Debate Analysis

The Debate That Changed Destiny's Philosophy

Channel: Destiny

Primary speakers:Stephen Bonnell (Destiny)T.K. Coleman

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): What does the role of suffering play in morality? I don't know, like I said, I'm very philosophical. I try to be careful because there's so many weird objections or challenges. Like, if your goal is to reduce suffering, this way I have to be careful with these AI guys, right? If your goal is to reduce suffering and you push the button on the ad or reduce the suffering as much as possible on the human planet, they would just nuke the whole world and you had a zero suffering whatsoever. If I want to live a life right now that is the peak of physical preference pleasure, you would just be hooked up to like a, you know, a heroin needle until you die.

T.K. Coleman: That would be an example of a moral wall. That's telling you, no, you know that life is about more than that. You know that. Don't do that. That's not right.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Well, now I'm curious because I hate Jordan Peterson. And it seemed like you had some admiration or respect for his public system. I, I feel like he reasons his stuff in a horrible way. I think I have to say yes to that based on everything I've said. But then I guess that would make me a physical anti-realist. But now I've changed my position completely, so I should have never said physical realism in the first place.

Joshua Fields-Millburn: But literally change your mind in the mid-sentence. It's not a thing that you see in typical debates. Does objective morality exist? I'm Joshua Fields-Millburn from The Minimalist. And today I'm moderating a conversation about morality between two thinkers I deeply admire. Joining me is Stephen Bunnell, better known as Destiny Online. Stephen is a prominent YouTuber and political commentator widely known for debating controversial topics and for his advocacy of liberal ideas. You can find him online at destiny.gg and on YouTube. And social media at destiny. I'm also joined by my podcast co-host and Netflix co-star T.K. Coleman T.K. is a minimalist philosopher, a devout Catholic. As far as I can tell, he is politically homeless. You can find his work at TheMinimalists.com and on YouTube and social media at The Minimalists. We're recording this conversation at The Minimalist podcast studio in West Hollywood. My role today is simple. I'm going to stay out of the way. Well, at least step out of the way for a moment here and let these two men have a thoughtful challenging conversation. I'll jump in only when it helps move things forward. Destiny, let's start with you.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Does objective morality exist? So kind of the boring way to start every philosophy conversation. I feel like it's kind of asking, what do we mean when we say like exist or is real? Yes, unfortunately, yeah. So not to go full Jordan Peterson here. Now I heard you bowling him about the Trinity off camera. So I'm guessing we have some Catholic philosophy coming from over here. I was raised as a Catholic. I went to Jesuit High School and everything. So I've heard all the Trinity criticisms and the Mary Worshipper insults and everything they throw at us. So I guess when I try to think of morality, typically the way that I do morality, some people will say that this is a real form of morality. Some people say this is not a real form of morality. In terms of like like a real thing or kind of like an anti-real thing. The way that I look at it is I view it as more of a question of like what are humans and then morality is the thing that emerges predictably from human behavior. So let's assume that we had a subset of humans at 100 different civilizations. And let's say 99 of them had no morality. Let's say one of them had some type of morality. And when I say morality, what I mean is some set of behaviors that guides them towards some kind of cooperation, I think that 99 of those civilizations would fail because without cooperation, you have people eating each other, killing each other's children, stealing, murdering, whatever. It just doesn't work. It falls apart. Whereas for the people that are more cooperative, those civilizations survive, and then they eventually thrive and they carry on. And I guess those people, thousands of years into the future, will be wondering, well, is our morality objective? Does it come from some written code in the universe? Is there some objectively true statements that we can make about morality? But the reality is the only people that would have survived that far would have been the ones that would have had some kind of like guiding behavior characteristics regardless. So insofar as that goes, I think that morality is like an intuitive thing that kind of necessarily emerges from humans because without these types of preferential behaviors, you basically just turn into the society that just cannibalizes itself until it ceases to exist.

Joshua Fields-Millburn: Yeah. That doesn't necessarily mean that morality is objective, though. It means that groups that have a set of moral codes are able to, I guess, cooperate in ways that a group that doesn't have a moral code might be able to cooperate.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Basically, so would say that like, because humans have a very shared biology, like 98% of humans are going to agree on like 98% of moral things. And then we're going to be arguing a lot about kind of edge cases. So things like like a board shirt or a gay marriage or whatever are going to be kind of like edge cases, but all of us are going to roughly agree that you shouldn't steal things, you shouldn't kill people, stuff like that.

Joshua Fields-Millburn: TK, the reason I wanted to have this conversation is last time we had Destiny on the Minimus podcast, YouTube, debated a bunch of really compelling topics. And there was a moment where we just touched on morality. And I asked you whether or not an objective morality exists. And the thing you said to me that is stuck with me for the last several years is you said, well, we over-moralize a lot of things. I think we could talk about that how our cultures become so self-righteous. We tend to moralize everything. But it seems to me that if there are five universal moral truths,

T.K. Coleman: then there is some sort of objective morality. That's right. I mean, my position you could argue is moral minimalism. That there is at least one moral fact. And if one moral fact exists, then moral realism is true. Now, I'm not actually a moral minimalist. I believe there's more than one moral fact. But for the purpose of this discussion, you know, if we're asking, is moral realism is true? That's all that would be needed to demonstrate the truth of it. Just to kind of clarify my position, I would say that moral realism for me is a subset of realism in general. And we can, we can always get more precise with our definitions. But when it comes to realism, I just advance a common sense notion of it. If I were to say, hey, Josh, there is a pickup truck parked right in front of this building. I take myself to be expressing more than a preference, more than a feeling, more than a view on what I wish were true. But I take myself to be making an actual claim about reality, a claim that can be falsified, a claim that can be verified. And if we go and we look, and we see there is no pickup truck parked in front of the building, then that means either I lied or I got it wrong or something changed that I would have to give an account for. And so in everyday life, we speak as if some kind of realism is true. If I say there is a chair there across the room, again, I believe there really is a chair. I'm saying something about the world and not just me. In a similar way, I believe that moral realism is just realism applied to moral values. So to use a classic example, when I say that it is morally wrong to torture innocent babies for spectator sport, I'm not just saying I personally, I'm disgusted with it. I'm not just saying human beings have evolved to feel yucky about that norm. I just expressing how I want the world to be. Those things may be in place. They may not be in place. But what I'm saying is that that kind of order, it is incongruent with reality itself. And in the same way that a person can behave irrationally by violating laws of logic and being incongruent with reality in their beliefs, a person can behave immorally by violating moral principles and being incongruent with reality

Joshua Fields-Millburn: at the level of behavior. Destiny, I've seen that you are, you've at least been sympathetic to emotiveism, which is I think different from completely different from TK's perspective here. Maybe you could talk a bit about that and relate to the way that he's describing moral realism.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): When you, just because I've heard everybody use these terms differently, I've heard the term like non-cognitivism, where you kind of expressing moral propositions and they're really just like preferences. When you say emotivism, can it just be clear what do you mean here?

Joshua Fields-Millburn: Yeah, the the boo hooray theory. Okay, gotcha gotcha.

T.K. Coleman: Yeah, so by the way, can I, this is completely off topic, but this is why I enjoyed our conversation with you when you were here on our show. And this is why I'm so excited about today. I'm in physical pain, so I don't look excited. But people make fun of anyone who says, what do you mean by that? And I think Jordan Peterson is kind of the classic example of it. But whenever I watch debates, I just get tired of them so quickly, because people go on for hours without ever taking the time to just define what they mean. And people are so put off by the request. And I thought it was a normal, responsible thing to do. I think it's an essential thing to do. And so whenever I find myself in conversation with someone who isn't scandalized by that, or who doesn't have any hesitancy to say, what do you mean by that? And that's okay. I'm like, all right, this is a good conversation. So I appreciate that. I hate the way Jordan Peterson does it,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): but we can do that with her. Yeah, that'll be a different debate. So when we speak about things, I think that there is a context to things that we say. And I think that there is, I think that when we say a thing is a thing, I think sometimes we're expressing different things, sometimes than that realizing it. So like a lot of language, I would say ordinary human language has a lot of built in or baked in assumptions to it. If I were to pop my head in and if I were to say, you know, is anybody in here hungry? And maybe all of you guys say, yeah. And then I would leave. I think everybody would be kind of confused if 20, 30 minutes later, I'm eating in the other room alone. And you would come through and you would ask me questions, okay, well, I thought you were going to get a spoon. It's like, I never said that. And it's like, wow, you know, when you ask somebody, you know, like, are they hungry? There's a whole bunch of baked in stuff there in terms of our, you know, would you like me to get you food? I can get you, right? There's, there's just so many different things. I've heard, I don't remember the name, but I've heard this expression is like the four maxims of like conversation or whatever. Like, oh, you know, if I were to text you this morning, I would say, hey, I'm outside and you go outside and I'm not there. And I was like, oh, I'm outside my house in Miami. I'm like, okay, well, that you're not conveying like the appropriate level of information. When you said outside, I assume you meant right outside my building right now at this point in time, right? But we don't say all these things. I think we talk about different types of facts. I think that there are words that we use. So words like is these types of verbs that we use. But I think we're kind of saying different things. So one thing that you brought up and I'll simplify the truck example to like, there is a chair in the room. So when we say like there is a chair, like we're agreeing that there's some collection of matter that we universally, we've applied the principal chair to it and we, you know, say it's here and you know, and we would say that's kind of a fact because it reduces to something hopefully and an objectively true reality that our sense of perceiving etc. But here's a question I guess I would have. If I were to say, um, if I were to say, uh, there is a chair in this room, is that the same type of statement as saying there, um, there is a, um, there is a bed underneath the stairs in the in the Dursley's house in in Harry Potter that there's like a, there's a, there's a bedroom underneath. I'm trying to think of a specific fact in Harry Potter. But if I say like there's a, there's a mirror in Harry Potter's room, is that the same type of statement

T.K. Coleman: as saying there is a chair in this room? In one sense and one sense, in one sense yes and one sense no, right? So if you were to ask me that as part of a normal conversation, uh, I would take you to mean something like, Hey, within the world that is the Harry Potter story, is this something that is deemed to be a fact? And so in that sense, yes, but it's a different kind of statement because you're making a statement about two different worlds. One is a world that we both agree on is purely conceptual and the other is a world that we both agree is actually like physical in nature.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Okay. Um, I, I think it was a perfect answer. Um, so now I'm not sure we're going to disagree on anything or if we're just going to come down to terms, but when I do morality, I look at it similarly as like, um, like math. So if I say like one plus one is two, we all agree on that given the same set of mathematical axioms, depending on what set they were, whatever you used to be, we all agree on that, generally speaking, that two plus two is four, three is six. These are things that we're going to agree on, but is three plus three is six is not the same type of truth as I spot, um, I think is that a whiteboard or a table or something in the corner. And then the answer that you gave, well, with respect to some system, I would agree that this is true. But does it exist outside of the agreements of that system? This is kind of where I view morality as sitting. Morality is kind of like, um, like a, like a statement in math or a statement in Harry Potter that so long as we all kind of agree on a set of norms governing that, we can make true statements with respect to those norms, but those norms are grounded in a relatively, I don't want to say arbitrary, because that's not quite true, because I think biologically, all of us are going to have similar norms, similarly like core guiding principles, but I don't know if it's true in the same way that like a table exists or, um, or wall exists. And then kind of the testing question that I would have on that, um, if you can speak to what I just said, the testing question is if I were to say there's a truck outside and we would go outside and we would look, we could use our senses to kind of figure out, well, is there a truck or is there not a truck? And we, you know, we're, there's going to be a right or wrong on that. Whereas if I were to say, um, killing that person is wrong, and then we would observe somebody killing a person, let's say there's a disagreement there. How do you resolve the disagreement between two people? What do you point to, or what are you looking at objectively to say, well, this person is correct, that is wrong or that person incorrect, you know,

T.K. Coleman: it is wrong. Yeah. It's a good question. Let me first respond to the, um, the example of the Harry Potter, the math facts, physical facts. So I think the Harry Potter example, that is a universe, so to speak, that we both agree is fictional. And we have concrete evidence that a human being created this universe, right? We can point to the person who created that and they can say, yes, here's a date on the calendar where no one talked about Harry Potter. Here's the date where they did talk about it. And it was because I introduced the idea to the world. I think mathematical troops are different from that. Um, and I don't think one needs to be a plateness on, on abstract entities in this way. But when we say things like two plus two equals four, yes, we're assuming a base, we're assuming a formal system of logic, but we're also making claims about the nature of reality in the sense of there being order, there being structure, there being things like coherence and consistency. And I, and I'm a realist on those things. So I think speaking of things like order and structure is very different than speaking of a bad being in a particular room in the Harry Potter story. One of those is fiction. And so I'm an anti-realist on that. And the other is, is, uh, is one that I, I take to be true. And I'm a realist on that. Your question about the, um, the pickup truck versus the moral example, like it's killing wrong, is there a pickup truck outside? Uh-huh. I think this feels compelling and complex on the surface for one reason, namely that we are not in the habit of subjecting our beliefs about the physical world to scrutiny in the way that we are inclined to do with more abstract things. And so sometimes when you're dealing with something that's familiar, even if your reasons for believing it are bad, you feel more safe and you feel more comfortable because there's no need to ask questions about it because there's nothing in my experience that forces me to ask questions about it. A good example of this would be money. You take fiat currency has all sorts of problems. It is not a perfect system at all. But when you introduce a new form of currency, like cryptocurrency, it incentivizes people to start thinking in a way that's really skeptical. And I think the skeptical questions are fair. Well, what is the money based on or, or, you know, like how does this or that work? Those are fair questions. But those same fair questions could also be asked about fiat currency. It's just that we're not inclined to ask them because it's familiar. And so that gives us a false sense of security. So when we talk about the physical world, I do not take for granted that there is a mind independent physical world. And I think it's a fair philosophical question to ask for any given experience you have of perceiving a physical thing. How do you know you're not hallucinating? How do you know that this is not merely the content of your consciousness? Now, we do not ask these questions at parties. If we're trying to make friends, if we're trying to get along in the world, most people would be annoyed by that. But when we're having philosophical discussions about the nature of justified belief about having rational belief formation processes, it's a fair question to ask. One of the classical distinctions in philosophy, Bertrand Russell talks about this and problems of philosophy as a parent's versus reality. We all have direct experience with seeming to see something, seeming to hear something. We have these sensory impressions. And then up on further reflection or examination, we realize we were wrong. There is a stick that appears to be bent because it's in the water. But when I pull it out, I go, oh, it appeared to be bent, but it actually isn't. And so we all understand that difference between appearance and reality. So when you have an experience of seeing a tree, seeing a mountain, seeing a pickup truck, the question to ask there is, how do you know that what you see exists independently of the contents of your consciousness? I contend that once you established the reasons for that, which is really the case for physical realism, you have in that the case for moral realism. I'm happy to make that case, but I want to pause here and just kind of hear your thoughts on that.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Yeah, I guess my question would be, how do you test any of the claims? So in so far as, we look at our five senses, for eyesight, if I want to say that thing is a particular color, and then we have a group of people and there might be some disagreement on the color of the thing is, we could actually test the wavelength of light that's being emitted from the thing. Or for sound, we can actually test the vibrations and the air to determine the sound coming from a particular thing. What kind of investigation could we do to explore or communicate, I guess, a moral fact?

T.K. Coleman: Yeah, so two things. So one, I want to make sure we don't oversell the ease with which we can test these physical claims. We have to significantly limit our data set to things that we pretty universally agree on. But when you look at many of the explanations we take for granted now about why we experience the physical world and the way we do, humanity has been flat out wrong about the theories of the experience for the overwhelming majority of history. So for instance, you take once upon a time disease was explained in terms of rotten matter in the way that that pollutes the air and we get sick or because of defects in people's moral character or the idea of heat transfer being explained in terms of pressure inherent in substances. And I believe it was like caloric pressure, something along those lines. And so if we were to go back and look at some of Aristotle's physics, you know, probably brighter than all of us combined. And we compare that to our understanding of physics today. If we just take Newtonian physics and compare that to Aristotle physics, then we have some major differences. So even today, when you push really hard to get into the substance of reality, there's a ton of difficulty in terms of understanding what the nature of physical reality is. And I'm not sure how we get out of it. So for instance, you take the debate in scientific realism. There's entity realism, there's structural realism. And when we push on the nature of matter, it's what are we interacting with? Are we actually interacting with entities? Are we interacting with some kind of energy pattern? Are we interacting with structure? What are we interacting with? These are very difficult questions to answer. And we cannot settle them with instruments. We cannot settle them with observations, or they would already be settled. We actually have to settle them with deep, difficult, conceptual analysis in the same way that we would argue about the existence of God. We're not going to settle this by like saying no God or God. We have to have philosophical discussions about what evidence look like, what rules of inference we abide by. And we may not come to an agreement, but we wouldn't say, we wouldn't deal with that disagreement by saying there is no truth. We would just say, this is really hard, and it's a different kind of thinking. So that's the first part of that. The second part is how do we go about settling moral disputes? Well, one thing that we can do, and this is a longer game, but one thing that we can do is we can talk about moral structures as a kind of order that's inherent in the fabric of reality itself. And so the earlier I mentioned that being immoral is to behavior, being irrational is to belief. When you form beliefs, irrationally, it produces disorder in your life. It puts you out of alignment with reality. In a similar way, immoral behavior produces disorder in one's life. And so we can take a look at what are the actual consequences in individuals and in civilizations. We can look at that historically. What are the consequences of this way of behaving? And I think one point of agreement that we have, based on what you just said about the evolutionary explanations, is that the things that we consider to be moral are things that tend to produce societal stability. They tend to produce human flourishing. They tend to optimize us for survival. And so we can appeal to those kinds of things, and we can test those kinds of things. But we have to be honest about the fact that those kinds of tests are a little more difficult, nuanced, and complex than like testing mechanical objects. In the same way that psychological research is more difficult than mechanical research.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Okay, so for the first part about not fully understanding where a thing is or what a thing might be, like in math, there are different sets of infinity, basically, right? From depending on the types of numbers you're talking about, we can say there's an infinite amount of numbers between one and two. There's an infinite amount of positive integers, whatever. There's a million things you can say about different types of sets of infinity. Just because there's an infinite amount of numbers between one and two, doesn't mean that we can say, well, also five could be an answer or zero could be an answer. So while I agree that it could be difficult sometimes to hone in exactly on what it is a phenomenon is being produced by what's going on, we're definitely like directionally moving in some way, such that the science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, I think is a really cute short essay about flat earth, basically. And the idea is when we conceive a flat earth, we think it'd be a stupid idea, but technically flat earth is a dramatically improved upon idea from thinking the surface of the planet is just random ups and downs, right? And the difference because of the size of the planet between flat earth and a spherical earth is quite small. It's like a fraction of a degree, basically. And then the difference between, you know, a lot of people think that if this round is not technically round, it's like an obelisk feroid, but the difference between roundness and an obelisk feroid is another fraction of a degree. So even if the first gas is wrong, directionally, it's pushing in a direction that's more correct, the same as, you know, whatever, I don't know who thought of the four humors or whatever, for medicine, but like these are all directionally moving into a better understanding of what, you know, today we have for medicine, you know, and then hopefully that's moving into better direction, etc. Agreed on all that. Yeah, I say all that to say that, even if I look in the past, and I say this is like a primitive notion that, you know, that somebody might have had, but, you know, we're making some kind of, you could say moral progress, you could say epistemic progress, whatever. I don't know if I feel like that same progress has ever occurred, you know, when it comes to morality, like if we looked 2000 years ago, you know, you get religion, you have before that your 10 commandments, everything else, I know there are other religions before Christianity. But I don't know if there's ever been a point where it's like, okay, well, here's a settled moral question, you know, we've kind of solved this, or we've made a lot of progress on these moral questions, like we know that adultery or murder is actually wrong or isn't actually wrong. Like I feel like these are questions that are about as, about as wrestled with as they always have been with, with some gains made in certain areas that I wonder if it has more to do with morality or more to do with like the physical manifestation of like medicine or technology. So for an example of that, we talk about like equal rights for women, and we talk about women being able to join the workplace and have education and everything. I would like to think that a lot of this came as a result of people, I guess evolving morally or viewing women as more equal, but a large part of this was probably also due to the fact that our economies grew so much that women being integrated into the workplace, especially, you know, when we're at war, it's really advantageous. And also the invention of birth control has given people the ability to have recreational sex without having to be married, having to have a child, and then being kind of committed to that, you know, forever. So to bring that back, I guess, we're talking about order, and we're talking about irrationality, and we're talking about the production of some kind of society based on your behavior. I guess my question is, is this starts to feel a little bit more like the Harry Potter thing where we say, you know, well, can't, somebody would ask, you know, can Harry Potter defeat Snape? The answer would never be, well, neither of those characters are real, so there's no answer, right? You would answer within that world. And I feel like much the same if we were to say is recreational sex, is that like acceptable or is that immoral? We would say, well, that's going to be with respect to whatever outcome you're optimizing for. But I don't know if there's like an objectively correct outcome to optimize for. And then say you have two people that want to argue back and forth, well, which outcome should be optimized more? In one world, there might be more recreational sex, and the other world, there might be a few more, we'll say children and stable families, but no world is like falling apart. How do you even come close to resolving any disagreement there? Like what would you even look at to test the disagreements there? How would you analyze those disagreements? Yeah.

T.K. Coleman: A few things. First, I'm going to go back to what you said about. It seems like you were getting ready to make a mild concession that there has been some moral progress, but you express some skepticism as to whether or not it's do more to something like advancements in technology and so on. I want to make sure that we don't dismiss the concession on grounds of that because that plays a role in science as well. We can definitely 100% without any doubt say our ability to do science well today and make advancements in science today is not just because we're so much smarter than the people of the past, but because of advancements in technology, we're able to test things that most of humanity wasn't able to test. So scientific progress really does depend on and benefit from things like the invention of the telescope, the invention of the microscope, the invention of the internet, the personal computer, innovations and transportation. So all of these things are connected, but just because we have other elements to thank for our capacity to make progress, doesn't mean that progress isn't made in the way that we do science. I would say in a similar way, we do see progress when it comes to morals. So for instance, we can say that people today think differently about slavery than most people throughout human history that... And actually, let me just ask you that because I don't want to assume or maybe we don't have the even waste time arguing about that. But do you believe that the world's view on slavery today is pretty much the same as it's been for most human history, and there has been no progress made

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): on that? I feel like there have been ebbs and flows, but I'm not sure again, if I would credit all of that to like the more evolution of people, more so than to the economic evolution of different societies. So for instance, I would say in some ways like slavery that existed in the United States was kind of uniquely also out there or evil, I guess. And the idea of like wholesale, chattel slavery based on your race from birth to death and then that that would follow you through for your entire family was kind of a uniquely terrible conception of slavery, which would have been arguably worse than some of the forms of slavery that had been existed and had been practice prior to that. So that would be like a dip. And then obviously, we had a whole civil war. Obviously, the rest of the planet is largely moved on from slavery-ish. Some people would argue that visa worktrap schemes and everything and Dubai and everything, you know, can kind of amount of the slavery. But when I look at this, my question is like, if we weren't in the economic state, we would be in today, would everybody have the same view of slavery or would we regress back to that if people thought that it was more economically viable or didn't want to share as many, you know, limited resources with different types of people, you know? I mean, I'd ask the same thing about

T.K. Coleman: scientific progress as well. If we didn't have the wealth that we have, the technology that we have, the economic consensus that we have, the social structures that we have, I'm not sure we'd be able to make this kind of progress. But more importantly, I think you're conflating the distinction between the reality of moral progress and the various explanations for why we have that progress. So for instance, if we point to a guy who used to make no money, and now he's a millionaire, one person can say, he got there because he works really hard. Another person can say, no, his father just gave him the money. Another person can say, well, he cheated a bunch of people and he's really duplicitous. That's why you had the money. But there's one thing we can disagree on. The guy has made economic progress. Maybe his reasons are legit. Maybe his reasons are illicit. But we don't want to confuse the various elements that made progress more accessible, more possible with the reality of progress itself. And so even when it comes to people's motives for seeking truth, people's motives for engaging in discussion and debate, we do a lot more of that in today's culture in terms of like, we don't settle disagreements as much by violence. We settle disagreements by sitting down and discussing things. You can't separate that from the economic incentives we have.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): I asked a question real quick on that because this word keeps coming up and I think it underlines a lot of our potential disagreement or actual disagreement. Whenever you say things like progress, we're assuming like kind of a start and finish and then like a directional thing. And I feel like progress is easy to talk about in some ways. When we talk about like economic progress, number go up. Typically good, right? Makes more money. Typically good. When we say like moral progress, how are we figuring out where is this delineation? How do we know like, well, this is the start and then this is the end. And how do we test that? What are we looking for? Yeah. So I would say

T.K. Coleman: being a person of integrity is not just about how you feel. It's about what you actually do, right? And some of those moments that we might deem to be the most heroic moments, the most virtuous moments are where you don't feel like doing something that is valuable and you choose to do it anyway, right? And so we could say progress, moral progress would be when more people are incentivized to choose the right thing, to choose the more valuable thing, to choose the more healthy thing, even if there are parts of them that really don't feel like it. Even if there are parts of them that may not have done that if everything were neutral. So let's say I'm an employer and everyone that works for me is always late. And I make some sort of policy change by saying, you know, how much you get paid depends on this. And then everyone starts to show up on time. We see that the capacity to show up on time was always there. We see an improvement in behavior that they're behaving more in accordance with the ideal. And a change has been made in the incentives to get people to do that. So when I say moral progress has occurred, I would say that human beings today are more incentivized to do things that we all agree are morally good things to do. And slavery would be an example of that, not settling debates with violence would be an

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): example of that. Do you think that that falls into kind of like a circularity to where if I have a society full of people who all tell me that trucks do not exist, there is no truck outside. We can go outside and I can show you there is indeed a truck or there's something here you have to call a truck. If there's a society and everybody says that murder is good or killing is good. And then I come in and I say, well, actually killing is not good. And then they all disagree with me. What do I point to to say, well, look, it really isn't good. Because again, the when you get the employee example, right, well, that's an easy one because the schedule is good because it's the schedule. So if they come in on time, then I know that it's good with respect to the schedule, much the same that Snape killed Dumbledore with respect to Harry Potter. But external that like contrived measurement system, how do you resolve the disagreement? Yeah.

