Is it ok to laugh at The Cosby Show? To rock to “Rock With You”? To eat with the knife that was used to murder your family? Does bad luck make you a bad person?
It may seem reasonable to separate the art from the artist and the instrument from the act, but Paul says that’s not how our brains work. He thinks human morality is driven by inconsistent irrational emotions and he thinks that’s a good thing.
In our second Thought Lab, we talk about bad celebrities, haunted knives and moral luck.
Paul Sagar "Tainted by Association" in Aeon.
Is it ok to laugh at The Cosby Show? To rock to “Rock With You”? To eat with the knife that was used to murder your family? Does bad luck make you a bad person?
It may seem reasonable to separate the art from the artist and the instrument from the act, but Paul says that’s not how our brains work. He thinks human morality is driven by inconsistent irrational emotions and he thinks that’s a good thing.
In our second Thought Lab, we talk about bad celebrities, haunted knives and moral luck.
Paul Sagar "Tainted by Association" in Aeon.
Today on good in theory, moral luck, murder knives, and why jello may be tainted by Bill Cosby. I'm Clif Mark. And this is good in theory. Back again, we have Paul Sager of King's College London. He's here for our second installment of thought lab v series in which Paul and I discussed philosophical thought experiments and the ideas and arguments that they bring up. Today, we're going to cover a lot of ground, we're going to talk about what to do when you find out that the artists behind art you enjoy is a morally bad person. Whether you
Unknown:should
Clif Mark:slice the Sunday roast with the murder knife, and how you can be blamed for things even though you really never meant to do anything wrong. Instead of starting right away with a thought experiment This week, we're going to structure our talk around an essay that Paul wrote, in Eon magazine. The essay is called tainted by association, you should go and read it. And as I understand it, Paul, your entire line of thinking in this essay, started with the kind of disappointed love for Canadian pop star Bryan Adams. So
Paul Sagar:Ryan Adams, it's a very important distinction with Bryan Adams is the atrocious 90s pop icon associated with that terrible theme song from Robin Hood. And all for summer of 69 song that you heard every time you went anywhere at university for a drink and like inevitably, that got played ISDS and Canadian hero Bryan Adams. No Ryan Adams, country folk American singer, Ryan Adams, although really I only really kind of like his early albums because you know, that's the cool thing to like. But yeah, what happened was, I was reading the news one day and a story came up on on I think it was either the BBC or the guardian or some, you know, liberal lefty website that I press peruse. And it turned out that Ryan Adams was having his very own metoo movement moment, when people were women who'd worked with him in the industry accused him of extorting sexual favors in return for advancement of their careers. And oh, yeah,
Clif Mark:that doesn't sound like Bryan Adams. Actually.
Paul Sagar:No, no. Canadian, like Bryan Adams was never engaged in such such activities. But But what was interesting to me was that in my immediate response when hearing these allegations was I didn't believe them. I just like no, there's no way that's true. That can't be true. Ryan Adams can't be
Clif Mark:because women are liars. Is that
Paul Sagar:his second poll. So it's probably sadly the case that, unfortunately, there may have been a reflex along those lines. Because we live in a society in which certain values towards women's sexuality are embedded quite early on in our upbringings. We're encouraged not to treat these things as seriously as perhaps we should. And there is a often a default suspicion that women make these kinds of things up and that famous men don't do that kind of thing. And it's just petty jealousy or revenge. And so sadly, there may well have been something like that. And of course, I tried to correct for those kinds of attitudes, because I try not to be a chauvinist pig. And so I tried to think No, well, okay, hang on, we've been through me too. And we know that women tend not to make these kinds of stories up. And, you know, we should, we should listen carefully. So that was one level of response. But then I thought, there's more to it than this. There's more to what's going on in this case, than me simply not wanting to believe because of ingrained sexism. Other it's possible that that that played a role. What was weird is that I didn't want it to be true, because I really like Ryan Adams, his music, in particular, his seminal album gold, which if people haven't heard it, they really should. It's an absolutely amazing, right, it's brilliant rock record from the early 2000s. Just every tracks fantastic. And it's one of my sort of means a lot to me, that album is associated with happy summers and road trips. And so it reminds me of certain people in certain times my life, and I had this horrible feeling that if it's true that Ryan Adams is a sexual predator, then I'm not gonna be able to listen to that album anymore. That album, The album's gonna feel tainted to me, right.
Clif Mark:The true victim here, Paul. Yeah,
Paul Sagar:exactly. I'm the one who's suffering here. And when I sort of stepped back, I kind of realized that that was that was playing a really important role in my emotional rejection of the The claims being made against Ryan Adams. So without any evidence either way, I intuitively or instinctively wanted to not believe these claims. And I think the most important thing for me was because I wanted to protect my enjoyment of a record that he made that I like a lot. And that suddenly struck me is really quite weird. And why should it matter? That this album that was made 20 years ago? Why should it matter of 20 years later, the guy who made it turns out to have been a bit of a scumbag I mean, why can we not separate those things, but but it but it really did matter to me. And I think it really matters to a lot of people, if they find out that artists or celebrities who they previously respected, turn out to be terrible people who've done terrible things, it tends to mean that we struggle to appreciate the thing that we used to like that they produce. There's been many, many examples in recent years, Ryan Adams,
Clif Mark:saying when we find out like, when an artist is a scumbag, it spoils the art for you.
