A Philosopher’s Guide To The Good Life - Meghan Sullivan & Paul Blaschko

1. 0:00 – 0:15

   Intro

   1. PBPaul Blaschko0:00

      Marcus Aurelius is constantly writing to himself. He's like, "Look, don't think about how you might lose the things you love in the future. Return to the present and realize they're here right now. And in worrying about them, you're missing out on what's so good about them."

2. 0:15 – 12:34

   The Threatening Ideas of Socrates

   1. CWChris Williamson0:15

      So I want to start with a quote, "Are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as possible, while you do not care nor give thought to wisdom or truth or the best possible state of your soul?" What's that mean to you?

   2. MSMeghan Sullivan0:31

      I can start. So that's a very famous passage from Socrates' Apology. Uh, 2,400 years ago, Socrates, the kind of founder of philosophy, was put on trial by the Athenian government for, among other things, corrupting the youth of Athens for asking too many hard questions and being a, a bit too aggressive and pushy about whether Athens was pursuing the things that were really valuable in life versus just kind of inflating their own egos. And one of the things I love about that quote, we, uh, we shout that and read it to, to undergraduates here at Notre Dame quite a bit. You can imagine somebody saying to their enemy or, like, their opposition, "You guys don't care about the right things. All you care about is money," or, "All you care about is fame. You don't care about what's really good." But Socrates, uh, is not saying that to his enemies. He's saying it to his friends and students. That's one of the quotes that got him into trouble, is he's going around to people he really cares about and saying, like, "Paul, I think you're getting too addicted to these, like, cultural lies about money and honor, and I really think you need to work harder on, like, going after things that are really worth having." And that was a threatening idea in Athens.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:45

      Why was it so threatening?

   4. PBPaul Blaschko1:47

      Yeah. Well, I mean, so for one thing, uh, Athens is a direct democracy, right? Uh, and so the ability to argue and the ability to persuade people could be literally a life or death matter, right? If somebody got up and accused you of something, uh, in front of, uh, uh, the assembly, you just had to stand up and you had to argue. You had to say like, "This is, you know, why this isn't true," uh, or, "This is why somebody else owes me a bunch of money," or whatever it might be. And so the ability to just win arguments at all costs is something that was a really valuable skill. And there were actually professional, you know, we call them argument or debate coaches, they're, they're called the Sophists, right? Uh, who would be hired, uh, often by sort of the wealthy, uh, uh, i- in Athens to train Athenian citizens on how to argue, right? Uh, and it's easy to see how you might lose, uh, the truth in all of that, right? Uh, or lose the desire for the truth, lose the love for the truth, uh, because if it doesn't matter, you know, whether your argument's true or not, if it just matters like whether you're persuading people, um, there's not really, uh, as much incentive, right, to, to focus on, uh, you know, whether your reasons that you're giving are good. Um, so this is one of the reasons why I think Socrates is such a revolutionary figure, both in his own time and also ours. I mean, like, a- as we sort of did the research and we're wri- looking at ancient Athens, I was just struck by how many parallels there are between, you know, the (laughs) complaints that Socrates has about his own time and the complaints that, you know, a lot of us have when we sort of look at the, the state of, of political debate or the state of, uh, debate on Twitter and, you know, people trying to sort of own each other on Twitter or, you know, just, uh, you know, exert some sort of power without any sort of respect for or love, uh, of the truth. And that's, you know, it's an over, uh, generalization. It's not always the case. It's not what's always going on. Um, but it certainly resonates, right? Uh, the message sort of resonates, and as I read, you know, Socrates' critique, I just, like, constantly found myself nodding along and thinking like, "Yeah, I recognize this."

   5. CWChris Williamson3:41

      Why did he end up being killed then?

   6. PBPaul Blaschko3:44

      Yeah, good. (laughs)

   7. MSMeghan Sullivan3:46

      Uh, this is the question (laughs) from the last 2,400 years. I mean, so much philosophy has been written, starting with his student Plato, about how did this go so wrong? This is one of the things I love about reading Greek philosophy is that, you know, you can empathize with these guys. Uh, I don't know, I suspect a lot of your listeners are like me, and you look around, it's 2022 and you just think, "How did we get here?" (laughs) Like, what exactly got us to the point where this is what we're fighting about in the news, and this is how I'm living my life? For, you know, allegedly the charges against Socrates were that he was corrupting the youth, that he was encouraging, uh, atheism or the, or rejection of the Greek religion. The weirdest one is that he worships things below the earth (laughs) , or is too interested in things below the earth. And again, it's as, even at his time people were like, "What is this charge?" (laughs) Um, you know, one of the, one of the hypotheses that I think, uh, makes the most sense to me is put yourself in the shoes of the Athenians. To make decisions, you have to do them democratically and people have to vote. And I don't know if you're part of, like, a local school board right now or if you're part of an office that's deciding your, like, policy for coming back to work, anytime you need people to vote to make an important decision, you really need people to be lined up and together and agreeing with each other. Otherwise, it's really, really fraught and very painful and stressful, especially if you think that the other... a bad decision might get made. And so for Athens, they made all their big decisions, "We're going to war. We're gonna levy a new tax," they, they made all the decisions that way. And somebody like Socrates going around encouraging people to question the status quo or question the culture is gonna be... once you see it working, and it worked, like he got people to think like, "Maybe I'm not so right. Maybe I shouldn't believe what the louder guy's telling me." Um, then you also start to lose confidence that we're able to vote on anything anymore, and, and that can be really scary if there's a lot on the line.

   8. PBPaul Blaschko5:49

      I think too, just to, to kind of jump in here, you know, one of the, the really powerful moments in the Apology is where Socrates is given the choice to either go free, right? He can totally go free, but they say, "If you go free, like, you, you can't keep asking questions," right? "You can't keep doing this thing that you've been doing, uh, or we're gonna kill you." Like, those are your choices, right? Uh, and of course he chooses to die. He says, "The unexamined life is not worth living." This is something that, like, we put on stickers here at Notre Dame <|agent|><|en|>

   9. CWChris Williamson6:16

      Is that his response...

   10. PBPaul Blaschko6:18

       ... or put on T-shirts.

   11. CWChris Williamson6:18

       Is that his response during the trial?

   12. PBPaul Blaschko6:21

       Yeah, it comes in the apology. Yeah. He says, uh -

   13. CWChris Williamson6:23

       That is a fucking boss move. Like, what an unbelievable response.

   14. MSMeghan Sullivan6:29

       (laughs)

   15. PBPaul Blaschko6:29

       If you think, that's, that's great. I mean, the other thing they say is like, "Well, what do you think your sentence should be, if not death?" And he says, "You guys should give me free lunch for the rest of my life."

   16. MSMeghan Sullivan6:37

       Yeah. (laughs)

   17. CWChris Williamson6:37

       (laughs)

   18. PBPaul Blaschko6:37

       He literally said that. "You should provide me meals."

   19. MSMeghan Sullivan6:39

       He was kind of trolling them. I mean, at this point, he is totally trolling them.

   20. PBPaul Blaschko6:42

       Totally trolling. Yeah.

   21. MSMeghan Sullivan6:42

       He knew where this was going.

