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- [00:00]
A
I think it starts with recognizing that we need a whole toolbox and that a certain tool that may work really well at one time will not work at another time. So if we go back to the abolitionist movement, what we see is that initially they needed to be really pragmatic. They focused on stuff like the suffering of white sailors. They decided not to fight slavery as such, but instead fight the slave trade. And now the good fight with Jasia Monk.
- [00:35]
B
When I was younger than I am today, I thought it was quite easy to know how to make a difference in the world. It was easy to know which job had a positive impact on the world and which job might have a negative impact on the world. What political cause was righteous and what political cause would make the world a worse place. I have to admit that the older I get, the more I think about politics, the more experience I have in the world, the less clear it is to me how to actually make a positive difference in the world. Things turn out to be more complex than we bargain for now. To help me think through what it means to have genuine moral ambition, what it means to want to make the world a better place in an effective way, I invited onto the podcast one of the more interesting writers of this moment. Radger Bregman is a best selling author of a number of books, including Utopia for Realists. He went viral when he scolded the audience at Davos in 2019, telling them about Brazil, the dangers of wealth inequality. And he has a new book, which is really thoughtful, called Moral Ambition. Trying to give advice to young people, to activists, to ordinary citizens, about how they can make a difference in the world in a way that's actually based on the evidence, that's actually thoughtful. We had a conversation about just about every element of that. How do we know what the grand moral causes of our time are? When we look back at past societies, it's obvious what the real injustices were. Can we have similar clarity about where the deep injustices in our own societies lie? We talked about the right means. Do activists get some things right when they just prioritize calling attention to a particular cause? And when can that backfire? When can that turn people against them? When can that make it harder to actually affect change? And finally, what kind of advice should we give to young people figuring out their career today, or to people who are simply trying to sustain American democracy today, who are trying to think about what to do in the face of the executive overreach in the Trump administration? Those last parts of a conversation are reserved for paying subscribers, if you would like to listen to Rutger's advice on that, Please go to jasamunk.substack.com and become a paying subscriber. That is. Jasamunk.substack dot com. Rakta Bregman, welcome back to the podcast.
- [03:37]
A
Thanks for having me again, Jasia. Good to see you.
- [03:41]
B
I've been struggling with a question which your book tries to answer in a systematic way, and that is how to have moral ambition in the world, how to actually try to make the world a better place. And I feel like when I was 15 or 16, I would have had very easy answers to that. I would have said, go and work for an NGO that does good work, or go and work for the United nations or go and fight for your political ideals as an activist of some sort. And the older I get, the more skeptical I am that some of these things actually work, that they actually have impact. But you can foresee whether or not they might not have negative consequences. You're not expecting whether fighting for some cause in the wrong way actually might not lead the opponents of that cause, or people who have very different ideals and all kinds of other important aspects of the world end up getting more political power, end up getting more influential. So, you know, how in 2025 should young people or older people who want to have a positive impact on the world, who don't want to disengage from the ambition to do good in the world, think intelligently about how to do that?
- [04:57]
A
That's actually the exact same feeling I had. Maybe it's part of becoming older. You know, I spend about a decade writing articles and books about all the kinds of things we should try and fix, providing all kinds of radical ideas of how we can make this world a wildly better place, and then just hoping that some other people will do the actual work of doing that. And more and more I've realized that doing good is just incredibly hard, and that the way the world works is often so weird. So very often things that you think would work work at all or the right things happen for the wrong reasons. And maybe I should tell you a little bit about why I wanted to write this book, Moral Ambition. I was actually working on another book about the great moral pioneers of the past, the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the civil rights campaigners. And I started with the abolitionists. And I discovered a couple of things. The first lesson was that most abolitionists in most countries weren't very successful. So I am personally from the Netherlands. I grew up there. And the Netherlands didn't really have an abolitionist movement. We did have a bunch of Calvinist social justice warriors who were very interested in their own moral purity, but who didn't get much done. Does that remind you of anything? Then in France, you had a bunch of writers and intellectuals who, you know, were very good at preaching and writing long essays, but again, didn't get much done. In Spain and Portugal, there was nothing. It was only in Britain that the movement really took off, but it was really successful. One of the reasons, I think, was that it was led by entrepreneurs. So 10 out of 12 of the founders of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade were people who had built their own companies and who had skilled them, who were quite wealthy and then use that wealth, their network, and their skills to take on this fight. But the other thing that really surprised me about this movement is just how pragmatic it was. If you talk to a lot of activists today, they could say things to you like, oh, we should learn from the abolitionists. You know, just be against slavery. Just be against the slave trade. You know, a lot of vegans are like that today. It's like, just shout, go vegan. And just convince one person at a time to stop eating meat and dairy. Well, we've tried that for 50 years. Doesn't seem to be working. And indeed, if you actually look at how these successful abolitionists did it, well, they had a very different kind of playbook. So just if I can give you one example, which was a big surprise for me, one of their most effective political arguments back then was not about the suffering of enslaved people on the slave ships or in the colonies. No. They discovered at Some point that 20% of white sailors were dying during the voyages. And then they were like, holy shit. This is politically very powerful because now we can go to Westminster and talk to the prime minister, William Pitt at the time, and he was deeply impressed when he heard that, like, our boys are dying on these ships.
- [08:01]
B
Right, right.