Paul Sagar:I don't think it should amaze me. I don't think it is just that spoils the art but it's somehow that the the scumbag Enos of the person who created it spills over into their creations, it starts to kind of infect or taint the thing that they made, right? So think about something like Bill Cosby, Bill Cosby, right? For many, many people. Bill Cosby was this comic genius who lit up their lives, his sitcoms and his comedy performances, when you find out that he was a serial rapist who drugged and abuse women. It's kind of hard to put on, you know, Bill Cosby's comedy and think Well, yeah, funny guy, he was just acting, you know, we can separate the actor from the performance, you know, if anybody who suggested that would seem downright morally unhinged, it seems to me. Similarly, Michael Jackson, a lot of people now feel very uncomfortable listening to the music of Michael Jackson, knowing what we think we now know about some of his behavior. That was complicated, because a lot of people want to say, Well, he himself was abused by his father and suffered. And so there may be mitigating circumstances. But but this is this seems like not just me, it seems like there's a common response that human beings have, which is people's actions can taint the things that they have produced and made. Okay, and so why is that? Why Is that weird? So because, basically, there's a sense in which it's arbitrary, that Ryan Adams himself, you know, and I think I actually don't know where this case has got to, for legal reasons, we should probably be careful. I haven't followed. And I probably should go and look at look it up, I guess I've been kind of willfully ignorant, because nothing else has come out. But But let's, let's stick with a case like like Bill Cosby, where we we know for well, that he was guilty, you know, very low, there's no doubt about it. Because if Bill Cosby was playing a role in his comedy shows, you know, then he was playing a role. And it's simply irrelevant for the performance of the actor that the you know, that the actor themselves in their private life was doing other terrible things. So there's a puzzle there, because the thing we're upset about is his private behavior. So why should that reflect upon his performance? Because we're all completely comfortable saying the actor and the performance are separable things. And yet, we don't separate them. We think that actually one can be, you know, and 2030 years later, when we find this out, we can say, hang on a minute, that that that isn't funny, after all, and we may have fought it was 30 years ago. But that's because we didn't know the full facts. But the full facts are the guy in his private life that something so there's a separate that, at least when you spell it out like that we should be separating these things, right, because they're not the same. And yeah, it's very hard to feel that they are separate, they seem very much bound up together.
Clif Mark:So that's the example of a work of art being tainted by the moral history of the artist. But that's kind of a jumping off point in your essay to another set of cases, which I think are even a bit stranger, which are cases in which physical objects also take on a kind of taint or moral aura from their moral histories. So tell me about that.
Paul Sagar:So what I think is going on in these cases where our art is being tainted by the creator's bad behavior, is a complicated manifestation of the phenomenon that philosophers know as moral luck. And moral luck has many, many dimensions and is quite complicated. But one dimension of it is precisely is this idea of objects or acquiring a certain kind of aura, based on the past usages they've been put to. And here, I think it can maybe help if we break it down to some more straightforward examples. And then maybe we can return to the complex examples to do with the celebrities in due course. And maybe just look at some intuitively powerful cases and see how they work and then hopefully try and Bill back around to try and explain what what might be going on in the cases of art being tainted by the artist having Mido morally transgressed in various ways.
Clif Mark:Sure, go ahead.
Paul Sagar:So the example that I really love, which is one by by philosopher, Simon Blackburn, he introduced it in his paper on this subject is imagine you're sitting down to dinner at my house, you know, I've invited you and some other friends over, and I'm carving the roast, you know, having roast beef tonight, and I'm carving the knife carving with this knife, and I just casually remark, and oh, yeah, this is the very same knife that the the home invader used to to murder my wife and children as I was tied up in the basement with electrical tape. But don't worry, I'm over it. Now. You know, I didn't have PTSD for a while, but I had a good therapist. And you know, I kind of over it now. Here's your beef cliff. Uh huh. How would you feel about about eating beef with a knife that I'd Oh, how would you feel about this entire situation?
Clif Mark:I feel that you're you invited me to a pretty creepy dinner
Paul Sagar:party, Paul. Yeah, pretty creepy. Right? What's creepy about it?
Clif Mark:It seems a bit casual that you'd be using the murder weapon to serve? And how do you even have it? Do they like seven years?
Paul Sagar:I would think so obviously, like we're doing, we're not doing a proper thought experiment where we're, we're having slightly silly examples, because of course, you wouldn't be allowed to keep the murder weapon, it would be police evidence. And but interestingly, that kind of thing would in most jurisdictions is impounded. Right motor weapons are partly because of evidential reasons. But partly they are kept and withheld from being put back into circulation because they are associated with the crime itself. So this, this practice was quite well entrenched for a long time that objects which were used for the killing of other people, cause the death of others were seized and destroyed, because there's something about the object itself, which was offensive,
Clif Mark:and the object was poisoned, morally poisoned by by the crime that had taken place,
Paul Sagar:right, there's something about the object itself compromised in the same way that you just think there was something really creepy about my willingness to use a knife that had murdered my wife and children as just a knife. Right. But which is hard, because it is just a knife. The fact that it you know, pretty good knife over an action shot. Yeah, it was very effective. It cuts the beef as well as it cut, you know, cut through my children's but. But the point is worse and worse. Of course, of course, the point is, it's a knife, right? It does what knives do, it cuts through things. It could have been any knife that the assassin used that day, they could have picked a different knife in the drawer, or they could have brought their own. They just happen to use this one. But from the moment that they happen to use that one, that knife is compromised. And for me to just use it as a knife as though it had no history prior to it, which we know it does, is it right? But then that's something that needs to be explained because it's just a knife. Except now we don't think it's just a knife. It's the knife that killed my family.