   22. PBPaul Blaschko6:43

       Which like ... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, but I, I think one of the reasons that's so powerful for me is because, you know, a way of, uh, focusing in on what you think are the most important goals in life, or the most important good things in life, right, is just to ask, like, "What are the things that, if I didn't have them, my life wouldn't be worth living?" You know, Aristotle famously says, you know, "Without friends, a man would not choose to live, though he had every other good." And to me, you know, that just strikes me, right? I think like, yeah, gosh, you can imagine somebody who's, you know, totally wealthy. They have, you know, they're physically fit and healthy and everything else. They don't have any friends. You think there's something deeply lacking in that life, right? And so in choosing not to continue to live if he can't engage in this kind of questioning, if he can't pursue the truth with other people in his community, Socrates is really just saying like, "This is the ultimate good. This is the ultimate goal in my life, and if you're gonna take that away from me, you might as well take my life, too." That like, I don't know, even now, like, gives me chills. It sort of, you know, is the reason why I think philosophy professors see him as sort of the, the martyr, uh, kind of hero figure, uh, uh, in philosophy. Uh, and I think, you know, it's a worthwhile thought experiment for us, too, just to think, like, you know, what are those good things in our life that we'd be either willing to give up our life for, or that just, you know, without which we would say, "Yeah, our life is, is not worth living," or is certainly not as good as it is now.

   23. MSMeghan Sullivan8:07

       I think, and this can kind of sound like, you know, literature, uh, not realizing that this is a real, uh, a real trade-off that people face even now. So I was really moved this summer reading about faculty members in philosophy departments in Hong Kong, who are faced with this decision of going to jail if they continue to teach certain kinds of political philosophy, or, uh, if they're willing to stop teaching that, then they can keep their jobs and, uh, if they have like a-

   24. CWChris Williamson8:33

       What type of philosophy is it?

   25. MSMeghan Sullivan8:36

       Uh, philosophy about liberal democracies, so like John Rawls and, uh, like, Western-style arguments about how decisions should be made in a democratic liberal republic. Uh, Rawls in particular is kind of the flash point, because he's on in a lot of curricula. And there are faculty members who, um, are threatened directly with the government, with jail sentences or losing their jobs, who I think are pretty brave. I, I read this and thought, like, "Gosh, what would I do?" Like, uh, would I be willing to change my class to avoid going to jail? Or would I think, like, there's no point in me claiming I'm a philosopher or living in this world if I can't, if I can't ask the questions that I think we need answers to.

   26. CWChris Williamson9:17

       That Socratic sacrifice is a good way to kick off any subject area, right? Like if that's the guy that was ...

   27. MSMeghan Sullivan9:25

       Yeah.

   28. CWChris Williamson9:25

       You know, that's your Jesus Christ, it's gonna make some pretty badass people downstream from that. I didn't even know that about Hong Kong, because they're not ... Hong Kong are, are separate nation state independent of China, right? Or is there some Chinese influence that's coming over the top of that which is causing issues?

   29. MSMeghan Sullivan9:41

       It's quite complicated at the moment, and this is definitely not an area where I'm an expert. I've had the chance to spend some time at these universities in Hong Kong doing philosophy, and they have really vibrant, totally amazing philosophy departments. But yeah, the, the, um, the mainland, mainland China and the People's Republic is, uh, taking over more and more, uh, governing control over Hong Kong as a part of this process of, uh, Britain giving up control. And so we're facing some really hard questions about what, what the nature of education is. Um, I mean, this, it's just two very different mindsets about what's really valuable, and, and it's, like, you know, it's, it's institutionalized in these particular people having to make hard, hard decisions.

   30. PBPaul Blaschko10:21

       One thing, yeah, that this reminds me of is, uh, there's this great series of episodes on This American Life about Hong Kong and about what's going on. Uh, and it's actually just fascinating. Again, I know nothing about, uh, the political situation in Hong Kong, but, uh, but one thing that comes out in that series is just, uh, how education, uh, is a, is a flash point, as you're saying. It's kind of, um ... It's got this power, right? Like, what you're teaching in the schools, it's got this generational power, uh, which, you know, is humbling to think about in our own context, because I think it's, it's easy to get lost in all the different debates that we have in academia or wherever else. Um, but it, you know, it, it does hold a kind of power. What, what you're teaching, what you're learning, what kind of community you're building up with people that you're asking questions with, I mean, it's got political, uh, impacts.
3. 12:34 – 22:37

   Finding the Good Life from Philosophy

   1. CWChris Williamson12:34

      to what you guys are doing now, what does this have to do with leading a good life?

   2. MSMeghan Sullivan12:39

      Yes. We, we actually talk about this in the first chapter of the book. We talk about, uh, all of the adventures we've had in, uh, in teaching philosophy over the last four years, where we try to ask these really fraut- really hard questions to hundreds and hundreds of 18-year-olds, and kind of like light the match and watch what happens. Well, I think one thing that we've learned, and we, we really try to share this with the reader in the first chapter, is a l- a lot of folks are frustrated right now by realizing that they have pretty persistent disagreements with other people about hot button issues. About racism, about how to handle a global health emergency. And they think that, uh, you know, strategies that we get recommended to us, one strategy which I feel like I read about all the time in The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education is how to mold people's minds to agree with you using, like, subtle techniques. So how, how to, like, get Paul to come around on wearing a mask by using re- ret- rhetorical tricks. And it's like, oh my gosh, this is sophistry. Like, th- this is totally, um, not the ethical way to te- treat people who disagree with you. Another approach is, like, why your arguments are better than the people who disagree with you, and how to know that your arguments are better. Uh, and that's also not gonna help you make any progress at trying to figure out how to, we can all get on the same page and, and improve our beliefs. Plato, in The Republic, one, just talks about how frustrated he is with trying to argue with people who spend all their time thinking about winning arguments. Uh, but then he also says, "We have another option," which is to first, like, remind ourselves when we start to get into these fights why we care in the first place about this issue, and, like, why it matters to us to get it right, rather than just to win. Plato has his students in the academy doing all these exercises, like math problems, to just remind themselves that they still like getting the right answer, uh, even if it wasn't the answer they initially started out with. And he thinks that, like, cultivating that feeling of, like, wanting the right answer rather than defending the answer you currently have is, it's a better option. And then we get this allegory of the cave in The Republic where he's like, "What if there's, like, better answers about absolutely everything, and not just math problems? And what if, like, if you tried harder, you might get those as well? And how much, how beautiful would it be to be outside the cave? How much better would it be to be outside the cave with your friends, (laughs) and not just by yourself?" And starting to kind of ... We call it fear of missing out, but philosophical fear of missing out. Like, what if you, if you kind of feel like there could be something better that we could achieve by cooperative discuss- discussion of this issue, aimed at the truth rather than just trying to win the argument, then maybe, uh, maybe wanting that would help decrease some of the tension.

   3. PBPaul Blaschko15:24

      I think, too ... So the, the way that I, uh, sort of experience, you know, the method that Socrates is employing, and, and in some ways this is related to, you know, even the title of our book, The Good Life Method, like, uh, thinking about, you know, rightly ordering the values that you have, uh, in pursuing the truth or, or, you know, in, in thinking about what matters in your life and, and what your goals should be. Uh, the way I connect it with, with our contemporary, especially, like, our very contemporary situation is, you know, uh, maybe 10 years ago or so, uh, I used to read a lot of op-eds, uh, that had the following form. They would say, like, "Look, we all disagree about things, but as long as we get all the views out there on the table, we're eventually ... Like, the truth is gonna rise to the top, and we're just gonna figure it out, right?" And then it turns out that, uh, when people start making arguments with no regard (laughs) for the truth at all, this strategy just doesn't work, right? Uh, in the book, we, we, we call this, you know, after, um, Harry Frankfurt, you know, calls this bullshit, right? Just making arguments without any concern for the truth at all, that's just bullshit, right? So, you know, you can't have a policy, a personal policy or sort of an institutional policy that just says, "Look, we take every single argument that comes out there and we put them at exactly the same level, and eventually we're all gonna agree. There's gonna be a consensus." Uh, now, where that does work is if you have some shared value underlying, you know, the arguments that are getting on the table. Now, here's how I, I think about it and experience it. I argue with my mom, like, all the time. Like, this is, like, the way that we show that we love each other, is we, you know, call each other up and we're like, "There's this article about something, and, you know, I think you're wrong about this." And we go back and forth. And the reason I think it works for us, whereas it definitely doesn't work for me on Twitter or on Facebook or, you know, on social media, is that my mom and I care both about each other, but also about the truth. Like, we genuinely ... You know, not, not always. I mean, you know, it's, like, easy to kind of get into a position where you're like, "Ah, I just wanna be right." But, but we really care. We really think, "Look, we're both gonna be better off if we know the truth about this, even if that means that you're wrong, even if it means that I'm wrong, even if it means we're both wrong." So I think, you know, I don't have a, like, deep diagnosis of, like, why we're so politically polarized or why we've gotten to a position where, you know, we use argumentational bullshit, uh, to just kind of, like, push the different positions that we have to try to change politics or our community or whatever it might be. I don't know why exactly that is. Uh, but I do know that, that, you know, Plato and Socrates and Aristotle are onto something where they say part of the problem, a huge part of the problem, is that we just don't have this really fundamental attitude, a love for the truth. And it's something that, that we don't have in relationship and in community with other people. And if we have that, if we can rediscover that or reawaken it, it's gon- gonna make a huge difference.