T.K. Coleman: Well, well, we both agree that for the most part, humanity agrees on basic underlying moral categories. If we need to hash out differences there, just let me know. But I'm assuming that you agree that in some sense, murder is a society where we just murder people because we disagree with them is a worse society than one in which we handle our disagreements respectfully and respecting one another's rights and so on. I think so. We're getting really bad rock here.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): But I think these are good. Yeah. So when we say good or bad, there's a question of like, what do we mean when we say good or bad? So I would say that these societies are bad and that they don't survive. But so I think like the difference between like that's like a type of normative claim, but it's not a moral claim. I wouldn't say that they're bad and that there's like an objectively bad or evil thing here. I would say they're bad with respect to their ability to persevere or survive into the future. And then a good thing is a thing that satisfies like if I want to fill this glass of water, it would be good for the water to be to be full of water. But it wouldn't be good like morally good, right? Or if I say, oh, well, I'm parched and I was handed a glass of water that's almost empty. I would say, oh, well, that's bad. But not like morally bad. So when you say, we agree on things that are good or bad, I agree that we agree on those things. But when we say with respect to the society being able to exist or persevere, I don't know if that like satisfies the conditions of goodness or badness is the same type of like moral good or bad versus

T.K. Coleman: just a normative. Yeah. Sure. We both agree that a society being moving towards the good involves at some level some kind of concept of flourishing. But what appears to differentiate us is that I'm positing something additional. I'm positing that there is an oughtness behind all this or related to this. And you're saying that that's the part that you reject. Okay. So to your question, would this be circular? It would be if the things I'm saying to you now, we're being presented as an argument for moral realism. And fairness, I haven't given any reason for why I think moral realism is true. What we're talking about is the consistency that some explanatory accounts have or don't have with moral realism. And so when you say things like we can measure progress in terms of human flourishing in terms of less violence, I'm saying that these are things that we actually can measure and that's consistent with moral realism. Now, I still got to prove moral realism. But these things are not refutations of moral realism or for instance, when we give evolutionary accounts of why people have an aversion to things like assault, evolution presupposes an ontology, but it doesn't prove one, right? Evolution starts with basic presuppositions about what sorts of things exist. And it attempts to explain how those things function or how those things emerge. But they don't say anything either way about what kind of substance things have or whether or not things exist. So I'll give an example. Let's say we're to observe a family in two different situations. Situation one, you have a family that's having a party and they're outside at a pool and you see the kids, you know, putting their their hands in the water, you see the adults dipping their their toes in the water, you see people diving in and swimming around. Scenario two, that same family is now around a campfire. They cozy up in the warmth of the fire, but you notice that there's an aversion to touching the fire in a way that wasn't present with them touching the water. And we can ask, well, why is that? Why do they have an aversion to fire that doesn't seem to be present to water? Well, we can have a good evolutionary explanation for that. We can say, well, when they touch the fire, the fire consumes them. It creates harm and they are less likely to survive if they don't have that kind of aversion. So they've evolved to have an aversion to touching fire because you can't survive if you don't have that aversion. Both the realists and the anti-realists on the existence of fire can accept that explanation as being consistent with their ontology. Evolutionary theories can can be consistent with multiple competing ontologies. And that explanation doesn't negate the fact that fire is real. And so if some of these explanations are true, it would negate moral realism. It's not irreconcilable with moral realism. It's consistent. So everything that I'm saying right now is to sort of defend moral realism against a charge that the fact you're raising is an inconsistency or refutation.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Gotcha. I guess, I'll have to prove it more realistic. I would agree with you. Nothing I'm saying is necessarily going to disprove realism. I guess my argument would just be that everything that I'm saying is necessary and sufficient to make all the statements I would need to about what we call maybe human morality. And I would argue that a realist explanation is just adding an unnecessary layer on top that doesn't need to be there for explaining I guess everything

T.K. Coleman: that could be explained about it. Now we have our our our our our I think this is our debate.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Okay. Sure. Okay. So I guess a question I would have with relation to that. Are you familiar with games like the Sims? Yeah. Yeah. So I imagine in the Sims, if you were to make it sufficiently complicated, you could have interactions that resemble like the human world, you know, at some point, I actually have never played where I played SimCity 2000. I never played it, but I'm familiar. Okay. Yeah. So very old. But I'm imagining we could create like a sufficiently complex, you know, computer game with the Sims or whatever. If if I were to say in the Sims, you know, John murdering Jane would be wrong. Is there a type of moral statement or moral fact there? The same way that there could be an R real world of John murdering Jane being wrong. And then I imagine my answer would be, well, no, you're they're both with respect to some agreed upon system or whatever. But I imagine your answer would be yes. And then my question would be how do you like what's the difference between the moral factor in these two worlds? I guess. Yeah. Yeah. So

T.K. Coleman: I'm going to I'm going to propose a way of going about that and you tell me if you're cool with it. Yeah. I like to give you my argument for why I think moral realism is true. Okay. Sure. It's so hard for me to say moral realism when I say moral realism. Sure. But I'll give you my argument for that. And then I'm going to make the case that you that any argument against moral realism effectively undermines physical realism. Okay. And every argument that you give for physical realism also substantiates moral realism. Gotcha. And after I give my reasons for why I believe moral realism is true, I think it'll be easier for me to sort of respond to objections and answer questions. And maybe even be able to apply some pressure back. Okay. All right. So I defined it as a subset of realism, right? In the same way that rocks and mountains exist. I believe that moral facts exist. Going back to the appearance versus reality distinction, I think we both agree it's a fair question to ask why should you believe that when you seem to see a tree that it's more than a mere seeming that this is not just part of the content of your consciousness, but it's real. It's out there in some sense. I think we justify this by an epistemic principle. I'm sorry, inference to best explanation. So we identify certain features of the experience and we posit realism as the best explanation for those features. So there are lots of features we can assign to the so-called physical world, but I'll just kind of give two to keep it simple. First is universality of appearance. There's shared experience. So when I see a chair over there, I can say, Josh, look over there. What do you see? And when he says chair, I go, destiny, look over there. What do you see? Chair. I can go, okay, it's not just me that lens some credence to the idea that this experience I'm having of seeing a chair is being caused by something other than me. So there's the universality of experience that I share this with other people. The second is the involuntary nature of it. When it comes to these physical perceptions I have, there's something about them that impose on me, that there's a kind of constraint I experience. So for instance, I can close my eyes and I can imagine a blue color car. I can manipulate it and change the color to red. I can make it go 80 miles an hour in my mind. Then I can bring it to a complete stop. I can have music playing in that scene. I can drain that scene of color. I seem to be like a god in that realm where I can manipulate and control. And so that would be a good candidate for saying, well, that's just my subjective experiences. But when it comes to other kinds of perceptions I have, it seems that even when I don't want them to be there, I can't make them go away. Even when I want them to be there, I can't muster them up. And even when I have no concept of them or expect them, I seem to interact with them or run into them. I don't have to have a concept of a wall or have ever seen a wall in my life. And all of a sudden I will have the phenomenological experience of hitting a wall. I can have the phenomenological experience of touching water or touching fire even though I didn't have these concepts in my mind. And so the involuntary nature of the experience is another element that lends credence to the idea that this is imposing on me from the outside. So I just take those two features. And if I need more, I'll give more. But if I just start with those, the universality of appearance and the involuntary nature of the perceptions, the best explanation for that is that there really is something out there, a tree, a mountain or what have you that is imposing on me and causing me to have these subjective experiences. So there is a subjective component, but there's an object of component that's causing it. One quick point of clarification. To say that there is something out there that's causing me to experience this isn't to make a claim to knowledge about having a complete theory about what it is that's out there because there are entity realists who would say it's a tree as I see it causing me to see it as such. And there are structural realists who would say these are just geometrical extensions in space. The pattern is something that I impose, but like it's it's atoms and molecules imposing on me. Either way, both of them are realism. Even if you take like a barkly an idea of these are ideas in the mind of God. That's still a kind of realism, but it's a disagreement about the substance of what's real. He says it's not physical. It's ideas in the mind of God. Okay, so that's my soft case for physical realism. I don't know if you've

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): argued with somebody, but you've made this point a few times. I don't know if you've had a big disagreement, but I'm always going to agree with you there. I don't know if it was syrup or whatever, there's like the reference triangle or whatever. But like when people 2000 years ago said water, and then we say water today, there's a question of like a re-referring to the same thing, and it's like, well, how could you have even known what water was in the past when you didn't know anything about chemistry, right? When I say water, I mean H2O, but like, well, not really, this isn't pure H2O in front of me or anything. So I understand when you're making those distinctions, I don't know if you've, it sounds like you've had a big distinction in the past or argument with somebody in the past, but that's why I laughed at there. Sorry, yeah. So this is my

T.K. Coleman: first one, actually, but I think about these things. Yeah, I just feel like distinctions are a type of thing that don't get made. Sure, for sure. Okay, so that's my case for physical realism. I like to now show how that applies to moral realism, but before I do that, any questions,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): any thoughts so far? No, I think I broadly agree that you're too prongs, basically, where universality, we can all speak to kind of like a shared experience. We can all agree on some set of facts about external things. We can test them with our sense data. It'll convey similar things to us. And then there are things that are imposed upon you whether or not you want to believe in them or not. You might have never been introduced to a chair or any physical object before somehow, and you'll walk into it and you will stub your toe and it will hurt, and there will be a thing you can't overcome. So yeah, I think I might agree with these two things,

T.K. Coleman: sure. Yeah. Okay, so now let's talk about moral realism, because I believe in that, like trees and mountains, I believe that with moral values. So the first observation we can make

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): well, okay. I was actually just going to think there was an example. I thought of the my test is, but you might want to explain more first, or let me give you like a question, and then as you explain your moral realism, we can kind of speak to that, right? You mentioned in your mind that there were certain things that you could think of. Something that's kind of interesting to me is I feel like for humans, there are certain things that even in our mind where we're gods, there are certain kind of like epistemic principles that we can't think of. So if I were to think of the two of you, and I would close my eyes, and I would imagine I want to imagine you as being taller and shorter than him at the same time. I actually can't conceive of that, but these are like, I don't know, I think it's principle of non-contradiction, or that I can't actually even fathom that thing. So there's going to be some like logical things that I'm like locked into that I have to believe. So some things I can kind of bend and twist. I can imagine people as different sizes or shapes. There are certain logical epistemic principles. I can't imagine them violating. When it comes to morality, I would argue there are a lot of things that I can imagine breaking in ways that are totally fine. So for instance, I would say in every single movie ever, in the real world, killing a person is a really big deal. This is your ending of life. This is a whole subset of experiences for I don't have to explain here why killing is really bad. If you watch, you know, like John Wick or any of these movies that I enjoy, they're really fun. There's a lot of killing and it really doesn't matter. It's like not a big deal at all. I was like, oh, you know, a million people died who cares? If you watch any of the Avengers movies, there's billions of dollars of citywide damage being caused in nobody cares. This is whatever no one cares. And that to me feels like a like a disconnect. I can never imagine the same type of violations of like the physical universe. But for the moral stuff, all of it can be thrown out so easily that will argue it kind of tests that maybe that imposition subset of your, you know, you got like the universality and imposition that your morality there isn't actually imposed at all. You can totally throw it out if you want to make some kind of fun, interesting thing. Yeah. And then, okay, so then you can explain what you're going to say. Then maybe find a way to come back and maybe answer that question. How would you? Yeah. That's really good. Yeah. It's great to flag that. Yeah.

T.K. Coleman: Okay. So a couple of points of clarification about that. When it comes to these thought experiments, the part that I believe is purely subjective that I'm making up is the part where I'm able to just create and destroy at whim, right? But I do experience constraints and I take those constraints as evidence of a reality that imposes on me. And so I'm a realist when it comes to laws of logic, epistemic principles in a way that I'm not when it comes to my ability to imagine a blue color giraffe, right? One of them I'm making up and it's a constraint that I can blow right through it any time. And the other imposes on me and there's there's more to deal with than just me. There's a reality that contains with me. The second thing too is I want to make sure we don't treat all constraints as merely in the form of that which is inconceivable because when it comes to physical structures, I can imagine myself walking through walls. And when I close my eyes and see myself doing that, that's the part that's subjective. The experience of TK walking through a wall in his mind, that's something that he created. That's not a reality imposing on me. That's me blowing through constraints in this realm where I have almost got like powers. But in the physical world, no matter how much I can imagine, not so much in the physical world, but when there are certain phenomenological experiences where no matter how hard I try, they say, no, you can't go any further. Stop, right? And I don't have any power over them, even if I don't like it. So constraints don't have to be inconceivable. It can be conceivable that I can surpass the constraint, but there is a real thing that I'm unable to do because of them. So just those points of clarification. All right, so now applying the soft case for realism to moral realism, we see those same two features. Universality of appearance. In most discussions on morals, people focus on the disagreements. The disagreements are easy because the disagreements are inflated. The reason disagreements are inflated is because when it comes to physical reality, I'm limited in how many things I can create, right? But when it comes to moral reality, I can treat any claim as if it's a moral judgment. And so it's easy for me to print money in the realm of moral judgments. So I can say, what kind of, what are you drinking? Is that Fiji water? Man, you're a bad person. And now I've just created a moral claim. And so there's an excess of moral claims. And I think one point we both could agree on is that there are many things that are treated like a moral issue that are probably not moral issues. I like strawberry ice cream. You like chocolate ice cream. Josh doesn't like ice cream at all. Who's right? None of us are bad guys for a taste. It's a matter of taste. An immoral realist can make a distinction between matters of taste, matters of fact. So not all claims about the moral value of things are actually legitimate claims. Some of them are morals matters of taste. Okay. So, but if we focus on the agreements, we find something interesting. We find that there are certain moral convictions at a fundamental level that are shared in a way that is geographically across space and that is also enduring over time. So for instance, when we argue about particulars, we often don't pay attention to what we pre-suppose in the argument. So let's say someone says, I think the appropriate legal drinking age should be 25. Another person says, no, no, I like it where we have it in the US. It's 21. And another person says, I think you guys are just way too serious. And motherly, it's 16. That's a good age. Well, what none of them are discussing is the fact that there is such a thing as an inappropriate age. That's where the agreement is. The disagreement is, well, how much wiggle room do we have within that? No one's making the argument that we should give babies whiskey, right? And so there's a shared intuition that there is such a thing as a wrong age to administer alcohol. So when we look at cultures, every culture has a concept of treachery or betrayal. Every culture has a concept of arbitrary killing. Every culture has a concept of there are certain conditions in which it is permissible to kill another person. And there are certain conditions where arbitrary killing is not justified. And so even where these cultures disagree on the particulars, we're not able to find counter examples where we can point to cultures that have no moral categories at all. Every culture has its concept of heroes and villains. This is the type of person that's worth emulating. This is the type of person that embodies virtue. This is the type of person that does evil and that we should shine. Now, that's an observation. That doesn't mean morals exist just from that, but that's an observation that we have this universality of appearance in the same way that I don't just seem to see a tree. You also seem to see it too. You don't have to believe in trees yet, but that is something that has to be explained and we can't just ignore that.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Oh, go ahead. Yeah, so a quick question because I agree with what I think you've said so far, which makes sense because you've said it's not technically an argument for more realism yet. Have you ever seen pictures of speaking of trees? If you look from above to below or below to above and you look at the tops of trees, the tree leaves are always like perfectly fitting together kind of like a puzzle. It has to be that way, though. Because they were constantly overlapping

T.K. Coleman: the other than they would die because they need sunlight. You're moving towards the hey, but look, I can account for this without more. Basically, yeah, because my question is like,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): yeah, it's going to be the thing. They can only be that way. They have to have that because no other human society would exist. I'm almost done. Let me go ahead and then I'll respond to that.

T.K. Coleman: Yeah, go ahead. Okay, so the second thing is the involuntary nature of the experience. One of the fascinating things about the moral impulse is that it seems to impose on us even when it's inconvenient for us, even when we don't want it, even when we don't like it. Some of the strongest examples of this are the things that are often set forth as counter examples. So let's take people who are criminals or psychopaths who seem to have no conscience. They totally reject societal norms. Three guys decide, screw everybody, you know, we're just going to think about ourselves and they rob a bank together, but they feel deeply wronged when one of the people violates the agreement to split the money evenly, three ways and takes a little extra for himself. Or the psychopath, like if you look at the history of people like different serial killers, Ted Bundy will be a good example of this. They tend to be some of the most self righteous people you will ever meet. They lack empathy. They lack a sense of moral compassion and because we equate moral sensitivity only with empathy and compassion, we miss it. But many of these people are so self-righteous, they have very strong opinions about who deserves to live and who doesn't. They have very strong opinions about privilege. They have very strong opinions about the people who have wronged them and done evil and deserve death and deserve suffering and so on. And that's a sense of moral pain and in the same way that when I run into a wall, I feel physical pain. And this physical pain that I feel is a subject of experience, but there's something imposing on me that accounts for why I'm having this experience, that human beings everywhere have some kind of sense of moral pain. It might be expressed in remorse, it might be expressed in guilt, it might be expressed in a sense of pity and compassion, it might be expressed in self righteous indignation towards others. But if you want to talk about constraints, there is this constraint that makes it impossible for us to live as if morals are not true. Even if we philosophically say, hey, I don't believe in object of moral values, we can't help but treat people and talk to them as if they have done us wrong when they violate certain codes of ethics. So we have the universality of experience. We have the involuntary nature of it because we feel guilty when we don't want to sometimes. We resent ourselves for filling pity sometimes like, man, I only got five dollars left and this homeless guy is asking me for money and I'm so broke right now, but there's a part of me that just can't freaking say no even though I want to, right? So we have both of those elements. And so what I want to say here is that in the same way that physical reality, a mind independent physical reality is the best explanation for those features when it comes to objects. A mind independent moral reality is the best explanation for those features when it comes to moral judgments. Now we got to deal with the the objection that's ready and waiting. Okay, that's fine, but anyone who hears that and think that sounds soft. It's because they have what they think to be a good alternative, right? Like here's an alternative that can effectively undermine that. And so if both of them are possible, then the burdens back on you, TK, to show that one is more likely than the other. And the alternative that you supply is, hey, look, we can account for those two features when it comes to people's moral sensitivities by positing an evolutionary explanation. Now you already agree with me that that doesn't prove a disproven ontology, but what it at least does is that it at least undermines the the the weight of my argument by putting something out there that's just as possible, right? Okay, my first objection to this is how does that not undermine physical realism as well? So let me give you an example. I can say that the reason my eye processes light in the way that it does is because that's what's conducive to survival. My brain has evolved to process information in a way that keeps me alive. And so there's nothing about the way in which I process information, the way in which I analyze evidence, I do research or observe the world that is truth seeking or optimized for truth. It's just optimized for survival. And so I can undermine physical realism with that same objection by saying, all right, my eye sees my ear hears, my brain processes information, but none of this has anything to do with truth and reality. It just has everything

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): to do with survival. Well, now this might be an area where I get more uncomfortably fundamental or I don't assume as much. I think I would agree with that statement. So insofar as, for instance, like collars exist. I would say that like we have the quality of the experience of in the sensation of seeing a color, but when we actually measure, you know, all the electromagnetic spectrum, color is just a very small part of that. We don't have a physical sensation for x-ray or gamma rays or or micro rays or any of the other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. So insofar as, collars exist. Well, there's a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that most of us can perceive if you're not colorblind. So, but I would say that my my concept of there being some underlying physical reality kind of only extends as far as like human I guess evolution has existed to perceive said reality. I would be humble epistemically towards some type of seemingly illogical or seemingly irrational reality that exists outside of what I can perceive because I would agree with the statement that we've only evolved as far as I can tell to survive. Maybe there is some part of reality that if we could perceive it, it would actually undermine our ability to survive. And I have no reason to believe that we would have evolved to perceive that part of reality, rather we would evolve to survive. So there might be, I think there are interesting questions with regards to like AI. And then I don't think about or talk about too much, but it might be that if the AI has become sufficiently complex, there are whole parts of the universe that they'd be able to perceive that we just don't even have the organs to be able to perceive because there's no benefit to us whatsoever as a creature to be able to. So we wouldn't be involved with the things too. The same way that, you know, animals that can't perceive sound or can't perceive any light whatsoever, single-cell creatures or whatever, could theoretically or not theoretically that do exist. So I would say it doesn't necessarily undermine physical realism because I already don't take for granted that it could be that there are things that we don't perceive in the universe, so we just don't have the organs to perceive because there's no evolutionary benefit to us. I don't assume first that humans are like truth-seeking machines that were created just to perceive truth. We just perceive the things that are beneficial to our survival. Let me ask you a few questions just to

T.K. Coleman: get some clarity on what a position is on things. Do you believe that we have a reasons, like good, epistimically justifiable reasons to believe that there is a physical world out there

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): independently of our perceiving it? I would say yes, but I'm going to say for the same reasons why we would believe anything about the Harry Potter universe. I would say all of this kind of like is grounded in the subject of human experience, but I don't know if I could speak to like true universality outside of the human experience. Like I agree that all of us have a shared reality the same way that everybody inside the Sims would have a shared reality, but I would have to be humble about anything that exists outside of that because there'd be no way for me to perceive it.

T.K. Coleman: So here's where I'm confused. When you've talked about some of your misgivings about moral realism, you've used analogies with the physical world and you've expressed a kind of confidence that like, hey, we can we can settle the debate about the pickup truck being outside. We can we can settle debates about, you know, flat earth or whatever it may be and and you have sought some similar method for morals and and the impression that I get from that is that if if one could provide that that would lend it the same weight of credibility as like your convictions towards the physical world. What you're saying right now sounds inconsistent with that because it sounds like yeah,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): so I understand what you're saying. What I'm saying is that the whatever humans perceive on the physical world, it feels like the morality is an abstracted layer away from that that doesn't have the same weight as the physical world perception, but I'm not necessarily saying that physical world perception we have is the ultimate frame of reference for the universe that beneath that there might be another thing, but it's outside of our perception because we're only human. So we have our subjective physical interactions in the world. So I could make the statement, although it sounds ridiculous, maybe there is a possibility that a fourth geometric dimension exists, but we just can't traverse that dimension because if we could, we would die instantly because there's a whole bunch of terrible stuff for whatever reason that exists or the gauntlet or our third dimension. So I would never make the statement that like, well, I know for a fact that the fourth dimension geometrically doesn't exist. I would just say that it might it might not, but I can't perceive it. So when I say that like the morality questions seem to be less testable than the physical ones, I'm not saying that's because the physical ones are the ultimate universal frame of reference that we can perceive. I'm just saying that of that there's a moral layer on top that seems to be less provable than the physical layer on the bottom, and there might be something beneath that, but it's outside of my perception, yeah.

T.K. Coleman: Yeah, I think I understand what I want to push back on is why you have any confidence at all in that physical side. I get that you place it a step above morals, but oh, could necessary to avoid

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): absurdity, I guess. Unfortunately. Okay. So it's kind of one of the, I think therefore I am think basically I kind of have to like theoretically, there could be a demon that's placing before us, an illusion of the world that we could never prove or disprove. I could never speak to like 100 percent universal certainty to that, but I kind of have to, otherwise, everything is pretty absurd

T.K. Coleman: otherwise. Okay, so a couple of things. So yeah, so I think therefore I am was was was was not day cards way of directly solving the evil deceiver problem for day card. He he began with methodological skepticism saying, whatever I can conceive of as being wrong, I'm just going to toss it aside experimentally. Yeah, because I want to see if I can establish some foundations foundation, which I can build my edifice of knowledge. And I would agree that, but I would just say that

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): the foundation that I can establish is the one that I can establish, but I wouldn't assume I don't think I have a good reason to assume that that's like a universal foundation. Sure. There couldn't be some creature that can perceive of more truths that I can't even possibly conceive of. They might perceive things that I can't even conceive of. Yeah. So, okay, so when you when you,

T.K. Coleman: when you've given evolutionary explanation for something like the moral impulse, for instance, do you take that evolutionary explanation to be true, or is this just a tendency that you have to think about things in that way, but it doesn't have any truth value? I mean, I would say it's

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): true in so far as it explains the things that I'm trying to explain, but it's going to sit within that context of like what can humans perceive, I guess. Like, I wouldn't say that it's like a it establishes some universal truth that if there were any other higher dimensional being in the universe, it would also understand that truth. It would probably be a subset of some other thing that they understand that I can't possibly conceive of.

T.K. Coleman: You set forth evolutionary explanations as if they are a potential defeated of the claim to

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): moral realism. Sure. Not necessarily defeated, but like they're necessary and sufficient. They explain everything. And then adding that moral abstraction, I think, introduces some problems, and it doesn't explain anything that my explanation wouldn't already account for, I would say.

T.K. Coleman: Help me remember this. I want to stay on this line, but help me remember this. Yeah, you made the claim a couple of times that moral realism requires the positive of some extra stuff, and I want to deal with that, because I don't think that's true, but let's come back to that in a sec. When you say the explanation suffices, though, are you expressing your truth, or are you just expressing the way my brain works?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): I mean, I would say kind of both, I guess like if we can conceive of like math, like I would say that we're working at like different levels here, but like I would say like one plus one is true, that that's a true statement, but that true statement exists on like a bed of logic that is only that that that can exist within the human mind. But there might be other logics that humans would not be able to perceive or even conceive of that might exist outside of the human experience, but I can't deal with those because I'm only human. So yeah, yeah. So I only say that because like I speak of like an ultimate like bedrock, but that ultimate bedrock is really just my subjective experience, and I'm epistimically humble about other bed rocks that might exist, because my question of you could solve this, I'd be great, because my question would be, well, can you prove that your experience you're having right now is like the realest thing in the universe and you're not a brain and a vet?

T.K. Coleman: No, no, I couldn't prove that. Okay, so that's my position, I guess, yeah.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Do we differ there or could you be a brain and a vet that exists that the people who are experimenting on you might be able to conceive of things or perceive things that is inconceivable

T.K. Coleman: or imperceptible to you? Yeah, so I do think you can argue your way out of that, but I do want to say that the brain and the vet, that's still a form of realism because the brain and the vet theory is to say that what I am is the brain sitting in the vet, but there's a vet that I didn't create. Somebody else put me here and all of these experiences I have really are being imposed on me from the outside. Somebody's putting these signals into my brain and telling me that there's a tree over there. What have you? So that would mean that the world is real. The tree is real, but the substance of it is something different than what it might seem to me. Sure, but I'm only bringing up

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): the, I'm only bringing that up because I'm saying that there can be real, I'm not arguing with the brain and the vet against the difference between moral realism or the physical realism. I'm also saying that when I speak of things as being real on a physical level, I'm still working with then kind of the, what I understand to be the subjective constraints of the human mind for what we can perceive. Sure. So when I say things are real, I mean that when I say there's a difference between the realness of like the physical world and the realness of the moral world, I'm not saying that whatever you're calling more realism is totally bunk because I have objective physical truth of all things on my side. I'm just saying that it seems like that's another layer of abstraction. It's a different type of truth. The same way that Harry Potter is a different type of truth than whatever physical

T.K. Coleman: facts are that I can perceive in the world. All right. So why is it rationally permissible for you to say I can set forth an alternative explanation for why people feel the moral impulse without there being moral structures? That's permissible for you to say and that that successfully undermines my position. But I can't say I can submit an alternative for why you seem to see the things you see and for why you even think the way that you think and that doesn't undermine your

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): position. What's the asymmetry there? For, can you give me an example of what type of thing you

T.K. Coleman: would posit? Yeah. Okay. So let me try to format your objection to me still logistically and you tell me if I'm representing you. Well, we could say statement one, our moral intuitions can be accounted for with evolutionary explanations. Statement two, evolutionary explanations track survival, not reality. Statement three, our moral intuitions track survival, not reality. Therefore, our moral intuitions are only a reliable source for survival, not knowing reality. Is that a fair representation? I think so. Yeah. Okay. So now I'm just going to repeat that best I can and just substitute something else. Sure. Okay. The way in which our brain processes information can be accounted for by evolutionary explanations, evolutionary explanations track for survival, not reality. The way our brain processes information tracks for survival, not reality. Therefore, the way our brain processes information is not a reliable source for truth, but for survival. Okay. Why does that work for against moral realism? But it doesn't work against your very cognitive processes by which you come up with arguments

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): against moral realism. Okay. I'm going to totally flip my position. Okay. Okay. I don't have these

T.K. Coleman: discussions too often. It's going to be fun. Maybe we can create something. Well, no, let me, I'm

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): going to restate and plan language what you're saying, because now I think I understand what your objection is. Okay. Okay. So I'm arguing for physical realism, but moral anti-realism. And you're telling me, well, whatever argument you put forth for physical realism, and you say this in the beginning, would necessarily carry over to moral realism. And I'm trying to argue, well, there's different structures that I see to kind of like physical realism and what you're calling this moral world. And you're saying, okay, well, all the ways that you can describe morality, you're accounting for all of your intuitions and feelings are being just survival mechanisms to essentially. I'm saying, well, yeah, of course. And you're saying, okay, well, it seems to me that you're so epistemically humble that you're also willing to say all of your physical things, and perceptions are the same thing. I think I have to say yes to that based on everything I've said. But then I guess that would be a physical anti-realist. But now I've changed my position completely. So I should have never said physical realism in the first place. I'm trying to be true. Yeah, that

T.K. Coleman: might be the case. It would be more fair to describe what you're doing, not as changing your position, but realizing based on where the discussion has gone, that you'll need to be more precise and refined in your presentation of what you believe. Sure. Or rather, I shouldn't ever identify

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): I guess it's physical realism. I guess I'm not sure 100% of the that would be the kind of for it. Yeah, because I don't believe I guess it comes down to the matter of like the context of what we're talking about. Like if I start with the context of humans have some universal experience of the planet, like we all see a couch, we can all touch it or whatever, we can start making descriptions about the planet and the universe I guess from there. But if somebody would ask me, just checking real quick, do you believe that your experiences as true and that the human experiences as true as it could ever be a physical reality? I would be epistemically humbled towards that position. I say, well, I don't know that 100% I can't I wouldn't make that statement. So I would that necessarily be a physically anti-realist position. I guess I'm not I'm not

T.K. Coleman: actually 100% sure on that. No, I should state where we agree. I think we both agree that there's

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): more to reality than human experience. Okay, including like other logics or other dimensions, things that would be they're not just like we can't directly perceive them, but they're inconceivable. Like literally not because you like the building is so huge, but inconceivable and that like maybe contradictory objects or properties could exist to the same object. Like that kind of thing. I don't can see that. You don't can see that. Okay, I would I would say that it would be it might be possible. I would be epistemically humble in that record. I'm not sure I don't know and I would

T.K. Coleman: ever make a statement about it. Yeah. But there's a problem with saying that contradictions are possible because you have to presuppose the law of identity just to even make that statement. Sure. So it's kind of like saying a boobalars exists and I go what's in the boobalar and you say in a boobalar and I say what's in the boobalar? You know, it's a sugar shusha. Is there what's that?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): It's like we it doesn't mean anything. Yeah, so my question would be is there a reason why this isn't a test question. So I just don't have the answer. I'm just curious what you're yeah, we're is there a reason why I should assume that the a priori logical assumptions that are necessary for the human mind to conceive of things is there a reason where I should assume that that's like the that's like a facet of reality that is true and unshakable and that there's no being in the universe that could ever conceive of something that is literally logically inconceivable

T.K. Coleman: to me. Yeah. Yeah. Aside from like a god or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we have to make a distinction between going beyond logic and going against logic. Sure. And sometimes these words get used in different ways, but like beyond logic simply means hey, beyond what I currently understand or beyond what I might even have the hardware to understand. And we both can agree that there are realities that are just beyond our IQ, beyond our capacity to think and do the research or even just like there are there are sounds that a dog can hear that we can't hear. So we're just not constituted in such a way to experience those things. And I understand what you're saying

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): there. Yeah. But I'm saying something that is beyond that because you're taking the reality that we have and you're kind of like extending it along things you already know. Sure. I guess my question is couldn't could there not be things that are unknowable to us. So not just like colors like expanded wavelengths, but just like inconsistent logic, basically. Yeah. Well, I don't want to say

T.K. Coleman: inconsistent logic, but what I want to do because I do want to say is like I understand yeah, even our capacity to conceive is constrained a great deal to by our experience, right? The more we experience, the more expansive our imagination becomes and so on. And so the very process of learning seems to provide evidence that there are realities that relative to any given state of mind we're in are inconceivable to us. I'm freely with you on that. But when you say that and even other logics, you could mean that there are other formal systems that exist beyond what we know. And yeah, that's definitely a thing. But when you say that contradictions exist or that contradictions might exist or it's possible for contradictions to exist. Now we're saying something that literally doesn't mean anything. Do I need to demonstrate that or you agree with that?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): I agree with you because you're expressing things that I agree with. But my question is more like, are we just limited in our ability to express things? So when I say like, well, couldn't there be inconsistent logic, you would say like the response is like, well, if we're talking about logic, we're talking about even the concept of consistency, then there can't be inconsistency because it's basically baked into the understanding of logic and consistency that can't be an inconsistent thing because that doesn't work. And I'm asking, okay, so our thing that could exist outside of our human understanding there. Maybe to ground this on an example, I'm curious how you would think about this. Do you think that there are... I'll use moral facts. Do you think that animals perceive moral facts? So maybe dogs or cats. And then do you think that reptiles perceive moral facts? Do you think single-cell creatures perceive moral facts? Do you think that at least permeate up and down through all of the cognition of things or do moral facts just come into existence with humans? Yeah, I could you speak on that? I'm just curious, yeah.