Clif Mark:Yeah, but are you saying it's right that they think the knife is haunted? Because isn't this just superstition?
Paul Sagar:Well, so let's hold off on the question of whether or not it's right or wrong, because I think we don't want to jump into that too quickly. And in a way that loads the deck because it encourages a straightforward Yes, no answer. And we might want to dig a little deeper. And the first thing I think we should notice is it cuts in both directions. No pun intended, because because it's not just good. It's not just bad thing, right? It's not just that things can become associated with crimes and evil deeds. And that's become tainted, they can go the other way they can have their value increased. So again, another example that Simon Blackburn uses in his article is, imagine that you're in in someone's house, and they have a collection of guitars and they have like 20 guitars, and they say, Yep, this guitar. This is the fender guitar that Jimi Hendrix played the night before he died. This is the last guitar that Jimi Hendrix ever played.
Clif Mark:Right? So that is like a relic.
Paul Sagar:That's a relic right? It becomes a special thing, right
Clif Mark:exams extremely valuable. It's a sliver of the True Cross of rock'n'roll.
Paul Sagar:Exactly right. And no, even if you just wanted to hang it in your house, and never, you know, never cash in on it. That would be the one that has real value. Yeah. If you wanted to take it to auction, if you could prove that it was the last guitar that Hendrix played people would pay many, many millions of pounds more for that. They don't right. But let's suppose that that Fender guitar is identical to the other 200 that came off the production line that week. Right. And as a guitar, let's imagine it doesn't play any better than any other guitars. It's, you know, it's just a perfectly good Fender guitar. It could have been any guitar that Hendrix picked up and played for that show. But he picked this one. And because he did this one is special. So again, we have this this idea that something that's essentially a matter of luck. This knife rather than that knife, this guitar rather than that guitar, is now invested with either value or dis value because of an event that happened in the past. And that, so that's interesting. It works in both directions.
Clif Mark:Okay, so, so far we have art that's tainted by its association with the immoral acts of the artist, Bill Cosby's comedy, Ryan Adams music, jello, Michael Jackson tunes. And then we have inanimate objects which are tainted by their own history, like the murder knife, or Jimmy's guitar, which is a kind of good moral aura. And, and now, I want to get to the more central cases of moral luck, because when we're talking about moral luck, it's usually about individuals. It's about the idea that your moral status, whether you're good or a bad person, depends on luck somehow. And that's counterintuitive.
Paul Sagar:So the important thing to be aware of here is that most of our moral judgments seem to track something really important, which is the intention of the agent who performed a moral action. Indeed, it seems to be intention that determines entirely whether or not we think somebody does something good or bad. I can give you an example here to make this clear. If I push you, and you fall over and hurt yourself, absolutely further knowledge of my intentions, it's unclear whether I did something good or bad. If I intended if I pushed you because I intended to
Unknown:hurt you, and it sounds bad.
Paul Sagar:Yeah, that's pretty bad. That's pretty bad. Like you fall. If you hurt yourself, right, then I've done something bad, right. But let's say that the reason I pushed you, and I've hurt you because you fallen over weed, because there was a moped tearing down the street, which you hadn't heard because you had your headphones on. And if I hadn't pushed you, they would have hit you and probably killed you, right. Now, in both cases, the outcome is exactly the same. You fall over and get hurt. Because the cause the cause was exactly the same. In both cases, I pushed you, right. But when you find out that the reason I pushed you was because the moped was gonna hit you. Then suddenly, I did something good rather than something bad right. Now this must have a Hogan isn't about the consequences, right? You seem to save me from a moped, which would have killed me. So isn't it isn't right? This is good, because the consequences were better in this case. Okay. But even in a case like this, it seems like it can't really be the consequences that make a difference. Because let's suppose that the moped, in fact, wasn't going to hit you at all, that I just completely misjudged its trajectory, right? That actually, you is nowhere near hitting you. But I panicked in the moment, I pushed you anyway, right. Now, in this case, if you, if I tell you, I'm really sorry. I genuinely thought the moped was gonna hit you. Even though actually it wasn't, then you'll still think, Oh, well, they tried to save me, they tried to help me. So that must have been a good action. Right? what that tells us is that when we judge other people's behavior, what we're really judging is the intentions that lay behind their actions. Not that it's simply the consequences.
Clif Mark:Like if you didn't mean to do it, I shouldn't be mad at you.
Paul Sagar:Exactly. Right. And as a general rule, if somebody did something towards which causes harm, but they meant to causes benefits, then we'll tend to forgive them. Whereas if they try to cause us harm, but accidentally causes benefits, well, we'll tend to withhold our support for them our sort of approval of what they did for us, because they didn't mean to bring us a benefit, right? You know, if I, if I meant to send you a poisoned cake on your birthday to make you incredibly sick, but the bakery messed up and sent you a really nice cake that didn't have any poison in it, if you find out that I meant to poison you, it doesn't matter. There's a thought that counts. It's the thought that counts, right? That expression really does actually have some meaning, right? Because it won't matter to you that the cake is actually delicious or non poisonous, if you know that I was trying to poison you, right? So intentions are what really matter when we seem to interact in these moral cases, rather than simply outcome.