- [08:01]
A
What's happening here? Right. And this is a tactic that psychologists call moral reframing. It's finding different arguments that resonate with different audiences for the same point that you're still trying to make. Anyway, this is just an example of how weird history can often be, is that we tend to think, oh, yeah, surely these abolitionists would just have, you know, shouted, ban slavery all day. And, you know, you just keep doing that. And at some point, you know, people ban slavery. Well, that's not at all how it happened. And this is one example, like, the whole history of Abolitionism is littered with weird, crazy examples of how things didn't happen the way you expect they would.
- [08:39]
B
Yeah, and I like how many counterintuitive things are already contained in that little snippet. Right. I mean, you and I, as writers would like to think that what moves history is the perfectly written pamphlet or book or essay. And perhaps we sometimes have a slight tendency to look down on our friends who've done MBAs, who are out in the business world actually doing things. But it turns out that people who have had real life experience, who know how to build an organization, who know how to make things work, might actually be more impactful. I also find very interesting this sort of question about which argument to choose. Right. I mean, both of those are bad things. There's young white people on those boats. Dying is a bad thing. It's less morally bad than the people who were stolen from the land and shipped off to other countries in an extremely violent way. But if you can use one of those bads in order to also undermine the other, then perhaps you should do that. I'm struck by the fact that often in forms of purity politics, we go out of a way not to do that. In one debate that's been big in the last years, though it doesn't seem to have moved the middle that much about police violence in the United States. I was always struck by the fact that there is disproportionate impact on African Americans for all kinds of reasons, from how difficult it is to hold bad cops to account in the United States. But it also has a lot of impact on others. Right. The majority of unarmed people who are shot dead in the United States are white just because whites remain a very clear majority of the overall population. And not only do we not emphasize this point in order to build solidarity around this, in many cases, we explicitly de. Emphasize it because it would somehow seem that to say white people are affected by this too, sounds like white lives also matter. It sounds like you're undermining the cause, when actually it could just be a way to build a broader coalition to fight for important reforms.
- [10:42]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So the book is about how can you effectively make the world a wildly better place? And that's what I've come to call moral ambition. The combination of, on the one hand, the idealism of an activist, but on the other hand, also the entrepreneurship and the ambition of someone who actually builds things, of an entrepreneur. I think that when those two things come together, something really magic happens. So I spent a lot of time in my book Critiquing the people who are very ambitious, but not very idealistic. Sometimes. This is described as the Bermuda Triangle of talent. A friend of mine who went to Oxford University always calls it that. All those people who've ended up in consultancy finance or corporate law one time, they may have been really idealistic when they still studied at, I don't know, Harvard or Yale or Princeton, but then McKinsey knocked on their door and something happened, I guess. But I also spend a lot of time critiquing those people who are very idealistic but not very ambitious, who aren't very serious about actually achieving results. And I like to describe them as noble losers, people who are more interested in their own moral purity, in washing their own hands in innocence, than in actually helping those people that they say they really care about. And this is obviously the point. The billions of animals who are currently tortured in factory farms, or the people who are suffering from police violence or inequality or oppression, the people who are currently suffering from war crimes in Gaza, you name it, they don't care about what you say in the comment section, right? They. They don't care that you've just won a debate in the group chat. They want you to achieve real, real results that will improve their own lives. That's what it means to be morally serious. And there is a. There's a huge lack of this currently, in my view, among. Among the left, a lot of idealistic people there who just don't seem to have the ambition of actually making a difference.
- [12:44]
B
I'm going to try to set up a different kind of trilemma and see how you think about it or respond to it. Right. So it's not really a trilemma, but it's sort of three very difficult things that you need to each get right in order to have positive impact in the world. The first is that you have to choose a good cause and a cause that remains good. And that's not a trivial thing. I can absolutely see why, from the perspective of my grandparents who grew up in small towns in Central Europe, most of in what today is Ukraine, at a time of great poverty and discrimination and social inequality, believed that the promises of communism could make the world a better place. We would all be equal, we would all be brothers. Those ethnic and religious distinction would no longer define our societies. And they, very courageously, for a lot of moral ambition, devoted themselves to advancing a course which turned out to kill millions of people, which turned out to perpetuate poverty in a part of a world that might otherwise have grown economically much more quickly. Right. So there's a problem of choosing the right cause, and most people are the heroes in their own stories. Right? Most people, even who fight for political causes that you or I might find horrifying from day one, think that they are doing something morally ambitious and morally good. So choosing a course that is actually good and choosing a course that actually will have good consequences, not just speaking in terms of positive ideals, is not at all trivial. So that's number one. Then there's number two, which is where you have to choose the right tactics and strategies and approaches to fight for a course that really might be objectively good in ways that are ineffective, might give you victories in the group chat, as you say, but not actually do anything. But the third is you also have to think about unintended consequences in terms of a potential victory on the other side. I mean, Barack Obama is a politician I still admire greatly. I have my disagreements with him and my criticisms of some of the things that may have gone wrong during his presidency, but he still, of all politicians living today, is one that I greatly admire. But it's easy to tell a counterfactual history by which without Obama, you don't get Trump. And actually, if Mitt Romney had won in 2012, the world would probably be in a much better place today. So even if you are really fighting for causes that, let's say, for sake of argument, are good, and even if you're very effective, you become President of the United States, the impact of all of that may in fact be that you move history in a really dark direction as a result. And so, you know, perhaps we can sort of click on each of those three elements. But that is, to me, what makes it so hard to think through what to actually devoid one's life to or how actually to make improvements, because once you recognize the difficulty of each three of these points in a free conjunction, it just becomes very, very hard to feel like you can predict what impact your life is going to have.