T.K. Coleman: Yeah, so I believe moral structures are as real, but in a different way as physical structures. And in the same way that we can run into a physical wall, we can run into a moral wall. And I believe that our ability to theorize about physical structures or moral structures or any reality varies with our cognitive ability, right? So I wouldn't compare a squirrel and a coyote in their ability to effectively cross the street. They're not equals here. One has a cognitive ability to do this more successfully than the other. Okay, wait, can I challenge you on that real quick?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Oh, man, yeah, that's hilarious though. We're getting really bad right there. Okay, I'm just also not saying this just because I want to argue, I genuinely don't know the answer to these things because these are things I just don't explore. I'm just just deeply about much. So I'm generally just curious. So when you say varies with cognitive ability, in my mind, there are things that you can conceive of due to IQ or whatever, but like pushing all of that aside, there are physical like things that are granted to the human mind that are irrespective of cognitive ability, save for like you're missing half your brain or something is like to be a brain damage, like no matter how 40 IQ somebody is versus 200 IQ somebody is, they will always run into the wall. They will always run into the couch. Now they might not be able to conceive of, you know, physical structures and some, you know, very philosophical way, but they know it and they can see it and they can interact with it. So when you say, yeah, so just because you mentioned so the animals for cognitive ability, I wouldn't view an animal as being just a lower IQ human. I would view their mind as being a different thing in kind. Yeah, okay,

T.K. Coleman: okay. Yes, so I believe animals have different degrees of cognition. And I'm mostly agnostic on my theories about what different species are capable of. Like some animals seem to be really intelligent in ways that we're only beginning to understand. And some animals seem to just not really have it, but I don't believe that you need to have the intelligence to think critically about the theory behind reality in order to run up against those walls, so to speak. So a dog doesn't need to perform mathematical calculations in order to run up against the realities that we use math to describe. A dog doesn't need to understand gravity in order for its very being to be affected by gravity, even though it wouldn't have that conversation with you. Additionally, there's the element of moral agency. There's not just intelligence, but there's agency. The capacity to disagree, the capacity to disobey, the capacity to opt out of something, the capacity to exercise optionally. And so this gives rise to the distinction between what we might call an act of moral wrongdoing and the state of culpability. It's possible to act in a way that's incongruent with moral structure in a way that is disordered and in a way that produces disorder, but for that person or that entity to not be culpable because it lacks moral agency. That lack of moral agency might be a matter of intelligence as we often see with humans where you do something wrong and you say, hey, don't do that. That's wrong, but you don't put them in jail. You don't punish them. You don't find them. They just didn't know any better. But sometimes it's also due to the way an entity is constituted. So machines don't have, well, let me say this microphone because machines are this microphone doesn't have moral agency, right? It doesn't have the capacity to punch me in the face or disagree with me in a rude manner or anything like that. So when it comes to animals, I don't think there's anything about the experiences of animals that supports or negates the existence of moral structures. I would say just like with physical structures, they run into walls, but they don't necessarily describe or talk about or think about these realities in the way that we do at highly abstract levels. They don't necessarily do philosophy, math, and physics.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Do you think that animals that could an animal commit, let's say we'll go down to reptiles. Do you think that a reptile could commit a moral wrong? Do you think they have a different set of morals? If there were a set of morals, or do they have the feeling of it? I've seen videos where a crocodile's would just grab a person's arm like another crocodile arm and rip it off because they're random. Do you think they're like committing, are they committing moral wrongs there,

T.K. Coleman: or do you not think they have moral systems? I don't know if animals can be held culpable for the things they do. I just don't know if they have moral agency. It's my habit to not think of them as such, but I'm a skeptic on that. I've always felt really uncomfortable when people make strong claims about what animals do and don't know, because we just don't have perfect systems for not only communicating with them, but understanding the way in which they communicate. The jury's out on whether or not they have agency, but I'm inclined to think they don't, but I don't advocate any positions that depend on them having it or not having it. Can I ask you a question that is,

Joshua Fields-Millburn: I think, related to that, but maybe it gets closer to what Destiny's asking here. Take a human being. They're on a deserted island by themselves for the rest of their lives. Does morality exist for that person on the deserted island, and is it different from how it exists for all of us

T.K. Coleman: in this room? No, I would say it exists for them as well. I would say it's not something that depends on their geography or their space. Give me an example of something they could do that would then be immoral. If I say, hey, Destiny, man, I got a rocket ship. You want to go to Mars with me, and then I take him up to Mars and I murder him on Mars. I haven't violated any laws on Earth. It's just him and I. No one else knows. I was in a completed different part of the universe. It's

Joshua Fields-Millburn: still morally wrong for me to have done that. That's not you want to deserted island by yourself.

T.K. Coleman: If I want to deserted island by myself, I can say to myself, boy, if I ever get back to Earth, I'm going to murder everybody. I can set that intention in my heart. That would be morally wrong. Destiny responded. If anybody ever shows up on this planet, I'm just going to kill them for fun.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): I think it depends on how you conceive of morality. Some people argue that there are certain virtues that are moral to embody. Self-harm could be considered immoral, even as just yourself. A lot of people conceive of morality as how you interact with other people. We could conceive of things you could do bad to yourself. I guess it might be immoral. If you build the nurture out there for something. There was a thing that you have brought up a couple times now that I think is really important. This concept of moral agency. How do you feel about determinism? Like the freewill question?

T.K. Coleman: Yeah, I guess. Yeah. Oh, man, we're opening up like five tabs here. I'm not a determinist. I believe in libertarian freewill. Libertarian freewill. Maybe we need to be clear. Maybe I should drop that libertarian because I could be introducing ambiguity. Oh, sure. I understand it to be three

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): categories. You have the determinists that nobody likes to talk to. You have the compatibilists who are like, okay, we can talk about different levels of free choice. Then you have the libertarian freewill, which is I'm summoning from another dimension the capacity for making choices that is not necessarily tied causally to the physical reality that I exist in today. So when you say

T.K. Coleman: libertarian freewill, are you in that third category? Yeah, except I would describe it in a more compatibilist friendly way. I wouldn't necessarily put it as we're summoning from another dimension. I'm kind of in the compatibilist camp. And I also would say that it is not a commitment of this position to believe that freewill is the same as free reign. I didn't get to determine my height and a host of other features. The ability to choose doesn't mean I get to determine what my options are and so on. So freewill occurs within a context of constraint.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Some of the questions, some of the hypotheticals I kind of asked earlier about like the trees growing in a certain way, humans only being a certain way. A lot of these things are, we kind of bumped up against this, but we haven't really talked about it. If you were to get rid of your concept of freewill, let's say you were a hard-line determinist, would that necessarily erase your belief in like more realism or could more realism exist in a world where you're a hard-line determinist

T.K. Coleman: or a compatibilist even maybe? I mean, if I were a determinist, then I would be compelled to think whatever the forces and factors are that dictate my thoughts. I would be, my opinions would be at the same level as hurricane is happening. The wind is blowing.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): I kind of believe that. So that might be a different, a more fundamental thing as well, because I think that if you have a moral agency, and a lot of the questions I asked earlier about reptiles about trees growing in a certain way or whatever, presupposing all of these moral or moral, the presupposing every immoral thing is, could you have chosen differently, right? Because without that, it's kind of what are we even talking about at that point? But then I also obviously, when we speak, we're speaking within the context of our ordinary day-to-day experiences, or sort of say, hey, did you do this? I would say, well, obviously I did that. It's the only thing I could have ever done since the creation of the universe from the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago, so obviously we're speaking on the level of, as a compatibilist, you would say, well, there are different types of choices I can make. When I say, I chose to do this for dinner, I'm not saying that I summoned Libertarian Freewill to make this choice. I'm saying that well, in the context that we understand we can make choices as a choice that I made, yeah. If you were a compatibilist, do you think you could still believe in more realism, or do you think even compatibilism would commit you to kind of just like, well, physical realism was basically all there is, and I passed that, it's kind of meaningless to say anything passed.

T.K. Coleman: I'm inclined to think so, but I would have to make sure I understand it well enough. It sounds like your version of compatibilism is such that you believe in the exercise of freewill

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): within highly constrained contexts. Kind of, yeah. As a compatibilist, I would say that when you chose to say this mean thing to your mom, that that was a bad thing, but I would say that that choice is different than somebody holds a gun to your head and tells you you have to say a bad thing to your mom. These are two different types of choices, but I would still understand these in a determinist physical setting to where, since the birth of the university, we're only ever going to do one thing, and that's the way it is. But moreover, they would speak of these two

T.K. Coleman: things differently. Yeah, like if I had, let's say if I had perfect knowledge and I knew all the causal factors that led you to being in the disposition you're in at this moment, I would certainly have greater predictive power over what you're going to do next, but I wouldn't be infallible in my judgment because there is an element that is not just the consequence of everything that has

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): occurred probably. What is that element, I guess, that might be an important disagreeable we have

T.K. Coleman: now? Yeah, I would say that element is freedom. What, and what is that? I'm looking for it. Let's say

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): I'm poking him with some kind of needle or some kind of scientific instrument. What am I looking for to find that? Or conversely, actually, I have a circuit board that's sufficiently complex and it's got those CPUs necessary to emulate almost every part of the human mind. What am I looking for here to try to find like that free will thing? How do I know if it can make choices that I can describe as having more agency, basically? Yeah, so how you can know that for yourself is going

T.K. Coleman: to be different for how you can know it for someone else because it's like, how can I know that destiny has a headache? He tells me, but I can always doubt, maybe he's trying to impress me, maybe he's trying to garner sympathy, maybe he's lying. I see him clutching the tile and all, but maybe that's an act. When it comes to myself, though, I have unmediated direct experience of the pain in my head. And so I can know with a degree of confidence that I have a headache in a way that I can't know for you. And I also can't hold you accountable for knowing what it is that I experience. And so I would say in an analogous way, we have direct experience of volition that I experience within myself, just like I experience pain, the capacity to set forth

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): and intention, that I will do thus, that I will try to do this. Okay. If that is the case, I'm trying to thank coming back to our physical realism and then our moral realism distinction here. I'm making a physical realism distinction from moral realism. You're saying that one necessarily follows from the other where we went off on a really big tangent there. I guess part of what we went on this tangent, I guess, is because I'm wondering if our disagreements on free will wouldn't necessitate our distinction between moral or physical realism. If I don't really believe, there is this like freedom-free will kind of thing. I don't really believe in that as a concept. And it sounds like if you didn't believe in that as a concept, it would tie you more to the physical realist description independent of any moral realism. You wouldn't believe in the moral realism. But if I were to believe in this kind of free choice thing, maybe that would move me more along or it would commit me more to like that moral realist thing. Do you think that's necessarily true? Do you think this is not super relevant to that conversation? I don't know. I don't know. I haven't thought about it that way. It's hard to talk about morals when choices can't be made like the trees, right? We wouldn't say that like if a tree falls on you, we would never say that's immoral because the tree can't do anything else, right? Yeah. I'll put it this way. If I knew we had

T.K. Coleman: former hours and you had the energy to go, I would say let's just talk about that for the next two hours. Okay. But I guess some questions I'm going to ask you. You got your pan over there asking me questions. Let me ask you some questions. Brother. This is kidding me. Okay. So one of the things you mentioned a few times is as a moral realism requires the positive of these extra constraints or these extra things. And this may get to some of the different ways we look at realism. But I would say that moral realism doesn't require extra elements any more than the things you already accept. So for instance, we have, we talked about laws of logic. We've got rules of inference, you know, so law of identity, law of non-contradiction, we've got if P, then Q, P, therefore Q, we have epistemic principles like principle of sufficient reason or like some weak principle of causality. We have abstract concepts like necessary connection and causation, right? And we literally cannot observe necessary connection. We can observe correlation. But in terms of what we can physically detect, there is no like your question about free will. Where's the necessary connection in there? We can pick everything apart, shine our lights on it, create our instruments and focus on it. But we're never going to see necessary connection. We just see correlation. One thing happens, another thing follows. And yet we accept necessary connection and causation as the bet rock for all of our reasoning about the world. I would say the positing of moral structures requires no more abstraction, no more positing additional elements than the things you already accept in terms of epistemic principles, laws of logic, and so on.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): So I guess what I would say is if I was looking at a like a fishbowl or a terrarium or a bacterium, I don't know if these are real words, but when you look at the things that grow on the microscope, you look at like things that grow, we can describe the ways that these things interact with each other. And we can describe like what do they have to do to like there's going to be some equilibrium state that will be reached. I don't have to introduce new category of things like moral facts to account for how these things might flourish, much the same that for humans, I would say, well, I can describe how humans behave and what they do, and there might be an optimal set of behaviors for human flourishing, but I don't have to introduce the constitutive moral facts to explain that. So in my question, why do I have to introduce moral facts to explain human behavior? But I wouldn't have to introduce moral facts to explain the fishbowl

T.K. Coleman: behavior for the fish. Yeah. Okay. So I do at some point want to come back to why I think this is a self-defeating line of reasoning that I can turn back on your cognitive processes because I'm I'm not satisfied with my response to that, but let me let me try a different angle and we come back to that. So part of what we are doing when we try to come up with evolutionary explanations, any kind of scientific explanation is we're we're trying to do more than just ask ourselves what is a theory that sounds plausible to me or what is something I can imagine being the case. Karl Popper's whole point was that scientific theories have to be constrained and falsifiable. And so when it comes to you saying, hey, evolution can account for this. There's a very intentional methodical scientific way to do that, but there's also a potentially lazy way to do that, and that's to treat evolution as an ideology that says, hey, look, I got this in my back pocket. I'm going to use evolution of the gaps. Anything you say in support of moral realism, I'm going to say, look, man, I can close my eyes and I can imagine that evolution can account for it. That's ideological, not scientific, scientific would say, I'm able to set this forth in a way that is constrained and falsifiable. So my question for you is what kind of evidence could be presented? What kind of data could be set forth that in theory would count as evidence against your appeals to evolutionary explanations? What could be shown to you that would make you say, hey, man, even if this doesn't completely undermine my position, it certainly counts against it. Nothing because I'm an atheist.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): No, actually, there's a category of questions actually that I think would that I'm curious for. So let me start by saying that when we ought to do something as a moral ought, it seems like you have these moral oughts and I would say that these oughts are only satisfying other things. So like one plus one ought to be equal to because of whatever a base set of mathematical axons are using, you know, a chair ought to be this color if it's to match the color of the other things in a room. We ought to not kill each other because we need to satisfy the optimal human flourishing, you know, so there are the most number of humans that are having the highest satisfaction of preference is basically. So I feel like when you're talking about an ought, you're speaking to something a little bit different than just human survival. You must be otherwise, you would just satisfy my evolution thing. So my question would be what would be an example of a moral ought or are there any moral oughts that don't immediately satisfy my evolutionary or survival oughts because that would challenge

T.K. Coleman: I think my survival oughts, yeah. Sure. So I see and use the concept of oughtness in a way that's different than a lot of moral realists. So I would make a distinction between moral structures and moral sensitivities. Moral structures are the moral walls we run up against. They are the realities that impose upon us causing us to feel moral pain and causing us to feel a sense of being compelled to do something in the same way that a car says you can't go any further. It's the moral wall that says you can't do that. Sure. Moral sensitivity is the subject of component of that. It's when I feel guilt. It's when I look at another person and I say, you know, I feel morally superior to them. It's my part. Aughtness is part of the moral sensitivity. I do not believe oughtness is objective. Aughtness is a part of our subject of response to moral structures. An oughtness is a teleological concept that's driven by purposes and goals. So for instance, if the doctor says, hey, look, I'm going to give it to you straight, man. If you smoke one more cigarette, you are going to die instantly relative to your desire to live relative to your desire to be healthy. You ought to not smoke a cigarette. But you're free to say, you know what? I don't care about life, you know, and there is no such thing as any argument, any ought or any concept that can negate your power to say, sure, but I don't care about the implications of that, right? And so in a similar way, when it comes to moral claims, I can say that, hey, look, if you do that, that's going to be bad for you or that's going to be bad for him or that's going to really feel bad or that's going to lead to doom. So even if we took like a religious scenario and says, well, God will punish you, but well, God will put you in hell. You can still just shrug your soul to say, oh, hell sounds nice to me. Oh, I don't care, guys, mad at me. I'm my own man. I don't care where I spend it. You can always do that. So if you're looking for something in a platonic realm or in nature that has the power to impose on that feature of human experience, you won't find anything. But if you place the ought inside the moral sensitivity side of the distinction, then it makes perfect sense because the oughtness is what you feel when you run into that moral wall and you consider solving a dispute by resorting to violence and your conscience says, you ought not do that in the same way that you think to yourself. I ought not to have a cigarette.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): I so I understand that. But then I feel like we've taken the moral ought statements and we've just kind of basically put them into some axiomatic framework where we're saying, well, if we agree with this framework, then we can make these ought statements and so far as they satisfy the framework, the same thing is like any kind of mathematical thing. I'm not making ought axiomatic. I'm saying that we all have. I'm just saying that the oughts only exist to satisfy whatever conditions we agree we're trying to satisfy. That's that's so I'm saying ought is a is a psychological experience

T.K. Coleman: that everyone has. Sure. Relative to the behavior they must adopt in order to. Yeah, but I guess

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): my question is for these three statements like one plus one ought to be two. A man ought to stop smoking cigarettes if he doesn't want to have cancer and you ought not murder another human being are all three of these oughts of the same type of like moral gravity to you or. So the first one is

T.K. Coleman: a ought statement that doesn't make sense to me. I don't know what you could even possibly mean by saying one plus one ought to equal to one plus one equals to and that's the answer you ought to put on the test if you're asked that question. Okay, but but one plus one doesn't ought to equal to it just it just does equal to. Okay, so I would I would take that one out, but the other two I would say they're of the same nature in the sense that you ought not to smoke a cigarette you ought not to commit murder in the sense that this is what you feel when you run up against a truth. Like you are responding to the truth. So there's the truth that if you eat it if you smoke another cigarette you're going to die and your response to that truth is I don't want to die relative to one thing to live you ought to agree with that truth because there are consequences for being incongruant with reality. But if you don't care about those consequences that that always is an option and that

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): won't be a motivating factor for you. Gotcha. So then is there something that your morality concepts can describe that my survival concepts can't describe is there like a thing that you could say that carries some kind of weight to it or conveys some type of meaning that I wouldn't be able

T.K. Coleman: to say from my perspective. So a couple of things one my position of moral realism is falsifiable. Okay, so I can say look here a couple of things you can do to falsify my position. Number one, produce for me an example of asymmetry between physical realism and moral realism. An example of epistemic asymmetry point out something an epistemic commitment that I must make in order to believe in moral realism that I don't already make when it comes to my belief in physical realism. So if you point out what you take to be epistemic of symmetry I will be able to show that you and I already make similar commitments when it comes to physical. But if you're able to produce such an example of epistemic asymmetry that would falsify my position. The second thing you can do is to either show that that example of epistemic asymmetry is inconsistent, unsubstantiated or just put the pressure back on me to demonstrate it's non-arbituriness. So one difference between what can I work off that? Will you just send? Before we do, I just want to point this out. So far, I don't know what could falsify your position. And so I would say if we're thinking scientifically and we're honoring that criterion, right, it's constrained and it's defeatable, I would say my position so far has identified the criterion for falsifying it. And I'm not sure what would falsify your position. I'm not sure what data I could set forth that in theory you would accept as

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): counting against your position. Gotcha. Okay. All right. Maybe this is maybe we're getting to this. So let's say that somebody let's say that there were five men over here and they all played basketball and somebody wanted to say from a physical real perspective, that's a basketball team and they want to say that's a basketball team the same way that that thing is a couch or whatever that thing is, right? And I want to say, well, no, I don't really think so. I think that it's just five dudes that you know might play basketball, but like that couch is different and somebody says, well, in what way is the collection of matter that you've chosen to identify as the couch here? And what way is that different than the collection of matter that I've chosen to group here as a basketball team? And we could go back and forth in that conversation for quite a while. But I think at the end of that conversation, I would actually, I think I would kind of be stumped. I don't know, I don't really know what I could say. You know, I could argue that, well, you know, the basketball team is arbitrary. I could swap anybody out and it would be a different basketball team and say, okay, why could swap out sections of the couch? Okay, well, the basketball team is like kind of separate, you know, from each other and it's like, well, separate, how separate, right? These atoms are separate for each other. They don't actually collide with each other. You know, if you zoom out enough, the basketball team is pretty close. It's like, okay, other people might not recognize them as a basketball team. It's like, well, people recognize different things as characters and it's like, okay, maybe, yeah, okay, maybe I guess I kind of have to accept that both of them are as real as each other in terms of objects. And it feels like we're almost playing a similar, I don't want to say game, like I'm attacking your position, but we're playing a similar kind of conversation with game here when it comes to morality and physical realism and that for all the properties that I'm going to give of a physically real thing, it seems that almost necessary that those things would map on to whatever you call as a morally real thing. And I think through this conversation, like I might, I think I might accept that, but then I feel like, I guess my two questions would be, when you call yourself a moral realist, do you feel like you're occupying a similar space as most other people that are, I would say, casually moral realists, like religious people, and then maybe academically moral, morally realists and the people that are more well read and have thought about it. That'd be my first question. And then my second question would be, I guess what, couldn't I theoretically conceive of any system and call it as real as your moral real system? Because it sounds like basically what you've done is you can take a whole bunch of things that I understand to be survival concepts and then you can kind of remap these onto things that you're calling moral concepts. And for me to argue my survivability thing, if I'm, I think, if I'm following everything you're saying, I kind of have to give on all of the morally real things to the physically real things I'm saying are real, they're coming from the same spot as the morally real things you're describing. But it feels like you've kind of just taken a bunch of things that I describe as, as being evolutionary and you're describing them as moral. And then you would say, well, you're just taking a bunch of things that I describe as moral and you're calling them evolutionary. Is there any distinction between these things at the end of the day or is it all just kind of could you theoretically create any number of infinite description systems and say they're all as real as the other thing? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a

T.K. Coleman: lot of a sort of hang on to it. So regarding the basketball team in the couch. Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't have any problem with saying, yeah, the basketball team and the couch, they're real in the same way. You know, we would just maybe need to be precise a little bit,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): right? Which is why I would have to ultimately end up, I would say they're both real in the same way.

T.K. Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough on that. Yeah. Just remind me, there are a few things. One is, is my moral realism? Do I think it's the same as like others or similar to them religious people?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): There was something else you said. Yeah, they're basically religious and academic people. I got that one. Yeah. And then the second one is basically, could you not create any arbitrary number of systems to describe reality? And as long as they follow basic logic, you have to say

T.K. Coleman: they're as real as any other system? No, I would love to see an arbitrary example of that, but remember those two features, I think those are really difficult to find. We've got that universality of experience and the involuntary nature. I think if you can show me something that has those two features, then we do have a case for an imposing reality. In fact, I think the epistemic and logical constraints that you talked about are examples of that very thing. You know, when you when you try to think in a way that doesn't invoke the law of identity and the law of non-contradiction, you're running into a mental wall. Something is stopping you and it's not just you. And so like those kinds of constraints are indicators of reality.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Can I just a quick because you brought up slavery before? How do you account for that like in the past that people seem to consider a great universality of experience or running into a wall that it seems like for a large portion, maybe the majority portion of human history, people have been okay with some form of slavery or another.

T.K. Coleman: Yeah, so I would say the same thing about truth. You and I don't question truth, right? No one's we're not going to say, hey, the truth doesn't exist. But for the overwhelming majority of history and up to now, people argue every day about what really happened, what really was said, what is true, what's really important, what the priority should be, what matters and so on. In addition to that, morality has another component. Being moral is like being healthy. It's quite inconvenient and it makes a demand on us. That's part of it being imposing. That there are things that are right to do and good to do, but they're not easy, they're not comfortable. And when you have the choice to not do things that are difficult and uncomfortable, one might make them, one might choose to rationalize what is wrong, one might choose to just take the easy way out. I think we can account for a whole lot of human behavior just in those terms and a lot of progress that we see with people doing the right thing. It's not necessarily because of new information, but sometimes it's new incentives. Think about being in an argument with someone, not so much a philosophical argument, because I feel like people who do that are kind of used to it, but think about being in a personal argument with someone like a family member or something like that. And you can see that they're wrong and they just don't want to admit it. And sometimes there's something you can say like, hey, look, I'm not saying your intentions are bad. I'm not saying you're a bad person. I get why you did it. I'm just saying we can't do things like that. And you kind of say something to make them feel a little safe with acknowledging that they're wrong. And they come clean and say, yeah, I agree. I was wrong about that. And so what did you do in that situation? They knew what the right thing to do was. They were kind of suppressing that by choosing to do what's easier. And you altered the incentives by making it easier for them to choose what is good. So there are a lot of different reasons why people behave the way they do. But there's nothing about moral structures that make us do what is right. But they do impose on us and they cause moral pain. In the same way, there's nothing about fire that makes us not touch it. I can touch it as much as I want. And the fire can't stop me. But it will cause me pain that will either incentivize me to change my behavior or produce disorder in my life.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Would it be a counter example to say that there are ways that you can just hide moral pain. So like say you don't like slavery. But what if the slavery is in another country and there's buy stuff from that I never see it. So now you're enjoying it without experiencing that moral pain at all. I feel like this points more towards saying just you have some base level of preferences or whatever the humans have more so than pointing towards any like moral fact world. Like if I can so easily hide or brush off to the side and leave the moral miscarings as somebody might have.