Clif Mark:Okay, and so when when I hear you a philosopher talking about thought experiments, say There seems to be a general rule. I expect you're about to overturn that general rule. So so what what are let's let's get to moral luck. Well, give me an example of, of maybe the opposite.
Paul Sagar:good moral luck is the set of problems where it's where we seem to drive a wedge between this general rule that intention is what determines whether or not an action is good or bad, because what moral luck cases bring out is structurally identical situations where the actions and intentions of an agent are exactly the same. And yet our moral responses are very different based on some Lucky factor that changes along the way, okay, like what? So here's an example imagine a guy who's just walking along and trucks a brick off the top of a building. And he doesn't hit anybody, because there's nobody underneath the building at that point. his intentions in this case are pure callous disregard for the safety of others. He just fancies thrown a brick for no reason. That's not it's
Clif Mark:callous. Disregard isn't his intention. His intention is as fun to throw things off I places.
Paul Sagar:Okay, okay. Okay, his in Okay, good. But, but that carries with it callous disregard because you should know as an adult that you shouldn't throw bricks off high places because there might be people underneath. But that's fine. That's that's fleshes it out nicely. So that's Scenario number one, the guy throws the brick because it's fun to throw bricks, brick smashes on the pavement below doesn't hit anybody. Okay, what they have. So if we hear about this guy, we're likely to think this person's douchebag. Right? That was that was not a cool thing to do, because they could have hurt somebody. But hey, they got away with it, no one got hurt, we kind of move on, right. But that's very the scenario. Imagine the exact same person. For the exact same reasons. It's fun to throw bricks, Chuck's the brick off the top of the building. But this time, just completely by chance there is somebody walking beneath them, the break hits them on the head and kills them. So in this case, it seems that we want to say a heck of a lot more than this person is just a douchebag.
Clif Mark:Right? Yeah, this person is a killer. They're supposed
Paul Sagar:to kill it right? And they should probably be punished for what they did, because they killed somebody. But then the puzzle is, well hang on a minute. If intention is what determines whether or not an act is morally good or bad, rather than simply outcome. Why is it we have such different responses in these kinds of cases, because in both cases, the guy's intentions are exactly the same. She wants to check a Briton check and bricks is fun. And in both cases, the consequences, the actions he takes are exactly the same. He throws a brick, right so that his physical actions are identical. In both cases, the only thing that's different is the matter of luck, which is in the second case, bad luck for the person walking underneath him because they get killed by a brick. So if normally we think emotions are what matters, why is it that in these kinds of cases, we have dramatically different responses?
Clif Mark:Well, there's one thing I just want to mention is that you may be under estimating how much people blame the person who throws something that doesn't hit someone, because before shortly before, you know the entire world shut down, we had a small local sort of celebrity, we call her chair girl now in Toronto. This is a young woman who was I guess, in high spirits, the lighting in the video looked to be early in the morning, and she posted on social media, her throwing a chair, a lawn chair off a condominium balcony onto the highway. And it went viral. I think she had to go to actually go to court for something and was publicly shamed, and this and that, so but nope, she did. She didn't hit anyone. Exactly.
Paul Sagar:But if you had hit something is interesting, right? It's not just our intuitions. It's the law too. If she had hit somebody and say caused a crash on the highway, she'd have gone to jail. Whereas As it stands, she's publicly shamed, and people think what a douche. But if she'd been prosecuted as if she had actually hit someone who killed them, most people would think that's too harsh. But then the question is why? It's pure luck that she didn't kill anybody.
Clif Mark:Drunk driving is a good example, right example, could be like, fine, kind of bad thing to do. But like once you kill someone, then it turns into murder,
Paul Sagar:right? So if you get arrested drunk driving, and you haven't hit anybody yet, you will in the UK, at least you will lose your license and pay a large fine, right? If you know, let's say instead of the police stopping you five minutes later down the road, you hit a child, you go to jail. But the only difference is the bad luck in the second case that the police didn't stop you five minutes earlier.
Clif Mark:Right? And you're probably gonna feel you're gonna feel a lot worse, everyone's gonna think you're total scum. Good.