   4. CWChris Williamson18:08

      I think the problem is that you have perverse incentives going on here. If somebody was constrained by the truth, then their argumentation would be less effective, because the race to the bottom is the person that isn't constrained by the truth can use more limbically hijacking language, or they can be more inflammatory, or they can understand neurolinguistic programming, or whatever tactic it is that they need to be more effective. If you decide to play ... If I decide to play football, and I'm constrained by the rules of football, but you decide to pick it up and run with it under your arm like it's rugby, then I, I ... There is an asymmetry in terms of how effective we can be at playing this game, because you've decided not to play by the rules.

   5. PBPaul Blaschko18:47

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson18:47

      So, yeah, there's two ways to do it, right? One way would be to say, "We need to have very, very hard and fast rules about the game that makes it incre- highly sanctioned if you decide to pick the ball up and run with it under your arm." The alternative, which is what you guys are suggesting, is to have an emergent bottom-up social, uh, enforcement mechanism where all of the players on the field would stop and go, "Mate, you can't ..."... you can't pick the ball up. Stop being a dick.

   7. MSMeghan Sullivan19:09

      (laughs)

   8. CWChris Williamson19:09

      So you have sort of this top-down or bottom-up approach. But yeah, I think increasingly at the moment, the bottom-up approach, because of how tribal everybody is, no one wants to restrict their own team's ability to win. And generally, at the moment, there is such an anti-authoritarian... Like, what gets called authoritarian now, there are some authoritarian policies out there, but it's a word that gets used an awful lot to describe, like, any type of intervention that occurs from the top.

   9. MSMeghan Sullivan19:36

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson19:36

       So it's kind of hard to work out how to just get people playing by the rules of the game again.

   11. MSMeghan Sullivan19:41

       Well, and this is why, again, you totally need Socrates and you understand why he was in such a bind at the end of The Apology, because you very well could decide, "I care about the truth. I'm going to be willing to change my mind." I think a big cultural problem we have right now is if somebody, um, looks like they change their mind about an issue that they really care about, they get beat up. Like, people just jump down-

   12. CWChris Williamson20:03

       So true.

   13. MSMeghan Sullivan20:04

       ... their throats.

   14. CWChris Williamson20:04

       So fucking true.

   15. MSMeghan Sullivan20:05

       It's so risky to be the kind of person that's saying, "I'm wrong," will get you fired. Um, it'll get you canceled. So, uh, but you can be the kind of person who thinks, "Look, caring about the truth is so important to me that even in a completely screwed-up system where I'm not going to win football games as a result of it, or where I might put my job at risk..." That's why Socrates is saying, "You've got to care about this more than your job. You've got to care about this more than winning." Um, it's got to, it's got to be that important because to, to, to make it a part of your life, you're, you're gonna take some risks. It... The... Part of the, the living philosophically and living a good life doesn't mean that you're just gonna get everything.

   16. CWChris Williamson20:43

       So aside from the avoiding culture war topics and stuff like that, how have you guys defined what a good life means? What does a good life mean to you?

   17. PBPaul Blaschko20:53

       Yeah, that's a... I mean, one of the, the sort of structuring principles that we used in, in writing the book is, you know, we tried to look at different, uh, what we call virtues. And we, you know, we're working in a virtue ethics tradition, uh, but I should maybe just, just sort of say, you know, the way that we're thinking about virtues here is as human excellences, you know. So we're thinking about virtues in the way that, that Aristotle thinks about virtues. Uh, so what are the traits of character? What are the, the habits, uh, of soul, you know, uh, if you want to put it sort of in different language, uh, that are required to flourish as a person, to be happy? And so one of the ways that we organized the book is, you know, each of the chapters looks at a different virtue, uh, or a different kind of class of virtues. Um, so we go through, you know, at the beginning of the book, we talk about the love of truth, uh, we talk about generosity and the ways that, that, you know, people think differently about generosity and what it means to be a generous person, uh, how you should structure and order your financial life. We talk about love and attention and care, how should you relate to the people in your life. Uh, and responsibility, this is one of my favorite ones, uh, and how you can take personal responsibility for things. Uh, so we, so we go through these, right? Each of the chapters is kind of, um, a picture of a virtue and, and hopefully one that you can see related, uh, to an actual life. We give a lot of personal stories as we go through and say, "Look, this is how we think about generosity, you know, theoretically, like, as philosophers, but this is how we try to live it out in our actual lives." Uh, and so what we're hoping emerges is, you know, a, a picture of what we think are, you know, really important virtues for a good life, so that our readers can kind of see that, see themselves reflected in each of those stories, and then critically evaluate and say like, "Yeah, that is how I think about generosity too," or, "No, totally not. I think you guys are wrong."

4. 22:37 – 32:52

   Why People Started Searching for a Better Life

   1. PBPaul Blaschko22:37

   2. CWChris Williamson22:37

      You say that a, uh, a remarkable feature about human history is that we all started wondering philosophically about how to live better lives at roughly the same time, between 600 and 300 BC. Wh- why do you think that happened?

   3. MSMeghan Sullivan22:50

      (laughs) We've gotten that question once or twice now, and, uh, I feel like this is where we show how little we know about the history of the world. Um, we should say, you know, we probably should have qualified that in the book of, like, that's at least when the written records all start popping up. So you got Confucius in the Zhou Dynasty, you've got Buddha working in, um, in Southeast Asia, you've got the Jewish wisdom tradition that's really getting fired up and writing like Job and Ecclesiastes, and starting to think really hard about this whole God question in a philosophical way. And then you got your Socrates, Plato, Aristotle dream team operating in Greece. And it is... I mean, 300 years is actually not that long. It's a drop in the bucket for humans. And so it's pretty nuts that just, uh, you know, spanning a bunch of different parts of the world, they're all, uh, issuing theories that, uh, are different in some respects, but the core operating system is shockingly similar. Humans have a certain way that we are right now. There's a human 2.0, like a version of us that would be better and that, uh, we can't help but worry about and want to be, but we don't quite know how to get from where we are to what that version is. And we're not even 100% sure. Aristotle talks about being an archer who kind of sees the target off in the distance, but doesn't have good enough vision to know exactly how to hit it or exactly what it looks like. And folks think we're gonna need philosophy and we're gonna need systems of education to try to figure out this target, and we're going to be miserable if we don't find it. Um, and then, th- then, then it gets weird, obviously, like Buddhists have very different vision of the target than, um, than the Greek philosophers do. And Confucius is not 100% clear about whether everyone has that target or it's really just people in the Zhou Dynasty (laughs) that, that need to hit their target. Um, so it's not to, like, try to lump them all together, but there's thi- th- that there's this kind of recipe. Let's start developing schools and training systems and try to be a lot more systematic about figuring out what it is that we're trying to become. Uh, that's pretty freaking cool. And some of these cultures are interacting with each other, but it's not like they're right on top of each other. Um, so it's a l- that's a bit of, like, the mystery aspect of, like, what was going on in human development where we're all just kind of turning onto this stage at the same time?