T.K. Coleman: So I don't think it's very easy to hide. But what I will say here is that you can just do the same thing with truth. It's not that difficult to avoid having to honestly engage the contradictions in your beliefs or assess evidence if you choose to not look in the directions where you know that's going to happen. So I can insulate myself from ever having discussions with people that I don't agree with. I can deliberately surround myself with people who feel the same way about most of my political religious beliefs and so on. When conversations get tense and uncomfortable and I feel like I'm losing the upper hand or someone's making me feel stupid. I can just exit. I can make it about their character rather than about the logic of what they're saying. I can choose not to read books by anybody who doesn't reinforce what I already think. So there are lots of ways to sort of try to circumvent the way that truth imposes on me. It still will impose on me. But there are a lot of things that I can be woefully ignorant about, not by directly choosing the ignorance, but by choosing a lifestyle that makes me woefully oblivious to things that would

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): otherwise trouble me. Gotcha. Okay. I feel like it'd be really hard to do for some physical truths. I don't know. I feel like it'd be a lot easier to do for a lot of moral things. But also,

T.K. Coleman: it's really hard to do for some moral things. The difference, however, is when we look at morals, we see 8,000 trillion truths or claims, rather, to be contended with. Whereas when we look at the physical world, it feels a little bit more controllable because Josh can't just do this and create a tree for you to contend with. Whereas with moral claims, I can do this and create a moral claim that you have to think about and contend with. So we not only have to contend with moral structures, we have to contend with the poorly formed moral claims that people can make up in any instance. That's what makes it a little bit more complex in that way. This is why this conversation

Joshua Fields-Millburn: was so fascinating to me is because we hyper-moralize almost everything now. Gluten is now immoral and wealth is immoral the same way. And so we can talk about things in a way that is hyper-moralized. And it makes it feel as though, I think the word you used earlier was self-righteousness. There's a whole lot of sort of self-righteousness that's tangled up in that. And I'm wondering if there is morality without self-righteousness here. There is morality without self-righteousness,

T.K. Coleman: but there is no self-righteousness without morality. My capacity to think that I am better than you even if I am mistaken is the result of me having some kind of standard by which I evaluate you and I. But even if that standard is faulty. Even if that standard is faulty, yeah. So the moment I subscribe to any kind of value system, that makes it possible for me to be self-righteous. But the two can still come apart. You can have a situation where there is no objective value system and you can kind of just choose some arbitrary one and be self-righteous because of that. Or you can have more realism and also be self-righteous because you think you're doing all the good things to preserve society and maybe you don't see what someone else is doing and you sell them short in comparison with you. It's kind of like what we do on the highway, right? Like when I cut you off, it's because I'm late for work. But when you cut me off, it's because you woke up that morning

Joshua Fields-Millburn: choosing to be a jerk. Yeah. Destiny, you are the things that are overly moralized that kind of

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): drive you crazy. Yeah, probably a lot of things. When I think about like government stuff or policy stuff, I usually tell people to be attached to outcomes and not be attached to processes. I find that when people moralize stuff on a policy level, they tend to moralize the process and not think about what they're actually trying to achieve. So, you know, there might be questions related to healthcare and people will supervoralize single-payer versus multi-payer versus public option versus free market healthcare versus whatever. And I say, well, we shouldn't really moralize the processes. We should moralize the outcome we want as many people to be provided for as possible to have as the optimal healthcare or whatever. This comes up a lot when it comes to rent as well, like for housing, right? People will say, oh, well, I think that it's more really good to have rent control or it's more really good to have whatever housing policies. Well, we should just want as few people to be homeless as possible. And for as many people to afford the housing they want as possible, whatever process we used to get there, we should just choose for that. But I find that a lot of people get mirrored down and moralizing the actual processes instead of the outcomes and then that can lead to some weird things happening in people's heads. Why do you think we do that? That's going to be a question of psychology for a billion different reasons. It could be because the groups we're in, there might be pressure to conform to some level to believe that the group has. It could be just a psychologically personal ego thing. Like if you start arguing for a thing, then you kind of start to identify with that thing. And then if that thing is wrong, then you're wrong. And it's like going to

Joshua Fields-Millburn: attack on your character. I think that's it. I think by and large, the over moralizing and the self-righteousness has a lot to do with some deep insecurity that is a result of the ego,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): the sort of false self. I think there's a lot. There's sometimes you have these transcendental ideas of like what's actually happening. So for people that, I don't know where you guys are politically, so hopefully I'm not triggering any huge underlying political disagreements. But for people that believe in this like very big concept of like the deep state, you kind of have to believe in all of the subsets of it because if one is wrong, the whole thing collapses. Or if we talk about like God, we can't say like, well, in regulations, God was wrong. And then in this part of the book, he was actually wrong. He messed up here. I was like, well, that doesn't really work for God. He kind of has to be right all the time. Maybe your interpretation of him could be incorrect, but he can't really be wrong because I kind of undermined his whole idea of it. So sometimes people have a commitment to a whole belief system, and then that belief system necessitates every single thing underneath. You see this a lot when people break up with somebody in order to kind of like protect their ego, they have to say, well, their ex was a horrible person the whole time. And what that does is it means that I don't have to admit any fault because they were wrong and horrible the entire time. But if I give on any of that, then I have to do some painful self-reflections like, okay, maybe I messed up. Maybe I was in the wrong here. And that's really hard. So yeah, sometimes there's like whole constellations of beliefs you have to buy into because of some overlying idea or whatever.

T.K. Coleman: There's a lot of different things, I think. Yeah. Also just there's a great void in educating people on critical thinking and incentivizing people to participate in uncomfortable discussions. One of the reasons I was excited to talk with Destiny is because I was able to guarantee to myself that there are going to be no crash outs, that there are going to be no name callings because I'm talking to someone who loves ideas, right? And there won't be any hurt feelings, there won't be any attacks on one of those character. We're just going to talk about our differences and just hash it out. And we now live at a time where if you voted a certain way, if you believe a certain thing, you don't believe a certain thing, you didn't vote a certain way, I can't even talk to you. And I think that can feel very satisfying. It can create, it's good for the ego to feel that way because you're so much better than anyone else. But I think that's the death of civilization. I've never endorsed the idea that, you know, to seriously engage an idea that you think is wrong or dangerous is equivalent to platforming it and you should be ashamed for that. I think you drag all the ideas into the light and you show the very best things that can be said for them and against them. And you have a little trust in letting people think for themselves and you make that demand on people. You got to think for yourself. So I think that's a big problem as well. Man, I hope we can get some more discussions. I know you need to leave soon. One thing I really want us to be able to go down the rabbit hole of is what does your, because I think our back and forth has been about me saying your critiques of my position undermine the very means by which you can critique any position. And it seems like you, you think that's a little arbitrary for me to say that, that I could, that I can sort of use that line of reasoning to make anything true.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): I think I kind of agree with what you're saying. I think at the end of the day, and then keep in mind is why I have no formal education on this. So I, so I could, there just might be things that I'm misunderstanding. I said that with, with genuine humility. At the end of the day, I guess what I would say is it feels like what you're calling an objective moral system or some kind of like objective morality or some kind of moral realist framework is a thing that at the end of the day, I might actually just agree with if we hash this out over and over again, and it gets to the point where, okay, well, I understand the criticism. You're making I understand how you're saying that this moral realism would be emergent from any logic system that I used to derive any kind of physical realism. And then my, I don't know if you'd say a critique I would have because I don't know if you've done this, but my critique, I guess at the end of the day would be, I feel like you could basically believe in either, that's not a satisfactory hold on. I was going to say you could believe in either thing, but you're saying what you can't because it'd be logically inconsistent. Backing up from a layman's perspective, you could kind of have like any ideology, and they wouldn't really meaningfully differ from each other at all. That typically when people come from, in the layman's world, this is why I asked like, do you think you're good most academics and with most laymans when they say they believe morals are real? I feel like in the layman's world, when we talk about like morals are real, what they're really saying is like, here's a list of like 10 things, or here's these things, and these are real moral truths, and now all of us have to follow these things, and that's it, end of discussion. Whereas the kind of the approach that you're taking to more realism is one that is a lot more, when I say up to interpretation or debate or leaves a room for back and forth on, I guess like what a moral fact would be. So for instance, if you were to say, well, it's a moral fact that, you know, a person shouldn't kill another person without justification or something, right? That moral fact, there's a rich world that we can draw from to have a debate back and forth on that, but must be able to talk about more reals and say, oh, we'll look, it's one of the 10 commandments, or oh, look, you know, this guy says not to do this, so he can't do it or whatever, right? Yeah, yeah. So at the end of the day, like in the way that you argue for more realism, maybe I would be that type of more realist, or I would just be a physical anti-realist, I guess I'm not sure if we explore either direction, maybe I'd be one of those things, but whatever world that that would commit me to, I would be totally fine with because it seems wholly consistent with the world that I feel like I'm committed to now, but it still seems out of step with most people who say like, I think moral facts are real. I guess if that makes sense, yeah?

T.K. Coleman: Yeah, I know you're saying to your question about like, hey, do you think you're a positionist similar to most people who believe in it? I think one of the misgivings I have about the role of invoking God in these discussions is that God would be an explanation for why there is order, but belief in God would not be necessary to identify the presence of order. Those are two separate things, right? We can point to things and say, hey, can we agree that this is a tree or can we agree that this is an example of structure or whatever it may be? And then there can be a separate conversation where we say, well, what's the best explanation for why anything existed or for why a world like this exists? But I reasoned from the idea that structures are real and that when we think about the physical world, when we talk about the physical world, even the way we engage physical reality, we do not think about talk about or treat physical objects as if they are just atoms or spatial extensions, but we think about them, we interact with them, we talk about them as if there are these structures that are real relationships. Essentially distinct things, yeah? Yeah, relations, causation, these things are real, and I would posit that moral structures are just like that in the sense that to be a moral, to do something that is morally wrong, to commit murder for instance or torture innocent babies for spectator sport, that you are going against order, that you are producing disorder and you are being disordered and even deteriorating yourself in certain ways. But we'll get into this sometime. What do you think about this point? What do you think about this point? Just a word on belief. We often think about belief as what people verbally represent themselves as saying they think is true. I think belief can also be this really revealed by behavior. Absolutely, yeah. So there's what you say you think and then there's what you reveal yourself to think and it's possible to maybe even believe what we say we think. Yeah, one of the big

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): just on that, when I say yes to that, and I think you're saying the same thing that I'm agreeing with, but like I wouldn't even necessarily say that people are lying to other people or lying to themselves when they say a thing that they believe that's out of step with what they actually believe. But just one thing that I've tried to, I didn't realize until maybe a couple of years ago, how unbelievably complex language is and that a lot of issues that we have philosophically or logically are really just like language issues kind of and that yeah. So for instance, somebody might say like I think that killing is always wrong and they might genuinely believe, like they say that and then it's like, oh, okay, well, this guy's about to kill this innocent person and someone's going to intervene by killing them. Do you think that's wrong? They're like, oh, shoot, no, okay, that's not wrong. They didn't lie when they first said it. They just didn't realize that there were a lot more conditions to their statement than they realized, I guess. Yeah,

T.K. Coleman: so that's right. That's right. Yeah, I think what what muddies the water in these discussions is that I don't think we're always very clear on that distinction. And so people self-report all sorts of things that may not even reflect what they believe. I believe there are people who think they believe that morals are objective and their real belief is that it's relative and there are people who think that it's relative and their real belief as revealed by behavior is that it's objective. And so yeah, we'll get into it, man. We'll talk more about it. We better open it

Joshua Fields-Millburn: out of the time. No, I think I think we still have some time for this. So the reason I wanted to pair you two together because I've seen you as a moral realist or moral object to this, right? And I've always been more drawn to the relative nature of morality. And it seems to me that there is some sort of a datant here between the two worldviews that you're expressing here. And it could be that most things are relative, whether it's gluten or sports or furniture, you're not in moral for buying the wrong culture, wearing the wrong logo on your shirt. But Destiny, you did use some terms earlier when you even use the term evil. And there may be some focal quotes around that I couldn't tell. But using that term suggests that maybe there is some sort of objective moral truth.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Okay, so ejecting all of this conversation, which I think is very loaded. I would say like from a very layman's perspective, when people are talking about objective morality versus relative morality, and a very layman's kind of like the worst faith sense they're talking about, like people who are moral versus people who are like hedonistic losers, basically, right? You just do what everyone to do. I'm giving a little bit more credibility. I feel like when people say they're objective moral truths, generally what I think people want to say, and I'm sympathetic towards this position, and sometimes even inhabit this position, what they really want to say is there are some things that we just don't need to talk about because it's not worth having the debate on this. I don't need to have the debate on whether or not it's okay to rape somebody or not. We don't have to debate this topic. This is like objectively, we know this is a moral thing, and we can have arguments around the edges. So, wait a second. What you're saying then is that just becomes a thought

Joshua Fields-Millburn: terminating cliche. We're like, yes, that is bad. So therefore we dismiss it from you. I think

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): that's the attraction sometimes when people say like objective moral truths. Now, I don't think that you use when you talk about like an objective moral truth. I don't think that you're using it that way. Clearly, because we wouldn't have had hours of conversation. This is an easily thought terminating thing. But I think a lot of people just like the attractiveness of that type of statement, the strength of that statement, and then the infallibility of it because they can't attack it. I think in some ways, I think there is some strength to this. You don't want to have a debate over every single thing, every single time you talk about any single thing ever, because it would get married on another list. But then the obvious weakness to this is that sometimes people start to assume too much, and then they lose the ability to defend or argue for some of the underlying things. And then I think we've seen this happen today in society where there are more fundamental truths that are being attacked, truths that are being attacked, that people aren't used to defending because it kind of just took these as like objectively true things. And then you're in this world where yeah, a bunch of people believe things that don't really know why they believe it, and they can't really defend or attack it anymore. And now everybody's kind of lost.

Joshua Fields-Millburn: Because we dismissed it for so long as being an objective truth or an objective, it's immoral to do X. So we don't even need to discuss why that may be on him. Would you call yourself a moral relativist then?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Um, it really depends on the layer or level of conversation we're having.

Joshua Fields-Millburn: Right. So for a layman that you're speaking to, would you say that you think morality is relative?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Um, I don't know. I've gotten in such trouble saying, I'm precise things philosophically in my lifetime that I try to be really humble towards every position.

Joshua Fields-Millburn: Well, the thing that TK said earlier that was fascinating. He said there are many people who, who believe in moral relativism, but act as though there is a moral objectivity.

T.K. Coleman: And I would say those people don't believe moral relativism. I would say in fact, they're made, but they think they believe it. Yeah, I think there may be some really smart philosophers who truly believe in moral relativism, but I think the average person who says, um, hey, man, what's true for me and may not be true for you or I think it's just a matter of preference. I think, I think for the most part, they just haven't really thought about it. And I don't think that's how they react to the world when they see people vote for Trump or vote for Kamala or take a stance on women's rights that they disagree with or when they see someone behave in a debate that they disagree with. Like the way they actually act as if there is real wrongdoing and they condemn people and they, I think their visceral beliefs, behavior reveals

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): what they really believe. Yeah, and I think it comes down to the, like, do you really mean this? Do you really think that some of you test it with a few questions? Maybe not. So if you talk about like moral relativism or whatever, if somebody says something along the lines of like I think, um, like, um, I may, like, I'm a moral absolutist or I may moral, no, no, I'm a moral relativist. I think that back then, um, maybe cannibalism, uh, or, yeah, we'll say cannibalism might have been the way that tribes survived or whatever, but like today it would be really wrong to be a cannibal. I think that, I think that, but I wouldn't say that it was wrong back then, but I would say it's probably wrong today. Um, so I'm a moral relativist. The morals have changed through time. But then if you were to test it and you're like, okay, let's say you were on a deserted island. There's 10 of you. There's a ship that's gonna come and save you, but it's gonna be like in, uh, two months. And the only way you guys can survive is if five of you eat the other five and you have to like make that decision how you're gonna do it. I'm like, okay, well, I guess in this sense, then maybe, sure, maybe I would be okay with cannibalism here. Um, and then might even say, but look, I'm being morally relativistic because the conditions are changing. I was like, no, you have the exact same morals. The only thing that changes is like, you know, what, what does it take for you to do this thing? Similar to the self-defense example I used, right? Your moral, so your moral statement isn't that cannibalism is always wrong. Your moral statement is just that like killing people without justification or murder, right? That this is always wrong and there might be some cases where cannibalism is okay. That's like an absolute moral statement that you could make through all of human history. Like if I could find a human civilization 10,000 years ago, that the first ones to discover wheat and they had plenty of food, but they were just eating people because they got a sick kick out of watching them suffer. Would you say those people were wrong? They probably say, okay, well, yeah, I guess maybe those people were wrong. So when they say they're relativistic, they're probably not. They're just adding more conditions than they realize and then the conditions don't apply today. So they think the moral statements have changed, but they

T.K. Coleman: haven't actually. That would be my feeling on it. Yeah, exactly. And they're thinking about the absurd number of moral propositions that there are. And most of them are just things we can't figure out or their matters of preference and matters of taste. And so when you've got, so let's say you talk about the people who list out the number of facts. Let's say we added up the number of moral claims in the Bible and we came up with a number like, let's just say it's like 100 million moral claims in the Bible. Even then, that's like infinitismally small compared to the number of moral propositions that have been uttered throughout history. And so it's just easy to look at that large number and just be like, yeah, I'm a moral relativist. But then like you said, you point out that one thing, well, torturing innocent babies for spectator sport. Oh, no, I think

Joshua Fields-Millburn: that's wrong. Yeah. So in a way, you are a moral relativist with respect to the vast majority of moral claims. It sounds like because there's a functionally infinite number of moral claims that

T.K. Coleman: people make on Twitter today. And I would say every moral realist is, every moralist believes that there are an abundance of propositions that can be set forth as if they were moral propositions

Joshua Fields-Millburn: that are nonsense or really matters of taste. But there's a set of propositions that you believe

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): to be morally objective. Yeah, but those are invisible because we already agree with them. So like the example earlier of like, what should the age of consent be for drinking or you would call it? What should the drinking age be? Right? There might be a disagree between 16 and 18 and 21 and 25 or whatever. But there is a whole bunch of moral claims that you need to get through to even build up the idea that children ought to be restricted from drinking. There's so many moral claims that they're already in agreement on. So while it might seem that these people have some kind of like relativism or different moral beliefs between each other, they do have different moral beliefs between each other. But like that moral belief is like the tip of the iceberg of all these other things that they have in moral agreement on that the state should have a role in protecting children that children ought to be protected that alcohol does bad things to the body that whatever you're like there's so many things you have to agree on to even get to that conversation for us.

Joshua Fields-Millburn: Would you say a lot of your opinions or beliefs TK are underpinned by morality? Like you don't vote.

T.K. Coleman: Is that a moral decision? Yeah, every time I get out of this, I can't tell from people. So there we go. But no, is it part of my moral opinion? I mean, part of my moral convictions? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I'm trying to think of what it might look like for me to have any thoughts that are completely independent of a moral framework. I'm not sure if I will say I do.

Joshua Fields-Millburn: Well, there are opinions, I assume. My opinion is this team is going to win the Super Bowl, or this team is going to win the second round of the NBA playoffs this year. They probably don't have a moral underpinning. Or am I wrong there? They have a moral context. So for instance,

T.K. Coleman: if I have an opinion like that the Chicago Bulls are going to win tonight, I also have the opinion that the people who vote against them are not evil. The people who want what I want are not better than the people who want the opposite that this is a matter of taste and not a matter of fact. This is not this is much less important than other things like how to treat a human being. And if in if something comes up tonight like an emergency with the family member, that prevents me from watching the game. I ought to do those things more than this thing. So there's always a moral context within which actions are performed, opinions are formed and so on.

Joshua Fields-Millburn: Destiny, I'm shocked. We haven't talked much about suffering today. It's come up just slightly with respect to like killing or whatever, but it seems to me that there is a sort of middle ground between you don't have to be religious in order to believe in a moral objective reality like St. Harris, the moral landscape sort of is I guess moral objectivism to some extent. It's not moral relativism. Or is it? I don't think it is, but but also like there's something about suffering that underpins all of that. It is anything that increases suffering is at least by his definition approaching to be more immoral than a thing that eliminates suffering is maybe a more moral thing to do. What's the question exactly? Just like is there? Well, the question is with respect to suffering. Yeah. And so what does suffering, what does the role of suffering play in morality?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): I don't like it's that I'm very philosophical. I try to be careful because there's so many weird objections or challenges like like to if your goal is to reduce suffering, this is why I have to be careful with these AI guys, right? If your goal is to reduce suffering and you push the button on the ad or reduce suffering as much as possible on him a planet, they would just nuke the whole world and you had a zero suffering whatsoever. That's sort of an anti-natalist perspective. Yeah, sure. Yeah, or even you can make things more

T.K. Coleman: convenient for people in ways that are harmful to them, right? Yeah, and then it's also weird

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): because you're going to do a world where it's like if I want to live if I want to live a life right now that is the peak of just like physical preference pleasure, you would just be hooked up to like you know a heroin needle until you die and you just keep upping the dust to die and that would be your experience would just be up, up, up, up and then you would end and there'd be no suffering. But it feels that intuitively it feels like a not good answer for some reason.

Joshua Fields-Millburn: Right, right. And you've reduced suffering there to functionally zero except you haven't because what are the ripple effects of that? The knock-on effects of someone who kills himself from heroin from Dayton, Ohio is the overdose capital of America like a lot of people I know have overdosed.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Sure, but even if you were to expand it to every single human being on the planet, if we could all hook ourselves up to a heroin needle at the same time and then ride and die it, you know, I don't think that I don't think that would be satisfactory either. Right, it seems like there's something that is a little bit greater, the human mind is a capacity for something that's better than just physical pleasure. There seems to be yeah, something built into us that wants to aspire to something a little bit more than that.

T.K. Coleman: Can I play double-z advocate with this? Sure. I'll audition this as an example of a moral fact. So here you have from the vantage point of self-interest, a person who has before them the option to just maximize pleasure. And if they do this, they get to experience increases in pleasure up to the point they die and the suffering is gone. And even if by their behavior other people might be negatively affected or grieved by it or what have you, at the end of the day society can absorb quite a few people like that. And yet people who know they would benefit in terms of pleasure from that option, I agree with you that there's something baked into us, built into us. And I would say in the same way that your mind runs into those mental walls of trying to conceive contradictions or trying to violate epistemic principles, that that would be an example of a moral wall that's telling you no, you know, you know that life is about more than that. You know that. Don't do that. That's not right.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Yeah, I'm hearing you. I think we'd run into the same problem we ran into earlier. I would say, well, of course, that's the case because if our minds were built that way, then we wouldn't have made it this far. So our minds could only be this way that we have the capacity for something greater than ourselves. If you want to call that a moral fact versus a survival instinct or something else, I mean, I guess this is back to my question of like, well, what's the difference between any arbitrary way that we label or define or talk about things? But I would say that that survival instinct is not that's like a humanity wide survival instinct. And on the individual level, it might seem to be contradictory, but on the humanity wide level, it has to exist otherwise. All of us would have just

T.K. Coleman: died long ago. Can we please revisit for a moment something I flagged earlier or something I want to get back to is why does that not undermine the claim to rationality on anything?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Why does that not undermine the claim to rationality, unlike even perceiving physical objects

T.K. Coleman: or whatever, or reason or even reasoning correctly? I mean, this is a very unsatisfactory,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): this is like the ultimate skeptic position, which I know is not fun or whatever, but I would say that I wouldn't take those things for granted and I would and I would concede humility to that. There might be other forms of logic or reasoning or things that exist beyond meta logic or meta reason or meta meta, whatever outside of that that we just can't even conceive of. And it might undermine that on some ultimate level, but wherever that would undermine it, it's outside of my subjective ability to perceive like I can't even know about it. I wouldn't be able to know about

T.K. Coleman: those things. I get you on that, but why would you not describe your position in the following way? I'm going to describe it in like an exaggerated way that maybe unfair, but it seems to me your position could be described as this. Hey, look, that example you gave of a possible moral fact, it's just the way we are, okay? There doesn't have to be some moral structure or order in the universe that I'm being incongruent. I just can't be any other way. But there's nothing necessarily out there that corresponds to it. That doesn't give me a reason to believe in anything like that. And you know what? That's also true of my brain and my eye and my ears and my skin. I impose patterns. I impose concepts like structure, order, and causation on the universe. That stuff may not be out there at all. I'm humble enough to admit that. All I'm doing is just processing information in a way that apparently has helped me to survive. But I make no claims about my ideas or believe being better than any other ideas and beliefs. These are just the ideas and beliefs that the way I am forces me to have. Sounds good. Okay. Okay, go ahead. If that's true, yeah. That seems to me to have a considerable epistemic price. Go for it. What now becomes the basis for ever treating any idea as if it's superior to another idea? And by the way, in case anyone's thinking, oh, why do you need to be superior? Even the very act of trying to learn, even the very act of humbling oneself and receiving corrective feedback is based on the presupposition that a clarified and refined understanding is better than an unrefined understanding.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Yeah. I mean, I would say that that I'm making assumptions about other people that all of those other people are running basically the same firmware hardware that I'm running. And so we're going to have some level of like foundational agreement. I just don't go below that and say that like our shared understanding as humans also gives us some like insight into the absolute truth of the universe that no other greater being could conceive of that would be beyond my conception.

T.K. Coleman: But not just absolute truth because you add that qualifier. I like the way I just represented you that you agree with because you don't you don't add that qualifier for morals. You don't you don't you don't say, hey, look, I mean, I don't understand everything about morality. There might be moral truths we haven't discovered yet. But you know what? I do accept that torturing innocent babies for spectator sport, that that's a moral fact. And you know what? Maybe there are no more moral facts. Maybe there are a thousand and one moral facts who knows I'm epistemically humble enough to just, you know, be agnostic

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): on that. I don't hear you making a lot of people that would have a disagreement on that one though. And we would that would come down to who kills who I guess on it because there'd be a thousand people that would not I guess grant that consideration that maybe torturing babies for fun would be acceptable. And so the one guy would kind of be voted off the island there, I think.

T.K. Coleman: Yeah, but that's also true of the guy who questions the external world. We'd vote that person off

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): the island, you know, practically never have access to my thoughts on that kind of like how you were talking about like free will. I can't see that or observe that or discover that or really any conscious experience over, right? We can't observe that in another person. Yeah, but we have

T.K. Coleman: people that we we set aside in some kind of way as either being mentally ill or being

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): psychopaths don't conform with our concept of the world, right? So I imagine everyone to be

T.K. Coleman: or when their words don't conform that there are some things that we can walk into spaces and say or there are some contexts within which we can utter certain statements that will certainly cause people to treat us differently. Even if these statements are just about what we believe is true or not, they will cause us to be ostracized. Only I think only in so far as they might impact

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): what you would imagine their behavior would be. So like if I were to say to you right now, I don't know if there's like an objective outside world or if anything else really exists, I can't really prove that. I don't really know if there is. I think you can accept that statement and I don't know if you're thinking horrible thoughts about me. I think if I were to utter that same statement driving 105 miles down the interstate and you were my passenger, I think you would feel significantly different about that statement. I think you wouldn't want me to stop the car immediately because you don't want somebody driving you around that seems to be a total nihilist and so far as the universe exists. I think a lot of our disagreement two stems from I'm not trying to attack your position and maybe you've been agree with this. When you say when you utter moral or when you talk about moral things, I think that your position is considerably, I don't want to say softer because that sounds like an attack when you're position, but it's it's considerably softer than most people when they say here's like a moral statement because these statements are oftentimes arrived at kind of like when you're asking me questions about like subjective versus objective moral values. These statements are arrived at basically without reason, without rationale. It's just like here's like a list of rules that everybody has to follow and that's it. The types of moral statements that you're making I'm a lot more immutable too. I would just I just don't see the huge distinction between those. No, I can't say that because if I say that, that's technically your position because there's no distinction in that and a physical fact. I just don't see why that wouldn't be an arbitrary thing created to describe another set of things that could be described any other way I guess. That makes sense. That was worthy. Like morals are oftentimes people use these as like a shortcut to having any rational thought about a thing. Like here are these moral rules. That's it. Boom, you got to follow them. Whereas you're saying like moral facts can be observed as the logical consequence of all of these underlying, you know, physical realities and structures of the human brain and everything else. And then the ways that we act and the feelings that we have about a particular thing might be I perceive the color red and that's a sensation I have. And then I can speak about the fact of the wavelength there, much the same that I see a person killing a person there. And I have a feeling so I can speak about the fact of that, you know, the killing is wrong. That when you describe morals in that way, I'm like, I would be a lot more amenable to that than I would be to the person's like, here's a list of five moral statements that are just true and you can't think about it. They just have to be true. Full stop. Does that make sense? Yeah,

T.K. Coleman: but I think what you're highlighting though is the distinction. So in every, I'm going to speak loosely here, but in every worldview, every belief system, there are the apologists, right? There are the ambassadors, the people that you want out front, arguing with those who critique it, representing it, explaining it, teaching it and so on. And I would say the overwhelming majority of adherence to any worldview are not that. And so if you ask the average Catholic what they believe, you're going to get a very different answer than if you asked Thomas Aquinas, right? If you ask, you know, even a moral relativist, the quality of conversation I'm going to get from you, I'm just not going to get from the average person who walks around saying, you know, hey, my truth, your truth, who doesn't care. And so I think what you're highlighting is that there is a level of expression and sophistication of argumentation from those who think a lot about it are willing to take the risk of having philosophical conversations about it that just don't characterize people who just accept it as true. I mean, I mean, I think this may come off as a controversial statement. I don't know what you think, but I think if you were to take the average non debater who believes who rejects flat earth and you put them in a debate with the average guy making hours and hours of YouTube every day, proving flat earth. That guy is going to run circles around the majority of people. I can say that I don't think there's a debate to any

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): sufficiently educated conspiracy theorist for anything. Yeah, for sure.