Paul Sagar:So this is another important aspect of moral luck. Which is, if we bring about bad things ourselves, even if it's totally out of our control, and just because of bad luck, we feel worse if we actually do create the bad outcome. So imagine you're driving a truck and a child jumps in front of your truck. There's nothing you can do about it. You were doing it. You're driving at the speed limit. You weren't stone cold, sober. You had enough sleep. You were both hands on the wheel focused, right? But just pure bad luck. The child jumped out at them at that moment, and the child dies right now, somebody who said to us Oh, yeah, but you know, I don't feel any remorse about that. Because it wasn't my fault. I was doing everything that I was supposed to wait, I wasn't drunk. I had my hands on the wheel. I was doing this because the speed limit, you know, it's just bad luck. So nothing on me guff. Anybody you had that response, I would feel very, very, very special. About because this is the phenomenon of what Bernard Williams, philosopher of the 20th century who thought a lot about this problem called the phenomenon of agent regret, which is a class of regret, which attaches to having brought certain consequences about, even if you didn't mean it. Even if you didn't, you didn't, you wanted to do otherwise, even if the only reason this happened is pure bad luck. And there's an older English word for this state of emotional distress. It's called being pi acula, which is word we don't really use anymore, but it literally means being in a state for one which one needs to atone. So if you have done something you have brought something bad about, and as a result, you feel the need to atone for it. So the classic example from ancient Greek literature is Oedipus. So when Oedipus finds out that he's banged his mom and kill this dad, he feels piac killer. He didn't mean to kill his dad, he didn't know it was his dad, right? If it was just some random dude on the highway, who was challenging to a sword fight, he didn't mean to fuck his mom. He thought his mom was back in Corinth, right. And he really, he didn't realize you've been brought up by an adopted family. But he did. He did kill his father. And he did fuck his mother. And so he's payout killer. He has agent regret, because even though he didn't mean to do these things, he didn't intend to do them. It's not his fault. Yeah, it No, it's not his fault. But he still feels like he needs to atone. So he stabbed himself in the eyes with pens, is the Greek way. That's how he purifies himself. And even then he doesn't really do it. But he has to do something drastic, because of the crime he's committed in voluntarily, without intention, through pure bad luck that he couldn't control is nonetheless on him. And that's the classic example of moral luck is where something is on you. And you're responsible for it. And you have to feel like your payout killer. Even though you didn't do it out of choice, you didn't do it, because you wanted to you did it through pure bad luck beyond your control.
Clif Mark:Right, I can see why etoposide feels bad. And there's a whole tragedy associated with that. But isn't the whole point of modern rationalist morality to get rid of those cases, and to say that if it's not your fault, then we shouldn't blame someone for it.
Paul Sagar:So there's been a powerful strain of Western philosophy that has suggested precisely that these kinds of emotions are confused, they're irrational, and we better be better off doing without them. And so famously, kantian ethics, one of the big players in the history of Western philosophy kind of says exactly that, look, you know, all that matters is that you intend to do good, the only truly good thing is a good Well, you're only responsible for what you chose to bring about. And morality is all about finding out what your duty is, and simply acting on it. And as long as you're trying to fulfill your duty, and obey the moral rules, then it doesn't matter what the consequences are. And you certainly shouldn't be having these kinds of self torturing feelings, because you happen to bring about bad consequences. As long as you were trying to live a good life by following the rules of what Kant called the categorical imperative, the absolute rules of morality, which you give to yourself through a process of rational deduction. That's all that matters. And all this other stuff is exactly a kind of superstitious, and emotionally grotty mass that we should be better off doing without, but many people have tried to suggest that precisely that that the kind of emotional messiness that moral luck cases draw to are exactly what philosophy should try and disabuse us of what you're trying to get to those kinds of things from our moral life.
Clif Mark:So Kant thinks we should get rid of some of these irrational emotions that don't make sense. What do you think?
Paul Sagar:Well, I disagree. Because I tend to think with with Adam Smith, who was one of the great early modern, moral philosophers, as well as the famous economist who put forward some of the most insightful discussions of moral luck and the 18th century and also with Bernard Williams, who was the person who sort of resurrected these ideas for a modern audience, that actually, it's quite likely that these aspects of our moral emotions are doing important work for us, and that we probably would be worse off. If we got rid of the emotional messiness and the apparent arbitrariness. Why do we care so much more about the guy when the brick hits the person? Why? Why is it that we think that person should go to jail, even though it's a matter of pure matter of luck that the brick killed somebody rather than didn't kill somebody? Why do we feel so bad when we kill the child because we're driving the truck, even though we were driving it safely, even though it wasn't our fault? You know, I tend to think it's good that we have these kinds of emotions and we shouldn't try and get rid of them.
Clif Mark:Alright, so except that luck matters that if the kid runs in front of your car, you're morally tainted. You're a worse person. Now can you Spend a little bit on what counts as luck, because it strikes me that is not just these random events, right? It could be all sorts of things. Maybe you had a bad personal history. And that inclines you more to crime. Or you might have a specific neurological chemical balance or one interesting one could be your political circumstances, right? If you grow up, or live in a really bad political regime, you might face some difficult choices about things that you have to do. Because people who wound up being Nazis, if they were born 20 years earlier, or later or over some national borders, they probably wouldn't have been guilty of doing a Holocaust, right. And yet, that seems, in large part due to luck.
Paul Sagar:Absolutely, hugely.
Clif Mark:So what I'm asking is, in some cases, these are cases of bad luck that make you seem like a worse person or guilty. But in other cases, sometimes they seem like extenuating circumstances. Maybe you're threatened. Maybe you had a really bad day, maybe your daughter was tied up in the Brooklyn basement, and so you're under duress. So do all these instances of luck affect your moral status?
Paul Sagar:So I think, yes, they can. And I think what you've brought out really nice if that is the extent to which a lot provides so much, often so much more than were willing to remember in our day to day lives. And that actually, a recognition of how many things are ultimately down to luck Can I think, induce a certain kind of humility and a certain kind of kindness towards other people, because even people who do bad things, when you find out the extenuating circumstances, as a general rule, we tend to soften our responses to them now not in all cases. Well, exactly right. And then on the counter side is the unkind response, which is the hard response, which is, there shouldn't be extenuating circumstances, look should look shouldn't look shouldn't matter, and we must punish people. So there are these two competing moral, psychological responses in our culture. One is, luck should ameliorate and should make us kinder to people even when they've done bad things. Because so much of what people do tends to be rooted in things beyond their control. The other very powerful responses disregard that treat them as though they were independent of their circumstances, and hurt them and punish them. And those two emotional responses have been duking it out in our culture for a very long time. And the punishment strand has tended to prevail, especially at the level of public policy, and at the level of things like judicial systems. And it's a really interesting question whether in fact, as a society, we might be a better kind of society, we were a bit more honest about how much of the bad stuff that happens is due to luck, rather than pure intention and pure agency.