- [15:50]
A
Yeah, so those are three really good points. And let's click on all of them. I feel we can spend the whole podcast, by the way, talking about all of this. That's the idea.
- [15:58]
B
This is the roadmap. We can do that from the roadmap.
- [16:01]
A
Yeah. Okay, so let's first talk about picking the right cause. So I'm no moral philosopher, I'm no ethicist, I'm a historian. I like to think that I have, well, you could call it a common sense view of morality. I do see a certain directionality in the moral progress we've made in the last two centuries, I think it all started with the abolitionist movement. That was the first big attempt to expand the moral circle, as a philosopher, like Peter Singer would call it. And then once people started doing that, there were always logical next steps. So it's no surprise to me that the first suffragettes were initially abolitionists. Right. But once they had achieved certain successes, and in 1834, slavery was abolished across the British Empire, yeah, it became logical to think about, okay, can we push this even further? Don't women have rights as well then? And then after that came the children's rights movements, the union movements, the civil rights movements, LGBT movements. So I do think there's a certain logic at play here. It doesn't surprise me that a lot of the first abolitionists also cared deeply about animal rights. William Wilberforce was the founder of the Royal Society for the prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the United Kingdom. Benjamin Lay, he was a Quaker, who was the very first abolitionist in the United States, was also, well, pretty much a vegan, even though the word didn't exist back then. So for me, morality, it's not random, right? Once you start recognizing the inherent dignity of each and every one of on this planet, you believe in something like human rights, a certain amount of equality, then there is a certain logic at play. And I also think that very often moral disagreements are not as big as we think they are. So, for example, I've co founded an organization called the School for moral Ambition. And we help really talented people to pivot their career to work on some of the most pressing issues we face as a species. One of the causes we've took up is the fight against big tobacco. And I've just never met anyone who has wanted to make the case that the tobacco industry is a really good industry doing good work. I mean, it's the deadliest product in the history of civilization. It's killing 8 million people on an annual basis, which is like a jumbo, yet crashing every 30 minutes. It's purposely made to be as addictive as possible. I've never met any, like, whether it's a utilitarian or a deontologist, there are no big moral disagreements here. In my view, the same is true for something like factory farming. So I turned pretty much vegan. What is it now? A decade ago. And sometimes I get these invitations from television programs who are like, hey, Rutger, do you want to debate factory farming? The morality of it? And I always say, like, yes, of course I want to, but Good luck with finding someone who, you know, actually want to defend the other side. And very often the journalists come back to me a couple of days later and say, yeah, we couldn't find anyone because like anyone who looks into this, you don't need to be some, I don't know, some three hugger to just watch some videos and see just how horrific this is. So yeah, that's just one point. I think that sometimes people overestimate just the moral differences here. I think we can really pick some cases where we just agree that what's going on is really bad. Like malaria, also an example. 600,000 people die from malaria every year. Very little is happening and preventing that. I've never met anyone who's pro malaria, so I think it's more in the method kind of thing where we have disagreements. And I would also actually place something like communism in that bucket because the goals of communism probably all of us would, or like the theoretical goals of communism, most of us would agree, like, wouldn't it be nice to live in some kind of utopian society where we'd all be happy and you know, there would be equality and blah, blah, blah. It's just that it doesn't, really doesn't work that way. Right. It was a totally broken economic model and also the politics was completely messed up. So yeah, I think that's, that's where things get really, really tricky. And we obviously already talked about that earlier. Very often what you think works just doesn't work. In the book I talk about a simple example like fair trade, for example. I think that most people are like, yeah, sure, obviously, yeah, let's, let's pay a little bit extra money for my, I don't know, for my chocolate or my rice. And yeah, let's help poor farmers far away. Well, economists always pour cold water on this. They've done extensive studies and it just, I'm sorry to say, but it just doesn't work. The money doesn't end up with the poor farmers, but you know, it ends up with some middleman along the way. So the intentions are great, but the results are not. So yeah, that's more, more or less my take. I think especially when you think about the methods, you need to have a deep humility and have a very deep understanding that very often what you think works is not going to work. So surround yourself with people who, you know, who can be very critical of your work and build positive or quick feedback loops. Right? Make sure you get feedback from reality so that you know when something is really not Working the way you want it.
