Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense, I am your host, Julia Gillard. And with me, as always, is my co-host, Massimo Plushie. Julia, it's a new dawn.

So I was about to say so. Massimo, what are you going to talk about today? But actually, I'm introducing that part, too. So I'm here with Massimo Kōichi and a special guest he'll introduce in a moment at the fourth annual Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism.

And I have here a live audience. Come on, guys. Make him jealous at home. So we've just heard two talks here at Nexus One from Masimo and the other sort of paired talk from our special guest today, Michael Shermer. Welcome, Michael.

Thank you. Thank you.

Michael barely needs an introduction, but he is the executive director of the Skeptics Society, publisher of Skeptic magazine, author of many best selling books, a columnist for Scientific American and so on and so on and so forth. Masimo and Michael have both written a fair bit about morality and what science has to say about morality. Masimo most recently, and answers for Aristotle, his most recently published book, and also in other books and many times on his blog, Michael Shermer has written The Science of Good and Evil and also written articles and blog posts about morality in science and in the last few months.

Michael have had a sprightly but gentlemanly sparring match on the rationally speaking blog about there the overlap and and disagreements in their views on science and morality. So we're going to delve into that in more detail today. I'll start for the benefit of listeners at home who haven't just heard your two talks by having you sort of lay out and just broad strokes what your positions are.

I if it were up to me and it is since I'm holding the mic, I would say that in a nutshell, Michael, you would say that science plays a larger role in defining what morality is, how we should think about morality than than Masimo would.

And that might help. To sum up, you believe that science can tell us that the goal of morality should be to increase human flourishing. And also science can tell us how to increase human flourishing. Is that a fair summary? Correct. Great. And then, Masimo, would you like to lay out your.

Well, my position is that certainly philosophy and science in this particular case, moral philosophy and the types of science that deal with ethical issues are not independent. But I think that science plays a rather minor role. It plays the role of providing us with the basic facts about the human condition. It also plays an important role when it comes to actual policy decisions. So once we have our ethical discussions and we figure out that that we want to do X instead of Y, then I really do think that in terms of social policy, actual actual decision making ought to be informed by heavily informed by science, by fact gathering, by empirical gathering.

But I, I think, yes, I see that science has a much more limited role in the actual ethical, ethical decision making, in the ethical reasoning than Michael does. Because to me, ethics is a way of reasoning about things. It's not a way of finding out facts.

So maybe we should diven by first talking about the role that science plays in defining what morality should be about or lack of role as the case may be in your talk. Michael, you argued that we know from science certain facts about our nature as humans and as a social creature and that those facts can inform our understanding of morality. Can you expand on that?

Well, I guess. Like an example of gay marriage that I mentioned, you know, conservatives would argue, well, this this degrades the sanctity of marriage or that it has some kind of negative consequences on child rearing and all other things being equal. Wouldn't you agree it's better to have a child raised by a mother and a father than a mother and a mother or father and a father or something? They make arguments like that. So they're at the start.

We can we can evaluate those claims. You know, we can test those claims. You know, the American Pediatric Association just came out with a study showing no difference in the effects on children being raised by gay couples or straight couples. OK. So that's just a factual they're just wrong. Factually wrong. Done. But but to Massimo's point and maybe to Aristotle's that once we've debunked those, can we then make the transition to if this is the way you are, then this is the way things ought to be.

If if you are gay instead of straight and straight to these sets of rights, why should gays not have the same sets of rights since that's in their nature? They're just they're just being true to themselves. It seems to me we can make that transition and just say science tells us the way things actually are. And therefore, the way they ought to be constitutionally, legally and so on, I don't see any problem with just making that smooth transition like that.

Well, here's a problem.

So, yes, I would agree with you that if, let's say, a conservative makes an argument against gay marriage based on a factual claim like, oh, well, children of gay couples have significantly more problems, then then children metrosexual that factual claim. It clearly is empirical in nature. You can do the science. It's not necessarily that easy to do the science of it because, you know, controlling, as you know, controlling experiments, doing that sort of stuff is not easy.

But in principle, you can certainly answer that question beautifully. But doing your talk, even earlier today, you said a couple of times, you know, well, you know, being gay is a natural condition for certain people.

It's not a choice. It follows that they should be allowed to follow the nature.