Clif Mark:Okay, so let me just summarize a little bit. You've got two approaches to morality. One is contian, rational and based on intention. So if you don't intend to do something wrong, you shouldn't be held responsible for it. That's the one you say is kind of philosophically consistent. Then you have another one which all these things about moral luck are based on. And this is where people are guilty from unintended consequences. knives can be haunted. And this approach to morality is based on emotions right? Now you say that these emotions, these moral emotions that they're based on are inconsistent and irrational, but we should still listen to them instead of trying to ignore them.
Paul Sagar:Yes. Because there is so intertwined with Smith on on why this is probably a good thing. And it partly comes down to the fact that intent, living in a world where intentions alone what all that mattered, may not be a world we'd like to live in, and might, in fact, be something of a horror existence. And it's interesting to think through why. So intentions are all that matters. If we judge people purely by their intentions, and not also by the consequences of their actions. We constantly be trying to work out what people's internal motivations were. And it would be kind of like a living hell. It's quite healthy, a quite useful and so quite socially desirable for us not to be constantly prying into each other's secret emotions and secret sentiments. So that's one kind of consideration. But it's not, in many ways, the most important or the most interesting.
Clif Mark:So it's a bit of a pain in the ass to always be wondering about people's intentions. But there's more important reason that we should listen to these emotions. about moral luck.
Paul Sagar:So I think these moral luck cases and the cases of the objects that become tainted, for good or bad, are interesting because they reveal something about the way we want to interact with other people in the world. So take the brick thrower. It's bad to throw bricks off buildings, right? Because you might hit somebody. And although there's something weird about the fact that in one case, we just think this person is a douche. And we're kind of like, we will publicly shame them on social media, but that's as far as it should go. versus if they kill somebody, we think they should probably go to prison. The fact that we have an aversion to people who behave like that, in both cases, is quite useful, because it encourages us to encourage other people not to behave like that, right. So even if you didn't hit somebody, even if you didn't kill somebody, that's not enough to let you off the hook. You know, the consequences aren't, you know, the fact that the bad consequences didn't happen isn't enough to let you off the hook. Because you because you shouldn't behave like that around other people.
Clif Mark:So you want to you want to make an example of people who aren't even guilty just to scare people away from doing the thing that might hurt
Paul Sagar:not just to scare them, but to internalize amongst ourselves and people like us that that's the kind of behavior that we don't engage in, because it might lead to other people being hurt, okay. And other people, innocent bystanders should be respected, they should, as Smith puts it, they should be treated as though they've got a kind of sacredness, right? So you've got to be careful around them. Sure. If you're walking along on clifftops, don't kick stones off the edge, right? Because even if you didn't mean to kill somebody, you've got to be careful in this situation, because you might hurt somebody else, you've got to think about other people first, right? So one thing it's doing here is encouraging us to get out of our own kind of preoccupation with ourselves and treat other people as though they're kind of sacred in some way, Smith points out, and he's and he says, he doesn't really know why or how we got to this stage, it seems to be a kind of quirk of our irregular sentiments, but he thinks on balance, that's a pretty good thing. If we treat other people as sacred. And as things that are to be respected, and that we don't take risks regarding them, then, in general, we're all going to live better lives. And we're all going to do better if we if we behave like that towards each other. And the other kind of example, goes back to those things where the objects are kind of tainted, for better or worse. And I think this connects to the idea of treating other people as sacred that, like Smith, I'm not really sure why we have this sense of like, oh, that knife, someone used to kill your family. Like you shouldn't be using that knife anymore, right? There's something there's something wrong about the knife, the knife is now compromised. And knife is now tainted. Although it's kind of irrational, the wrist something very good about a world in which we treat objects like that with disdain, because what we're kind of doing is investing our moral respect and our moral empathy with the victims of the crime into the knife and sort of saying, stuff like that doesn't belong anymore.
Clif Mark:Okay. So you're saying that this emotional mechanism whereby a bad moral act can contaminate everything around it, knives, objects, people who didn't intend to do wrong, is good, because it reinforces our repulsion against morally repugnant acts? Fine. My problem with this My problem with abdicating rational moral judgment in favor of irrational moral emotion is that one of the most common ways this contamination runs is two groups of people. So you get one emotionally salient crime or act. And that pollutes the whole group that that person belongs to, right. And this can lead to persecution and all sorts of bad stuff like that. And I don't think that just letting this sense of moral contamination, run, wherever it runs, is going to make the world a better place. Like you're saying.