T.K. Coleman: Because the average person, if you say, hey, why do you believe the earth is a flat? They're going to be like, look, I'd never had a reason to doubt it. This is what I was taught. And I never thought twice about it, but the guy who's making videos about flat earth, he's read so much about it, he'd run circles around them. I don't know what you're thinking, but I feel like the statements

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): that normal people make are not like, if I were to ask you like, oh, you know what water is? And somebody's like, yeah. And I'm like, okay, we'll tell me exactly what a quark is. We're like, okay, I don't know. But like this person is like the level of understanding might have is here. And then the level of like to get, you know, to chemistry, to physics, to subatomic particles is going down here. But I feel like where we're at right now, where we're talking about, oh, morality, there are statements that God said that at some point, you're like, whoom, okay, actually, there's like an underlying structure of reality and all of these things are what kind of we can observe morals from. I feel like there's a change here. Where it's not just like, you have a more sophisticated understanding of it. It's more like the nature of the understanding is completely different than I think the ordinary person conceives

T.K. Coleman: of like moral facts as I don't know what like. So I have some beliefs about, hey, this is what God said. And this is wrong or this is good. But I just think the difference is I be willing to argue for it. Sure. I'm okay with being interrogated on it, right? And so can I ask a question?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Okay, I want to ask a hypothetical. You have to answer this one, okay? Because you've gotten, you haven't answered a lot of my okay, but I'm curious on this type of thing. There's something I haven't answered. Well, or because I asked hypothetical and we do a broader explanation, but I'm just curious on this, on this thing. Let's imagine, well, here, so first is the, the Euphrates or whatever, the, whatever the thing is, do you have an opinion on like our things good because God commands them or do God command it? Does God command things that are good? Do you have like a, what's your

T.K. Coleman: position on that? Yeah, yeah. So I think of God as the ultimate reality towards which all true propositions point that God is like, you know, the ground of being so to speak. Okay. And so I would say that God is honest, not because he conforms to some law outside of himself, but all of the order and structure symmetry that we see in the universe is an expression of God's infinite intelligence. Okay. Yeah. So then, okay. So it's an expression of his nature,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): if you will. Gotcha. Okay. I have a question for you. I think I know who you're going to answer when I'm curious. Okay. Tomorrow, they're digging in Drew's Limer River and they find a whole new book of the Bible. Okay. It's the last beyond the one after revelation, ignore all the other non-canonical scripture, whatever they're gonna create, but they find a new book. Okay. They find a

Joshua Fields-Millburn: new book. What is what? No, he's just a big fan of the, the Deuteron canon. We're always having these.

T.K. Coleman: Oh, you can't resist. Yeah. No. And I'm a big fan of these types of hypotheticals too. I just

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): sure. So we find a new book of the Bible. It's 100% authenticated signed by God himself. Okay. And this book of the Bible says, actually, eating screaming babies is actually more a good God-rides eating screaming babies is a super good thing. Are you more likely to believe that against all your human intuition or are you more likely to reject all of the Bible and see and kind of like seek some other former truth or is there some third answer? How would you

T.K. Coleman: deal with that question? Yeah. I mean, so I don't even know what that means to say that like, hey, this has been 100% authenticated by God and signed by God because what you're using that as shorthand for is to smuggle in the presupposition that you already accept this is true. Right? Like here's here's a new book of the Bible that's been found. You already accept this book is true. Okay. And this thing that you accept is true is telling you to do something evil. So I think that's sort of like saying to me like, hey, I found this little book and you accept this book as true and this book tells you that the law of non-contradiction is false. Why would I even accept the book? That's true. That's going to tell me that. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Am I make a sense? I think so, yeah. Now, my guess the answer is that I've noticed this, I think, for a lot of questions is that things that are very difficult questions are difficult questions because they bake into them some prior assumptions that make the question or render the question kind of meaningless. So if you assume that God is an ultimate source of truth or points in that direction and there are so many things about our current reality that exist that comport with that, that for you to break that with a simple question would kind of break every single thing you understand about reality such that it would render everything absurd and pointless and the question

T.K. Coleman: becomes kind of meaningless. Yeah. And also because I believe so if we talk about like order is something that comes from God, we would be talking about something different than the ability to observe order in the same way that if you try to explain a sound in terms of electromagnetic energy, that latter thing is an explanation that you don't even need to understand or know about in order to experience sound. And so we can experience moral facts independently of our theories about God. And so it's in the same way that one can come to know certain truths independently of their belief in God. And you can analyze evidence for or against God in light of those things which you know to be true. And so I don't look at it as like something is true because in this moment, God says, all right, that's true. And then in the next moment, God snaps his finger and says, no, that's not true. That what we have like even something like identity or consistency that ultimately that finds its nature in whatever the ultimate reality is that finds its nature in God. But that doesn't mean I can't recognize consistency

Joshua Fields-Millburn: without having a theory of God. I know we need to get Destiny on a plane here. Destiny,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): how do you feel about this conversation? Good. I think as I think when you get deeper and deeper into philosophical stuff, sometimes it can feel a little bit more unsatisfying, but it's probably unsatisfying in a good way where it's like there are like I do, if you've ever done any political debates, obviously very few reach anywhere near this level of exploitation. So for a lot of that, it was happened to exercise this muscle before. And then like having a conversation like this is not like like most debate, you're not actually thinking on the fly, right? For most debate, you kind of have like you know all the answers and you kind of run through them like a million times. So in this month, there were a few times where I'm going to say a thing and then I recognize well if I will hold on actually by grant this. Technically, I guess I am granting this. So I have to think, yeah, so I'll probably this will be a thing that I'll sit with for a while. I'll kind of like think out more and refine some more positions. And then I'll either think of like, oh, I should have said it to this guy because he was he was so off on this or I'll think like, you know, maybe I'm a little more close to this position than I realized before more something. Yeah. I saw both of you trying

Joshua Fields-Millburn: to explore truth as opposed to prove the other person wrong. And your openness to being rolling it literally change your mind in the mid sentence is not a thing that you see in typical debates. TK, I know you've expressed this earlier in the conversation. What you dislike about debates is the one upping and the, I don't know, it's maybe it's satisfying from a viewer perspective. He's dunking on me sort of thing, but it doesn't make for a great conversation. And what I loved about the two of you connecting here, yeah, it got in the weeds and I stayed out of the wave. And when it got into the weeds here, I'd love to see more conversations like this, whether it's between you two or other people because you don't see a whole lot of this, especially online, especially with the moralizing or the self-righteousness that we see.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Sure. Well, I will say this is a very abstract conversation. What there could be, I think, if we had a debate on voting, we might get a lot more heated in terms of like, you absolutely should vote. I can't believe you don't believe this or he might think, I'm not sure what your justification is for not voting, but I'm or in other things like health care or government intervention, but the more abstracted a thought is I think away from what we're doing in our lives day to day or what we're telling other people to do. I think it's probably easier for people to have those conversations. I don't listen to them as well because I don't feel as personally

Joshua Fields-Millburn: invested in the outcome. Right, but I also think having two of you having that conversation where you disagree about voting is probably going to be go better at most debates about voting.

T.K. Coleman: For sure. Yeah, that's her too. In fact, we've talked a lot about us getting into the weeds here and I love to know if you agree or disagree with this. My frustration the first time when we had you on the show is every time it felt like we were about to get into the weeds, it seemed like we really enjoyed it, but then we had to like move it on. And so today I was like, oh, this is going to be great. We're going to talk like for six hours. We'll get way into the weeds. I'm not frustrated at all that we got into the weeds. I just hate that we don't have several more hours. And so I would love it if we could talk again in the future and it can be a deeper exploration. And we can try to work some of these things out to see what the implications of some of these things are and get into those fundamentals about realism and anti-realism and so on.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): So I actually have I wrote a bunch of we make up a bunch of like fallacies and like names for fallacies that people have or we make our own because you think it's funny and actually I have one called the lazy gardener where when you're having a conversation with somebody every time you're starting to get to some bedrock disagreement, they're like, oh, let's not get into the weeds on that. And it's like, well, what are we here for? If not, is this a 30-second TikTok video? Yeah, why not?

Joshua Fields-Millburn: So yeah, I do appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. Are there is there any when you'd love to see TK have a conversation or debate with with all your experience debating different people? So if someone you're like, now I'd love to hear a conversation between TK and these three people.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny): Well, now I'm curious because I hate Jordan Peterson and it seemed like you had some admiration or respect for his blue system. I see like he reasons his stuff in a horrible way. So I'd be interested in seeing that back and forth. There's one thing I really hate is you talked about like defining things earlier, like calling for like, oh, what did you mean when you said this or what did you mean when you say that? I really don't like it when people do that selectively. So for instance, one criticism I have of Jordan Peterson is Jordan Peterson will become, you know, do you think that Jews really existed in Egypt and they walked to whatever? And you're like, well, what does it mean when we say Jews and existed and what it's about? It's like, okay, we're all right. And then it's like, when I have it to be with them for like, you know, what do we think about vaccines and medicine? I'm like, well, I know this is wrong and I know that's evil, but I know this isn't true. It's like, okay, well, it seems like here we have very solid foundations on everything. And yeah, when I see people, the biggest like my bad faith sensor goes office when I see highly selective skepticism, when some stuff becomes so like, I can't know anything about this, whereas I know everything about this. That drives you crazy. And listening to him, did you hear him on Jubilee when he did the debate thing? I don't, I thought he called himself a Catholic at one point, but maybe not. But I heard a lot of like very normal ordinary attacks against Catholics on that. Like the mother Mary thing came up, which is if you've ever been Catholic, that's one of the things people always attack you with. And I seem like he didn't have any constant of any of these ordinary lines of attack, which makes him wonder like, well, have you spent any time at all thinking about this?

T.K. Coleman: Or yeah, I don't know, that drove me crazy. Well, you know, that particular discussion, the way it seemed, I can't know for sure, but the way it seemed was that they advertised it to the students as, hey, bunch of atheists against theists. We're going to get a Christian in here. And then they told Jordan Peterson, hey, look, we're going to have you debate a bunch of atheists about, you know, the, your metaphysics. And he went in there and they took him to task on Christianity and he didn't seem all that willing to even commit to the, to belief in the propositions. I'm not sure that that could be overly charitable, but I will say as much as I roll my eyes at people's irritation with giving definitions or asking for them, I think there is something there about what you said with the way he handles that, questions about the Bible. I haven't watched him in a long time, but the impression that I always got is that this is a question that he doesn't like. It's a question that he wants nothing to do with right now. And it seemed to me that it's that he was in the middle of wrestling. And I'm partially empathetic because philosophy done out in the open can be very risky, you know, like, you know, I don't vote, but it's like, that's not laziness on my part. I would actually love to be convinced. And I would challenge anybody to just bring me on their show. And let's talk about it for three, four hours. I would love for you to make the case for why you think I should vote and I can express all my concerns and objections. I love to get that invite. I'm skeptical that I'll ever get that invite. But like, sometimes when you, when you say things like that, people just write you off. They misunderstand you and they attack you. And it seemed to me like he's not, or he wasn't comfortable with just saying, I don't know if I believe Jesus physically rose from the dead because he has so many Christians who support him. And so many people would be disappointed if he says that. But then he kind of is drawn to the narrative. And I think it's one of those things where he just wishes he could work that part of his philosophy out in private, not be asked about it in public. And he looks like an uncomfortable man when that set of questions comes up. Okay, maybe. I mean, that may be overly charitable, but I'm with you in that. I do think he does that over does it

Joshua Fields-Millburn: when it comes to those questions. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Destiny. Shout out to Tom Cat, an audio bin, SavvyDee, and Professor Sean on the production side. Thank you so much for doing this today. Yeah, thanks for having me. Look up for it the next time. All right, y'all. Much love.

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Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [00:00] What does the role of suffering play in morality? I don't know, like I said, I'm very philosophical. I try to be careful because there's so many weird objections or challenges. Like, if your goal is to reduce suffering, this way I have to be careful with these AI guys, right? If your goal is to reduce suffering and you push the button on the ad or reduce the suffering as much as possible on the human planet, they would just nuke the whole world and you had a zero suffering whatsoever. If I want to live a life right now that is the peak of physical preference pleasure, you would just be hooked up to like a, you know, a heroin needle until you die.

T.K. Coleman [00:27] That would be an example of a moral wall. That's telling you, no, you know that life is about more than that. You know that. Don't do that. That's not right.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [00:37] Well, now I'm curious because I hate Jordan Peterson. And it seemed like you had some admiration or respect for his public system. I, I feel like he reasons his stuff in a horrible way. I think I have to say yes to that based on everything I've said. But then I guess that would make me a physical anti-realist. But now I've changed my position completely, so I should have never said physical realism in the first place.

Joshua Fields-Millburn [00:55] But literally change your mind in the mid-sentence. It's not a thing that you see in typical debates. Does objective morality exist? I'm Joshua Fields-Millburn from The Minimalist. And today I'm moderating a conversation about morality between two thinkers I deeply admire. Joining me is Stephen Bunnell, better known as Destiny Online. Stephen is a prominent YouTuber and political commentator widely known for debating controversial topics and for his advocacy of liberal ideas. You can find him online at destiny.gg and on YouTube. And social media at destiny. I'm also joined by my podcast co-host and Netflix co-star T.K. Coleman T.K. is a minimalist philosopher, a devout Catholic. As far as I can tell, he is politically homeless. You can find his work at TheMinimalists.com and on YouTube and social media at The Minimalists. We're recording this conversation at The Minimalist podcast studio in West Hollywood. My role today is simple. I'm going to stay out of the way. Well, at least step out of the way for a moment here and let these two men have a thoughtful challenging conversation. I'll jump in only when it helps move things forward. Destiny, let's start with you.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [02:12] Does objective morality exist? So kind of the boring way to start every philosophy conversation. I feel like it's kind of asking, what do we mean when we say like exist or is real? Yes, unfortunately, yeah. So not to go full Jordan Peterson here. Now I heard you bowling him about the Trinity off camera. So I'm guessing we have some Catholic philosophy coming from over here. I was raised as a Catholic. I went to Jesuit High School and everything. So I've heard all the Trinity criticisms and the Mary Worshipper insults and everything they throw at us. So I guess when I try to think of morality, typically the way that I do morality, some people will say that this is a real form of morality. Some people say this is not a real form of morality. In terms of like like a real thing or kind of like an anti-real thing. The way that I look at it is I view it as more of a question of like what are humans and then morality is the thing that emerges predictably from human behavior. So let's assume that we had a subset of humans at 100 different civilizations. And let's say 99 of them had no morality. Let's say one of them had some type of morality. And when I say morality, what I mean is some set of behaviors that guides them towards some kind of cooperation, I think that 99 of those civilizations would fail because without cooperation, you have people eating each other, killing each other's children, stealing, murdering, whatever. It just doesn't work. It falls apart. Whereas for the people that are more cooperative, those civilizations survive, and then they eventually thrive and they carry on. And I guess those people, thousands of years into the future, will be wondering, well, is our morality objective? Does it come from some written code in the universe? Is there some objectively true statements that we can make about morality? But the reality is the only people that would have survived that far would have been the ones that would have had some kind of like guiding behavior characteristics regardless. So insofar as that goes, I think that morality is like an intuitive thing that kind of necessarily emerges from humans because without these types of preferential behaviors, you basically just turn into the society that just cannibalizes itself until it ceases to exist.

Joshua Fields-Millburn [04:05] Yeah. That doesn't necessarily mean that morality is objective, though. It means that groups that have a set of moral codes are able to, I guess, cooperate in ways that a group that doesn't have a moral code might be able to cooperate.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [04:20] Basically, so would say that like, because humans have a very shared biology, like 98% of humans are going to agree on like 98% of moral things. And then we're going to be arguing a lot about kind of edge cases. So things like like a board shirt or a gay marriage or whatever are going to be kind of like edge cases, but all of us are going to roughly agree that you shouldn't steal things, you shouldn't kill people, stuff like that.

Joshua Fields-Millburn [04:40] TK, the reason I wanted to have this conversation is last time we had Destiny on the Minimus podcast, YouTube, debated a bunch of really compelling topics. And there was a moment where we just touched on morality. And I asked you whether or not an objective morality exists. And the thing you said to me that is stuck with me for the last several years is you said, well, we over-moralize a lot of things. I think we could talk about that how our cultures become so self-righteous. We tend to moralize everything. But it seems to me that if there are five universal moral truths,

T.K. Coleman [05:12] then there is some sort of objective morality. That's right. I mean, my position you could argue is moral minimalism. That there is at least one moral fact. And if one moral fact exists, then moral realism is true. Now, I'm not actually a moral minimalist. I believe there's more than one moral fact. But for the purpose of this discussion, you know, if we're asking, is moral realism is true? That's all that would be needed to demonstrate the truth of it. Just to kind of clarify my position, I would say that moral realism for me is a subset of realism in general. And we can, we can always get more precise with our definitions. But when it comes to realism, I just advance a common sense notion of it. If I were to say, hey, Josh, there is a pickup truck parked right in front of this building. I take myself to be expressing more than a preference, more than a feeling, more than a view on what I wish were true. But I take myself to be making an actual claim about reality, a claim that can be falsified, a claim that can be verified. And if we go and we look, and we see there is no pickup truck parked in front of the building, then that means either I lied or I got it wrong or something changed that I would have to give an account for. And so in everyday life, we speak as if some kind of realism is true. If I say there is a chair there across the room, again, I believe there really is a chair. I'm saying something about the world and not just me. In a similar way, I believe that moral realism is just realism applied to moral values. So to use a classic example, when I say that it is morally wrong to torture innocent babies for spectator sport, I'm not just saying I personally, I'm disgusted with it. I'm not just saying human beings have evolved to feel yucky about that norm. I just expressing how I want the world to be. Those things may be in place. They may not be in place. But what I'm saying is that that kind of order, it is incongruent with reality itself. And in the same way that a person can behave irrationally by violating laws of logic and being incongruent with reality in their beliefs, a person can behave immorally by violating moral principles and being incongruent with reality

Joshua Fields-Millburn [07:34] at the level of behavior. Destiny, I've seen that you are, you've at least been sympathetic to emotiveism, which is I think different from completely different from TK's perspective here. Maybe you could talk a bit about that and relate to the way that he's describing moral realism.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [07:55] When you, just because I've heard everybody use these terms differently, I've heard the term like non-cognitivism, where you kind of expressing moral propositions and they're really just like preferences. When you say emotivism, can it just be clear what do you mean here?

Joshua Fields-Millburn [08:06] Yeah, the the boo hooray theory. Okay, gotcha gotcha.

T.K. Coleman [08:10] Yeah, so by the way, can I, this is completely off topic, but this is why I enjoyed our conversation with you when you were here on our show. And this is why I'm so excited about today. I'm in physical pain, so I don't look excited. But people make fun of anyone who says, what do you mean by that? And I think Jordan Peterson is kind of the classic example of it. But whenever I watch debates, I just get tired of them so quickly, because people go on for hours without ever taking the time to just define what they mean. And people are so put off by the request. And I thought it was a normal, responsible thing to do. I think it's an essential thing to do. And so whenever I find myself in conversation with someone who isn't scandalized by that, or who doesn't have any hesitancy to say, what do you mean by that? And that's okay. I'm like, all right, this is a good conversation. So I appreciate that. I hate the way Jordan Peterson does it,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [09:04] but we can do that with her. Yeah, that'll be a different debate. So when we speak about things, I think that there is a context to things that we say. And I think that there is, I think that when we say a thing is a thing, I think sometimes we're expressing different things, sometimes than that realizing it. So like a lot of language, I would say ordinary human language has a lot of built in or baked in assumptions to it. If I were to pop my head in and if I were to say, you know, is anybody in here hungry? And maybe all of you guys say, yeah. And then I would leave. I think everybody would be kind of confused if 20, 30 minutes later, I'm eating in the other room alone. And you would come through and you would ask me questions, okay, well, I thought you were going to get a spoon. It's like, I never said that. And it's like, wow, you know, when you ask somebody, you know, like, are they hungry? There's a whole bunch of baked in stuff there in terms of our, you know, would you like me to get you food? I can get you, right? There's, there's just so many different things. I've heard, I don't remember the name, but I've heard this expression is like the four maxims of like conversation or whatever. Like, oh, you know, if I were to text you this morning, I would say, hey, I'm outside and you go outside and I'm not there. And I was like, oh, I'm outside my house in Miami. I'm like, okay, well, that you're not conveying like the appropriate level of information. When you said outside, I assume you meant right outside my building right now at this point in time, right? But we don't say all these things. I think we talk about different types of facts. I think that there are words that we use. So words like is these types of verbs that we use. But I think we're kind of saying different things. So one thing that you brought up and I'll simplify the truck example to like, there is a chair in the room. So when we say like there is a chair, like we're agreeing that there's some collection of matter that we universally, we've applied the principal chair to it and we, you know, say it's here and you know, and we would say that's kind of a fact because it reduces to something hopefully and an objectively true reality that our sense of perceiving etc. But here's a question I guess I would have. If I were to say, um, if I were to say, uh, there is a chair in this room, is that the same type of statement as saying there, um, there is a, um, there is a bed underneath the stairs in the in the Dursley's house in in Harry Potter that there's like a, there's a, there's a bedroom underneath. I'm trying to think of a specific fact in Harry Potter. But if I say like there's a, there's a mirror in Harry Potter's room, is that the same type of statement

T.K. Coleman [11:09] as saying there is a chair in this room? In one sense and one sense, in one sense yes and one sense no, right? So if you were to ask me that as part of a normal conversation, uh, I would take you to mean something like, Hey, within the world that is the Harry Potter story, is this something that is deemed to be a fact? And so in that sense, yes, but it's a different kind of statement because you're making a statement about two different worlds. One is a world that we both agree on is purely conceptual and the other is a world that we both agree is actually like physical in nature.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [11:41] Okay. Um, I, I think it was a perfect answer. Um, so now I'm not sure we're going to disagree on anything or if we're just going to come down to terms, but when I do morality, I look at it similarly as like, um, like math. So if I say like one plus one is two, we all agree on that given the same set of mathematical axioms, depending on what set they were, whatever you used to be, we all agree on that, generally speaking, that two plus two is four, three is six. These are things that we're going to agree on, but is three plus three is six is not the same type of truth as I spot, um, I think is that a whiteboard or a table or something in the corner. And then the answer that you gave, well, with respect to some system, I would agree that this is true. But does it exist outside of the agreements of that system? This is kind of where I view morality as sitting. Morality is kind of like, um, like a, like a statement in math or a statement in Harry Potter that so long as we all kind of agree on a set of norms governing that, we can make true statements with respect to those norms, but those norms are grounded in a relatively, I don't want to say arbitrary, because that's not quite true, because I think biologically, all of us are going to have similar norms, similarly like core guiding principles, but I don't know if it's true in the same way that like a table exists or, um, or wall exists. And then kind of the testing question that I would have on that, um, if you can speak to what I just said, the testing question is if I were to say there's a truck outside and we would go outside and we would look, we could use our senses to kind of figure out, well, is there a truck or is there not a truck? And we, you know, we're, there's going to be a right or wrong on that. Whereas if I were to say, um, killing that person is wrong, and then we would observe somebody killing a person, let's say there's a disagreement there. How do you resolve the disagreement between two people? What do you point to, or what are you looking at objectively to say, well, this person is correct, that is wrong or that person incorrect, you know,

T.K. Coleman [13:22] it is wrong. Yeah. It's a good question. Let me first respond to the, um, the example of the Harry Potter, the math facts, physical facts. So I think the Harry Potter example, that is a universe, so to speak, that we both agree is fictional. And we have concrete evidence that a human being created this universe, right? We can point to the person who created that and they can say, yes, here's a date on the calendar where no one talked about Harry Potter. Here's the date where they did talk about it. And it was because I introduced the idea to the world. I think mathematical troops are different from that. Um, and I don't think one needs to be a plateness on, on abstract entities in this way. But when we say things like two plus two equals four, yes, we're assuming a base, we're assuming a formal system of logic, but we're also making claims about the nature of reality in the sense of there being order, there being structure, there being things like coherence and consistency. And I, and I'm a realist on those things. So I think speaking of things like order and structure is very different than speaking of a bad being in a particular room in the Harry Potter story. One of those is fiction. And so I'm an anti-realist on that. And the other is, is, uh, is one that I, I take to be true. And I'm a realist on that. Your question about the, um, the pickup truck versus the moral example, like it's killing wrong, is there a pickup truck outside? Uh-huh. I think this feels compelling and complex on the surface for one reason, namely that we are not in the habit of subjecting our beliefs about the physical world to scrutiny in the way that we are inclined to do with more abstract things. And so sometimes when you're dealing with something that's familiar, even if your reasons for believing it are bad, you feel more safe and you feel more comfortable because there's no need to ask questions about it because there's nothing in my experience that forces me to ask questions about it. A good example of this would be money. You take fiat currency has all sorts of problems. It is not a perfect system at all. But when you introduce a new form of currency, like cryptocurrency, it incentivizes people to start thinking in a way that's really skeptical. And I think the skeptical questions are fair. Well, what is the money based on or, or, you know, like how does this or that work? Those are fair questions. But those same fair questions could also be asked about fiat currency. It's just that we're not inclined to ask them because it's familiar. And so that gives us a false sense of security. So when we talk about the physical world, I do not take for granted that there is a mind independent physical world. And I think it's a fair philosophical question to ask for any given experience you have of perceiving a physical thing. How do you know you're not hallucinating? How do you know that this is not merely the content of your consciousness? Now, we do not ask these questions at parties. If we're trying to make friends, if we're trying to get along in the world, most people would be annoyed by that. But when we're having philosophical discussions about the nature of justified belief about having rational belief formation processes, it's a fair question to ask. One of the classical distinctions in philosophy, Bertrand Russell talks about this and problems of philosophy as a parent's versus reality. We all have direct experience with seeming to see something, seeming to hear something. We have these sensory impressions. And then up on further reflection or examination, we realize we were wrong. There is a stick that appears to be bent because it's in the water. But when I pull it out, I go, oh, it appeared to be bent, but it actually isn't. And so we all understand that difference between appearance and reality. So when you have an experience of seeing a tree, seeing a mountain, seeing a pickup truck, the question to ask there is, how do you know that what you see exists independently of the contents of your consciousness? I contend that once you established the reasons for that, which is really the case for physical realism, you have in that the case for moral realism. I'm happy to make that case, but I want to pause here and just kind of hear your thoughts on that.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [17:29] Yeah, I guess my question would be, how do you test any of the claims? So in so far as, we look at our five senses, for eyesight, if I want to say that thing is a particular color, and then we have a group of people and there might be some disagreement on the color of the thing is, we could actually test the wavelength of light that's being emitted from the thing. Or for sound, we can actually test the vibrations and the air to determine the sound coming from a particular thing. What kind of investigation could we do to explore or communicate, I guess, a moral fact?

