I said, well, maybe to you, but to me, you're six,

and he lost it. He said eight. Some things are just true. Um So, so even in the end, right, once I hit on the thing Hank cared about, right, he couldn't handle my thinking differently about it. Yeah, I'm trying to think of what I feel that strongly about Chris versus Steve. I definitely excellent. Let's pivot to an article that got a lot of press. It was called What Shamu taught Me about a Happy Marriage by Amy Sutherland. Tell me a little bit about that. I think there's

a lot of great things to unpack underneath that. Yeah, so this was an article that was at the time the most emailed article ever for The New York Times. Maybe it still is. It was an article written by Amy Sutherland. She was working on a book about animal trainers, say like the trainers at Sea World and how they get these animals to do extraordinary things like balance the ball in their nose. And she's telling the story in

The New York Times. She says that she realized that maybe she could use these animal training techniques on her husband. His name was also Scott. She goes home and you know, one of his problems maybe also one of my problems, as he leaves his clothes on the floor, and so she says, well, I learned from the animal trainers that you don't give negative feedback. When you get behavior you

don't like, you just nor it entirely. You act like it didn't even happen, right, So that's called least reinforcing syndrome. But then when you get positive behavior, like the least little step in the right direction, you reward that wildly.

So she stopped complaining about his clothes on the floor, But if he actually picks him up and put it in the hamper, she would praise him wildly right, and then you know, like he'd like the praise, he maybe more close in the hamper, and she'd praise him wildly again. And she reports that over time his behavior started to improve, right, like he was the sea lion balancing the ball on his nose. Right. This caused kind of some tension in

our house. I saw the article, and I knew that I had a problem, and so I kind of disappeared our copy of the paper one night. I thought, oh, wait a minute, you know, Julie, my wife is like praising me for something that really ought to be doing anyway, like putting my dishes in the sink. Did she see that article? And I asked her, I was like, is this about Chamu? And it turned out she had seen the article. She was trying to shammou me. We made an agreement, we weren't going to try and use these

techniques on each other. And actually, you know, this arise is in the book and the context of the chapter on punishment, where I say, look, your little kids treat them like animals, like when they're two, when they're three, they really can't understand yet what they're doing wrong or why they should be doing better. So all you can do with very little kids is adjust the incentives that they face so that you elicit the kind of behavior

that you want. But I think the aspiration is actually to raise a person that you shouldn't treat that way, To raise a person who's a person and not an animal. And what makes them a person is, as we were talking about earlier, that they can appreciate the difference between what they want to do and what they ought to do, and they can act on what they ought to do, and then it's appropriate for us to feel grateful when

they behave well and angry when they behave poorly. Part of what it means to relate to each other as people and not to relate to each other as animals, is to have these kinds of reactive attitudes, like I get angry, I am appreciative, And I think that that's the way spouse's friends really ought to be relating to one another. You shouldn't be trying to train your friend in the way that you would train an animal. So

there's lots of interesting things in this. You talk about this as seen a person rather than an object, right, And there's a philosopher I don't remember her exact name or his name, but said, you know, to see a person as an object is to see them as something to be managed or handled or cured or trained. Yeah. So this is a philosopher named Peter Strawson who is a prominent English philosopher in the twentieth century, and he

distinguished two different ways of looking at human beings. One he called the objective attitude is what you just described. You just see a person like an object in the world, subject to the laws of cause and effect. You know, if I push over here, this might happen. If I give them this incentive, it might change their behavior in

that way. And he wanted to contrast that with what he called the participant attitude, like your participant in relationships with them, maybe as their spouse, maybe as their friend. Maybe you're the teacher and somebody else's the student and there. Right, he thought, we have these attitudes like gratitude and anger and resentment and love. And he thought that, like, it's not that these ways of looking at people, the objective

attitude and the participant attitude are absolutely incompatible. We can take both, right, I can look at my spouse objectively or look at my kids objectively. And say, oh, look, you're tired today. I know that you don't really mean what you say. I'm not going to get mad at