- [21:22]
B
So I'm excited to dive more deeply into methods in a little moment. But let's stay for now with this question about what the goals are. Because, look, I agree that there are some goals that seem on the surface to be uncontroversial and that perhaps really are right. I'm not going to argue with you. But somehow malaria might turn out to be a good thing, right? I mean, if we can divert more resources in an intelligent way to eradicating malaria in the world, that obviously is a good thing. And there's other causes like that as well. And at some level, I share the small p progressive worldview you have, which is that I think humanity has made moral progress over the last centuries. That's something that we should absolutely defend. And if you think that we have made moral progress over the last centuries in doing things like abolishing slavery, like giving women a lot more rights in society, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, then we should think that we can also go on to have more moral progress in the future. I nevertheless worry that it may not be as easy to recognize what does constitute further moral progress like that today and what doesn't if you're operating within that framework. It's a framework I basically accept, but that I think could often lead us wrong. And there's a few concerns I have here. The first is that the distinction between goals and means may not always be as clear as it is. One description of what's wrong with communism is to say they chose the wrong means. It just turns out that the regulated free market, but free market is much more effective at creating human welfare than a planned economy. And that wasn't obvious in 1940s, 1950s. A lot of economists believed that wouldn't turn out to be true. But now we are pretty confident that it is. And so that was a big mistake about means. But perhaps there's also something about the goal of a fully equal society, specified as the early communists did, that just inherently chafes against human nature in ways that we should have been more skeptical about. Perhaps part of the failure of communism is not only the practical failure of central planning, it is actually that it had the wrong goals in some kind of way. Another way of making this critique of expressing that skepticism is to say, well, what happens the way we remember history is often wrong. I think there is a kind of basically progressive view in which we say no at each step. There was people who wanted to change things in order to make them better, and then others who stood in the way, and we've made more progress over time. And that's because the progressives won against the conservatives at each of those steps. And now we have recognized that, of course African Americans should have the same rights, Black people around the world should have the same rights. But of course women should have the same rights, et cetera. And there's an element of that in the history of the last 300 years. But of course, we often forget the moments where the left of the progressives were on the wrong side of things and where what seemed like the logical next step turned out to be wrong. When you think about the breaking of sexual taboos in the 1950s and 1960s, I mean, in the centuries before that as well, right. There seemed to be a very logical progression where you're saying, look, all of these things we thought needed to be stopped and needed to be regulated and so on have turned out to just be these old superstitions. And society is much better off after the sexual liberation. And you know what the last remnant is? You know what the last thing is where we haven't yet applied the sexual revolution, the sexual self determination of children. Right? And that's how you ended up getting a lot of very serious philosophers, you know, signing letters advocating for the abolition of the age of consent and other kinds of things. But now we look back on these monsters. How could they basically advocate for pedophilia? But there was at the time a kind of logic to saying that is just the natural next step. Right. And it turned out very much not to be the natural next step.
- [25:24]
A
It's a really good point. Perhaps the same is true, by the way, for drugs. Right. Among liberals and progressives.
- [25:30]
B
Yeah, that's a good point.
- [25:31]
A
This tendency to say, like, let's liberate it. The Netherlands, you know, where I'm from, was actually ahead on this already in the 90s. Liberalize the use of weed, and we just should go further and further. And actually I've been thinking recently, but won't that give us another tobacco industry? But then much bigger than what we currently have, you have a huge legalized evil industry making even more people addicted and making a shitload of money at the same time. I think you could argue that's basically what has already happened in the US with weed. I am, you know, as a European walking down the streets in New York, I'm astonished about how many of these shops you have everywhere pushing wheat and you smell it everywhere as well. So, yeah, do we really want that? Right. Give these enormous commercial incentives to make people addicted. But I gotta be honest that I changed my mind on this. If you would have talked to me a decade ago, I was that kind of progressive who was like, yeah, sure, people can handle it, you know, and prohibition will always fail. Just liberalize it and things will work out fine. I think what goes wrong there is just that ideology gets in the way of scalp mindset. So on a higher level you still care about human welfare, right? It's just that you've, you've doubled down on a certain method here which is like liberalization. But anyway, I see your point is that causes and methods there, it's not always easy to distinguish well, which is which.
- [27:17]
B
Yeah, I mean, another way of thinking about this is, you know, I'm a liberal, right? In the philosophical sense. And it seems to me, and again, we have to retain a scout mindset. And perhaps it turns out that liberalism is not the right philosophy for the 21st century. Once we have, you know, artificial general intelligence and all kinds of other things. I for now believe that the evidence remains firmly on liberalism side. But that gives you a basic moral framework for where to push for equality and where not to push for equality. Right? Any being that is capable of a certain form of self government should have the rights and the ability to do that. Right? People who are capable of ordering the life according to their conception of the good should both have a freedom to choose the life as they choose, and they should have access to some set of basic resources in order to do that. That is the basic political credo that I have. Now you can get into all kinds of debates about what choosing means. I think some liberals are much too far on the side of imagining that at 18 we all self discover and self reinvent from scratch. For a lot of people, that simply means remaining true to the pre existing moral and perhaps religious commitments that they grew up with. Right? You can talk about what does it mean to have access to those kind of resources. Are we talking about a freedom to participate in the market or are we talking about a much more kind of Scandinavian welfare state that ensures that more proactively we can have all kinds of debates. But that's the basic outlook that I have now. That means that I can easily solve the question of enslaved people or of women, because it's actually an empirical question to start off with. I mean, you have to actually have certain set of empirical beliefs about the equality of different human groups. But those hopefully are very uncontroversial in 2025. Right? And so my ideology tells me that disenfranchising in any way, people on the basis of biological sex, on the basis of their skin color or of other such factors is a great evil and we have to fight against it. The problem with that is that at some point you run out of road. Which is to say that precisely because we have made great progress over the course of the last 200 years, I wonder whether the cause of fighting for formal equality is no longer the most pertinent lens for looking at society today. We want to sustain those gains and they might always be at risk. Right. So we don't want to lose sight of that. We might want to make other kinds of improvements. So I care about animal welfare and I recognize the evil of factory farming, even though I don't think that animals are equals in that sense and that it makes sense to make them citizens or give them political rights or anything
- [30:22]
A
like that, give them a vote.