   4. PBPaul Blaschko25:10

      Yeah. And o- one of the things that we talk about in the book and, and that Aristotle talks, uh, about ad nauseam, like, across all the texts that he writes, is that, uh, you know, reflecting on our lives as a means of improving them...... is something that's just baked into us, right? He thought this was like our function or like part of our nature. Uh, that we are self-reflective, reason-directed creatures, right? We wanna think about how to get better. Uh, I love, you know, the example that, that Megan often gives about this, like, you know, dogs don't do this. They don't, they don't sort of wake up and they think, "Man, how can I be better at fetching?" Right?

   5. CWChris Williamson25:44

      (laughs)

   6. PBPaul Blaschko25:44

      "Let me read a book about fetching." They just like, they fetch, and they're either great at it or they're terrible at it, right? Uh, but human beings, we, we use the intellect. We use our mind, uh, and we do it in community with other people through conversation, uh, to get better, right? And so I, I think that's just, uh, uh, sort of fascinating evidence that, that Aristotle was certainly onto something, and, and, you know, figures in these other traditions that talk about it as well. But there's just something really attractive, right? "All humans, by nature, desire to know." Like this is a quote from, from, uh, the beginning of, uh, the Metaphysics, uh, by Aristotle. "All humans desire by nature to know." That's just a value that's baked in. I don't know. I think that resonates, and I think it's sort of, yeah, evidenced by all of these different traditions popping up at the same time.

   7. CWChris Williamson26:26

      I love the way Plato, Plato in the Protagoras is giving... Has Socrates, uh, giving this speech about how you really need to start teaching your kids math and philosophy.

   8. PBPaul Blaschko26:35

      (laughs)

   9. CWChris Williamson26:35

      Like do it early. And he's talking with his friends, and his friends are like, "Why (laughs) is this such a big deal for you?" And he's like, "Look..." You know, this is a paraphrase, obviously, but he's like, "Animals have a lot of advantages. They've got fur, they've got sharp teeth, they've got a lot going for them in this whole survival game just d- that's just given to them." But we are, (laughs) uh, furless, toothless, kind of awkwardly designed creatures.

   10. PBPaul Blaschko26:58

       We're fet- featherless bipeds, right? Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson26:59

       The only thing we have is our wits. (laughs) And so if your kids don't develop that, like the ability to kind of make far-sighted plans and trade-offs, that's what they're talking about in that passage, um, we are screwed. (laughs) Like we're not gonna make it. It's just the only, the only advantage that we've got in this game. Have you seen... There's a meme of a guy and a dog next to an open landscape, and there's a thought bubble coming out of the guy, and it's a computer and it's a car and it's a money tree and it's other shit. And coming out of the dog, it's just a small representation of the landscape that they're seeing, right? It's like a comment on the fact that-

   12. PBPaul Blaschko27:33

       (laughs)

   13. CWChris Williamson27:33

       ... the reason that the dog is happy is because the dog is able to be present, and the human's unhappiness is because he's constantly ruminating about all of the shit that he needs to do. There's something about that, that, that kinda triggers me a little bit. I always feel it regularly comes up, and it always makes me feel a little bit, I don't know, just pissed off. Because like implied in that is if we were able to tune our cognition down to some sort of more base level, we would be happier, that the dog is somehow superior or i- i- it's the dog's got it right because it made the choice. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. It is working at its maximum capacity. The dog is thinking about going for fetch without trying to become better at playing fetch because it can't think of that. If it was burdened with the depth of thought that humans have, it would have all of the ruminations and all of the f- awful reflections that we do as well. There's something about that, that, that always pisses me off. I don't know why.

   14. PBPaul Blaschko28:30

       I love that.

   15. CWChris Williamson28:31

       (laughs)

   16. PBPaul Blaschko28:31

       I, I think, uh... Uh, and I love that like you get mad at this. I, I do the same thing. I look at these memes and I'm just like, "Come on." Uh, I think w- you know, I, I think one thing that's interesting that this just really calls to mind for me is, um, the Stoic tradition, right? So we talk about Stoicism at the end of the book, uh, and about how human beings, they, they can sort of capture what's good about, you know, what's happening with the dog, but we do it in a really distinctive way, right? We do it in a contemplative sort of way. Uh, and so here's, here's what that means. Look, yeah, we've got all this other stuff going on, and it's a huge advantage. Like I would never give up the ability to like, you know, rationally think about my life and organize it and appreciate in an intellectual way like what I love about my family and all these other things. They're just incredible things. Okay, but there's a bunch of downsides. There's a bunch of terrible stuff that comes along with that, right? Uh, loving my son, but also knowing that like the world could intervene and frustrate this in some way gives me deep anxiety about the future, right? Uh, and that's the downside, right? So, you know, it's great that we can think. There- there's this downside. Okay, so what do we do about that fact? One of the things that's really fascinating about Stoicism and the Stoics is they say the answer to that problem is philosophy, right? Uh, what you're supposed to do is you're supposed to come up with meditations or exercises or ways of intellectually, contemplatively putting yourself in touch with reality. Not, again, not, not in the way that the dog is. I think the meme is, is mistaken even in like, you know, attributing this as a thought of the dog. I mean the dog isn't a... There's no representation. Uh, actually, sorry. I'm, I'm gonna get out of like the philosophy of mind of animals.

   17. CWChris Williamson30:08

       (laughs)

   18. PBPaul Blaschko30:08

       But, uh, you know, it's just, it's just boom. It's just there, whatever. Well, for human beings, right, uh, uh, one of the things that we can do is we can look at our representation of the way things are. I might lose, you know, my son in the future or be estranged from him or whatever, and we can use our contemplative capacities to make sure that those are attuned to reality in the right sort of way, right? So Marcus Aurelius is constantly writing to himself. He's like, "Look, don't think about how you might lose the things you love in the future. Like return to the present and realize they're here right now. And in worrying about them, you're missing out on what's so good about them, that you could be present to them, that you can be sort of, uh, tethered to reality in the right sort of way." So one thing that's just, you know, uh, fascinating to me about, about the Stoics and a lot of traditions, uh, in philosophy around the time they're writing is that they think that, you know, the answer to the problems that, that arise with intellectual capacity is actually to go through those capacities, to go through contemplation. Uh, and Aristotle writes about contemplation at, at great length. And I, I do think that's actually something w-... that in our culture we sometimes sort of lose, right? We think of, I don't know, contemplation as this weird, isolated, monastic sort of thing that, like, some weirdos do, but like, yeah, I'm not gonna- I'm not gonna do that. Uh, but really, like, you know, the Stoics, Aristotle, they think, no, no, this is absolutely central for dealing with exactly the- the kind of problems that- that you're referencing.

   19. CWChris Williamson31:33

       Well, think about what most people are trying to do, or what a lot of people are trying to do with their daily lives, either consciously or subconsciously. They're trying to escape from that contemplative practice. They're using caffeine to make themselves move faster or alcohol to make themselves move slower and down-regulate the resolution that they see the world with, phones to distract themselves, and Netflix and sex and extreme sports and, you know, pick your pursuit. Naval Ravikant has a quote where he says, "We don't want peace of mind. We want peace from mind." And that distinction of us just ... Uh, Paul Bloom, who you may know, a psychologist from Yale now in Toronto, he's interviewed a dominatrix and she said, "Nothing captures attention like a whip." And what she meant was that if you get slapped in the face, for the next five seconds, you don't think about anything.