you about it. Or I can hear what you've said, understand the way it's insulting, and I can get mad about it, right, and Strawson thought there's occasions to have both of these attitudes, but he thought it was a serious mistake to try and always look at other people objectively, because you lose touch with their humanity. You'd lose touch with the kinds of relationships that we really value in our lives if you only treated other people like they

were objects or animals. This is a really fascinating topic because my primary, I would say, both philosophical, psychological, and spiritual orientation has largely been a lot of Buddhist thought, and Buddhist thought is very much about being non reactive. Right. It praises a certain degree of objectivity, It praises a certain degree of seeing that what you're doing is not necessarily personal, that it has its causes in the world and all that, and so it's easy to see the

benefits of that. Right. But I love that you're making a point that sometimes anger or gratitude is a better response than trying to think about how could I get that person to behave in a way that doesn't make me angry. Say a little bit more about that, because that's pretty fundamental. Yeah, So I think anger is an emotion that needs some defenders. Actually, we don't need more anger. Actually, it's pretty of anger in the world, but the culture has kind telling us to let it go, to not

be angry. And I think it's important to see that anger serves some important purposes. In particular, my getting angry is sometimes important to my respecting myself. So, you know, here's a person who's mistreated me, right, and they've done something, you know, like maybe they've exploited me, they've used me. Right.

If I don't react in any way, right, then I'm in a way acquiescing in my own mistreatment, right, you know, signaling to that person and others that it's okay to treat me this way, and maybe most disturbing me of all, possibly accepting for myself that it's okay to treat me that way. And so I think anger can be justified as a kind of protest. It says, hey, look, it's not okay for you to treat me that way. I want you to know it. I want you to know

that I know it. Right now, it's important not to be consumed by one's anger and for anger not to be the only thing that that one feel. Right. So, I think that like the thing that people often have, right is people take their anger too far, And so it's important to be able to let your anger go and not let it take over your life. And I think like the buddhis kind britisht practice that you're talking

about can be an incredible aid towards that. I just want to make a pitch for Sometimes being upset, being angry, feeling resentful is a way of defending yourself in the world and respecting yourself. And you know, we could tell a similar story about gratitude is a way of sort of respecting others and recognizing the sacrifices they might make

on your behalf. Yeah, Now, the line between shamooing somebody and being grateful is very thin, right, Because if I want you to pick up your clothes and put them in the basket and you do, I could praise you because I'm like, I want more of that behavior. I could also say to you, thank you. I'm really happy that you did that, which they're very close to each other.

But you're saying it's the spirit, yeah, exactly. So it may involve the same sentence that would be said either way, but we all know the difference between maybe we can always tell, but we all appreciate there's a difference between the thank you that's offered sincerely and the thank you

that's offered strategically. And actually, my wife wanted to thank me sincerely for putting my clothes in the laundry hamper, right because it's not it's not like a situation where I've gone above and beyondest like I like, I did the minimum, I did what I should do on that occasion, right, Like, chances are that thank you is strategic, And if Sutherland's husband had thought about it, he may have recognized that, actually, she's not as appreciative she seems to be, uh, she

seems to be in the moment. But I guess I want to make a pitch for not feeling these motions, are expressing these emotions strategically though sometimes perhaps that's helpful, But for being the kind of person and having the kinds of relationships where you feel and express these emotions sincerely without letting them take control of your life when they're not constructive. Yeah, and I really love how you said that we're all going to do a little of

both of these right with context. We're back to this idea of there being context. But I really love this line where you said she stopped reasoning with him. This is talking about the animal trainer and her husband. She stopped reasoning with him and started shaping him. And I love that distinction, right that if I'm always trying to shape you into being somebody else, I am treating you

more as an object versus reason with you. Now, I might be diving off the deep end again, but we're talking about the belief that people are capable of reason. We talked about how you should shape a three year old because a three year old isn't fully capable. I'm just gonna do it. It It seems like a terrible idea, but I'm just gonna do it. Sure, is there a case that says certain people aren't intelligent enough to know to figure out what's right, to figure out to reason