- [30:25]
B
But it does mean that sudden the remaining ethical questions become a lot more complicated. It's much more complicated to think about how do we think about the right treatment of animals when they're not part of our liberal political community, when we can't, I think, in any very meaningful sense give them political rights? Or you get into really complicated questions about, for example, trans rights and say, all right, what is the right balance between the interest of people who have transitioned to have full participation in society and the interest that biological women might have in feeling safe in certain same sex spaces? Right. What is the right treatment of a 13 year old who feels strongly that they were born in the wrong body and who wants to have certain sets of hormonal or medical interventions so that they can potentially pass as the gender with which we identify when, on the other hand, we know that there's lifelong medical risks that might come from that and we might come to regret that change? How do we think about those things? I think you just get into much more morally gray and complicated territory because we're no longer in the world of should we be able to enslave people because they happen to have a different skin scale? Well, of course not. What do we do about the 13 year old who's confused about their gender identity? Or how exactly do we fight for the interests of sentient beings that aren't capable of inclusion in the liberal community, like animals that are being factory farmed? I. I think they're more complicated questions even at that moral level.
- [31:57]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the questions I keep coming back to in the book is how will the historians of the future look back on us because for us, it's fairly easy to look back on, say, the Mayas and the Aztecs who engaged in child sacrifice, or the Romans who threw naked women for the lions in the Colosseum, or the Middle Agers who burned witches at the stake, right? And then we say, oh, those people were barbarians, right? But luckily, we are so civilized. The point is obviously that pretty much every civilization throughout history has believed that it is, you know, that it was the most civilized civilization ever. The Romans thought very highly of themselves because they didn't sacrifice kids anymore. That's only what the barbarians did, Right? So it would be quite a coincidence if we would turn out to be that one civilization at the beginning of the 21st century that has figured it all out like that Liberals in the 21st century, they were the good people. And that the historians will say, like, finally, right, congratulations, you did it. Seems unlikely to me, but then what's the framework we'll use for trying to find out what we're still doing wrong today? In my book, I talk about a couple of potential candidates for things that might be ongoing moral atrocities. And indeed, I do think that the way we treat animals is probably the most obvious one. It's really easy, in my view at least, to make the case from a lot of different moral perspective. As I said, I rarely get any pushback here. It's one of those things that people already. Jeremy Bentham said this in one of his famous footnotes that he said, yeah, with animals, it doesn't matter whether they can reason or whether they can talk or how intelligent they are. The point is, can they suffer? Right? That's the question. And we've got an abundance of evidence now that says, yes, they can suffer immensely, and we've basically created the worst conditions for them in which they do suffer immensely. But there are other cases that are more difficult for me. There's one thing in particular I'm curious to hear. Your opinion here is with advancing neuroscience, it becomes clearer and clearer, in my view at least, that this thing we call free will, it doesn't really make sense. I mean, philosophers can have long debates about what free will actually is. But I think the way most people see free will is that, I don't know, you have some power independently almost of causality, to change the trajectory of your life. But, you know, there was this famous case of a man who turned out to develop, you know, an sexual interest in children. And then they found this tumor in his brain, right? And they removed it and the interest was gone. As neuroscience progresses, I Think it will become more and more difficult to assign moral blame to people because we will understand human behavior better and better. So this is a little bit like how God has retreated in the last couple centuries. Some philosophers call this the God of the gaps. Right. So Newton still needed God to make sure that the laws of history, of nature still work. But then there's this famous moment when the French physicist Laplace was asked by Napoleon after Napoleon had read his big book on physics, and Napoleon asked, like, where's God in this book? And then Laplace said, well, I didn't need that hypothesis. And I feel that the same thing could be happening to free will right now. But that has enormous political and moral implications, I would say. Does it still make sense to punish people? Well, perhaps if you have pragmatic reasons, right. Some people are just a danger to society. So you can always use that argument, like some people, you just need to lock them up. But then, yeah, does it make sense to punish them in a more, how do you say, that moralistic way? Maybe not anymore. Maybe the historians of the future will consider that utterly barbaric. Right. A form of a pagan religion or something like that. But the same could be true on the flip side of this, on giving people all kinds of bonuses. Why should we give the people who are lucky enough to have a lot of willpower or a high IQ or whatever, or a high amount of agency? I mean, they're already lucky that they have that. And now we should also give them more money and more prestige and you name it. You could still use the pragmatic argument and say, look, we've tested other economic models. You know, we just talked about communism. We've seen it doesn't work. But that's a pretty weak defense. Right? Because then that defense is always in danger of, you know, whenever we can find another model, right. That would still be effective economics and would still bring, I don't know, economic growth or innovation, whatever. Yeah. Then that would threaten the current meritocracy as we have it. So this was one of those examples for me where I feel that you have a couple of critics of free will out there, like Sam Harris, for example, or Robert Sapolsky. But I always felt that they don't really take the argument far enough that they don't realize how radical the point is that they're making. Right. If we really come to the conclusion that free will doesn't exist the way we think it is, then our whole political philosophy basically collapses. And the whole reasoning for giving some people bonuses based on their merits and punishing other people for their failings doesn't make sense anymore. But yeah, here I'm just super confused about how we should even move forward with this. And I'm curious to hear what you think.