Paul Sagar:Good. So I think that's absolutely correct. And so I wouldn't want to say that this phenomenon is always in all cases, a good thing. And it did. I think that's a really important example of how, as a society, we've just chosen to renounce certain ways in which this psychological quirk can manifest. Right. And I think you're absolutely right, that when we transpose it away from objects, and start to put it onto groups of people, so you know, the Jews, they're always doing this kind of thing, aren't they? Because it's kind of thing. I let our listeners fill in, fill in as their prejudice, prejudices dictate. wouldn't do that. Do we have good listeners? No. But so I think you're exactly right. And we've got to be careful here. Because what can be a healthy and beneficial phenomenon in some cases? You know, it's a general rule, I think it's good if people are turned off Bill Cosby is comedy, because Bill Cosby was an awful person. Because what that does is reinforces our rejection of that kind of behavior, whoever it may have come from, right? A world in which people didn't think there was any problem with listening to Michael Jackson, after the revelations about what he seems to have done to children, I think would be a morally worse world. But we can make a distinction here, a world in which people are treating entire groups of humans as polluted because of some association with maybe the wrongdoing of one individual. Now, that to me, seems like a bad world. And that, to me, seems to be where the quirk no longer is helpful, and starts to become corrupted, or in various ways, ethically, very deeply problematic.
Clif Mark:And I don't think it's a worse world if nobody's enjoying Michael Jackson song.
Paul Sagar:Okay, that's a that's a that's a good example. I don't know, I kind of like I kind of like some of those 80s tunes, you know, they're all right.
Clif Mark:Well, this is what I want to press you on, right? Because you keep saying that, as a matter of psychological fact, people get turned off by art that they find out is by really bad people, or people who've done bad things. But I don't think that everyone has this intuition. I think a lot of people think that their enjoyment of Michael Jackson's music can coexist with their condemnation of his abuses. So are you saying that they shouldn't enjoy his music, and that people should not enjoy a tasty cup of jello because of its association with Bill Cosby, which makes it the desert of rapists or something?
Paul Sagar:So I think it's genuinely difficult, right? So I don't think so. So what I want to say here is because there's so much complex psychology going on here, and because there are so many conflicting intuitions and issues, it's unwise for anybody to think that they can answer that question definitively. Yes, no. Right. So I'd want to say, it's not completely wrong, because we can detach the artist from their product. And that product is going to be attached to, for example, people's memories that were made before the artist revelations about the artist came out, it's good, they're going to be attached to emotional resonance as they have with that kind of song. Right? But But now that we know that the artists did these things, that should register. And if it doesn't register, I think there's something normatively questionable, I'm suspicious of people. And anybody who thinks that Bill Cosby is comedy is unaffected by knowledge of what is called Bill Cosby did that seems to me to be normatively suspicious. But I'm not sitting here saying yes, no black white answers to whether you can or cannot enjoy the artistic product to people who did bad things. Because I think it's genuinely to some extent, confusing and tragic, that the risk there is conflict here. So it's both normative and its psychological. But what I actually in here, I'm very much with Adam Smith and Bernard Williams is I want to resist the idea that the philosopher's job is just to give one clear, yes, no answer here. That I want to say, yeah, you should feel a twinge. You should and no, and it's up to you. To what extent you're comfortable with these things, I would I would suggest, if you're entirely comfortable with them, then a lot of people are going to think there's something wrong with you. You might be fine with that. But you should be sensitive to why people think there's something wrong with you. And on balance. I think it's good that people have this kind of sense of unease about these things.
Clif Mark:Okay, so I want to talk a little more about just how irregular these sentiments are. Because we've talked a lot about art being ruined when the artists do something really bad when they're bad people. But you also mentioned in your essay, other examples of good things that came from bad people, for example, most people like the Civil Rights Act in America, but that was passed by LBJ, who is famously an asshole
Paul Sagar:more than an asshole. I mean, read the BART the famous biographies by Robert Caro. I mean, LBJ is on another level,
Clif Mark:give us give us some examples.
Paul Sagar:I mean, he was he he stole his senate seat. He was almost certainly vitriolic racist. He may well have sexually abused his his staff, he would frequently do things like take a shit whilst dictating notes, their secretaries just to bully them, let them know who was boss. I mean, the guy was unspeakable, he was corrupt. He You know, it just just, it's unbelievable what that guy like, did in his in his public and private life, but he passed the Civil Rights Act. And that's pretty important to American history. Right?
Clif Mark:Right, so how come the Civil Rights Act isn't polluted by the evil? lyndon b johnson?
Paul Sagar:So that's an interesting counter example which I hadn't thought of before. I've got to admit, right. And now there's a question if it maybe people. Yeah, maybe some, some acts are so important and so good. And because it's a political act that focuses purely on the consequences for people that aren't LBJ, maybe that makes an important difference. But perhaps perhaps there's a sense in which I actually wonder if Cairo himself the the great biography of LBJ did have something like this experience because the story about him he wrote a very famous Pulitzer Prize winning a biography of Robert Moses, the architects who built most of New York, and he said Moses was such despicable character that after that he wanted to write about somebody he admired. So he might LBJ because of LBJ. And the Civil Rights Act, and then he ended up writing this for an unfolding unfinished biography of LBJ was pretty much revealed that he was one of the worst people ever to have lived. And I wonder if Cairo himself was thorough
Clif Mark:milkshake duck.
Paul Sagar:I wonder if Cairo himself has a kind of sense of being so deep into the grotty legacy of LBJ himself, ends up coming out thinking a lot less of his political achievements and whether the achievements himself or lesson but then maybe in a case of politics, because what LBJ did was so important for the consequences it brought about other people, and another level of much more great ethical significance than simply being a nice piece of music, or even a great piece of music, maybe that but counterbalances out in a different way. So there's an interesting question there about whether political actions are more separable, you know, we tend to be more comfortable in the realm of politics, divorcing people's personalities from the actual release, we used to be maybe, maybe that's something that's changed more recently.