T.K. Coleman [18:00] Yeah, so two things. So one, I want to make sure we don't oversell the ease with which we can test these physical claims. We have to significantly limit our data set to things that we pretty universally agree on. But when you look at many of the explanations we take for granted now about why we experience the physical world and the way we do, humanity has been flat out wrong about the theories of the experience for the overwhelming majority of history. So for instance, you take once upon a time disease was explained in terms of rotten matter in the way that that pollutes the air and we get sick or because of defects in people's moral character or the idea of heat transfer being explained in terms of pressure inherent in substances. And I believe it was like caloric pressure, something along those lines. And so if we were to go back and look at some of Aristotle's physics, you know, probably brighter than all of us combined. And we compare that to our understanding of physics today. If we just take Newtonian physics and compare that to Aristotle physics, then we have some major differences. So even today, when you push really hard to get into the substance of reality, there's a ton of difficulty in terms of understanding what the nature of physical reality is. And I'm not sure how we get out of it. So for instance, you take the debate in scientific realism. There's entity realism, there's structural realism. And when we push on the nature of matter, it's what are we interacting with? Are we actually interacting with entities? Are we interacting with some kind of energy pattern? Are we interacting with structure? What are we interacting with? These are very difficult questions to answer. And we cannot settle them with instruments. We cannot settle them with observations, or they would already be settled. We actually have to settle them with deep, difficult, conceptual analysis in the same way that we would argue about the existence of God. We're not going to settle this by like saying no God or God. We have to have philosophical discussions about what evidence look like, what rules of inference we abide by. And we may not come to an agreement, but we wouldn't say, we wouldn't deal with that disagreement by saying there is no truth. We would just say, this is really hard, and it's a different kind of thinking. So that's the first part of that. The second part is how do we go about settling moral disputes? Well, one thing that we can do, and this is a longer game, but one thing that we can do is we can talk about moral structures as a kind of order that's inherent in the fabric of reality itself. And so the earlier I mentioned that being immoral is to behavior, being irrational is to belief. When you form beliefs, irrationally, it produces disorder in your life. It puts you out of alignment with reality. In a similar way, immoral behavior produces disorder in one's life. And so we can take a look at what are the actual consequences in individuals and in civilizations. We can look at that historically. What are the consequences of this way of behaving? And I think one point of agreement that we have, based on what you just said about the evolutionary explanations, is that the things that we consider to be moral are things that tend to produce societal stability. They tend to produce human flourishing. They tend to optimize us for survival. And so we can appeal to those kinds of things, and we can test those kinds of things. But we have to be honest about the fact that those kinds of tests are a little more difficult, nuanced, and complex than like testing mechanical objects. In the same way that psychological research is more difficult than mechanical research.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [21:38] Okay, so for the first part about not fully understanding where a thing is or what a thing might be, like in math, there are different sets of infinity, basically, right? From depending on the types of numbers you're talking about, we can say there's an infinite amount of numbers between one and two. There's an infinite amount of positive integers, whatever. There's a million things you can say about different types of sets of infinity. Just because there's an infinite amount of numbers between one and two, doesn't mean that we can say, well, also five could be an answer or zero could be an answer. So while I agree that it could be difficult sometimes to hone in exactly on what it is a phenomenon is being produced by what's going on, we're definitely like directionally moving in some way, such that the science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, I think is a really cute short essay about flat earth, basically. And the idea is when we conceive a flat earth, we think it'd be a stupid idea, but technically flat earth is a dramatically improved upon idea from thinking the surface of the planet is just random ups and downs, right? And the difference because of the size of the planet between flat earth and a spherical earth is quite small. It's like a fraction of a degree, basically. And then the difference between, you know, a lot of people think that if this round is not technically round, it's like an obelisk feroid, but the difference between roundness and an obelisk feroid is another fraction of a degree. So even if the first gas is wrong, directionally, it's pushing in a direction that's more correct, the same as, you know, whatever, I don't know who thought of the four humors or whatever, for medicine, but like these are all directionally moving into a better understanding of what, you know, today we have for medicine, you know, and then hopefully that's moving into better direction, etc. Agreed on all that. Yeah, I say all that to say that, even if I look in the past, and I say this is like a primitive notion that, you know, that somebody might have had, but, you know, we're making some kind of, you could say moral progress, you could say epistemic progress, whatever. I don't know if I feel like that same progress has ever occurred, you know, when it comes to morality, like if we looked 2000 years ago, you know, you get religion, you have before that your 10 commandments, everything else, I know there are other religions before Christianity. But I don't know if there's ever been a point where it's like, okay, well, here's a settled moral question, you know, we've kind of solved this, or we've made a lot of progress on these moral questions, like we know that adultery or murder is actually wrong or isn't actually wrong. Like I feel like these are questions that are about as, about as wrestled with as they always have been with, with some gains made in certain areas that I wonder if it has more to do with morality or more to do with like the physical manifestation of like medicine or technology. So for an example of that, we talk about like equal rights for women, and we talk about women being able to join the workplace and have education and everything. I would like to think that a lot of this came as a result of people, I guess evolving morally or viewing women as more equal, but a large part of this was probably also due to the fact that our economies grew so much that women being integrated into the workplace, especially, you know, when we're at war, it's really advantageous. And also the invention of birth control has given people the ability to have recreational sex without having to be married, having to have a child, and then being kind of committed to that, you know, forever. So to bring that back, I guess, we're talking about order, and we're talking about irrationality, and we're talking about the production of some kind of society based on your behavior. I guess my question is, is this starts to feel a little bit more like the Harry Potter thing where we say, you know, well, can't, somebody would ask, you know, can Harry Potter defeat Snape? The answer would never be, well, neither of those characters are real, so there's no answer, right? You would answer within that world. And I feel like much the same if we were to say is recreational sex, is that like acceptable or is that immoral? We would say, well, that's going to be with respect to whatever outcome you're optimizing for. But I don't know if there's like an objectively correct outcome to optimize for. And then say you have two people that want to argue back and forth, well, which outcome should be optimized more? In one world, there might be more recreational sex, and the other world, there might be a few more, we'll say children and stable families, but no world is like falling apart. How do you even come close to resolving any disagreement there? Like what would you even look at to test the disagreements there? How would you analyze those disagreements? Yeah.

T.K. Coleman [25:59] A few things. First, I'm going to go back to what you said about. It seems like you were getting ready to make a mild concession that there has been some moral progress, but you express some skepticism as to whether or not it's do more to something like advancements in technology and so on. I want to make sure that we don't dismiss the concession on grounds of that because that plays a role in science as well. We can definitely 100% without any doubt say our ability to do science well today and make advancements in science today is not just because we're so much smarter than the people of the past, but because of advancements in technology, we're able to test things that most of humanity wasn't able to test. So scientific progress really does depend on and benefit from things like the invention of the telescope, the invention of the microscope, the invention of the internet, the personal computer, innovations and transportation. So all of these things are connected, but just because we have other elements to thank for our capacity to make progress, doesn't mean that progress isn't made in the way that we do science. I would say in a similar way, we do see progress when it comes to morals. So for instance, we can say that people today think differently about slavery than most people throughout human history that... And actually, let me just ask you that because I don't want to assume or maybe we don't have the even waste time arguing about that. But do you believe that the world's view on slavery today is pretty much the same as it's been for most human history, and there has been no progress made

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [27:34] on that? I feel like there have been ebbs and flows, but I'm not sure again, if I would credit all of that to like the more evolution of people, more so than to the economic evolution of different societies. So for instance, I would say in some ways like slavery that existed in the United States was kind of uniquely also out there or evil, I guess. And the idea of like wholesale, chattel slavery based on your race from birth to death and then that that would follow you through for your entire family was kind of a uniquely terrible conception of slavery, which would have been arguably worse than some of the forms of slavery that had been existed and had been practice prior to that. So that would be like a dip. And then obviously, we had a whole civil war. Obviously, the rest of the planet is largely moved on from slavery-ish. Some people would argue that visa worktrap schemes and everything and Dubai and everything, you know, can kind of amount of the slavery. But when I look at this, my question is like, if we weren't in the economic state, we would be in today, would everybody have the same view of slavery or would we regress back to that if people thought that it was more economically viable or didn't want to share as many, you know, limited resources with different types of people, you know? I mean, I'd ask the same thing about

T.K. Coleman [28:45] scientific progress as well. If we didn't have the wealth that we have, the technology that we have, the economic consensus that we have, the social structures that we have, I'm not sure we'd be able to make this kind of progress. But more importantly, I think you're conflating the distinction between the reality of moral progress and the various explanations for why we have that progress. So for instance, if we point to a guy who used to make no money, and now he's a millionaire, one person can say, he got there because he works really hard. Another person can say, no, his father just gave him the money. Another person can say, well, he cheated a bunch of people and he's really duplicitous. That's why you had the money. But there's one thing we can disagree on. The guy has made economic progress. Maybe his reasons are legit. Maybe his reasons are illicit. But we don't want to confuse the various elements that made progress more accessible, more possible with the reality of progress itself. And so even when it comes to people's motives for seeking truth, people's motives for engaging in discussion and debate, we do a lot more of that in today's culture in terms of like, we don't settle disagreements as much by violence. We settle disagreements by sitting down and discussing things. You can't separate that from the economic incentives we have.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [30:00] I asked a question real quick on that because this word keeps coming up and I think it underlines a lot of our potential disagreement or actual disagreement. Whenever you say things like progress, we're assuming like kind of a start and finish and then like a directional thing. And I feel like progress is easy to talk about in some ways. When we talk about like economic progress, number go up. Typically good, right? Makes more money. Typically good. When we say like moral progress, how are we figuring out where is this delineation? How do we know like, well, this is the start and then this is the end. And how do we test that? What are we looking for? Yeah. So I would say

T.K. Coleman [30:35] being a person of integrity is not just about how you feel. It's about what you actually do, right? And some of those moments that we might deem to be the most heroic moments, the most virtuous moments are where you don't feel like doing something that is valuable and you choose to do it anyway, right? And so we could say progress, moral progress would be when more people are incentivized to choose the right thing, to choose the more valuable thing, to choose the more healthy thing, even if there are parts of them that really don't feel like it. Even if there are parts of them that may not have done that if everything were neutral. So let's say I'm an employer and everyone that works for me is always late. And I make some sort of policy change by saying, you know, how much you get paid depends on this. And then everyone starts to show up on time. We see that the capacity to show up on time was always there. We see an improvement in behavior that they're behaving more in accordance with the ideal. And a change has been made in the incentives to get people to do that. So when I say moral progress has occurred, I would say that human beings today are more incentivized to do things that we all agree are morally good things to do. And slavery would be an example of that, not settling debates with violence would be an

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [31:53] example of that. Do you think that that falls into kind of like a circularity to where if I have a society full of people who all tell me that trucks do not exist, there is no truck outside. We can go outside and I can show you there is indeed a truck or there's something here you have to call a truck. If there's a society and everybody says that murder is good or killing is good. And then I come in and I say, well, actually killing is not good. And then they all disagree with me. What do I point to to say, well, look, it really isn't good. Because again, the when you get the employee example, right, well, that's an easy one because the schedule is good because it's the schedule. So if they come in on time, then I know that it's good with respect to the schedule, much the same that Snape killed Dumbledore with respect to Harry Potter. But external that like contrived measurement system, how do you resolve the disagreement? Yeah.

T.K. Coleman [32:42] Well, well, we both agree that for the most part, humanity agrees on basic underlying moral categories. If we need to hash out differences there, just let me know. But I'm assuming that you agree that in some sense, murder is a society where we just murder people because we disagree with them is a worse society than one in which we handle our disagreements respectfully and respecting one another's rights and so on. I think so. We're getting really bad rock here.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [33:14] But I think these are good. Yeah. So when we say good or bad, there's a question of like, what do we mean when we say good or bad? So I would say that these societies are bad and that they don't survive. But so I think like the difference between like that's like a type of normative claim, but it's not a moral claim. I wouldn't say that they're bad and that there's like an objectively bad or evil thing here. I would say they're bad with respect to their ability to persevere or survive into the future. And then a good thing is a thing that satisfies like if I want to fill this glass of water, it would be good for the water to be to be full of water. But it wouldn't be good like morally good, right? Or if I say, oh, well, I'm parched and I was handed a glass of water that's almost empty. I would say, oh, well, that's bad. But not like morally bad. So when you say, we agree on things that are good or bad, I agree that we agree on those things. But when we say with respect to the society being able to exist or persevere, I don't know if that like satisfies the conditions of goodness or badness is the same type of like moral good or bad versus

T.K. Coleman [34:08] just a normative. Yeah. Sure. We both agree that a society being moving towards the good involves at some level some kind of concept of flourishing. But what appears to differentiate us is that I'm positing something additional. I'm positing that there is an oughtness behind all this or related to this. And you're saying that that's the part that you reject. Okay. So to your question, would this be circular? It would be if the things I'm saying to you now, we're being presented as an argument for moral realism. And fairness, I haven't given any reason for why I think moral realism is true. What we're talking about is the consistency that some explanatory accounts have or don't have with moral realism. And so when you say things like we can measure progress in terms of human flourishing in terms of less violence, I'm saying that these are things that we actually can measure and that's consistent with moral realism. Now, I still got to prove moral realism. But these things are not refutations of moral realism or for instance, when we give evolutionary accounts of why people have an aversion to things like assault, evolution presupposes an ontology, but it doesn't prove one, right? Evolution starts with basic presuppositions about what sorts of things exist. And it attempts to explain how those things function or how those things emerge. But they don't say anything either way about what kind of substance things have or whether or not things exist. So I'll give an example. Let's say we're to observe a family in two different situations. Situation one, you have a family that's having a party and they're outside at a pool and you see the kids, you know, putting their their hands in the water, you see the adults dipping their their toes in the water, you see people diving in and swimming around. Scenario two, that same family is now around a campfire. They cozy up in the warmth of the fire, but you notice that there's an aversion to touching the fire in a way that wasn't present with them touching the water. And we can ask, well, why is that? Why do they have an aversion to fire that doesn't seem to be present to water? Well, we can have a good evolutionary explanation for that. We can say, well, when they touch the fire, the fire consumes them. It creates harm and they are less likely to survive if they don't have that kind of aversion. So they've evolved to have an aversion to touching fire because you can't survive if you don't have that aversion. Both the realists and the anti-realists on the existence of fire can accept that explanation as being consistent with their ontology. Evolutionary theories can can be consistent with multiple competing ontologies. And that explanation doesn't negate the fact that fire is real. And so if some of these explanations are true, it would negate moral realism. It's not irreconcilable with moral realism. It's consistent. So everything that I'm saying right now is to sort of defend moral realism against a charge that the fact you're raising is an inconsistency or refutation.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [37:09] Gotcha. I guess, I'll have to prove it more realistic. I would agree with you. Nothing I'm saying is necessarily going to disprove realism. I guess my argument would just be that everything that I'm saying is necessary and sufficient to make all the statements I would need to about what we call maybe human morality. And I would argue that a realist explanation is just adding an unnecessary layer on top that doesn't need to be there for explaining I guess everything

T.K. Coleman [37:31] that could be explained about it. Now we have our our our our our I think this is our debate.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [37:37] Okay. Sure. Okay. So I guess a question I would have with relation to that. Are you familiar with games like the Sims? Yeah. Yeah. So I imagine in the Sims, if you were to make it sufficiently complicated, you could have interactions that resemble like the human world, you know, at some point, I actually have never played where I played SimCity 2000. I never played it, but I'm familiar. Okay. Yeah. So very old. But I'm imagining we could create like a sufficiently complex, you know, computer game with the Sims or whatever. If if I were to say in the Sims, you know, John murdering Jane would be wrong. Is there a type of moral statement or moral fact there? The same way that there could be an R real world of John murdering Jane being wrong. And then I imagine my answer would be, well, no, you're they're both with respect to some agreed upon system or whatever. But I imagine your answer would be yes. And then my question would be how do you like what's the difference between the moral factor in these two worlds? I guess. Yeah. Yeah. So

T.K. Coleman [38:35] I'm going to I'm going to propose a way of going about that and you tell me if you're cool with it. Yeah. I like to give you my argument for why I think moral realism is true. Okay. Sure. It's so hard for me to say moral realism when I say moral realism. Sure. But I'll give you my argument for that. And then I'm going to make the case that you that any argument against moral realism effectively undermines physical realism. Okay. And every argument that you give for physical realism also substantiates moral realism. Gotcha. And after I give my reasons for why I believe moral realism is true, I think it'll be easier for me to sort of respond to objections and answer questions. And maybe even be able to apply some pressure back. Okay. All right. So I defined it as a subset of realism, right? In the same way that rocks and mountains exist. I believe that moral facts exist. Going back to the appearance versus reality distinction, I think we both agree it's a fair question to ask why should you believe that when you seem to see a tree that it's more than a mere seeming that this is not just part of the content of your consciousness, but it's real. It's out there in some sense. I think we justify this by an epistemic principle. I'm sorry, inference to best explanation. So we identify certain features of the experience and we posit realism as the best explanation for those features. So there are lots of features we can assign to the so-called physical world, but I'll just kind of give two to keep it simple. First is universality of appearance. There's shared experience. So when I see a chair over there, I can say, Josh, look over there. What do you see? And when he says chair, I go, destiny, look over there. What do you see? Chair. I can go, okay, it's not just me that lens some credence to the idea that this experience I'm having of seeing a chair is being caused by something other than me. So there's the universality of experience that I share this with other people. The second is the involuntary nature of it. When it comes to these physical perceptions I have, there's something about them that impose on me, that there's a kind of constraint I experience. So for instance, I can close my eyes and I can imagine a blue color car. I can manipulate it and change the color to red. I can make it go 80 miles an hour in my mind. Then I can bring it to a complete stop. I can have music playing in that scene. I can drain that scene of color. I seem to be like a god in that realm where I can manipulate and control. And so that would be a good candidate for saying, well, that's just my subjective experiences. But when it comes to other kinds of perceptions I have, it seems that even when I don't want them to be there, I can't make them go away. Even when I want them to be there, I can't muster them up. And even when I have no concept of them or expect them, I seem to interact with them or run into them. I don't have to have a concept of a wall or have ever seen a wall in my life. And all of a sudden I will have the phenomenological experience of hitting a wall. I can have the phenomenological experience of touching water or touching fire even though I didn't have these concepts in my mind. And so the involuntary nature of the experience is another element that lends credence to the idea that this is imposing on me from the outside. So I just take those two features. And if I need more, I'll give more. But if I just start with those, the universality of appearance and the involuntary nature of the perceptions, the best explanation for that is that there really is something out there, a tree, a mountain or what have you that is imposing on me and causing me to have these subjective experiences. So there is a subjective component, but there's an object of component that's causing it. One quick point of clarification. To say that there is something out there that's causing me to experience this isn't to make a claim to knowledge about having a complete theory about what it is that's out there because there are entity realists who would say it's a tree as I see it causing me to see it as such. And there are structural realists who would say these are just geometrical extensions in space. The pattern is something that I impose, but like it's it's atoms and molecules imposing on me. Either way, both of them are realism. Even if you take like a barkly an idea of these are ideas in the mind of God. That's still a kind of realism, but it's a disagreement about the substance of what's real. He says it's not physical. It's ideas in the mind of God. Okay, so that's my soft case for physical realism. I don't know if you've

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [43:24] argued with somebody, but you've made this point a few times. I don't know if you've had a big disagreement, but I'm always going to agree with you there. I don't know if it was syrup or whatever, there's like the reference triangle or whatever. But like when people 2000 years ago said water, and then we say water today, there's a question of like a re-referring to the same thing, and it's like, well, how could you have even known what water was in the past when you didn't know anything about chemistry, right? When I say water, I mean H2O, but like, well, not really, this isn't pure H2O in front of me or anything. So I understand when you're making those distinctions, I don't know if you've, it sounds like you've had a big distinction in the past or argument with somebody in the past, but that's why I laughed at there. Sorry, yeah. So this is my

T.K. Coleman [43:57] first one, actually, but I think about these things. Yeah, I just feel like distinctions are a type of thing that don't get made. Sure, for sure. Okay, so that's my case for physical realism. I like to now show how that applies to moral realism, but before I do that, any questions,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [44:18] any thoughts so far? No, I think I broadly agree that you're too prongs, basically, where universality, we can all speak to kind of like a shared experience. We can all agree on some set of facts about external things. We can test them with our sense data. It'll convey similar things to us. And then there are things that are imposed upon you whether or not you want to believe in them or not. You might have never been introduced to a chair or any physical object before somehow, and you'll walk into it and you will stub your toe and it will hurt, and there will be a thing you can't overcome. So yeah, I think I might agree with these two things,

T.K. Coleman [44:47] sure. Yeah. Okay, so now let's talk about moral realism, because I believe in that, like trees and mountains, I believe that with moral values. So the first observation we can make

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [45:02] well, okay. I was actually just going to think there was an example. I thought of the my test is, but you might want to explain more first, or let me give you like a question, and then as you explain your moral realism, we can kind of speak to that, right? You mentioned in your mind that there were certain things that you could think of. Something that's kind of interesting to me is I feel like for humans, there are certain things that even in our mind where we're gods, there are certain kind of like epistemic principles that we can't think of. So if I were to think of the two of you, and I would close my eyes, and I would imagine I want to imagine you as being taller and shorter than him at the same time. I actually can't conceive of that, but these are like, I don't know, I think it's principle of non-contradiction, or that I can't actually even fathom that thing. So there's going to be some like logical things that I'm like locked into that I have to believe. So some things I can kind of bend and twist. I can imagine people as different sizes or shapes. There are certain logical epistemic principles. I can't imagine them violating. When it comes to morality, I would argue there are a lot of things that I can imagine breaking in ways that are totally fine. So for instance, I would say in every single movie ever, in the real world, killing a person is a really big deal. This is your ending of life. This is a whole subset of experiences for I don't have to explain here why killing is really bad. If you watch, you know, like John Wick or any of these movies that I enjoy, they're really fun. There's a lot of killing and it really doesn't matter. It's like not a big deal at all. I was like, oh, you know, a million people died who cares? If you watch any of the Avengers movies, there's billions of dollars of citywide damage being caused in nobody cares. This is whatever no one cares. And that to me feels like a like a disconnect. I can never imagine the same type of violations of like the physical universe. But for the moral stuff, all of it can be thrown out so easily that will argue it kind of tests that maybe that imposition subset of your, you know, you got like the universality and imposition that your morality there isn't actually imposed at all. You can totally throw it out if you want to make some kind of fun, interesting thing. Yeah. And then, okay, so then you can explain what you're going to say. Then maybe find a way to come back and maybe answer that question. How would you? Yeah. That's really good. Yeah. It's great to flag that. Yeah.

T.K. Coleman [47:02] Okay. So a couple of points of clarification about that. When it comes to these thought experiments, the part that I believe is purely subjective that I'm making up is the part where I'm able to just create and destroy at whim, right? But I do experience constraints and I take those constraints as evidence of a reality that imposes on me. And so I'm a realist when it comes to laws of logic, epistemic principles in a way that I'm not when it comes to my ability to imagine a blue color giraffe, right? One of them I'm making up and it's a constraint that I can blow right through it any time. And the other imposes on me and there's there's more to deal with than just me. There's a reality that contains with me. The second thing too is I want to make sure we don't treat all constraints as merely in the form of that which is inconceivable because when it comes to physical structures, I can imagine myself walking through walls. And when I close my eyes and see myself doing that, that's the part that's subjective. The experience of TK walking through a wall in his mind, that's something that he created. That's not a reality imposing on me. That's me blowing through constraints in this realm where I have almost got like powers. But in the physical world, no matter how much I can imagine, not so much in the physical world, but when there are certain phenomenological experiences where no matter how hard I try, they say, no, you can't go any further. Stop, right? And I don't have any power over them, even if I don't like it. So constraints don't have to be inconceivable. It can be conceivable that I can surpass the constraint, but there is a real thing that I'm unable to do because of them. So just those points of clarification. All right, so now applying the soft case for realism to moral realism, we see those same two features. Universality of appearance. In most discussions on morals, people focus on the disagreements. The disagreements are easy because the disagreements are inflated. The reason disagreements are inflated is because when it comes to physical reality, I'm limited in how many things I can create, right? But when it comes to moral reality, I can treat any claim as if it's a moral judgment. And so it's easy for me to print money in the realm of moral judgments. So I can say, what kind of, what are you drinking? Is that Fiji water? Man, you're a bad person. And now I've just created a moral claim. And so there's an excess of moral claims. And I think one point we both could agree on is that there are many things that are treated like a moral issue that are probably not moral issues. I like strawberry ice cream. You like chocolate ice cream. Josh doesn't like ice cream at all. Who's right? None of us are bad guys for a taste. It's a matter of taste. An immoral realist can make a distinction between matters of taste, matters of fact. So not all claims about the moral value of things are actually legitimate claims. Some of them are morals matters of taste. Okay. So, but if we focus on the agreements, we find something interesting. We find that there are certain moral convictions at a fundamental level that are shared in a way that is geographically across space and that is also enduring over time. So for instance, when we argue about particulars, we often don't pay attention to what we pre-suppose in the argument. So let's say someone says, I think the appropriate legal drinking age should be 25. Another person says, no, no, I like it where we have it in the US. It's 21. And another person says, I think you guys are just way too serious. And motherly, it's 16. That's a good age. Well, what none of them are discussing is the fact that there is such a thing as an inappropriate age. That's where the agreement is. The disagreement is, well, how much wiggle room do we have within that? No one's making the argument that we should give babies whiskey, right? And so there's a shared intuition that there is such a thing as a wrong age to administer alcohol. So when we look at cultures, every culture has a concept of treachery or betrayal. Every culture has a concept of arbitrary killing. Every culture has a concept of there are certain conditions in which it is permissible to kill another person. And there are certain conditions where arbitrary killing is not justified. And so even where these cultures disagree on the particulars, we're not able to find counter examples where we can point to cultures that have no moral categories at all. Every culture has its concept of heroes and villains. This is the type of person that's worth emulating. This is the type of person that embodies virtue. This is the type of person that does evil and that we should shine. Now, that's an observation. That doesn't mean morals exist just from that, but that's an observation that we have this universality of appearance in the same way that I don't just seem to see a tree. You also seem to see it too. You don't have to believe in trees yet, but that is something that has to be explained and we can't just ignore that.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [52:03] Oh, go ahead. Yeah, so a quick question because I agree with what I think you've said so far, which makes sense because you've said it's not technically an argument for more realism yet. Have you ever seen pictures of speaking of trees? If you look from above to below or below to above and you look at the tops of trees, the tree leaves are always like perfectly fitting together kind of like a puzzle. It has to be that way, though. Because they were constantly overlapping

T.K. Coleman [52:27] the other than they would die because they need sunlight. You're moving towards the hey, but look, I can account for this without more. Basically, yeah, because my question is like,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [52:35] yeah, it's going to be the thing. They can only be that way. They have to have that because no other human society would exist. I'm almost done. Let me go ahead and then I'll respond to that.

T.K. Coleman [52:41] Yeah, go ahead. Okay, so the second thing is the involuntary nature of the experience. One of the fascinating things about the moral impulse is that it seems to impose on us even when it's inconvenient for us, even when we don't want it, even when we don't like it. Some of the strongest examples of this are the things that are often set forth as counter examples. So let's take people who are criminals or psychopaths who seem to have no conscience. They totally reject societal norms. Three guys decide, screw everybody, you know, we're just going to think about ourselves and they rob a bank together, but they feel deeply wronged when one of the people violates the agreement to split the money evenly, three ways and takes a little extra for himself. Or the psychopath, like if you look at the history of people like different serial killers, Ted Bundy will be a good example of this. They tend to be some of the most self righteous people you will ever meet. They lack empathy. They lack a sense of moral compassion and because we equate moral sensitivity only with empathy and compassion, we miss it. But many of these people are so self-righteous, they have very strong opinions about who deserves to live and who doesn't. They have very strong opinions about privilege. They have very strong opinions about the people who have wronged them and done evil and deserve death and deserve suffering and so on. And that's a sense of moral pain and in the same way that when I run into a wall, I feel physical pain. And this physical pain that I feel is a subject of experience, but there's something imposing on me that accounts for why I'm having this experience, that human beings everywhere have some kind of sense of moral pain. It might be expressed in remorse, it might be expressed in guilt, it might be expressed in a sense of pity and compassion, it might be expressed in self righteous indignation towards others. But if you want to talk about constraints, there is this constraint that makes it impossible for us to live as if morals are not true. Even if we philosophically say, hey, I don't believe in object of moral values, we can't help but treat people and talk to them as if they have done us wrong when they violate certain codes of ethics. So we have the universality of experience. We have the involuntary nature of it because we feel guilty when we don't want to sometimes. We resent ourselves for filling pity sometimes like, man, I only got five dollars left and this homeless guy is asking me for money and I'm so broke right now, but there's a part of me that just can't freaking say no even though I want to, right? So we have both of those elements. And so what I want to say here is that in the same way that physical reality, a mind independent physical reality is the best explanation for those features when it comes to objects. A mind independent moral reality is the best explanation for those features when it comes to moral judgments. Now we got to deal with the the objection that's ready and waiting. Okay, that's fine, but anyone who hears that and think that sounds soft. It's because they have what they think to be a good alternative, right? Like here's an alternative that can effectively undermine that. And so if both of them are possible, then the burdens back on you, TK, to show that one is more likely than the other. And the alternative that you supply is, hey, look, we can account for those two features when it comes to people's moral sensitivities by positing an evolutionary explanation. Now you already agree with me that that doesn't prove a disproven ontology, but what it at least does is that it at least undermines the the the weight of my argument by putting something out there that's just as possible, right? Okay, my first objection to this is how does that not undermine physical realism as well? So let me give you an example. I can say that the reason my eye processes light in the way that it does is because that's what's conducive to survival. My brain has evolved to process information in a way that keeps me alive. And so there's nothing about the way in which I process information, the way in which I analyze evidence, I do research or observe the world that is truth seeking or optimized for truth. It's just optimized for survival. And so I can undermine physical realism with that same objection by saying, all right, my eye sees my ear hears, my brain processes information, but none of this has anything to do with truth and reality. It just has everything

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [57:38] to do with survival. Well, now this might be an area where I get more uncomfortably fundamental or I don't assume as much. I think I would agree with that statement. So insofar as, for instance, like collars exist. I would say that like we have the quality of the experience of in the sensation of seeing a color, but when we actually measure, you know, all the electromagnetic spectrum, color is just a very small part of that. We don't have a physical sensation for x-ray or gamma rays or or micro rays or any of the other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. So insofar as, collars exist. Well, there's a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that most of us can perceive if you're not colorblind. So, but I would say that my my concept of there being some underlying physical reality kind of only extends as far as like human I guess evolution has existed to perceive said reality. I would be humble epistemically towards some type of seemingly illogical or seemingly irrational reality that exists outside of what I can perceive because I would agree with the statement that we've only evolved as far as I can tell to survive. Maybe there is some part of reality that if we could perceive it, it would actually undermine our ability to survive. And I have no reason to believe that we would have evolved to perceive that part of reality, rather we would evolve to survive. So there might be, I think there are interesting questions with regards to like AI. And then I don't think about or talk about too much, but it might be that if the AI has become sufficiently complex, there are whole parts of the universe that they'd be able to perceive that we just don't even have the organs to be able to perceive because there's no benefit to us whatsoever as a creature to be able to. So we wouldn't be involved with the things too. The same way that, you know, animals that can't perceive sound or can't perceive any light whatsoever, single-cell creatures or whatever, could theoretically or not theoretically that do exist. So I would say it doesn't necessarily undermine physical realism because I already don't take for granted that it could be that there are things that we don't perceive in the universe, so we just don't have the organs to perceive because there's no evolutionary benefit to us. I don't assume first that humans are like truth-seeking machines that were created just to perceive truth. We just perceive the things that are beneficial to our survival. Let me ask you a few questions just to

T.K. Coleman [59:46] get some clarity on what a position is on things. Do you believe that we have a reasons, like good, epistimically justifiable reasons to believe that there is a physical world out there

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [59:57] independently of our perceiving it? I would say yes, but I'm going to say for the same reasons why we would believe anything about the Harry Potter universe. I would say all of this kind of like is grounded in the subject of human experience, but I don't know if I could speak to like true universality outside of the human experience. Like I agree that all of us have a shared reality the same way that everybody inside the Sims would have a shared reality, but I would have to be humble about anything that exists outside of that because there'd be no way for me to perceive it.