- [37:54]
B
So I certainly don't have any definitive answers to the free will debate. I had Robert Sapolsky on the podcast for a spirited conversation if people want to look it up. And I also recently recorded a very interesting conversation with Kevin Mitchell, who has a kind of defense of free will. I think I tend towards a somewhat more, I suppose, compatibilist reading of a free will debate, which is to say that in part for the reasons you point out that our entire way of thinking about the world would be pulverized by giving up on any idea of free will. I actually think it's impossible for humans to coherently do that. It's interesting that we always focus on the punishment side on perhaps we should no longer punish people. Perhaps we might sort of isolate them from a community. They're dangerous or something like that. But we can no longer have moral standing to punish if they didn't fully choose the action in some kind of idealized way. But we never think about the positive side of that. And if you generally think, well, we don't have free will and that we're just automata that are being acted upon, then you can't love your spouse, Then you can't feel gratitude towards your friend, right? Then all kinds of other moral emotions would have to go out of a window as well. And to me, I think that just means that a particular account of what morality consists in is mistaken. I recognize that you happen to be smart and you happen to be a nice guy, and that's why I'd love to have lunch with you. I don't think you deserve those things. I don't think you chose those things. I don't think some other schmuck chose to be an unpleasant idiot, right? But what it means for me to like you and think of you as an acquaintance and perhaps eventually a friend, is that I recognize those positive attributes in you. And those are the things that I relate to, and those are the qualities on the basis of which I treat you. The fact that those aren't fully deserved, the fact that those aren't fully chosen, to me isn't some kind of gotcha, which makes me think, oh, I should be as keen to have lunch with Yiddi down the street as I am to have with you, right? So I think there's a way to sort of sidestep this bit of a free will, but we're not going to solve that. I do want to push you on a couple of other things because what you're saying is very interesting, which is I love this question of what do you think in a hundred years we're going to think very differently morally about than we do today? What's going to seem obvious about our society, but it's unjust in ways that we don't recognize. But of course, if we went back to the members of past societies and asked them that, they wouldn't have given the answers that we would give today. I mean, perhaps people in ancient Rome wouldn't have said, or in ancient Athens wouldn't have said it's our treatment of slaves that's terrible. And we really should rethink that. Perhaps they should think actually our moral standards are slipping and we're giving too many rights to our women and we're going around being too bold. Right. We might have given very, very different answers from the ones we give today. And I worry that, you know, I think you're right, that especially if we find new technologies that allow us to produce tasty protein at scale in a way that doesn't involve animal suffering, I think we will look back and say, you know, how barbarous was the practice of making all these sentient beings suffer, you know, in order to have a nice lunch or in order to have a nice dinner. I think that's quite convincing to me. By the same token, I might say that similar things might be true about our reproductive technologies. Now, you and I are both kind of similar in certain respects. We both come from pretty secular European countries. I believe you don't have a particular religious background. I didn't grow up in any, you know, religious way.
- [41:25]
A
I thought father is a preacher.
- [41:27]
B
Oh, is that right? Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, so I got you pegged wrong. But you know, I imagine that if it becomes trivially easy to make reproductive choices in 100 years, and if nobody ever becomes pregnant without choosing to do so, we might very well look back at this time and say how on earth could they tolerate a million people being aborted in the United States every year? How could they think that we should be super concerned about the suffering involved in milking a cow, that they were fine with five month old fetuses being killed? And that's not something that comes to us as easily because we're raised in a moral culture where worrying about those things implies a certain set of political convictions and stances that make Us nervous. And so that's not front of mind. But there may be other things like that that we're not thinking about at all because they're so fundamental to how our civilization runs.
- [42:24]
A
Yeah, I guess what I find a bit troublesome about discussion, Yasha, is that I don't want to end up in a place where, you know, we're two guys on a podcast thinking about, oh, yeah, really interesting. I guess we'll never know, let's see, a hundred years from now. Because I really don't think we're in that situation. I do think we have a decent amount of moral clarity on, you know, some obvious examples that I just gave. I'm pretty sure I'm like 99.9999% sure that we. That the way we treat animals today is utterly horrific. And that if we can find some way of. Of getting out of this situation, indeed, by coming up with tasty alternatives, I think that's probably going to be the way forward. That indeed we will look back on this utterly horrified. That's just because, you know, I have seen the responses of people who are, you know, pretty devout carnivores to certain images. You know, whenever people learn more about how their meat and dairy is produced, pretty much everyone is really shocked. So for me, this is one of those cases where we don't need deep philosophical discussion. Like, oh, I wonder what Plato would have said. It's like, but, yeah, maybe I'm not enough of a philosopher here, but, yeah, as I said, I'm also a little bit worried that making these kind of things too abstract or too philosophical is a way of evading moral responsibility, of not recognizing that we're in a pretty urgent situation and we got to do something.