   20. PBPaul Blaschko32:21

       Mm-hmm.

   21. CWChris Williamson32:21

       And that's a very rare but beautiful situation to be in. In a b- bizarre way, looking down the pipe of a dominatrix wearing leather with a whip in her hand, um, but it- it's true, right? You- you have this opportunity to escape the ruminations from your mind. And this is, I think, again, like that's what the person that made that meme is- is trying to create. Look, if only we could be like the dog, if only we could dial back the resolution that we see things with. You've mentioned, just a thought come up there,

5. 32:52 – 38:39

   Why is Stoicism Sexy?

   1. CWChris Williamson32:52

      you mentioned Stoicism an awful lot.

   2. PBPaul Blaschko32:54

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson32:54

      I've had a ton of Stoic, uh, scholars on the show. Ryan Holiday, Massimo Pigliucci, Donald Robertson. What is it about Stoicism that's made it so sexy in the modern era? Like why is Epicureanism or Taoism or, you know, uh, cynicism, why- why are there no other Renaissances? And do you think, if you could put a couple of bets, if you could invest in some different philosophies, do you think that we'll see a renaissance for some other ones coming soon?

   4. MSMeghan Sullivan33:25

      Uh, I can start off on this. So I've got- I've got my own potted theory about why Stoicism is having its moment. But first, the first thing I'll say, one of the things we try to show in the book is that Stoicism is part of this much bigger, longer, more interesting and variegated tradition in philosophy called virtue ethics, which gets going with the Greeks. You find versions of it in China. Um, but if- if you really like the general thrust of Sto- Stoicism, but you don't like some of the recommendations or some of the goals seem shallow to you, that's okay, 'cause it's, you know, there's other versions of this kind of philosophy that you might find a lot more use o- out of. And so, uh, we encourage you to think about Stoicism in context of this bigger kind of philosophy. I think Stoicism is really, um, exciting and appealing to a lot of folks in the United States right now because first, the Stoics, um, the Stoics are, uh, about finding ways to, uh, thrive in hostile environments. So, uh, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, these guys were all dealing with the hot dumpster fire that was the Roman Empire (laughs) . Um, they- they were important men of, like, public life, so I mean, some Stoics were- were full-time wackadoodle philosophers, but a lot of them were people with day jobs, like significant, prominent, honor-inducing day jobs, but who also had the big kind of problems. And this philosophical view seemed to help them thrive in light of challenges rather than being pummeled by them. And, you know, you look at all of the change that's even happened during our lifetimes, the fact that the internet has totally revolutionized every aspect of how we think and interact and communicate. That's happened just in the last two decades. That's crazy. Um, the way that we've dealt with political, you know, change- changes, the fact that we're in a mature empire that's having its own kinds of puzzles. Um, Stoics, the- we can see a lot of ourselves in these Romans who were dealing with their problems. And we might want to see that we're like them because they- they did okay and like Marcus Aurelius did okay in the end. I think also there are some really, uh, helpful psychological therapies that the Stoics suggested and then modern psychology has made really effective. Probably the most obvious one is cognitive behavioral therapy, this idea of you're- you're facing anxiety, which we all do, and you might have thought that you just have to live with it or it's your own problem. But in fact there are exercises that you can undertake to start to control your emotions, negative emotions. Um, and the Stoics took that extraordinarily seriously. And I think a lot of us find ourselves in this situation right now where we want that- we want that benefit.

   5. PBPaul Blaschko36:07

      Yeah. And- and let me make ... So I'll- I'll make a prediction, and that is that, uh, I think virtue ethics is, uh, in one way or another the thing that sort of comes next. And here's why I think it. So I think- I think Megan's totally right that- that Stoicism, you know, gives us these practices, these meditations, they're empirically grounded. Uh, but it also gives us, uh, a bit of substance, a bit of philosophical substance, uh, to sort of grab onto and say, you know, not only does this breathing technique work for me, uh, but it also connects up with my purpose as a human being and it- it connects up with this rational sort of contemplative nature. Now, one thing that's really crucial to the Stoic picture, uh, and that I- I guess I would, you know, really push a- a Stoic, you know, contemporary Stoic on if I, you know, if I had a chance to talk to them is, uh, the Stoics actually have some pretty crazy views in the background. The reason they're so optimistic that if you get in touch with reality your anxiety is going to go down is because they think the cosmos is divinely ordered, right? Uh, and a lot of contemporary Stoics say, "Well, you know, okay, we'll take some of that or we won't take some of that or maybe it's metaphorical," or whatever it might be. Uh, one thing that's really cool about virtue ethics and about, you know, the various different forms it takes is that, uh, there are versions of it, uh, that- that sort of don't assume substantively, uh, some of these pictures, these metaphysical pictures that I think a lot of- a lot of people today don't assume, right? Some people do and- and you can kind of plug in sort of theistic pictures to Stoicism or whatever, or even look at, like, Augustine and see how he tried to, you know, manage that kind of stuff. But a lot of people, you know, if- if you're just like, you know, a secular person out in the world looking for a great philosophy, a lot of the Stoicism resonates, but then you start thinking, gosh, like, I don't know if I think that, you know, there's this sort of cosmos that's divinely ordered and- and whatever else, there's noose that we all share. And I don't know.So my thought is, you know, if you, if you keep digging, philosophically, uh, virtue ethics is just this incredible territory, uh, where you can start coming up with resources and tools to come up with a substantive philosophical picture, um, that you actually, that you believe, that you think is, you know, this is the right picture. And of course, Aristotle has this. You know, he's got a view of, of human nature and our function, our purpose. Um, again, you know, going into Augustine, you know, the Christian philosophical tradition has these. Uh, but again, I think as people continue to look for more and more substantive philosophical views behind the things that they find really useful and, and, and helpful, I think, you know, they're gonna find that the virtue tradition is just totally, you know, full of these rich pictures, uh, that, yeah, that are, that are really appealing

6. 38:39 – 44:07

   Virtual Ethics Vs Stoicism

   1. PBPaul Blaschko38:39

      in their own way.

   2. CWChris Williamson38:40

      What do you think is a tool or a couple of tools that virtue ethics has, which Stoicism is missing massively?

   3. PBPaul Blaschko38:48

      I think, you know, just really distinctive pictures of the human person, right ?Uh, and, and distinctive pictures, just practical pictures of how we can take something like our view of what we think we are, what we think our function or purpose is, and then translate that into really practical advice, right? If you look at the Nicomachean Ethics from Aristotle, uh, and the Nicomachean Ethics is really fascinating, right ?Uh, the form of the book is, it's actually either lecture notes that he sort of wrote or that somebody that was taking his class wrote, uh, on a class that he was giving about how to be happy, how to achieve eudaimonia, right ?How to flourish as a human being. And so if you look at it, yeah, there's really abstract theoretical stuff, right? At the beginning he says, "Look, I'm gonna give you an argument about what your function is, about what the purpose and meaning of life is." And then immediately we jump into, and here's a virtue that, you know, in, in light of that fact, you've got to acquire, and here's what it looks like, here's what friendship looks like. Uh, and he's giving arguments, right ? He's not just saying, "Trust me." He's saying, "Here's my argument about why friendship is really important." He does that for, you know, most of the book. He's looking at these really practical issues, giving you arguments, and then he ends up kind of, like, zooming back and saying, "Okay, so let's, like, tie this all together, uh, and let's look at, you know, what this entails, uh, in the very end." Uh, but for me, I mean, that, that's, that's, you know ... It sort of shows the power of virtue ethics. You can have this really substantive theoretical view, uh, but you immediately get into just really practical issues, really practical advice, uh, about the things that we care about, about how you sh- how you should spend money or raise your kids, uh, or, you know, whether you should practice a religion, whatever it might be. Kind of the way that those big questions sort of show up or appear in our daily lives or experience. Um, to me, that's... I don't know, that's, that's one of the huge sort of strengths of virtue ethics.