Well, what if it were a choice? What if instead of being not a natural thing and or a genetic thing or whatever you want is in fact a choice? What if what if, in fact, that turned out a deliberate decision of certain people to engage in certain kinds of of sexual relationships?

Shouldn't they therefore not be allowed to do that because it's not in their nature? It's just a choice? I mean, how would you determine that scientifically? I'd go for gay conversion therapy in that case.

That just kidding. I knew you were going. Uh, let's see.

Well, so I guess we can still get back to whether it's in one's nature or not. That was just one line of inquiry like that other study I showed about individualist societies where people have more freedom to choose. They're happier. So the freedom to choose leads you to more better be able to flourish as an individual and therefore, as long as there's no harm to other people.

Then I would argue that that they asked for his principal, ask the people, what would you like to do us harm anybody, then that would be OK. That would be morally acceptable.

But then yes, maybe so. But first of all, we're now, I think, left science and we're getting into a.

I just think there's a smooth transition there. Not as good as you think it is, but it so let's let's take this example of.

Well, you are you ask people these issues or you ask people first of all, I looked at the slides you presented, research you presented. And in my book, your answer is very subtle. I did look at research on comparative sociological research of the kind you were mentioning. And actually the results are not quite as straightforward as as they they may seem. First of all, it is not true that more individualistic societies lead to more flourishing, actually is more social democratic societies that lead more flourishing, more which social democratic societies.

So things like, you know, Sweden, Denmark, social Democrat. Right.

So so which means that individualism actually has to be tempered by certain things, like a social net, for instance, or so certain certain degrees of access to education, access to health care and all that sort of stuff.

So that now those are all empirical issues, of course. But then it turns out that if you ask, you know, let's say if you ask a principal the ask principle in what you ask the majority of people, what do you think that this is the right thing to do or this is not the right thing to do? Well, the answer is are culturally dependent and completely dependent.

As it turns out, if you asked, apparently a large number of slaves in the before the civil war in the United States would have told you that actually slavery was a pretty good condition for them and so was the case for slaves in ancient Rome. Now, we don't accept those as good answers. A lot of Muslim women today will tell you that the position they find themselves in very conservative countries actually makes them feel better, makes them feel safe, makes them feel accepted and so on and so forth.

And yet I think that both you and I agree that those are not exactly the best conditions for flourishing for a human being. But now we're now that is no longer an empirical question, because if you simply ask them, you will get a very different answer from what you expect. There was a very interesting article that came out a few weeks ago about China and representing the first case of Post Democratic Society, Flourishing society. Now, I disagree with the author of the article.

In fact, I wrote a response that it's about to be published in the Philosophers magazine Unethical Grounds. But as it turns out, if you ask right now, a majority of Chinese are pretty happy about the way things are going as long as their material well-being is taken care of. They don't seem to care very much about individuality, freedom, democracy and so on and so forth. So where does that leave your ask for a principle?

They don't know any better. They don't know the choices available. Yes, of course. The the slaves in ancient Rome or or in 19th century America or in modern times where you see these interviews with these sister wives in these polygamist communities. Oh, I love you know, this is a great it's a great idea. Well, they don't know any better. I mean, they were raised as little children, that polygamy was normal and and having sex with old guys is OK and so forth.

But but once people know what freedom to choose is like, they almost always choose more freedom, not less freedom.

Well, as I said, that's actually empirically not the case, at least not in most European societies. But the thing is. So you're saying that they need to be educated?

Yes. Well, the mark the arc of the moral universe is many more toward individual rights and freedoms and less. Less so and so I'd say that natural trend that we're tracking indicates something that not only are we tracking it scientifically, but we can we can say that this is reflecting something about our nature. Let me interject for a moment.

Michael, you've laid out several different principles for how we can decide what's moral. There's the what is natural principle. There's the ask first, what do people want to be done to them or not to be done to them? Principle. And then there's the. Is it harming anyone principle. I'm curious, in your example, so far it has seemed to the best of my memory that all of them can be taken care of with the second two principles.

The what do people want and what causes harm? Is there any case where you need the what is natural criterion to decide what is moral? Beyond the other two, I mean, can I use a lifeline for this? I'd like to phone a friend.

Well, I can I can change the question a little bit.

OK, so, look, I'm not a moral philosopher by training. I'm just trying to I'm coming out this this way. I'm trying to answer the question to theists and theologians and believers. You know, without God, anything goes. No, that's not true. OK, so then what basis do we have? Well, we have to have some bases. And so utilitarianism and the ontology, virtue, ethics, fine. Those are all good. But we can do better than that.