- [43:58]
B
No, that's, I think, a good front. And that then implies the second question that we've delayed a little bit, but promised to get back to, which is, all right, so let's say that we agree, and I think that's an obvious candidate, that a lot of our practices for how to procure the meat that most of us, including myself, still eat are deeply unethical. What do we do about that? Is it a matter of individual consumption choice? Is it a matter of going around exhorting people to stop eating meat and convincing people to be vegetarians or vegans? And presumably that would, in fact, put an end to the practices of factory farming because people would no longer have any financial interest in doing so. There's no customers. Is it pushing for social rules and regulations? Is it fighting for legislation? Is it going a step further and trying to shame people who do eat meat, Staging very visible, theatrical forms of shaming people at Michelin star restaurants or at McDonald's. What kind of tactics would you then think are appropriate in order to pursue a moral goal like that?
- [45:11]
A
So I think it starts with recognizing that we need a whole toolbox and that a certain tool that may work really well at one time will not work at another time. So if we go back to the abolitionist movement, what we see is that initially they needed to be really pragmatic. They focused on stuff like the suffering of white sailors. They decided not to fight slavery as such, but instead fight the slave trade, you know, the transport of people from Africa towards the colonies in the Caribbean, because they knew that it was, like, politically toxic to say anything about, you know, private property or the autonomy of the colonies. But then later, there came a moment in the 1820s and the 1830s when the movement actually needed to become more radical. So this was a moment when people like William Wilberforce, one of the famous abolitionists, he was still a gradualist. He was saying, yeah, we can phase out slavery, and that's the way forward. But they weren't making progress anymore. And it was very necessary that there was a new generation of young abolitionists who talked about the slumber of the daddies and who were saying, like, immediate abolition right now. And that actually gave the movement a lot of new energy. So I think that is something to keep in mind here. It depends. If we look at something like the movement for climate justice or the fight against climate change, sometimes we need people like my mother, who was recently arrested. Once again, she's.
- [46:43]
B
That sounds like a story, especially for Once again.
- [46:46]
A
Well, she's an extinction rebellion activist, and she's been the person in our family who's the only one who keeps getting arrested. But, yeah, I think that there are moments when you need those kind of people. Right. I think there's decent good evidence that the climate movement, the Greta effect, as it's sometimes called among political scientists, really helped push the case forward, really helped politicians with the necessary momentum to propose certain legislation. It has helped entrepreneurs to make sure that there are more subsidies for their products, et cetera. I find it funny that very often people who benefit from these kind of movements also dislike the movements. So I've spoken to entrepreneurs who've built quite successful climate companies in the last couple of years who make quite a bit of money, and they would say, I don't like the activists. I'm like, well, I assume you do like it that they keep pushing this particular topic on the agenda. And maybe it's not their goal to be liked. Maybe that's not what it's about. So it depends. There are other times, though, that these kind of movements really don't work. Like in the 90s, we had a lot of confrontational activism for animal rights that I think did immense damage to the animal rights movement, really discredited it for many, many years. So there you probably need quite a bit more pragmatism and a more entrepreneurial approach. There are cases like, for example, the women's rights movement. It's hard to imagine the second wave of feminism without the birth control pill. Right, that gave women the control of their own fertility. Well, that was one feminist philanthropist, Catherine McCornick, who in the 50s said, you know, I want this thing to exist. And she deliberately sought out the scientist who could make her the pill. It was initially called Innovit, but it was so revolutionary that today we just call it the pill. So here, technology was deliberating for us. But, yeah, I think it's really important to keep coming back to that toolbox metaphor. It's just realize that what may work at a certain point in time may not work at another point in time and resist the temptation of falling in love with your own method. So you, for example, Yasha, you come across as a guy who really likes deep philosophical discussion. Maybe not the kind of guy who walks down the street with a sign that says climate justice now, but I think you and I gotta be smart enough to recognize that actually, sometimes that's what's necessary and that's what pushes things forward. It just. It depends.
- [49:27]
B
So. So perhaps I need to have your mother on the podcast at some point as well for debate. And I'm sure she's very eloquent and interesting too. I guess there's sort of two levels of. Two levels at which to ask questions about tactics and strategy, Right. One is the kind of slightly more lower level. Let's say there is, you know, a meat factory in your town or close to your town that has particularly heinous practices, and you're trying to think about how to it shut down or regulated or changed or whatever, right? And you have to think, well, you know, do I invite the owner of a factory for dinner and try and have a civilized conversation with the owner and appeal to their conscience and try and make them understand, you know, why what they're doing is wrong and have a change of heart? Or do I have a bunch of people sort of you know, staging viral action in front of a factory in a way that, you know, incites public opinion or shames them or impedes their business interests or whatever. Right. You know, and then there's a kind of, I think, slightly different question about what actually is a strategic goal where we might have sort of disagreements. Right. You know, in the. In the case of a meat industry, where I think the two are thought to be a little bit less. In contrast, it might be, well, you know, is it fighting each factory farm or is it saying, no, actually we have to go upstream to a technological level? And, you know, the best animal rights activists are the entrepreneurs who started Impossible Meats or whatever. Right. And how do we push it forward so that people no longer have that moral choice, you know, between enjoying a steak dinner and contributing to the suffering of animals. They can have a lovely steak at dinner and it doesn't involve any suffering. And that's going to make it easy for people, and that's how we're going to get change at scale. In the case of a climate movement. You know, the question that I would love to put to your mother is, is that actually the right framework about how we actually going to change the climate right now? Is it really the priority in the world to reduce carbon emissions, or is the priority to get enough electricity to the poor people in rural villages in Africa and still parts of Asia that don't, you know, have a light to switch on at night, that can't cook in a safe way, that can't, you know, get to the next town or to get medical treatment because they don't have enough energy? Right. And it's the right way to actually deal with climate change, not investing in technologies that are going to bind more carbon in the ocean, as my friend Kiko Toro argued in a recent podcast, or other kinds of technologies that are going to deal with this in a completely different kind of way. So how do we think about that level of strategy? Because, again, that. That's easy to dismiss, I think, as saying, well, those are kind of nice debates to have on a podcast, but that may be where the real choices are. Right. I do think that a lot of actress movements from the past that we think in retrospect weren't very effective. Some of them was because they kind of didn't win over public opinion. Some of them was, well, it turns out they really were sort of barking up in the wrong tree.