   4. MSMeghan Sullivan40:34

      I think one, one thing I found a little bit irritating about the kind of contemporary American version of Stoicism that's really popular right now is, if you ask them kind of what the goal is, we talked about trying to figure out that target that you're trying to hit with your arrow, a lot of times it sounds to me, and this might be a little bit uncharitable, like the goal is kind of invincibility, like to make myself immune from bad things that might happen to me.

   5. CWChris Williamson40:55

      I would, I would have said indifference, but yeah-

   6. MSMeghan Sullivan40:57

      Aindiff- indifference. (laughs)

   7. CWChris Williamson40:57

      ... invincibility might be a way to put it.

   8. MSMeghan Sullivan41:00

      And again, I don't know about you, like, that's not my goal. I, when I think about what a really good person is, sometimes it's somebody that makes extraordinary sacrifices for others, um, and, uh, in ways that's not gonna attribute back to their own glory and, like, has this kinda concept of and this, uh ... Marcus Aurelius certainly thinks stuff like this too, so I don't think this is fair to necessarily pin it to the Romans, but the, w- when you listen to some of the Stoic technology-driven, ametaphysical self-help advice right now, it's like, "I'm gonna use Stoicism to make sure that I win every argument with my board." And it's like, "No, man." The whole point of it was like, you are mortal (laughs) , um, and you are, uh, a non-fur, non-sharp teeth-covered organism that depends on other people and good reason in order to do well. And it would be better if you, um, if you were a little bit more vulnerable. Like, there are some really great goods that come from, uh, come from suffering for other people and allowing suffering to happen to you. And I think that, you know, certainly, like, Christians in Rome at the time were, were (laughs) really critical of how into the, into this the Roman Empire was getting, because it was also making the Roman Empire cold. And I in that-

   9. CWChris Williamson42:16

      Yeah, and I would s- ... Uh, that, that's the, that's the thing that I struggle to kind of parse out. Stoicism doesn't seem to have a ton of joy in it, to me, or certainly not... (sighs) I'm not gonna try and be like an advocate for, "Your philosophy needs to account for hedonism," but you know, people like to party. We like to find pleasure in the moment, and it, it seems like there aren't really much room for that in Stoicism.

   10. PBPaul Blaschko42:42

       One of the things that shocked me as I went back and read, uh, Marcus Aurelius, this, this, like last time, and I, I read Meditations like every, uh, couple of months now, 'cause I teach it in different classes. One of the things that shocked me is, right, you know, at the beginning of the Meditations, he's giving a list of people that he's grateful for and the things that he's learned from them, and one of them, I forget who he's, he's talking about, he says, you know, "I'm grateful that he showed me how to be the same man in all conditions," even during the, like this period where he had lost a child, and I read that and I was just like, "Whoa, dude, back up." Like, you know, uh, to be totally indifferent to something like that, like that struck me as, as, you know, um, kinda, uh, not monstrous, but, you know, the wrong way to go, right ? So, so to have the resources to say, "Look, there are times where it makes sense to tie your happiness up with the happiness of another person." There are, you know, ways in which we flourish and we're happy only if we're flourishing together. Uh, that to me is a really powerful idea, and I think, you know, we can swing sort of too far to one end or, or, or the other, and we can start thinking, well, our happiness consists in, you know, being super wealthy or having these external goods, and okay, now we're going, you know, in the wrong direction. But again, one thing that I think, you know, virtue ethics provides the resources for is, is just to kind of balance out, uh, some of, some of that, kind of the, the pejorative sense of Stoicism that, you know, uh, uh, you sometimes hear people talking about.... um, which I do think is a, is, you know, it's

7. 44:07 – 56:38

   The Role of Truth in a Good Life

   1. PBPaul Blaschko44:07

      a real danger.

   2. CWChris Williamson44:08

      What role do you think that truth has in The Good Life, then?

   3. PBPaul Blaschko44:12

      Yeah, I mean, well, yeah. So going all the way back to Socrates, you know, I find, uh, our students, uh, will often tell us that the, the line that we, uh, quoted from Socrates at the beginning is the thing that really sticks with them after the class, right? "The unexamined life is not worth living." Uh, it's this idea that's, again, shocking, uh, especially in our time, sort of a, a, a deeper commitment to the truth than even to my own goals in life or to, you know, uh, winning arguments online or whatever else. Um, I take that just really, really seriously. I think, um, if I can become the kind of person who cares more about the truth than winning arguments, who cares more about the truth, um, than, you know, my status or whatever it might be, if I can become a little bit more Socratic in that way, uh, I think, um, you know, that's an i- uh, sort of, uh, like, uh, Socrates serves as an exemplar here, um, uh, for me, you know, for those reasons. Um, yeah.

   4. MSMeghan Sullivan45:11

      I think... I, I've been reflecting a lot, and we write about this a little bit in the book, about the Elizabeth Holmes trial.

   5. CWChris Williamson45:16

      Shit.

   6. MSMeghan Sullivan45:16

      You know, she was just convicted on four fraud counts and we-

   7. CWChris Williamson45:19

      Serious shit.

   8. MSMeghan Sullivan45:19

      ... we, we, you know, we were writing about her when we were writing about William James a year ago when we were working on the manuscript. And we were thinking, "Man, this whole news cycle is going to be over by the time this book comes out. Nobody's gonna care about our philosophical -

   9. CWChris Williamson45:30

      Nailed it. We can release. Nailed it.

   10. MSMeghan Sullivan45:32

       No. No. We, we totally nailed it. But, uh, you know, we have, uh, up in the office where I work at Notre Dame, we have some pretty vigorous debates about how a good person should feel about that trial. If your readers or, or listeners don't, don't remember, Elizabeth Holmes was this very young, uh, medical device entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Dropped out of Stanford and started heavily marketing this blood testing technology she was trying to develop to use really small amounts of blood to determine various diseases. And like everybody, she got caught up in this, uh, culture that values, like, fake it till you make it. Like, just pitch really hard and, and you can, you can, your dreams can outstrip reality with respect to technology. And she raised all this money, and Walgreens started, like, trying out her blood testing technology, and the whole thing fell apart because at the end of the day, her blood tests don't work. (laughs) Like, she can't get accurate data. And, uh, you, you reflect on her case and you, one, psychologically and culturally, you totally understand how she got into this mess, because we, um... There are so many really tempting advantages to being somebody who, uh, who just wants something to be real but doesn't care that much about whether or not it's true. And there are so many success stories, like Steve Jobs, uh, uh, the... Like, it worked. He lived this way, he lived his life this way, and it worked out for him. But, uh, one of the reasons why we think it's really important to, to pause and make philosophy part of your life and why we think it's desperately important that kids be taught it at elite colleges before they go work for companies in Silicon Valley is, uh, you can't, you can't believe that myth. Like, you have to, you have to believe that there's some truth out there that's worth, like, making the anchor of your decision-making. Or otherwise, you know, practically speaking, you might end up in federal prison in San Francisco. Um, but even just, like, you know, speaking for, for y- her soul and the souls-

   11. CWChris Williamson47:34

       Correct. Yes.