Still, we can add all the components I brought up in terms of what science brings to it. We can ask first. We can you just it's too easy to rationalize based on some of these collectivist type arguments, the utilitarian type arguments for why it's OK to harm people. And I think we can do better than that. Well, first of all, just adding a few things because it's not actually quite that easy.

Modern utilitarianism is as much as I don't actually endorse it. It's a fairly sophisticated framework for moral philosophy. I mean, just if we have Peter Singer here, it would have quite a bit to say about about this. But let me go back to two of your of your point, your point judgment you just made. First of all, for instance, this idea that you also brought up in in your response on the rationally speaking blog that you can show that gods cannot possibly be the source of morality.

Well, that's a philosophical argument. And it was made by Plato 2400 years ago. It's called The Beautiful Dilemma, and it has absolutely no input from empirical evidence whatsoever. You can make that argument on logic alone, which is what I'm saying is, in fact, the reason why science is relevant. Certainly empirical evidence is relevant to moral philosophy, but it doesn't it doesn't determine it.

The other thing is, you know, if you talk about, let's say, utilitarianism, the ontology and virtue, ethics is different frameworks. The thing is. Once you start looking at empirical answers, you've already made implicitly a decision to adopt one of those or other available philosophical frameworks, for instance, they take Sam Harris, who you quoted in your in your talk. Sam thinks that is self-evident. Evidently true that we should go and increase people's happiness and decrease people's pain.

Well, that's due to terrorism. It is not at all self-evident. You have to argue for it. Now, he uses that as a starting point, and that's fair enough.

As long as he acknowledges that that starting point was actually arrived at by quite a bit of philosophical reasoning and ethical and ethical discussion. And if you say no, this is my starting point. And then from now on, I actually want I'm concerned with the practical question of how to implement this framework in actual social policy, then ensure that that does come down to a matter of of empirical facts.

So it sounded like you did actually have a justification for why increasing not happiness necessarily, but flourishing should be the goal of morality and that it was derived from natural selection. Right. Right.

Correct. Right. So, Masimo, so back to my opening example. Would you say that in some cultures, female genital mutilation is is morally acceptable? You think it's OK or do you use it? I don't you don't say, well, what basis?

I don't because I think that it is not ethical to force especially a child, especially somebody who can not actually object to it, to to undergo pain for arbitrary reasons that are not useful to the person. It's OK to undergo pain for things that reasons that are not arbitrary and is good for you. Like, you know, if you have to have an operation to get a tumor out of the way, well, that's going to cause you pain. And if I have to do it on child, even without her consent, I think that's ethically acceptable.

But in that case, I don't. Now, I can give you as I said, this was the short story. Then we can get into a more complex discussion because because, in fact, that the choice of the child or the welfare of the child is not just as simple as a question of as a matter of pain or not pain. There is also the societal context is it turns out if you don't do it, these children will suffer because they live in a certain society.

And I still think that that doesn't outweigh that the the idea that genital mutilation is wrong. So I still think it should be objected to.

But there is plenty of other of other situations where that that answer is not quite clear cut at all. What it does depend on the societal framework. For instance, there is research that, as you know, that shows by social psychologists recently that a major split between conservatives and and let's say progressives in the United States has to do with the fact the conservatives count as moral as part of the moral universe, certain things that progressives don't. Issues of purity and respect for authority and things like that.

They think that that is part of the moral framework.

I don't. There's no empirical answer to that, to that should we have to argue about why, why exactly is it that you're here? There's evidence Jonathan Haidt has all this empirical evidence. I know I don't like his research.

Well, you're I think you're wrong on that so. Well, and so in this case, go ahead.

What would be the answer with, like, take Sam's moral landscape? So maybe there's more than one correct answer. How do we find out which is the right one for you to ask? So states rights would be an example of this? Maybe instead of the federal government telling us what to do, the states should have the individual choice or break it down even further, the community or the city or whatever, or the individual, just the or the individual.

Right. So it sounds to me like you want science to justify your democratic libertarian positions, which are really.

No, no, no, no, no. I'm in favor of the individual right to me that we should have some we should have some gun control. That's not a libertarian position. And so that depends on look, there's there's no philosophical framework that's going to give us a single answer to all these different solutions. Just take them one by one. And I think we can do better than what you just said about female genital mutilation. I think we can do better than that.