- [52:36]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, as you know, in politics, agenda setting is incredibly important. It's just making sure that people talk about the right things. And I think that's where movements like extinction rebellion play a really important role, even if you don't like them. But every time they're in the news, yeah, we're talking about climate again. And I think actually that a lot of venture capitalists or entrepreneurs have benefited from them raising the issue of climate change so that then they can raise money for their companies that actually develop some of the solutions that you just talk about. So I think we shouldn't, shouldn't dismiss that kind of interaction. Now, what is the right tactic to make progress against something like factory farming? Here are three things that are very different, but that I all like. Take an organization like the Humane League, they have the Genghis Khan model of fighting factory farming. So Genghis Khan, famously, whenever he would arrive at a new city that he wanted to conquer, he would say, okay, surrender now or I will completely destroy you. And then if the city would not surrender, he would utterly destroy the whole city. They would rape all the women, kill all the men, etc. Then they would go to the next city and say, you see what we did there? Surrender now or we'll do it again. And that's basically the model of some of these animal rights organizations where they choose one company in particular and they say, we're going to throw everything we have at you. We're going to make your life horrible. There are going to be activists at all your shops all the time. We're going to shame you in the media, like everything we have. And then, yeah, unless you say, oh, we're going to go cage free, right, we're going to treat our chickens, for example, better. And that's been really effective. So in the US there's been enormous progress towards cage free eggs, for example, and a lot of that has been pushed by groups like the Humane League. Now, a completely different tactic is something that I talk about in my book. It's an animal rights activist called Leah Garches who is currently at Mercy for Animals. And one of the things she realized is that a lot of the farmers are currently also being exploited. So it's not just the chickens, but it's also these factory farmers who very often make very little money, are under the poverty line, and often want to get out actually of the business, but they can't because then they will have to sell the land that has been in the family for a long time. So she actually became friends with one of these factory farmers, a man named Craig Watts in North Carolina, and they agreed to team up against these Big multinational corporations that are not only exploiting the animals, but also the farmers. Very different kind of strategy. Right. But was super effective in raising awareness. They've done multiple productions together that have gone utterly viral. So that's tactic number two. Tactic number three could indeed be completely different. As you mentioned, some of these hardcore animal rights activists have now turned into entrepreneurs who've raised money to develop things like clean meat or use precision fermentation, a very exciting new technology where you use microbes to produce certain kind of proteins that are also present in meat. And indeed, the Impossible Burger is one of the famous examples here. I'm very excited to be living in the US right now because the Impossible Burger is sadly illegal because of very silly environmental laws. Another good example of people with good intentions doing a lot of harm because we have a total ban of GMO in Europe. But here I can eat these Impossible burgers and I can't get enough of them because they're the tastiest plant based burgers out there. So I think that all these three
- [56:38]
B
things I didn't know the Impossible Burger is illegal in Europe. Can you just explain this to me?
- [56:44]
A
Yes. Well, it's basically the green pieces of this world have done a really effective lobbying campaign in Europe on what we call the precautionary principle. So they saw some bad use of GMO and that ended up in a total ban. Which is really sad and really terrible because our current food system is just a nightmare in terms of sustainability and in terms of animal welfare. And Europe should be leading the way here. But we've really tied our own hands with saying, yeah, that there is this total ban and novel food regulation is also a nightmare. This is actually why with my organization, we are now recruiting really smart lobbyists and legal people out of their job to work on advancing the cause of alternative proteins in Brussels. Because what we need here is something that people like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson would call the abundance agenda. Environmentalists here have been really good at saying no blocking things. But what we actually need is a way to open things up again so that we will have a new wave of innovation. Because, yeah, the status quo is currently benefiting from all these bands. It's not the planet, climate or animals.
- [58:17]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, Radke and I talk about how to actually make a difference in the world. What advice does he end up giving to young people seeking out their career path or older people who want to reorient their life, who want to re inject meaning into what they do. And finally, what should American citizens be doing who are worried about Donald Trump? What does effective political action look like in the face of the Trump administration? To listen to that part of the conversation, Please go to yashamonk.substack.com Support the mission of this podcast. Make it possible for us to have these conversations gain access ad free to all bonus elements of each episode and to all bonus episodes. That's yashamunk.substack.com and as a reward for listening to so much of this conversation, I'm throwing in a special offer. If you go to yashamunktasapse.com thegoodfight, you are gonna get 25% off your first year of subscription. That means it's effectively a little more than a dollar a week. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about this show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like them. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [60:06]
A
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.