T.K. Coleman [60:23] So here's where I'm confused. When you've talked about some of your misgivings about moral realism, you've used analogies with the physical world and you've expressed a kind of confidence that like, hey, we can we can settle the debate about the pickup truck being outside. We can we can settle debates about, you know, flat earth or whatever it may be and and you have sought some similar method for morals and and the impression that I get from that is that if if one could provide that that would lend it the same weight of credibility as like your convictions towards the physical world. What you're saying right now sounds inconsistent with that because it sounds like yeah,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [61:05] so I understand what you're saying. What I'm saying is that the whatever humans perceive on the physical world, it feels like the morality is an abstracted layer away from that that doesn't have the same weight as the physical world perception, but I'm not necessarily saying that physical world perception we have is the ultimate frame of reference for the universe that beneath that there might be another thing, but it's outside of our perception because we're only human. So we have our subjective physical interactions in the world. So I could make the statement, although it sounds ridiculous, maybe there is a possibility that a fourth geometric dimension exists, but we just can't traverse that dimension because if we could, we would die instantly because there's a whole bunch of terrible stuff for whatever reason that exists or the gauntlet or our third dimension. So I would never make the statement that like, well, I know for a fact that the fourth dimension geometrically doesn't exist. I would just say that it might it might not, but I can't perceive it. So when I say that like the morality questions seem to be less testable than the physical ones, I'm not saying that's because the physical ones are the ultimate universal frame of reference that we can perceive. I'm just saying that of that there's a moral layer on top that seems to be less provable than the physical layer on the bottom, and there might be something beneath that, but it's outside of my perception, yeah.

T.K. Coleman [62:16] Yeah, I think I understand what I want to push back on is why you have any confidence at all in that physical side. I get that you place it a step above morals, but oh, could necessary to avoid

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [62:28] absurdity, I guess. Unfortunately. Okay. So it's kind of one of the, I think therefore I am think basically I kind of have to like theoretically, there could be a demon that's placing before us, an illusion of the world that we could never prove or disprove. I could never speak to like 100 percent universal certainty to that, but I kind of have to, otherwise, everything is pretty absurd

T.K. Coleman [62:47] otherwise. Okay, so a couple of things. So yeah, so I think therefore I am was was was was not day cards way of directly solving the evil deceiver problem for day card. He he began with methodological skepticism saying, whatever I can conceive of as being wrong, I'm just going to toss it aside experimentally. Yeah, because I want to see if I can establish some foundations foundation, which I can build my edifice of knowledge. And I would agree that, but I would just say that

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [63:16] the foundation that I can establish is the one that I can establish, but I wouldn't assume I don't think I have a good reason to assume that that's like a universal foundation. Sure. There couldn't be some creature that can perceive of more truths that I can't even possibly conceive of. They might perceive things that I can't even conceive of. Yeah. So, okay, so when you when you,

T.K. Coleman [63:33] when you've given evolutionary explanation for something like the moral impulse, for instance, do you take that evolutionary explanation to be true, or is this just a tendency that you have to think about things in that way, but it doesn't have any truth value? I mean, I would say it's

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [63:52] true in so far as it explains the things that I'm trying to explain, but it's going to sit within that context of like what can humans perceive, I guess. Like, I wouldn't say that it's like a it establishes some universal truth that if there were any other higher dimensional being in the universe, it would also understand that truth. It would probably be a subset of some other thing that they understand that I can't possibly conceive of.

T.K. Coleman [64:14] You set forth evolutionary explanations as if they are a potential defeated of the claim to

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [64:21] moral realism. Sure. Not necessarily defeated, but like they're necessary and sufficient. They explain everything. And then adding that moral abstraction, I think, introduces some problems, and it doesn't explain anything that my explanation wouldn't already account for, I would say.

T.K. Coleman [64:35] Help me remember this. I want to stay on this line, but help me remember this. Yeah, you made the claim a couple of times that moral realism requires the positive of some extra stuff, and I want to deal with that, because I don't think that's true, but let's come back to that in a sec. When you say the explanation suffices, though, are you expressing your truth, or are you just expressing the way my brain works?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [65:00] I mean, I would say kind of both, I guess like if we can conceive of like math, like I would say that we're working at like different levels here, but like I would say like one plus one is true, that that's a true statement, but that true statement exists on like a bed of logic that is only that that that can exist within the human mind. But there might be other logics that humans would not be able to perceive or even conceive of that might exist outside of the human experience, but I can't deal with those because I'm only human. So yeah, yeah. So I only say that because like I speak of like an ultimate like bedrock, but that ultimate bedrock is really just my subjective experience, and I'm epistimically humble about other bed rocks that might exist, because my question of you could solve this, I'd be great, because my question would be, well, can you prove that your experience you're having right now is like the realest thing in the universe and you're not a brain and a vet?

T.K. Coleman [65:53] No, no, I couldn't prove that. Okay, so that's my position, I guess, yeah.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [65:57] Do we differ there or could you be a brain and a vet that exists that the people who are experimenting on you might be able to conceive of things or perceive things that is inconceivable

T.K. Coleman [66:05] or imperceptible to you? Yeah, so I do think you can argue your way out of that, but I do want to say that the brain and the vet, that's still a form of realism because the brain and the vet theory is to say that what I am is the brain sitting in the vet, but there's a vet that I didn't create. Somebody else put me here and all of these experiences I have really are being imposed on me from the outside. Somebody's putting these signals into my brain and telling me that there's a tree over there. What have you? So that would mean that the world is real. The tree is real, but the substance of it is something different than what it might seem to me. Sure, but I'm only bringing up

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [66:40] the, I'm only bringing that up because I'm saying that there can be real, I'm not arguing with the brain and the vet against the difference between moral realism or the physical realism. I'm also saying that when I speak of things as being real on a physical level, I'm still working with then kind of the, what I understand to be the subjective constraints of the human mind for what we can perceive. Sure. So when I say things are real, I mean that when I say there's a difference between the realness of like the physical world and the realness of the moral world, I'm not saying that whatever you're calling more realism is totally bunk because I have objective physical truth of all things on my side. I'm just saying that it seems like that's another layer of abstraction. It's a different type of truth. The same way that Harry Potter is a different type of truth than whatever physical

T.K. Coleman [67:19] facts are that I can perceive in the world. All right. So why is it rationally permissible for you to say I can set forth an alternative explanation for why people feel the moral impulse without there being moral structures? That's permissible for you to say and that that successfully undermines my position. But I can't say I can submit an alternative for why you seem to see the things you see and for why you even think the way that you think and that doesn't undermine your

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [67:56] position. What's the asymmetry there? For, can you give me an example of what type of thing you

T.K. Coleman [68:03] would posit? Yeah. Okay. So let me try to format your objection to me still logistically and you tell me if I'm representing you. Well, we could say statement one, our moral intuitions can be accounted for with evolutionary explanations. Statement two, evolutionary explanations track survival, not reality. Statement three, our moral intuitions track survival, not reality. Therefore, our moral intuitions are only a reliable source for survival, not knowing reality. Is that a fair representation? I think so. Yeah. Okay. So now I'm just going to repeat that best I can and just substitute something else. Sure. Okay. The way in which our brain processes information can be accounted for by evolutionary explanations, evolutionary explanations track for survival, not reality. The way our brain processes information tracks for survival, not reality. Therefore, the way our brain processes information is not a reliable source for truth, but for survival. Okay. Why does that work for against moral realism? But it doesn't work against your very cognitive processes by which you come up with arguments

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [69:30] against moral realism. Okay. I'm going to totally flip my position. Okay. Okay. I don't have these

T.K. Coleman [69:37] discussions too often. It's going to be fun. Maybe we can create something. Well, no, let me, I'm

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [69:41] going to restate and plan language what you're saying, because now I think I understand what your objection is. Okay. Okay. So I'm arguing for physical realism, but moral anti-realism. And you're telling me, well, whatever argument you put forth for physical realism, and you say this in the beginning, would necessarily carry over to moral realism. And I'm trying to argue, well, there's different structures that I see to kind of like physical realism and what you're calling this moral world. And you're saying, okay, well, all the ways that you can describe morality, you're accounting for all of your intuitions and feelings are being just survival mechanisms to essentially. I'm saying, well, yeah, of course. And you're saying, okay, well, it seems to me that you're so epistemically humble that you're also willing to say all of your physical things, and perceptions are the same thing. I think I have to say yes to that based on everything I've said. But then I guess that would be a physical anti-realist. But now I've changed my position completely. So I should have never said physical realism in the first place. I'm trying to be true. Yeah, that

T.K. Coleman [70:37] might be the case. It would be more fair to describe what you're doing, not as changing your position, but realizing based on where the discussion has gone, that you'll need to be more precise and refined in your presentation of what you believe. Sure. Or rather, I shouldn't ever identify

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [70:54] I guess it's physical realism. I guess I'm not sure 100% of the that would be the kind of for it. Yeah, because I don't believe I guess it comes down to the matter of like the context of what we're talking about. Like if I start with the context of humans have some universal experience of the planet, like we all see a couch, we can all touch it or whatever, we can start making descriptions about the planet and the universe I guess from there. But if somebody would ask me, just checking real quick, do you believe that your experiences as true and that the human experiences as true as it could ever be a physical reality? I would be epistemically humbled towards that position. I say, well, I don't know that 100% I can't I wouldn't make that statement. So I would that necessarily be a physically anti-realist position. I guess I'm not I'm not

T.K. Coleman [71:38] actually 100% sure on that. No, I should state where we agree. I think we both agree that there's

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [71:42] more to reality than human experience. Okay, including like other logics or other dimensions, things that would be they're not just like we can't directly perceive them, but they're inconceivable. Like literally not because you like the building is so huge, but inconceivable and that like maybe contradictory objects or properties could exist to the same object. Like that kind of thing. I don't can see that. You don't can see that. Okay, I would I would say that it would be it might be possible. I would be epistemically humble in that record. I'm not sure I don't know and I would

T.K. Coleman [72:09] ever make a statement about it. Yeah. But there's a problem with saying that contradictions are possible because you have to presuppose the law of identity just to even make that statement. Sure. So it's kind of like saying a boobalars exists and I go what's in the boobalar and you say in a boobalar and I say what's in the boobalar? You know, it's a sugar shusha. Is there what's that?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [72:32] It's like we it doesn't mean anything. Yeah, so my question would be is there a reason why this isn't a test question. So I just don't have the answer. I'm just curious what you're yeah, we're is there a reason why I should assume that the a priori logical assumptions that are necessary for the human mind to conceive of things is there a reason where I should assume that that's like the that's like a facet of reality that is true and unshakable and that there's no being in the universe that could ever conceive of something that is literally logically inconceivable

T.K. Coleman [73:03] to me. Yeah. Yeah. Aside from like a god or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we have to make a distinction between going beyond logic and going against logic. Sure. And sometimes these words get used in different ways, but like beyond logic simply means hey, beyond what I currently understand or beyond what I might even have the hardware to understand. And we both can agree that there are realities that are just beyond our IQ, beyond our capacity to think and do the research or even just like there are there are sounds that a dog can hear that we can't hear. So we're just not constituted in such a way to experience those things. And I understand what you're saying

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [73:49] there. Yeah. But I'm saying something that is beyond that because you're taking the reality that we have and you're kind of like extending it along things you already know. Sure. I guess my question is couldn't could there not be things that are unknowable to us. So not just like colors like expanded wavelengths, but just like inconsistent logic, basically. Yeah. Well, I don't want to say

T.K. Coleman [74:07] inconsistent logic, but what I want to do because I do want to say is like I understand yeah, even our capacity to conceive is constrained a great deal to by our experience, right? The more we experience, the more expansive our imagination becomes and so on. And so the very process of learning seems to provide evidence that there are realities that relative to any given state of mind we're in are inconceivable to us. I'm freely with you on that. But when you say that and even other logics, you could mean that there are other formal systems that exist beyond what we know. And yeah, that's definitely a thing. But when you say that contradictions exist or that contradictions might exist or it's possible for contradictions to exist. Now we're saying something that literally doesn't mean anything. Do I need to demonstrate that or you agree with that?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [75:06] I agree with you because you're expressing things that I agree with. But my question is more like, are we just limited in our ability to express things? So when I say like, well, couldn't there be inconsistent logic, you would say like the response is like, well, if we're talking about logic, we're talking about even the concept of consistency, then there can't be inconsistency because it's basically baked into the understanding of logic and consistency that can't be an inconsistent thing because that doesn't work. And I'm asking, okay, so our thing that could exist outside of our human understanding there. Maybe to ground this on an example, I'm curious how you would think about this. Do you think that there are... I'll use moral facts. Do you think that animals perceive moral facts? So maybe dogs or cats. And then do you think that reptiles perceive moral facts? Do you think single-cell creatures perceive moral facts? Do you think that at least permeate up and down through all of the cognition of things or do moral facts just come into existence with humans? Yeah, I could you speak on that? I'm just curious, yeah.

T.K. Coleman [76:09] Yeah, so I believe moral structures are as real, but in a different way as physical structures. And in the same way that we can run into a physical wall, we can run into a moral wall. And I believe that our ability to theorize about physical structures or moral structures or any reality varies with our cognitive ability, right? So I wouldn't compare a squirrel and a coyote in their ability to effectively cross the street. They're not equals here. One has a cognitive ability to do this more successfully than the other. Okay, wait, can I challenge you on that real quick?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [76:44] Oh, man, yeah, that's hilarious though. We're getting really bad right there. Okay, I'm just also not saying this just because I want to argue, I genuinely don't know the answer to these things because these are things I just don't explore. I'm just just deeply about much. So I'm generally just curious. So when you say varies with cognitive ability, in my mind, there are things that you can conceive of due to IQ or whatever, but like pushing all of that aside, there are physical like things that are granted to the human mind that are irrespective of cognitive ability, save for like you're missing half your brain or something is like to be a brain damage, like no matter how 40 IQ somebody is versus 200 IQ somebody is, they will always run into the wall. They will always run into the couch. Now they might not be able to conceive of, you know, physical structures and some, you know, very philosophical way, but they know it and they can see it and they can interact with it. So when you say, yeah, so just because you mentioned so the animals for cognitive ability, I wouldn't view an animal as being just a lower IQ human. I would view their mind as being a different thing in kind. Yeah, okay,

T.K. Coleman [77:46] okay. Yes, so I believe animals have different degrees of cognition. And I'm mostly agnostic on my theories about what different species are capable of. Like some animals seem to be really intelligent in ways that we're only beginning to understand. And some animals seem to just not really have it, but I don't believe that you need to have the intelligence to think critically about the theory behind reality in order to run up against those walls, so to speak. So a dog doesn't need to perform mathematical calculations in order to run up against the realities that we use math to describe. A dog doesn't need to understand gravity in order for its very being to be affected by gravity, even though it wouldn't have that conversation with you. Additionally, there's the element of moral agency. There's not just intelligence, but there's agency. The capacity to disagree, the capacity to disobey, the capacity to opt out of something, the capacity to exercise optionally. And so this gives rise to the distinction between what we might call an act of moral wrongdoing and the state of culpability. It's possible to act in a way that's incongruent with moral structure in a way that is disordered and in a way that produces disorder, but for that person or that entity to not be culpable because it lacks moral agency. That lack of moral agency might be a matter of intelligence as we often see with humans where you do something wrong and you say, hey, don't do that. That's wrong, but you don't put them in jail. You don't punish them. You don't find them. They just didn't know any better. But sometimes it's also due to the way an entity is constituted. So machines don't have, well, let me say this microphone because machines are this microphone doesn't have moral agency, right? It doesn't have the capacity to punch me in the face or disagree with me in a rude manner or anything like that. So when it comes to animals, I don't think there's anything about the experiences of animals that supports or negates the existence of moral structures. I would say just like with physical structures, they run into walls, but they don't necessarily describe or talk about or think about these realities in the way that we do at highly abstract levels. They don't necessarily do philosophy, math, and physics.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [80:11] Do you think that animals that could an animal commit, let's say we'll go down to reptiles. Do you think that a reptile could commit a moral wrong? Do you think they have a different set of morals? If there were a set of morals, or do they have the feeling of it? I've seen videos where a crocodile's would just grab a person's arm like another crocodile arm and rip it off because they're random. Do you think they're like committing, are they committing moral wrongs there,

T.K. Coleman [80:38] or do you not think they have moral systems? I don't know if animals can be held culpable for the things they do. I just don't know if they have moral agency. It's my habit to not think of them as such, but I'm a skeptic on that. I've always felt really uncomfortable when people make strong claims about what animals do and don't know, because we just don't have perfect systems for not only communicating with them, but understanding the way in which they communicate. The jury's out on whether or not they have agency, but I'm inclined to think they don't, but I don't advocate any positions that depend on them having it or not having it. Can I ask you a question that is,

Joshua Fields-Millburn [81:18] I think, related to that, but maybe it gets closer to what Destiny's asking here. Take a human being. They're on a deserted island by themselves for the rest of their lives. Does morality exist for that person on the deserted island, and is it different from how it exists for all of us

T.K. Coleman [81:38] in this room? No, I would say it exists for them as well. I would say it's not something that depends on their geography or their space. Give me an example of something they could do that would then be immoral. If I say, hey, Destiny, man, I got a rocket ship. You want to go to Mars with me, and then I take him up to Mars and I murder him on Mars. I haven't violated any laws on Earth. It's just him and I. No one else knows. I was in a completed different part of the universe. It's

Joshua Fields-Millburn [82:10] still morally wrong for me to have done that. That's not you want to deserted island by yourself.

T.K. Coleman [82:16] If I want to deserted island by myself, I can say to myself, boy, if I ever get back to Earth, I'm going to murder everybody. I can set that intention in my heart. That would be morally wrong. Destiny responded. If anybody ever shows up on this planet, I'm just going to kill them for fun.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [82:39] I think it depends on how you conceive of morality. Some people argue that there are certain virtues that are moral to embody. Self-harm could be considered immoral, even as just yourself. A lot of people conceive of morality as how you interact with other people. We could conceive of things you could do bad to yourself. I guess it might be immoral. If you build the nurture out there for something. There was a thing that you have brought up a couple times now that I think is really important. This concept of moral agency. How do you feel about determinism? Like the freewill question?

T.K. Coleman [83:18] Yeah, I guess. Yeah. Oh, man, we're opening up like five tabs here. I'm not a determinist. I believe in libertarian freewill. Libertarian freewill. Maybe we need to be clear. Maybe I should drop that libertarian because I could be introducing ambiguity. Oh, sure. I understand it to be three

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [83:34] categories. You have the determinists that nobody likes to talk to. You have the compatibilists who are like, okay, we can talk about different levels of free choice. Then you have the libertarian freewill, which is I'm summoning from another dimension the capacity for making choices that is not necessarily tied causally to the physical reality that I exist in today. So when you say

T.K. Coleman [83:53] libertarian freewill, are you in that third category? Yeah, except I would describe it in a more compatibilist friendly way. I wouldn't necessarily put it as we're summoning from another dimension. I'm kind of in the compatibilist camp. And I also would say that it is not a commitment of this position to believe that freewill is the same as free reign. I didn't get to determine my height and a host of other features. The ability to choose doesn't mean I get to determine what my options are and so on. So freewill occurs within a context of constraint.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [84:30] Some of the questions, some of the hypotheticals I kind of asked earlier about like the trees growing in a certain way, humans only being a certain way. A lot of these things are, we kind of bumped up against this, but we haven't really talked about it. If you were to get rid of your concept of freewill, let's say you were a hard-line determinist, would that necessarily erase your belief in like more realism or could more realism exist in a world where you're a hard-line determinist

T.K. Coleman [84:52] or a compatibilist even maybe? I mean, if I were a determinist, then I would be compelled to think whatever the forces and factors are that dictate my thoughts. I would be, my opinions would be at the same level as hurricane is happening. The wind is blowing.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [85:19] I kind of believe that. So that might be a different, a more fundamental thing as well, because I think that if you have a moral agency, and a lot of the questions I asked earlier about reptiles about trees growing in a certain way or whatever, presupposing all of these moral or moral, the presupposing every immoral thing is, could you have chosen differently, right? Because without that, it's kind of what are we even talking about at that point? But then I also obviously, when we speak, we're speaking within the context of our ordinary day-to-day experiences, or sort of say, hey, did you do this? I would say, well, obviously I did that. It's the only thing I could have ever done since the creation of the universe from the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago, so obviously we're speaking on the level of, as a compatibilist, you would say, well, there are different types of choices I can make. When I say, I chose to do this for dinner, I'm not saying that I summoned Libertarian Freewill to make this choice. I'm saying that well, in the context that we understand we can make choices as a choice that I made, yeah. If you were a compatibilist, do you think you could still believe in more realism, or do you think even compatibilism would commit you to kind of just like, well, physical realism was basically all there is, and I passed that, it's kind of meaningless to say anything passed.

T.K. Coleman [86:23] I'm inclined to think so, but I would have to make sure I understand it well enough. It sounds like your version of compatibilism is such that you believe in the exercise of freewill

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [86:34] within highly constrained contexts. Kind of, yeah. As a compatibilist, I would say that when you chose to say this mean thing to your mom, that that was a bad thing, but I would say that that choice is different than somebody holds a gun to your head and tells you you have to say a bad thing to your mom. These are two different types of choices, but I would still understand these in a determinist physical setting to where, since the birth of the university, we're only ever going to do one thing, and that's the way it is. But moreover, they would speak of these two

T.K. Coleman [87:02] things differently. Yeah, like if I had, let's say if I had perfect knowledge and I knew all the causal factors that led you to being in the disposition you're in at this moment, I would certainly have greater predictive power over what you're going to do next, but I wouldn't be infallible in my judgment because there is an element that is not just the consequence of everything that has

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [87:26] occurred probably. What is that element, I guess, that might be an important disagreeable we have

T.K. Coleman [87:31] now? Yeah, I would say that element is freedom. What, and what is that? I'm looking for it. Let's say

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [87:36] I'm poking him with some kind of needle or some kind of scientific instrument. What am I looking for to find that? Or conversely, actually, I have a circuit board that's sufficiently complex and it's got those CPUs necessary to emulate almost every part of the human mind. What am I looking for here to try to find like that free will thing? How do I know if it can make choices that I can describe as having more agency, basically? Yeah, so how you can know that for yourself is going

T.K. Coleman [88:00] to be different for how you can know it for someone else because it's like, how can I know that destiny has a headache? He tells me, but I can always doubt, maybe he's trying to impress me, maybe he's trying to garner sympathy, maybe he's lying. I see him clutching the tile and all, but maybe that's an act. When it comes to myself, though, I have unmediated direct experience of the pain in my head. And so I can know with a degree of confidence that I have a headache in a way that I can't know for you. And I also can't hold you accountable for knowing what it is that I experience. And so I would say in an analogous way, we have direct experience of volition that I experience within myself, just like I experience pain, the capacity to set forth

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [88:48] and intention, that I will do thus, that I will try to do this. Okay. If that is the case, I'm trying to thank coming back to our physical realism and then our moral realism distinction here. I'm making a physical realism distinction from moral realism. You're saying that one necessarily follows from the other where we went off on a really big tangent there. I guess part of what we went on this tangent, I guess, is because I'm wondering if our disagreements on free will wouldn't necessitate our distinction between moral or physical realism. If I don't really believe, there is this like freedom-free will kind of thing. I don't really believe in that as a concept. And it sounds like if you didn't believe in that as a concept, it would tie you more to the physical realist description independent of any moral realism. You wouldn't believe in the moral realism. But if I were to believe in this kind of free choice thing, maybe that would move me more along or it would commit me more to like that moral realist thing. Do you think that's necessarily true? Do you think this is not super relevant to that conversation? I don't know. I don't know. I haven't thought about it that way. It's hard to talk about morals when choices can't be made like the trees, right? We wouldn't say that like if a tree falls on you, we would never say that's immoral because the tree can't do anything else, right? Yeah. I'll put it this way. If I knew we had

T.K. Coleman [90:14] former hours and you had the energy to go, I would say let's just talk about that for the next two hours. Okay. But I guess some questions I'm going to ask you. You got your pan over there asking me questions. Let me ask you some questions. Brother. This is kidding me. Okay. So one of the things you mentioned a few times is as a moral realism requires the positive of these extra constraints or these extra things. And this may get to some of the different ways we look at realism. But I would say that moral realism doesn't require extra elements any more than the things you already accept. So for instance, we have, we talked about laws of logic. We've got rules of inference, you know, so law of identity, law of non-contradiction, we've got if P, then Q, P, therefore Q, we have epistemic principles like principle of sufficient reason or like some weak principle of causality. We have abstract concepts like necessary connection and causation, right? And we literally cannot observe necessary connection. We can observe correlation. But in terms of what we can physically detect, there is no like your question about free will. Where's the necessary connection in there? We can pick everything apart, shine our lights on it, create our instruments and focus on it. But we're never going to see necessary connection. We just see correlation. One thing happens, another thing follows. And yet we accept necessary connection and causation as the bet rock for all of our reasoning about the world. I would say the positing of moral structures requires no more abstraction, no more positing additional elements than the things you already accept in terms of epistemic principles, laws of logic, and so on.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [92:01] So I guess what I would say is if I was looking at a like a fishbowl or a terrarium or a bacterium, I don't know if these are real words, but when you look at the things that grow on the microscope, you look at like things that grow, we can describe the ways that these things interact with each other. And we can describe like what do they have to do to like there's going to be some equilibrium state that will be reached. I don't have to introduce new category of things like moral facts to account for how these things might flourish, much the same that for humans, I would say, well, I can describe how humans behave and what they do, and there might be an optimal set of behaviors for human flourishing, but I don't have to introduce the constitutive moral facts to explain that. So in my question, why do I have to introduce moral facts to explain human behavior? But I wouldn't have to introduce moral facts to explain the fishbowl

T.K. Coleman [92:47] behavior for the fish. Yeah. Okay. So I do at some point want to come back to why I think this is a self-defeating line of reasoning that I can turn back on your cognitive processes because I'm I'm not satisfied with my response to that, but let me let me try a different angle and we come back to that. So part of what we are doing when we try to come up with evolutionary explanations, any kind of scientific explanation is we're we're trying to do more than just ask ourselves what is a theory that sounds plausible to me or what is something I can imagine being the case. Karl Popper's whole point was that scientific theories have to be constrained and falsifiable. And so when it comes to you saying, hey, evolution can account for this. There's a very intentional methodical scientific way to do that, but there's also a potentially lazy way to do that, and that's to treat evolution as an ideology that says, hey, look, I got this in my back pocket. I'm going to use evolution of the gaps. Anything you say in support of moral realism, I'm going to say, look, man, I can close my eyes and I can imagine that evolution can account for it. That's ideological, not scientific, scientific would say, I'm able to set this forth in a way that is constrained and falsifiable. So my question for you is what kind of evidence could be presented? What kind of data could be set forth that in theory would count as evidence against your appeals to evolutionary explanations? What could be shown to you that would make you say, hey, man, even if this doesn't completely undermine my position, it certainly counts against it. Nothing because I'm an atheist.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [94:32] No, actually, there's a category of questions actually that I think would that I'm curious for. So let me start by saying that when we ought to do something as a moral ought, it seems like you have these moral oughts and I would say that these oughts are only satisfying other things. So like one plus one ought to be equal to because of whatever a base set of mathematical axons are using, you know, a chair ought to be this color if it's to match the color of the other things in a room. We ought to not kill each other because we need to satisfy the optimal human flourishing, you know, so there are the most number of humans that are having the highest satisfaction of preference is basically. So I feel like when you're talking about an ought, you're speaking to something a little bit different than just human survival. You must be otherwise, you would just satisfy my evolution thing. So my question would be what would be an example of a moral ought or are there any moral oughts that don't immediately satisfy my evolutionary or survival oughts because that would challenge