   12. MSMeghan Sullivan47:34

       ... other, like, entrepreneurs and founders is, like, you might end up being the bad guy in history, like, the person who sold everybody snake oil. Um, and -

   13. CWChris Williamson47:43

       But let's, let's tune that up a little bit more. Think about the fact that over the next 100 years, we're p- moderately likely... I would give it maybe a 50% chance that we're going to see superintelligent general artificial intelligence, right, over the next 100 years. 50% chance. If that is done by somebody who is more concerned about being first than being right, the control problem and the alignment problem are not going to be fixed, and we're all going to be paper clips. Like, we're going to be Nick-

   14. MSMeghan Sullivan48:08

       (laughs)

   15. CWChris Williamson48:09

       ... Nick, Nick Bostrom's nightmare. So-

   16. PBPaul Blaschko48:11

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson48:11

       ... if that happens, w- uh, this is... You're so right. Like, when the externalities of your decisions begin to become civilizational collapse, you need to have a more fundamental, grounded, um, emergent idea that everybody agrees on to do with how the world should be run. And trying to think what is good for humanity at large when you can impact humanity at large, you know, it's all well and good. Think about the fact that Socrates was talking about this, and who could he impact? The people that were within his, uh, the, the field that his voice could reach. That's it. You know, the guy didn't even have a megaphone, let alone the ability to completely rework every piece of electronics on the planet to kill us.

   18. MSMeghan Sullivan48:54

       It... No, it's totally true. This actually gives me, uh, some optimism for philosophy, at least as a field. One of the things we talk about in the book is in the 20th century, virtue ethics really got this huge boost right around the time of World War II and afterwards. And one, a really concrete reason that happened was nobody saw the atomic bomb coming and nobody saw, like, complete total war fascism coming, and then they happened really fast and people realized, "Holy cow, we better have a kind of ethical theory and a sense of ethical goals that is gonna be able to cope now with living in a world where you could wipe everybody off the planet, um, with the wrong program." And, and then you see, like, Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot and all these philosophers rushing in to think, "Okay, like, we (laughs) need to think about this. We need to think about how we're gonna redial, because the game has changed." And philosophy is really good, again, at that, like, goal-finding, uh, activities, hopefully for the good. I mean, you could also imagine philo-... Like, you know, fascism was also fueled by a kind of philosophy. Um, so we hope we get it right, but you're, there, you definitely can't have this technological advance without the accompanying philosophy.

   19. PBPaul Blaschko50:08

       Yeah. And just even, you know, going all the way back to, to Socrates, you know, he's often described as a, a gadfly, as, as sort of somebody who, who is able to, to some extent, stand outside kind of dominant narratives in the culture, uh, and sort of just pick at them and just say, "You guys, are, like, are we really sure?"... uh, that this is the thing that we want, or, you know, are the arguments that we're making, that like, you know, this tech platform is gonna, you know, transform the world for the better, like is that right? Like, like what are the assumptions here about what kind of people we are, about, uh, what kind of community that, that we want to actually have? Uh, what are the assumptions there and are those true? And so, you know, one thing that, that gives me a bit of optimism is, you know, that's something that, like you mentioned, he could just do on his own. It was- it- it's sort of you can form yourself, you can, you know, again, we use the language of craft your soul, uh, by doing a little bit of philosophy, knowing a little bit of philosophy, and then, you know, doing some exercises or doing some meditations, you can sort of change yourself so that you're disposed to care about and stand up for the truth, uh, in circumstances where it might be incredibly difficult. There might be a lot of social pressure not to, right?

   20. CWChris Williamson51:16

       Yeah, well-

   21. PBPaul Blaschko51:16

       Um-

   22. CWChris Williamson51:16

       ... I mean, that's- that's what we were talking about at the very beginning, right?

   23. PBPaul Blaschko51:19

       Yeah.

   24. CWChris Williamson51:19

       The fact that you have, uh, how would you say, competing narratives and competing influences on people that makes changing your mind or having a nuanced view or being s- anything that isn't one extreme or the other, there are very, very few ... Do you know who Scott Adams is, the guy that wrote The Dilbert Creator?

   25. MSMeghan Sullivan51:40

       Oh, yeah.

   26. PBPaul Blaschko51:40

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   27. CWChris Williamson51:41

       Yeah. Uh, do you follow him on Twitter? Okay.

   28. PBPaul Blaschko51:43

       I'm barely on Twitter.

   29. CWChris Williamson51:45

       All right. That's good. That's for the benefit of your sanity.

   30. PBPaul Blaschko51:47

       (laughs)
8. 56:38 – 1:06:10

   Philosophy of Agency & Generosity

   1. CWChris Williamson56:38

      I was happy to see that agency made it into the book. It's one of the most important traits that I think that anyone can have. It's something that I try and cultivate in myself all the time. Have you got a story from history about agency that you can tell me?

   2. PBPaul Blaschko56:52

      Yeah. So the, the philosopher that we rely on in that chapter, and we talk about agency and responsibility, uh, is very closely tied together, right? Uh, so the philosopher we're relying on there is Elizabeth Anscombe, who I just, uh, adore. I love Elizabeth Anscombe. She's a virtue ethicist, middle of the 20th century, uh, and she's writing about a- about human action, right, and how we try to figure out, uh, when we're acting well, when we're acting wrongly. How do we measure that? And one of the huge insights that, that comes out of her work is that it really depends how we describe or how we tell the story, uh, of our action, right? A lot of things hang on that. So the example that I give is, you know, it's a silly example, but it, it, it, it illustrates it. Uh, you know, I, I show up late to a meeting. Well, I can tell the story of my action in one way. I can say, "Look. Oh. The traffic was so bad and I tried my hardest, and here I am." You know? Uh, and in doing so, I excuse myself. I sort of say, "Look. You know, I did everything I could. I, I, you know, cared about the right things and I, I got it wrong." Or I can take responsibility by describing, you know, "Look. I, I just slept in. I didn't care enough." Right? Uh, "I didn't leave time for traffic. I took a risk and yeah. Look at... Here I am." Uh, okay. So the way that we describe, the way we tell the story of our actions, and they can be simple ones like, you know, arriving... I mean, they can be really complex actions that take place over a long period of time with the people that we care about. This is going to, uh, like crucially determine like whether or not we're taking responsibility, whether, uh, our, our agency is, um, sort of being deployed rightly or wrongly, right? So, so one thing that we rely on Anscombe and another philosopher, uh, uh, Bernard Williams, uh, for is, is this idea of using what Williams calls, uh, morally thick concepts, like virtue terms, like generosity, uh, or, you know, uh, anger. Whatever it might be, uh, to interrogate and ask questions about the stories that we're telling. Like, am I telling stories that always make me the hero, right? And if so, are they true? It doesn't seem like they could possibly be true, right? Uh, so why do I tell them, right? How do I go back and start telling more accurate stories or start even just asking questions about my intentions in the first place, right? Uh, so I, I think this is one of the, the things that we get, you know, from the virtue ethics tradition, from Anscombe, uh, that again, can just sort of practically, and does practically, uh, change the way that, that I present myself in the world or that I think about actions that I'm gonna be undertaking in the future. How do I tell a story that's not just sort of, you know, a good story about it? How do I tell the true story about it, and what does that sort of say about me, about my character, about my intentions?

   3. CWChris Williamson59:32

      What about generosity? It's an interesting one. I had Scott Barry Kaufman on the show talking about... He's an expert in Maslow, and he was talking about the hierarchy of needs, and he was adamant that after actualization, you get to transcendence. And transcendence is when you then go beyond yourself and you give to other people. How... Or what was the angle that you guys came to, uh, charitability or generosity from?