They just say, well, you know, in Western democratic cultures, it's wrong.

But for those other cultures, that is not at all what I said. I said that it is wrong, period. I just said I was wrong in your head. How do you know it's wrong?

I, I think I explained that I that I that I think it's wrong to impose pain for arbitrary reasons because those are arbitrary reasons, as I said, as opposed to, you know, I'm going to kill you of a of a tumor.

But what are you basing that on? Where you can then we have right, we have well, that's not based on any empirical evidence whatsoever, because what empirical evidence would that be that people feel what they want to be feeling pain and want to be feeling pleasure. If that were all the basis to our morality, we can just talk ourselves to to a drug machine for the rest of our lives and be very happy and not in pain.

And then most of us don't think that's a that's a reasonable thing to do.

But why not the utilitarian calculus then? Just the simple hooked up to the machine kind of pleasure is not enough. There's a deeper, richer pleasures that come from. Well, the seven different criteria I put up there. So it's not just based on the one kind of pleasure. There's multiple kinds of pleasures, some that come from delay of gratification, for example.

Well, a lot of people actually, especially in the United States, would say that the legal definition is hard to pleasure at all. But if I could get it all right now, I would.

And if science allows me to do that, I should run. They're not they harm the society and they harm themselves. They're not better off.

But here's another problem that I have with with letting too much room to science in terms of moral decision making.

By the way, I should again, just in case there is some doubt, I should rather reiterate that I don't think science is irrelevant. No moral philosopher. I think science is irrelevant or empirical evidence is irrelevant to this discussion. It's a question of how much do we how do we balance things out? So science problem with science is science itself changes sometimes dramatically, and it doesn't always make progress. Sometimes there's some significant regresses. So, for instance, during the 19th century, the dominant position in science, in biology and anthropology in particular, was racist.

In the 20th century, early 20th century, there was a fairly widespread scientific position that is known. And there is there is known as as eugenics that actually resulted in social policies. The major branch of the eugenics society in the United States was actually right here on Long Island in just a few miles away from from New York. And it resulted in laws being in the books for decades and hundreds of thousands and people being forcefully castrated. That's what that was science now.

Well, they were wrong. A lot of yeah, they were wrong, but. Well, they were wrong on one case. In one case in what. According to what criteria.

And so, for example, like today's conservatives are far more liberal than liberals were in the 50s. That's moral progress. Based on what criteria? Based on individual liberties.

Seriously, seriously, really.

Because the where I've been. No, I'm not aware of this. In fact, on the contrary, I've been in this country for 23 years and I found myself reacting in the following way to every election of a Republican president to come to office. Surely people are not going to be that stupid to elect that guy and then they are.

And then four years later, the next guy comes up. And I think, you know what? The previous guy was actually fairly reasonable. I think that the political spectrum in the United States has moved dramatically to the right over the last 20 or 30 years.

And in fact, there is an interesting question that we have so much stuff that's actually on top of that aside for now. So there's one thing that I'm I'm still sort of confused about, Michael, for all that science can tell us about human flourishing, it has seemed to me in reading moral philosophy that the the philosophical questions and debate begin where the science ends. So, you know, even if we knew completely what would make individuals and societies flourish, we then have all of these questions about tradeoffs between my flourishing and your flourishing or trade offs between my flourishing and, you know, the greater societal good or trade off between the flourishing of people who exist today and people who are not yet born or.

Yeah, and I could name a lot more examples, but so so how does that reconcile with the fact that you don't seem to play a big role for philosophy in deciding moral questions? Do you think science can answer those trade off questions? Maybe. I'm just saying, in addition to philosophy, let's add another arrow to our quiver. Let's use science not just for measuring things, but for actually trying to decide what's the right thing to do. Why not add is it's a great tool.

What's wrong with.

But who is arguing against ending it? I mean, the argument is, again, you seem to be using. No, I don't think so. So we need to be careful about making this distinction. Again, I don't think any reasonable moral philosopher would object to importing empirical evidence, empirical issues into discussions of morality. The question is, how much do those those empirically for information weigh?

Let's just try it out and see what happens. We can always back off. We can always say, all right, this is a bad idea. Just try it out.