through to the right thing. What's your response to that? You know, I think I'm a little bit resistant in putting it in terms of intelligence, because I think it's more complicated than that. But there's a kind of question that is confronted constantly within the criminal justice system about who's responsible for what they do and who's not right because we think that many, most people are responsible for the choices that they make and are appropriate objects of

the condemnation that's associated with punishment. But we also think that there are people in the world that are suffering from various sorts of disabilities that may inhibit their ability to understand the choices that they're making or to control the choices that they're making, and we have some doubt that these people are appropriate objects of punishment, in part because we have some doubt that they're appropriate objects of of condemnation. We don't think that we're in a position

and to demanded better than they did. I'll tell you a little bit about like one of my favorite papers in philosophy I love to read with my students is by philosopher named Gary Watson. He writes about one of the most heinous murders that you'll ever read about. Just tells the story of somebody who murders two teenagers in a way that's shockingly callous, and you read this story and you have, like his harsh a judgment of a human beings. He would do this as you would have

of anybody. And so Watson kind of meditates on that reaction for a little bit, and then he says, well, let me tell you the story of this guy's upbringing. And then he describes what his childhood was like, and my shutter every time I think of it. You know, I won't describe it here, but it's the most abusive childhood I've ever heard described. His mother kind of resented his existence, and his parents deeply mistreated him physically and emotionally.

And you know, Watson gets to the end of that and he says, well, well, now I think, of course, now I understand, right. I don't think how could it have been otherwise, because I know some people survive that abuse and didn't do these things. But I do think, but I see why you you had so little regard for other people, because the world showed you so little regard. And what Watson ends up saying is something I feel

very deeply. He says, at the end of these it's not like I can choose one or the other perspective. He says, My anger at the man this person is now just sits alongside my empathy for the child that he was. I find it very hard to form an overall view of this human being and to understand how I should react to them and how I should treat them in the world. And I think that's actually one

of the deepest questions for the criminal justice system. As we learn more about causes of behavior and limitations that the people in different circumstances face, it's to sort of straddle these two perspectives. The engage perspective of we're really angry about what you did, we expected better from you, is tempered by this other perspective where we think the world hasn't treated you so well and we understand maybe why you weren't capable of better. Yeah. I don't have

full answers for you for how to reconcile this. Yeah, And I could go down this for hours and we have minutes left. But I do think that this is a really interesting topic. I think it's gonna become more interesting in the criminal justice system. As you say, as we begin to understand more about the effects of trauma on people's responses. You know, a question I ask, is

a recovering heroin addict and alcoholic? Is how much choice two people have when it comes to these substances, right, And we do know that the data seems unequivocal that the more trauma you've suffered, the much higher incidences of substance abuse you have. With substance abuse, I think it's a little bit easier to be like, well, let's not penalize an addiction, you know, but we do things as

addicts that probably do need punishing. This gets very complicated, and I look at my own life and I think back to the degree of choice I feel today around these substances, and I feel like I have as much choice as anybody who's never had a problem, more or less. Right, I probably have to do some things to maintain that, but more or less. But there was a day where the amount of choice I felt I had was just

a hair's breath. You know. It's interesting to have felt both those things in the same human being, around the same thing at really different times. You know, I was transporting opiates from my mother recently with no problem. But I would have robbed you at gunpoint for those ones upon a time. And so I think that you know I agree with you. I don't think there are easy answers to these questions because there is a compassion element of it, but there is also a fairness to the

victims element of it. There's also a protecting our society elements of it. And I think these things are really really complicated, and I would love to spend like four hours with you talking about these things. I think they're fascinating, but we are out of time and we didn't even get to cleverly disguised donkeys. Um. But my question for you is do you have a few minutes for a

post show conversation? Absolutely I do, and listeners, if you would like access to the post show conversation and the joy of giving a gift to this podcast and its listeners, go to when you feed dot net slash joint against Scott. Thank you so much. The book is a true joy to read. It's funny, it's engaging, it's deep. The notes I have on are accountless, so I encourage listeners to check it out, and again, thank you. This was so

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