   4. MSMeghan Sullivan59:54

      I, I, uh, had been thinking about this, um, question for a while, because, uh, ever since I've been teaching philosophy, and certainly since we started teaching God and Good Life here at Notre Dame, I've taught Peter Singer, uh, who has these really interesting super practical pieces of advice for how to, uh, make your money into a part of your moral life. And what Singer tells his students at Princeton, which is fascinating and I love reading about it, is he's got all these really smart 18, 19-year-olds who are also morally serious and who, who care about other people and care about their moral reasons, and he says, "Look. There are a lot of people out there in the world whom your money could help more than your time or volunteer or thoughts and prayers." Um, like, you could literally change the world. You could save people from malaria if you earn money and then do the hard thing of committing all of it to these re- really efficient ways of, uh, enhancing lives. And he'll teach this class and he'll get... You know, some students will sign pledges to, to try to pursue a high income in a, in at least a morally permissible way, so they're not gonna become like drug dealers, but they might go work for a hedge fund or a really big, uh, banking unit and then make as much money as possible and make themselves into a vehicle by which money is converted from the economy in the West to these really needy people elsewhere in the world. And he writes a lot of-

   5. CWChris Williamson1:01:19

      That's... You don't think it's so revolutionary to, to kind of look at charity in that way and giving in that way? 'Cause kind of the story that we've been told around charity is that it's, it's sort of this cottage industry that you're supposed to do, that the person that goes and gives their time at the soup kitchen is... That is the virtue that they have. When you realize, through the effective altruism movement or like 80,000 Hours, Rob Wiblin's thing, that if you are able to be an absolute force of nature at generating wealth and then you just decide to give it away, that is, that is your best way to help a lot of other people. But it runs quite counter to this sort of like homey, very kind of homespun style charity that's been a, a narrative that we've seen a lot recently.

   6. MSMeghan Sullivan1:02:04

      Oh. Yeah. No. And this... I mean, it weighed a lot on me because I read those arguments, and Singer makes a really good point. Those, the children in Africa, they're somebody's children in the South Sudan. Like, people love them. They matter. They're just... The, the system has been set up in such a way that, um, that their lives are valued much less than the lives of people directly surrounding us. And, and at the time when, when Paul and I were getting started with teaching our God and the Good Life course, uh, my youngest brother was getting ready to go to college and, and we have a very... Our parents are really low income.And so the question became, like, how much money would I be willing to put towards my brother getting a really elite education? Um, and the answer, I didn't have to think very hard about it at all. I was like, "Man, I would pay double my, my mortgage down payment for h- for his college." But then, you know, I had this pause, especially as I was teaching our students, that amount of money could s- could save on average seven people's lives. Would I kill seven people to send my brother to t- get This is the fucking problem with Singer's stuff. This is the problem. 'Cause as soon as you go down that there is a boy drowning in the lake next to you, you don't want to get your shoes wet, it's over the next village, it's in the next country. You just... Every... I, I struggle to not feel like an asshole all, all, all the time. Yeah. Well, that, yeah... But philosophy's point is to make you feel like an asshole sometimes. So, so, so one of the things that I, I got thinking about, and then Paul and I started working on really hard when we got to that chapter of the book is, Singer gives very practical advice. What kind of advice would a virtue ethicist give that tells you like, "No seriously, you're a kind of smart 18, 19-year-old with the capacity to make a lot of money, but also the capacity to join the Peace Corps, or the capacity to, like, start a family." How... Like, practically speaking, how can I help you figure out how you can, uh, make a morally serious difference without just assuming that, um, like, you know, we can imagine the kind of cultural default which, which is, of course give a whole lot more to people that are biologically related to you than you give to people who are far away. And of course whatever you feel is the right way to spend your money is the right way to spend your money, which is very un-philosophical. Or like, you can use philosophy to try to justify the decisions that you don't want to make, but it's hard for us to, to... It's hard for a lot of people to d- decide to change or morally evaluate their financial plans. So we, we wanted to get into that.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:04:24

      It's an i- it's a weird one, especially when a modern phenomenon like wealth, wealth acquisition comes crashing up against kind of this, like, old, dusty, or what feels like an old and dusty academic subject of philosophy.

   8. MSMeghan Sullivan1:04:38

      Oh my gosh. Like, I think about this a lot. And now you're just getting me on, like, the therapy couch. Uh, one thing I think about quite a bit is I, I don't want to be the kind of person that measures the good life in terms of money. Um, and we know that from Socrates. Like, don't do... That's a... There lies disaster. Um, so then you think, okay, well I'm in my job at a big corporation. How hard should I negotiate for a pay raise? Or how often should I complain about how much I'm being paid if I literally don't care about money and my needs are met? Um, and you might think the answer is none, but then that gives you pause. It certainly gives me pause because you think... But it's also grossly unfair that women are paid less than men, um, that some people who I think is like work is in fact objectively less economically valuable get paid more because of who they are. And so you want to fight individually against the, that, those forms of discrimination or injustice. But at the same time want to hold this paradox in your head of not wanting to care about money and use it as a way of keeping score, but it, but you're also using it as a way of keeping score on justice. So how to resolve that I think is a puzzle a lot of people... Certainly pe- women and people in marginalized groups are like dealing with that every single year.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:05:51

      It's a weird one. It's an interesting one thinking about how, how to ethically use money and money acquisition and chasing it without becoming captured by it or without being emotionally invested in it.

   10. MSMeghan Sullivan1:06:05

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson1:06:05

       It's... Yeah, it's a, it is a... Talk to me... Let's say that

9. 1:06:10 – 1:08:21

   Introductory Books for Virtue Ethics

   1. CWChris Williamson1:06:10

      someone's quite seduced by the idea of virtue ethics and wants to make a crack at it. What would you say are the most accessible books, the most, the, the best sort of introductions ?Where would you get people to start?

   2. PBPaul Blaschko1:06:23

      I mean, like, uh, I don't know, just to plug our own class here at Notre Dame, we actually, uh, have a whole website where we just put the whole class online basically, uh, or all the texts that we read in, in the class online. Uh, so you can go to godandgoodlife.nd.edu uh, and you can just see sort of how we walk through texts from the history of philosophy. Uh, we've got a lot of annotated texts that you can read, you know, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics but you know with some sort of pointers and some, some help, uh, to understand kind of the, the weirder distinctions that he's making. Um, so that's one place you can start to look.

   3. MSMeghan Sullivan1:06:56

      I mean, probably the even better place would be to buy our The Good Life Method book, the book that we wrote based on the class, which is really designed for, uh, for readers who are coming at this not as a college course but as somebody who's just really curious about starting to build philosophy into their life. And we have... Every chapter ends with... Uh, every chapter tackles a different kind of question of the good life that comes at us from philosophy. And we start off little with, like, how to have better political disagreements with folks using Plato, um, building up to, like, how to be a better, uh, romantic partner and parent using Iris Murdoch in Virtue Ethicist. We talk about work/life balance and all the ways philosophy makes that question a lot different than you think it is. And then build up to, like, what are you going to do about this whole religion thing? What are you going to do about death? Um, and we have a lot of practical exercises, but also just like... It's hard to just sit down and start reading philosophy. We don't recommend that you go to Barnes & Noble and buy a Nietzsche book and just sit down and try to read it from beginning to end. It's gonna be hard because it was written in a different time and it was meant to be put in context. But one of the things we do in the book is if you're just getting started try to give you all the handholds so that it feels really like you're making progress at the right pace and really understanding things. And uh, our students w- you know, we've taught this material to thousands of Notre Dame students right now, um, have really loved this system and it's worked for years with us so, so we're hoping it'll have a much bigger audience now.

   4. CWChris Williamson1:08:18

      Well that will be linked in the show notes below.

10. 1:08:21 – 1:09:04

    Where to Find Meghan & Paul

    1. CWChris Williamson1:08:21

       Paul, Megan, we made it, we made it to the end. Uh, thank you very much for coming on. It's been, it's been really, really interesting. It's nice to hear a different side of philosophy coming out and uh, I really appreciate that you guys are, are flying the flag for some sort of re-emerging and lesser known philosophers in this modern world. So thank you.

    2. MSMeghan Sullivan1:08:42

       Thank you, Chris.

    3. PBPaul Blaschko1:08:43

       Yeah, thank you so much. This is really fun.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:08:45

       What's happening people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe. Peace.

Episode duration: 1:09:04