Science has worked well in trying it out. I mean, you seem to be like like Sam Harris, I think, who makes similar arguments. You seem to be a bit the impression, the moral philosopher simply. Or, you know, empirical evidence, let me back up for a second here. As I said during my talk before before this discussion here, the major distinction of a major distinction between science and philosophy. And the reason I do think that they do really both need to work together on these and other issues is that science deals with empirical with empirical world and philosophy tends to deal with sort of logical possibilities and logical bias.

What I mean by it. Let me finish. So, so logical possibilities are much broader than empirical possibilities, which is another way to rephrase Julie's question a minute ago, which is science constantly will under determine empirically empirical information we're constantly under determine our ethical problems because our ethical problem is not a question of conflict of values. We need to explain to ourselves and to others why is it that certain things need to take priority over others? The empirical information is relevant, but it doesn't determine a unique answer.

Even even areas agreed that the moral landscape is more than one piece. But I think his view is very limited. It's not just that there is more than one empirical peak. There is many, many more logical peaks.

And so that's why that's why I think that the back and forth is now one of the things I think the problem is problematic about these discussions, not just about ethics, but about the relationship between philosophy and science in general, is that people on let's say I'm not going to put you with this, Michael, but certainly Harris go on and say things like, oh, anything that deals with facts is science.

Well, now science is a particular type of human cognitive, epistemic endeavor. Science is what biologists do, physicists do, social scientists do once answer for it is simply not the fact that if it is a fact, it is science. Last night, for instance, I was watching Loui, an episode of in a very funny TV show with Louis C.K. and I can guarantee you that there was no science in in doing that. I was simply engaging in a normal human activity that implied facts.

I had a TV, but if he was fed with certain certain signals, I was enjoying the signals. Certainly there were reactions in my brain that you could imagine, but all of that would have been irrelevant. I was just watching TV and having fun.

It is not science if we want to play that game. If if people sometimes expand the definition of science to the entire universe of factual information so that of course everything becomes science, then too can play the same game, I can say, and therefore similarly philosophies about everything that it has to do with thinking, which means that we're all doing philosophy all the time. But clearly, if we expand those definitions that far, we're losing, meaning it's not science anymore.

It's not philosophy like the Enlightenment philosophers, Jefferson and Paine, Franklin, Founding Fathers, even Locke. And so they they were doing philosophy and science. They just simply did not make the distinction that we make today. So science, your slide sancha, you know, reason, empiricism, rationality, logic, these are all tools we should use to try to figure out what's the right thing.

No disagreement at all there. But the reason the Enlightenment philosophers were doing both simultaneously is because at the time was possible to do both simultaneously. Science was just about to start to differentiate itself from philosophy. Science, of course, was referred to as natural philosophy. At the time, Newton thought of himself as a natural philosopher. The card, by the way, he thought of himself as a physicist mostly. And the reason we we remember Newton as a physicist and as a philosopher is because Newton got the better ideas in physics and Descartes was quite interesting at the end in philosophy better than Newton's.

So after that, however, things diverged.

We have specialization. We have, you know, today, as you know, doing science, you know, getting a little bit of really novel knowledge into the store of human knowledge. It's really difficult. It requires a lot of specialization and the same with philosophy. I want to pull the off topic card again because we have about five more minutes left. And I'm we touched on this earlier, but didn't really explore it. And it seemed like a major central issue here.

Both of you, you have your disagreements clearly, but you overlap a lot in your moral intuitions the way you want to make moral judgments.

Human flourishing is central. What do you say to people whose moral intuitions, your definition of morality does not have very much to do with flourishing? If someone says morality is about purity and it's about, you know, not violating taboos about cleanliness and sex and food and so on, or someone who says morality is just about being loyal to the people in my tribe, I owe nothing to anyone else and can harm them as much as I want. How how do you how do you prove them wrong?

Can you prove them wrong?

I guess it would just depend on a specific example. I mean, you just that was a broad swath there. But for example.

What you mentioned earlier, Masimo, about how liberals and conservatives differ, so in that case, we may have multiple peaks on the moral landscape in which the reason for these elections to go back and forth and why the pendulum seems to swing back and forth may be because by our very nature, some some of us prefer more flexibility and change in our worldview. And some of us are more rigid and hierarchical in our world view. And you kind of need both.

So that neither one gets too far in the extreme, so it could be that we evolve naturally, this propensity to divide up into these kind of left and right. This is this is hights argument that, you know, this may be just driven by our human nature, by just our genetic propensity to have a kind of temperament that prefers some of us prefer, you know, liberal and some of us prefer conservative. And so we end up with these kind of parties that like like this.