Clif Mark:Here's another thing that kind of bothers me about this worrying so much about artists and famous people, which is that the causality of watching, I don't know, a Harvey Weinstein production to his continued monstrosity, especially after you've been public punished, or, you know, what kind of causal harm or bad in the world would it create for me to laugh at Bill Cosby, or enjoy Michael Jackson's music given that they're not going to cause any more harm. I'm not out promoting that their personal life, I'm enjoying the thing. So that to me is like the connection between the moral evil in my enjoyment of the product is pretty attenuated, I admit that it's there, there's Association. Now, I want to compare that to examples where I think that there's a pretty clear causal relationship between my actions and my consumption and moral wrongs. So we could talk about different supply chains, people jumping out of windows and Apple factories, slavery in the seafood industry, all sorts of moral horrors, environmental horrors that involved in food production, just even the way we treat our migrant agricultural workers in your country in mind. These aspects of like everyday consumption seem to be causing moral harm that's comparable to like a certain Hollywood villains. And it seems like this is one where consuming it, you're more obviously, supporting the evil that's happening is directly causally connected to it. Like if I buy shrimp packed in Thailand, I'm probably supporting ungodly labor practices. Whereas that's not obviously true to me. If If I listened to off the wall. So this, I
Paul Sagar:think, is exactly why Smith wants to call these sentiments irregular. Because for precisely the reason you've said, it seems like totally out of whack, that we should get so upset about the films of Harvey Weinstein, not that we should definitely get upset about what Harvey Weinstein did, but that we should feel his films should now be viewed with suspicion seems like a bit of an overreaction, because, as you said, it doesn't seem to actually lead to any harmful consequences, especially when at the same time, we're totally indifferent about the slavery of the people who make our iPhones. And that leads to so to walk through, I think you've answered your own question there about how irregular are the sentiments like, seems pretty irregular, right? seems out of whack. And Smith handles this because he was a really phenomenal moral philosopher. It's still massively underrated in my view today. But he makes this point himself, which is, imagine someone told you that an earthquake had swallowed up, you know, a million people in China and killed them instantly. You'd feel bad about that. But then you wouldn't really think about it. You know, beyond that. If you find out Oh, when the earthquake happened, a million people died. You kind of go, Oh, that's a shame. That's really sad. But you know, five minutes later, you wouldn't think about it. But if someone said to you, tomorrow, I'm going to cut off your little finger right? You wouldn't sleep tonight. Because if you knew for sure you're getting your little finger cut off tomorrow, you'd be up all night like freaking out about it right? And but nobody thinks that your little finger being cut off is worse than a million people in China dying, right? No sane person thinks that. And yet our sentiments are very, very strongly calibrated towards ourselves. Right?
Clif Mark:Right. Well, if our Moral Sentiments are so irregular, and no sane person would follow them when making their moral judgment about your Chinese earthquake, then why should we be guided by these sentiments in cases like murder knives and folk music?
Paul Sagar:Because ultimately, like Smith, like Bernard Williams, like David Hume, the guys who have written most insightful in this area, I don't think it's for philosophers to tell us how to live. I think it's for us, really living our ethical life, to tease these things out carefully on a left personal basis, and muddle through as best we can, but not assume that the philosopher coming in with reason and the sharp scalpel of separating different cases and looking for black white answers. I don't think that's when philosophy is at its best. I think philosophy is at its best when it steps back, and lets you appreciate how messy the messes and try and improve that in various ways and try and make it a bit more consistent, and try and be honest about it. But ultimately, what else do we have to be guided by here other than our actual moral emotions and experiences? Because that's all that there is here?
Clif Mark:Well, that might not be all that there is because just earlier you were praising the accomplishments of modern liberal society by getting rid of certain forms of moral superstition, like racism, group responsibility and stuff like that. So isn't that a case of reason guiding the emotions or at least rejecting some forms of moral emotion?
Paul Sagar:It's the it's reason allowing us to examine our emotions and as choosing which emotions we're going to allow to prevail and encouraged over others, right. It's still the emotions
Clif Mark:that are being guided by reason. Gotcha. Okay. Let me ask. Okay, actually, I'm not gonna ask you another one. I think that's probably a good place to end it for today. So thank you, Paul. That was super interesting. And everyone should go read his essay on Eon magazine, eo n. It's called tainted by association. And it's super interesting. So before we go, is there anything you'd like to leave us with Paul?
Paul Sagar:No, I think we covered a lot there. I mean, I think I think it's kind of worth reiterating just how deep these things go. And when we hit what freewill moral responsibility, reason, the passions. And I think that's important because morality isn't simple. moral judgments aren't simple. And anybody who thinks that ethics can be boiled down to simple criteria and simple judgments. I thought I was making a serious mistake. So, you know, we covered a lot of ground and some of it we didn't cover very well, but that's sort of not our fault. As I like to say that's a feature, not a bug.
Clif Mark:All right. Thanks, Paul.
Paul Sagar:Well, Clif, thanks very much for having me again.
Clif Mark:It's a pleasure.
Unknown:Canada first was a summer of 16. Guys from school Julie got married.