And so, therefore, how do you find out what's the right thing to do? You have an election and see what happens. And then you throw the bums out and you do something different the next time. And so it's like an experiment. You keep changing the variables and run it again, change it again, collect more data, see how it goes and just keep going it alone. We have different definitions of success. What is the point?

The point here of the founding fathers, the way they design the Constitution was that nobody knows how to run a country. So we have to set it up such that it's a constant, ongoing experiment. That's science, that's a scientific way of thinking about how best we should live. See, that's what I lost you right there when you made the leap to that science. Now, that's a lot more complicated than science. If it were a science, actually, we could design an experiment very nicely controlled and figure out the answer.

We don't know. You were talking about a minute ago, I was trying to picture conservative and progressive Neanderthals and how they went about.

So, I mean, this whole idea, like height does of coming up with just so stories and say, oh, this this thing here today evolved because in the place the scene and I make up a story which, as we both know, are stories that are plausible.

But plausibility, of course, is not is not an empirical justification. It's not a scientific justification. We can't come up with all sorts of interesting scenarios. There is almost no way to test those scenarios. So I will leave the place, the scene alone in terms of our understanding and think it really shed much light on our understanding of why there are differences in values between conservatives and progressives in the United States in the 21st century in a particular human culture.

The fact remains there are differences. People have different definitions of what a successful political experiment I noticed. How do you reconcile the answer?

First of all, that Michael gave you, as far as I heard, has absolutely very little to do with science.

It's not it's not a scientific answer. It's just basically said, well, there are differences in the moral landscape. By the way, those differences are philosophical in nature. They're not empirical because it's not that there is any empirical evidence that, let's say the flag should be sacred or that authority should be a value as opposed to just a convenient way of recognizing, you know, organizing things. So these are differences of values. If the differences are valid and these are differences in ethical landscape, in logical landscape, not in an empirical one.

Number one. Number two, all he said was, well, let's vote over and over and see what happens.

Well, but but but that's empirical in the trivial sense that, yes, we're going to find out what people prefer. We're not going to find out what is true or what is best to do that.

We need to engage in a discussion with these people. So we need to have, first of all, to recognize start with recognizing which ethical philosophers have no problem in doing that. In fact, there are different ways of thinking about ethics and that they may be irreconcilable. There are certain things well, you know, that is your framework. And unless I can convince you that my framework is better, which is a matter of mathematics, by the way, we're getting even further away from science.

We're talking about the the justification of ethical systems.

Unless I can convince you of that, you're not going to change your mind. Now, how do I convince you of that? Well, I might try to, as philosophers say, and park the car can't impact the the context, that context of my way of thinking and your way of thinking. So it turns out that, for instance, my way of phrasing moral issues has a lot to do with harm and rights, and yours has to do with issues like purity or authority.

Now, we can have a discussion about why exactly do you think that authorities about in and of itself, what do you mean by value? What are you getting these values?

Turns out and a lot of cases, actually, if you really push it, those conservatives will tell you that those values come from religious authority. And they're Michael and I agree, are they don't stand a chance once you push them to into that corner.

Then I whip out my personal copy of the divorce dilemma and I say, gotcha, sorry you don't get to work mesbah. And so does that tend to work? Of course not. Just because you can explain.

But, you know, there is there is a famous widespread quote among among teachers, as you probably know. I can explain it to you. I cannot understand it for you. So, you know, there is only so much you can do, but persuasion is a different issue.

Now, there, by the way, science does come back sort of the back door because persuasion is really is a psychological issue. I mean, you can be right ethically. You can be right logically, OK, you can have the right arguments and even the right empirical evidence and not being able to convince people at all. And that's where you want to ask actually psychologists and say, you know, since I know I'm right, how do I convince these bastards to vote my way?

Am I out of time? I am. Oh, I'm out of time. I mean, any closing remarks at the microphone?

So, OK, well, then, unfortunately, this country feels ethically obliged not to exercise the option of keeping the microphone, regardless of what the organizers say.

I don't know. According to utilitarianism, there's a lot more of us than there are you timekeepers. But we didn't actually we didn't have that.

Correct. So so this Michael, thank you so much for participating in this conversation, being a guest on our show. It's been a great conversation. This now concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.