T.K. Coleman [95:26] I think my survival oughts, yeah. Sure. So I see and use the concept of oughtness in a way that's different than a lot of moral realists. So I would make a distinction between moral structures and moral sensitivities. Moral structures are the moral walls we run up against. They are the realities that impose upon us causing us to feel moral pain and causing us to feel a sense of being compelled to do something in the same way that a car says you can't go any further. It's the moral wall that says you can't do that. Sure. Moral sensitivity is the subject of component of that. It's when I feel guilt. It's when I look at another person and I say, you know, I feel morally superior to them. It's my part. Aughtness is part of the moral sensitivity. I do not believe oughtness is objective. Aughtness is a part of our subject of response to moral structures. An oughtness is a teleological concept that's driven by purposes and goals. So for instance, if the doctor says, hey, look, I'm going to give it to you straight, man. If you smoke one more cigarette, you are going to die instantly relative to your desire to live relative to your desire to be healthy. You ought to not smoke a cigarette. But you're free to say, you know what? I don't care about life, you know, and there is no such thing as any argument, any ought or any concept that can negate your power to say, sure, but I don't care about the implications of that, right? And so in a similar way, when it comes to moral claims, I can say that, hey, look, if you do that, that's going to be bad for you or that's going to be bad for him or that's going to really feel bad or that's going to lead to doom. So even if we took like a religious scenario and says, well, God will punish you, but well, God will put you in hell. You can still just shrug your soul to say, oh, hell sounds nice to me. Oh, I don't care, guys, mad at me. I'm my own man. I don't care where I spend it. You can always do that. So if you're looking for something in a platonic realm or in nature that has the power to impose on that feature of human experience, you won't find anything. But if you place the ought inside the moral sensitivity side of the distinction, then it makes perfect sense because the oughtness is what you feel when you run into that moral wall and you consider solving a dispute by resorting to violence and your conscience says, you ought not do that in the same way that you think to yourself. I ought not to have a cigarette.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [98:03] I so I understand that. But then I feel like we've taken the moral ought statements and we've just kind of basically put them into some axiomatic framework where we're saying, well, if we agree with this framework, then we can make these ought statements and so far as they satisfy the framework, the same thing is like any kind of mathematical thing. I'm not making ought axiomatic. I'm saying that we all have. I'm just saying that the oughts only exist to satisfy whatever conditions we agree we're trying to satisfy. That's that's so I'm saying ought is a is a psychological experience

T.K. Coleman [98:33] that everyone has. Sure. Relative to the behavior they must adopt in order to. Yeah, but I guess

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [98:40] my question is for these three statements like one plus one ought to be two. A man ought to stop smoking cigarettes if he doesn't want to have cancer and you ought not murder another human being are all three of these oughts of the same type of like moral gravity to you or. So the first one is

T.K. Coleman [98:56] a ought statement that doesn't make sense to me. I don't know what you could even possibly mean by saying one plus one ought to equal to one plus one equals to and that's the answer you ought to put on the test if you're asked that question. Okay, but but one plus one doesn't ought to equal to it just it just does equal to. Okay, so I would I would take that one out, but the other two I would say they're of the same nature in the sense that you ought not to smoke a cigarette you ought not to commit murder in the sense that this is what you feel when you run up against a truth. Like you are responding to the truth. So there's the truth that if you eat it if you smoke another cigarette you're going to die and your response to that truth is I don't want to die relative to one thing to live you ought to agree with that truth because there are consequences for being incongruant with reality. But if you don't care about those consequences that that always is an option and that

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [99:48] won't be a motivating factor for you. Gotcha. So then is there something that your morality concepts can describe that my survival concepts can't describe is there like a thing that you could say that carries some kind of weight to it or conveys some type of meaning that I wouldn't be able

T.K. Coleman [100:06] to say from my perspective. So a couple of things one my position of moral realism is falsifiable. Okay, so I can say look here a couple of things you can do to falsify my position. Number one, produce for me an example of asymmetry between physical realism and moral realism. An example of epistemic asymmetry point out something an epistemic commitment that I must make in order to believe in moral realism that I don't already make when it comes to my belief in physical realism. So if you point out what you take to be epistemic of symmetry I will be able to show that you and I already make similar commitments when it comes to physical. But if you're able to produce such an example of epistemic asymmetry that would falsify my position. The second thing you can do is to either show that that example of epistemic asymmetry is inconsistent, unsubstantiated or just put the pressure back on me to demonstrate it's non-arbituriness. So one difference between what can I work off that? Will you just send? Before we do, I just want to point this out. So far, I don't know what could falsify your position. And so I would say if we're thinking scientifically and we're honoring that criterion, right, it's constrained and it's defeatable, I would say my position so far has identified the criterion for falsifying it. And I'm not sure what would falsify your position. I'm not sure what data I could set forth that in theory you would accept as

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [101:48] counting against your position. Gotcha. Okay. All right. Maybe this is maybe we're getting to this. So let's say that somebody let's say that there were five men over here and they all played basketball and somebody wanted to say from a physical real perspective, that's a basketball team and they want to say that's a basketball team the same way that that thing is a couch or whatever that thing is, right? And I want to say, well, no, I don't really think so. I think that it's just five dudes that you know might play basketball, but like that couch is different and somebody says, well, in what way is the collection of matter that you've chosen to identify as the couch here? And what way is that different than the collection of matter that I've chosen to group here as a basketball team? And we could go back and forth in that conversation for quite a while. But I think at the end of that conversation, I would actually, I think I would kind of be stumped. I don't know, I don't really know what I could say. You know, I could argue that, well, you know, the basketball team is arbitrary. I could swap anybody out and it would be a different basketball team and say, okay, why could swap out sections of the couch? Okay, well, the basketball team is like kind of separate, you know, from each other and it's like, well, separate, how separate, right? These atoms are separate for each other. They don't actually collide with each other. You know, if you zoom out enough, the basketball team is pretty close. It's like, okay, other people might not recognize them as a basketball team. It's like, well, people recognize different things as characters and it's like, okay, maybe, yeah, okay, maybe I guess I kind of have to accept that both of them are as real as each other in terms of objects. And it feels like we're almost playing a similar, I don't want to say game, like I'm attacking your position, but we're playing a similar kind of conversation with game here when it comes to morality and physical realism and that for all the properties that I'm going to give of a physically real thing, it seems that almost necessary that those things would map on to whatever you call as a morally real thing. And I think through this conversation, like I might, I think I might accept that, but then I feel like, I guess my two questions would be, when you call yourself a moral realist, do you feel like you're occupying a similar space as most other people that are, I would say, casually moral realists, like religious people, and then maybe academically moral, morally realists and the people that are more well read and have thought about it. That'd be my first question. And then my second question would be, I guess what, couldn't I theoretically conceive of any system and call it as real as your moral real system? Because it sounds like basically what you've done is you can take a whole bunch of things that I understand to be survival concepts and then you can kind of remap these onto things that you're calling moral concepts. And for me to argue my survivability thing, if I'm, I think, if I'm following everything you're saying, I kind of have to give on all of the morally real things to the physically real things I'm saying are real, they're coming from the same spot as the morally real things you're describing. But it feels like you've kind of just taken a bunch of things that I describe as, as being evolutionary and you're describing them as moral. And then you would say, well, you're just taking a bunch of things that I describe as moral and you're calling them evolutionary. Is there any distinction between these things at the end of the day or is it all just kind of could you theoretically create any number of infinite description systems and say they're all as real as the other thing? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a

T.K. Coleman [104:48] lot of a sort of hang on to it. So regarding the basketball team in the couch. Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't have any problem with saying, yeah, the basketball team and the couch, they're real in the same way. You know, we would just maybe need to be precise a little bit,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [105:06] right? Which is why I would have to ultimately end up, I would say they're both real in the same way.

T.K. Coleman [105:09] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough on that. Yeah. Just remind me, there are a few things. One is, is my moral realism? Do I think it's the same as like others or similar to them religious people?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [105:20] There was something else you said. Yeah, they're basically religious and academic people. I got that one. Yeah. And then the second one is basically, could you not create any arbitrary number of systems to describe reality? And as long as they follow basic logic, you have to say

T.K. Coleman [105:33] they're as real as any other system? No, I would love to see an arbitrary example of that, but remember those two features, I think those are really difficult to find. We've got that universality of experience and the involuntary nature. I think if you can show me something that has those two features, then we do have a case for an imposing reality. In fact, I think the epistemic and logical constraints that you talked about are examples of that very thing. You know, when you when you try to think in a way that doesn't invoke the law of identity and the law of non-contradiction, you're running into a mental wall. Something is stopping you and it's not just you. And so like those kinds of constraints are indicators of reality.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [106:28] Can I just a quick because you brought up slavery before? How do you account for that like in the past that people seem to consider a great universality of experience or running into a wall that it seems like for a large portion, maybe the majority portion of human history, people have been okay with some form of slavery or another.

T.K. Coleman [106:42] Yeah, so I would say the same thing about truth. You and I don't question truth, right? No one's we're not going to say, hey, the truth doesn't exist. But for the overwhelming majority of history and up to now, people argue every day about what really happened, what really was said, what is true, what's really important, what the priority should be, what matters and so on. In addition to that, morality has another component. Being moral is like being healthy. It's quite inconvenient and it makes a demand on us. That's part of it being imposing. That there are things that are right to do and good to do, but they're not easy, they're not comfortable. And when you have the choice to not do things that are difficult and uncomfortable, one might make them, one might choose to rationalize what is wrong, one might choose to just take the easy way out. I think we can account for a whole lot of human behavior just in those terms and a lot of progress that we see with people doing the right thing. It's not necessarily because of new information, but sometimes it's new incentives. Think about being in an argument with someone, not so much a philosophical argument, because I feel like people who do that are kind of used to it, but think about being in a personal argument with someone like a family member or something like that. And you can see that they're wrong and they just don't want to admit it. And sometimes there's something you can say like, hey, look, I'm not saying your intentions are bad. I'm not saying you're a bad person. I get why you did it. I'm just saying we can't do things like that. And you kind of say something to make them feel a little safe with acknowledging that they're wrong. And they come clean and say, yeah, I agree. I was wrong about that. And so what did you do in that situation? They knew what the right thing to do was. They were kind of suppressing that by choosing to do what's easier. And you altered the incentives by making it easier for them to choose what is good. So there are a lot of different reasons why people behave the way they do. But there's nothing about moral structures that make us do what is right. But they do impose on us and they cause moral pain. In the same way, there's nothing about fire that makes us not touch it. I can touch it as much as I want. And the fire can't stop me. But it will cause me pain that will either incentivize me to change my behavior or produce disorder in my life.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [109:04] Would it be a counter example to say that there are ways that you can just hide moral pain. So like say you don't like slavery. But what if the slavery is in another country and there's buy stuff from that I never see it. So now you're enjoying it without experiencing that moral pain at all. I feel like this points more towards saying just you have some base level of preferences or whatever the humans have more so than pointing towards any like moral fact world. Like if I can so easily hide or brush off to the side and leave the moral miscarings as somebody might have.

T.K. Coleman [109:32] So I don't think it's very easy to hide. But what I will say here is that you can just do the same thing with truth. It's not that difficult to avoid having to honestly engage the contradictions in your beliefs or assess evidence if you choose to not look in the directions where you know that's going to happen. So I can insulate myself from ever having discussions with people that I don't agree with. I can deliberately surround myself with people who feel the same way about most of my political religious beliefs and so on. When conversations get tense and uncomfortable and I feel like I'm losing the upper hand or someone's making me feel stupid. I can just exit. I can make it about their character rather than about the logic of what they're saying. I can choose not to read books by anybody who doesn't reinforce what I already think. So there are lots of ways to sort of try to circumvent the way that truth imposes on me. It still will impose on me. But there are a lot of things that I can be woefully ignorant about, not by directly choosing the ignorance, but by choosing a lifestyle that makes me woefully oblivious to things that would

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [110:39] otherwise trouble me. Gotcha. Okay. I feel like it'd be really hard to do for some physical truths. I don't know. I feel like it'd be a lot easier to do for a lot of moral things. But also,

T.K. Coleman [110:49] it's really hard to do for some moral things. The difference, however, is when we look at morals, we see 8,000 trillion truths or claims, rather, to be contended with. Whereas when we look at the physical world, it feels a little bit more controllable because Josh can't just do this and create a tree for you to contend with. Whereas with moral claims, I can do this and create a moral claim that you have to think about and contend with. So we not only have to contend with moral structures, we have to contend with the poorly formed moral claims that people can make up in any instance. That's what makes it a little bit more complex in that way. This is why this conversation

Joshua Fields-Millburn [111:31] was so fascinating to me is because we hyper-moralize almost everything now. Gluten is now immoral and wealth is immoral the same way. And so we can talk about things in a way that is hyper-moralized. And it makes it feel as though, I think the word you used earlier was self-righteousness. There's a whole lot of sort of self-righteousness that's tangled up in that. And I'm wondering if there is morality without self-righteousness here. There is morality without self-righteousness,

T.K. Coleman [112:07] but there is no self-righteousness without morality. My capacity to think that I am better than you even if I am mistaken is the result of me having some kind of standard by which I evaluate you and I. But even if that standard is faulty. Even if that standard is faulty, yeah. So the moment I subscribe to any kind of value system, that makes it possible for me to be self-righteous. But the two can still come apart. You can have a situation where there is no objective value system and you can kind of just choose some arbitrary one and be self-righteous because of that. Or you can have more realism and also be self-righteous because you think you're doing all the good things to preserve society and maybe you don't see what someone else is doing and you sell them short in comparison with you. It's kind of like what we do on the highway, right? Like when I cut you off, it's because I'm late for work. But when you cut me off, it's because you woke up that morning

Joshua Fields-Millburn [113:05] choosing to be a jerk. Yeah. Destiny, you are the things that are overly moralized that kind of

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [113:14] drive you crazy. Yeah, probably a lot of things. When I think about like government stuff or policy stuff, I usually tell people to be attached to outcomes and not be attached to processes. I find that when people moralize stuff on a policy level, they tend to moralize the process and not think about what they're actually trying to achieve. So, you know, there might be questions related to healthcare and people will supervoralize single-payer versus multi-payer versus public option versus free market healthcare versus whatever. And I say, well, we shouldn't really moralize the processes. We should moralize the outcome we want as many people to be provided for as possible to have as the optimal healthcare or whatever. This comes up a lot when it comes to rent as well, like for housing, right? People will say, oh, well, I think that it's more really good to have rent control or it's more really good to have whatever housing policies. Well, we should just want as few people to be homeless as possible. And for as many people to afford the housing they want as possible, whatever process we used to get there, we should just choose for that. But I find that a lot of people get mirrored down and moralizing the actual processes instead of the outcomes and then that can lead to some weird things happening in people's heads. Why do you think we do that? That's going to be a question of psychology for a billion different reasons. It could be because the groups we're in, there might be pressure to conform to some level to believe that the group has. It could be just a psychologically personal ego thing. Like if you start arguing for a thing, then you kind of start to identify with that thing. And then if that thing is wrong, then you're wrong. And it's like going to

Joshua Fields-Millburn [114:40] attack on your character. I think that's it. I think by and large, the over moralizing and the self-righteousness has a lot to do with some deep insecurity that is a result of the ego,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [114:51] the sort of false self. I think there's a lot. There's sometimes you have these transcendental ideas of like what's actually happening. So for people that, I don't know where you guys are politically, so hopefully I'm not triggering any huge underlying political disagreements. But for people that believe in this like very big concept of like the deep state, you kind of have to believe in all of the subsets of it because if one is wrong, the whole thing collapses. Or if we talk about like God, we can't say like, well, in regulations, God was wrong. And then in this part of the book, he was actually wrong. He messed up here. I was like, well, that doesn't really work for God. He kind of has to be right all the time. Maybe your interpretation of him could be incorrect, but he can't really be wrong because I kind of undermined his whole idea of it. So sometimes people have a commitment to a whole belief system, and then that belief system necessitates every single thing underneath. You see this a lot when people break up with somebody in order to kind of like protect their ego, they have to say, well, their ex was a horrible person the whole time. And what that does is it means that I don't have to admit any fault because they were wrong and horrible the entire time. But if I give on any of that, then I have to do some painful self-reflections like, okay, maybe I messed up. Maybe I was in the wrong here. And that's really hard. So yeah, sometimes there's like whole constellations of beliefs you have to buy into because of some overlying idea or whatever.

T.K. Coleman [115:59] There's a lot of different things, I think. Yeah. Also just there's a great void in educating people on critical thinking and incentivizing people to participate in uncomfortable discussions. One of the reasons I was excited to talk with Destiny is because I was able to guarantee to myself that there are going to be no crash outs, that there are going to be no name callings because I'm talking to someone who loves ideas, right? And there won't be any hurt feelings, there won't be any attacks on one of those character. We're just going to talk about our differences and just hash it out. And we now live at a time where if you voted a certain way, if you believe a certain thing, you don't believe a certain thing, you didn't vote a certain way, I can't even talk to you. And I think that can feel very satisfying. It can create, it's good for the ego to feel that way because you're so much better than anyone else. But I think that's the death of civilization. I've never endorsed the idea that, you know, to seriously engage an idea that you think is wrong or dangerous is equivalent to platforming it and you should be ashamed for that. I think you drag all the ideas into the light and you show the very best things that can be said for them and against them. And you have a little trust in letting people think for themselves and you make that demand on people. You got to think for yourself. So I think that's a big problem as well. Man, I hope we can get some more discussions. I know you need to leave soon. One thing I really want us to be able to go down the rabbit hole of is what does your, because I think our back and forth has been about me saying your critiques of my position undermine the very means by which you can critique any position. And it seems like you, you think that's a little arbitrary for me to say that, that I could, that I can sort of use that line of reasoning to make anything true.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [118:05] I think I kind of agree with what you're saying. I think at the end of the day, and then keep in mind is why I have no formal education on this. So I, so I could, there just might be things that I'm misunderstanding. I said that with, with genuine humility. At the end of the day, I guess what I would say is it feels like what you're calling an objective moral system or some kind of like objective morality or some kind of moral realist framework is a thing that at the end of the day, I might actually just agree with if we hash this out over and over again, and it gets to the point where, okay, well, I understand the criticism. You're making I understand how you're saying that this moral realism would be emergent from any logic system that I used to derive any kind of physical realism. And then my, I don't know if you'd say a critique I would have because I don't know if you've done this, but my critique, I guess at the end of the day would be, I feel like you could basically believe in either, that's not a satisfactory hold on. I was going to say you could believe in either thing, but you're saying what you can't because it'd be logically inconsistent. Backing up from a layman's perspective, you could kind of have like any ideology, and they wouldn't really meaningfully differ from each other at all. That typically when people come from, in the layman's world, this is why I asked like, do you think you're good most academics and with most laymans when they say they believe morals are real? I feel like in the layman's world, when we talk about like morals are real, what they're really saying is like, here's a list of like 10 things, or here's these things, and these are real moral truths, and now all of us have to follow these things, and that's it, end of discussion. Whereas the kind of the approach that you're taking to more realism is one that is a lot more, when I say up to interpretation or debate or leaves a room for back and forth on, I guess like what a moral fact would be. So for instance, if you were to say, well, it's a moral fact that, you know, a person shouldn't kill another person without justification or something, right? That moral fact, there's a rich world that we can draw from to have a debate back and forth on that, but must be able to talk about more reals and say, oh, we'll look, it's one of the 10 commandments, or oh, look, you know, this guy says not to do this, so he can't do it or whatever, right? Yeah, yeah. So at the end of the day, like in the way that you argue for more realism, maybe I would be that type of more realist, or I would just be a physical anti-realist, I guess I'm not sure if we explore either direction, maybe I'd be one of those things, but whatever world that that would commit me to, I would be totally fine with because it seems wholly consistent with the world that I feel like I'm committed to now, but it still seems out of step with most people who say like, I think moral facts are real. I guess if that makes sense, yeah?

T.K. Coleman [120:22] Yeah, I know you're saying to your question about like, hey, do you think you're a positionist similar to most people who believe in it? I think one of the misgivings I have about the role of invoking God in these discussions is that God would be an explanation for why there is order, but belief in God would not be necessary to identify the presence of order. Those are two separate things, right? We can point to things and say, hey, can we agree that this is a tree or can we agree that this is an example of structure or whatever it may be? And then there can be a separate conversation where we say, well, what's the best explanation for why anything existed or for why a world like this exists? But I reasoned from the idea that structures are real and that when we think about the physical world, when we talk about the physical world, even the way we engage physical reality, we do not think about talk about or treat physical objects as if they are just atoms or spatial extensions, but we think about them, we interact with them, we talk about them as if there are these structures that are real relationships. Essentially distinct things, yeah? Yeah, relations, causation, these things are real, and I would posit that moral structures are just like that in the sense that to be a moral, to do something that is morally wrong, to commit murder for instance or torture innocent babies for spectator sport, that you are going against order, that you are producing disorder and you are being disordered and even deteriorating yourself in certain ways. But we'll get into this sometime. What do you think about this point? What do you think about this point? Just a word on belief. We often think about belief as what people verbally represent themselves as saying they think is true. I think belief can also be this really revealed by behavior. Absolutely, yeah. So there's what you say you think and then there's what you reveal yourself to think and it's possible to maybe even believe what we say we think. Yeah, one of the big

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [122:43] just on that, when I say yes to that, and I think you're saying the same thing that I'm agreeing with, but like I wouldn't even necessarily say that people are lying to other people or lying to themselves when they say a thing that they believe that's out of step with what they actually believe. But just one thing that I've tried to, I didn't realize until maybe a couple of years ago, how unbelievably complex language is and that a lot of issues that we have philosophically or logically are really just like language issues kind of and that yeah. So for instance, somebody might say like I think that killing is always wrong and they might genuinely believe, like they say that and then it's like, oh, okay, well, this guy's about to kill this innocent person and someone's going to intervene by killing them. Do you think that's wrong? They're like, oh, shoot, no, okay, that's not wrong. They didn't lie when they first said it. They just didn't realize that there were a lot more conditions to their statement than they realized, I guess. Yeah,

T.K. Coleman [123:28] so that's right. That's right. Yeah, I think what what muddies the water in these discussions is that I don't think we're always very clear on that distinction. And so people self-report all sorts of things that may not even reflect what they believe. I believe there are people who think they believe that morals are objective and their real belief is that it's relative and there are people who think that it's relative and their real belief as revealed by behavior is that it's objective. And so yeah, we'll get into it, man. We'll talk more about it. We better open it

Joshua Fields-Millburn [124:03] out of the time. No, I think I think we still have some time for this. So the reason I wanted to pair you two together because I've seen you as a moral realist or moral object to this, right? And I've always been more drawn to the relative nature of morality. And it seems to me that there is some sort of a datant here between the two worldviews that you're expressing here. And it could be that most things are relative, whether it's gluten or sports or furniture, you're not in moral for buying the wrong culture, wearing the wrong logo on your shirt. But Destiny, you did use some terms earlier when you even use the term evil. And there may be some focal quotes around that I couldn't tell. But using that term suggests that maybe there is some sort of objective moral truth.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [124:58] Okay, so ejecting all of this conversation, which I think is very loaded. I would say like from a very layman's perspective, when people are talking about objective morality versus relative morality, and a very layman's kind of like the worst faith sense they're talking about, like people who are moral versus people who are like hedonistic losers, basically, right? You just do what everyone to do. I'm giving a little bit more credibility. I feel like when people say they're objective moral truths, generally what I think people want to say, and I'm sympathetic towards this position, and sometimes even inhabit this position, what they really want to say is there are some things that we just don't need to talk about because it's not worth having the debate on this. I don't need to have the debate on whether or not it's okay to rape somebody or not. We don't have to debate this topic. This is like objectively, we know this is a moral thing, and we can have arguments around the edges. So, wait a second. What you're saying then is that just becomes a thought

Joshua Fields-Millburn [125:49] terminating cliche. We're like, yes, that is bad. So therefore we dismiss it from you. I think

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [125:54] that's the attraction sometimes when people say like objective moral truths. Now, I don't think that you use when you talk about like an objective moral truth. I don't think that you're using it that way. Clearly, because we wouldn't have had hours of conversation. This is an easily thought terminating thing. But I think a lot of people just like the attractiveness of that type of statement, the strength of that statement, and then the infallibility of it because they can't attack it. I think in some ways, I think there is some strength to this. You don't want to have a debate over every single thing, every single time you talk about any single thing ever, because it would get married on another list. But then the obvious weakness to this is that sometimes people start to assume too much, and then they lose the ability to defend or argue for some of the underlying things. And then I think we've seen this happen today in society where there are more fundamental truths that are being attacked, truths that are being attacked, that people aren't used to defending because it kind of just took these as like objectively true things. And then you're in this world where yeah, a bunch of people believe things that don't really know why they believe it, and they can't really defend or attack it anymore. And now everybody's kind of lost.

Joshua Fields-Millburn [126:49] Because we dismissed it for so long as being an objective truth or an objective, it's immoral to do X. So we don't even need to discuss why that may be on him. Would you call yourself a moral relativist then?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [127:02] Um, it really depends on the layer or level of conversation we're having.

Joshua Fields-Millburn [127:07] Right. So for a layman that you're speaking to, would you say that you think morality is relative?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [127:13] Um, I don't know. I've gotten in such trouble saying, I'm precise things philosophically in my lifetime that I try to be really humble towards every position.

Joshua Fields-Millburn [127:21] Well, the thing that TK said earlier that was fascinating. He said there are many people who, who believe in moral relativism, but act as though there is a moral objectivity.

T.K. Coleman [127:32] And I would say those people don't believe moral relativism. I would say in fact, they're made, but they think they believe it. Yeah, I think there may be some really smart philosophers who truly believe in moral relativism, but I think the average person who says, um, hey, man, what's true for me and may not be true for you or I think it's just a matter of preference. I think, I think for the most part, they just haven't really thought about it. And I don't think that's how they react to the world when they see people vote for Trump or vote for Kamala or take a stance on women's rights that they disagree with or when they see someone behave in a debate that they disagree with. Like the way they actually act as if there is real wrongdoing and they condemn people and they, I think their visceral beliefs, behavior reveals

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [128:15] what they really believe. Yeah, and I think it comes down to the, like, do you really mean this? Do you really think that some of you test it with a few questions? Maybe not. So if you talk about like moral relativism or whatever, if somebody says something along the lines of like I think, um, like, um, I may, like, I'm a moral absolutist or I may moral, no, no, I'm a moral relativist. I think that back then, um, maybe cannibalism, uh, or, yeah, we'll say cannibalism might have been the way that tribes survived or whatever, but like today it would be really wrong to be a cannibal. I think that, I think that, but I wouldn't say that it was wrong back then, but I would say it's probably wrong today. Um, so I'm a moral relativist. The morals have changed through time. But then if you were to test it and you're like, okay, let's say you were on a deserted island. There's 10 of you. There's a ship that's gonna come and save you, but it's gonna be like in, uh, two months. And the only way you guys can survive is if five of you eat the other five and you have to like make that decision how you're gonna do it. I'm like, okay, well, I guess in this sense, then maybe, sure, maybe I would be okay with cannibalism here. Um, and then might even say, but look, I'm being morally relativistic because the conditions are changing. I was like, no, you have the exact same morals. The only thing that changes is like, you know, what, what does it take for you to do this thing? Similar to the self-defense example I used, right? Your moral, so your moral statement isn't that cannibalism is always wrong. Your moral statement is just that like killing people without justification or murder, right? That this is always wrong and there might be some cases where cannibalism is okay. That's like an absolute moral statement that you could make through all of human history. Like if I could find a human civilization 10,000 years ago, that the first ones to discover wheat and they had plenty of food, but they were just eating people because they got a sick kick out of watching them suffer. Would you say those people were wrong? They probably say, okay, well, yeah, I guess maybe those people were wrong. So when they say they're relativistic, they're probably not. They're just adding more conditions than they realize and then the conditions don't apply today. So they think the moral statements have changed, but they

T.K. Coleman [129:54] haven't actually. That would be my feeling on it. Yeah, exactly. And they're thinking about the absurd number of moral propositions that there are. And most of them are just things we can't figure out or their matters of preference and matters of taste. And so when you've got, so let's say you talk about the people who list out the number of facts. Let's say we added up the number of moral claims in the Bible and we came up with a number like, let's just say it's like 100 million moral claims in the Bible. Even then, that's like infinitismally small compared to the number of moral propositions that have been uttered throughout history. And so it's just easy to look at that large number and just be like, yeah, I'm a moral relativist. But then like you said, you point out that one thing, well, torturing innocent babies for spectator sport. Oh, no, I think

Joshua Fields-Millburn [130:48] that's wrong. Yeah. So in a way, you are a moral relativist with respect to the vast majority of moral claims. It sounds like because there's a functionally infinite number of moral claims that

T.K. Coleman [131:00] people make on Twitter today. And I would say every moral realist is, every moralist believes that there are an abundance of propositions that can be set forth as if they were moral propositions

Joshua Fields-Millburn [131:12] that are nonsense or really matters of taste. But there's a set of propositions that you believe

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [131:17] to be morally objective. Yeah, but those are invisible because we already agree with them. So like the example earlier of like, what should the age of consent be for drinking or you would call it? What should the drinking age be? Right? There might be a disagree between 16 and 18 and 21 and 25 or whatever. But there is a whole bunch of moral claims that you need to get through to even build up the idea that children ought to be restricted from drinking. There's so many moral claims that they're already in agreement on. So while it might seem that these people have some kind of like relativism or different moral beliefs between each other, they do have different moral beliefs between each other. But like that moral belief is like the tip of the iceberg of all these other things that they have in moral agreement on that the state should have a role in protecting children that children ought to be protected that alcohol does bad things to the body that whatever you're like there's so many things you have to agree on to even get to that conversation for us.

Joshua Fields-Millburn [132:08] Would you say a lot of your opinions or beliefs TK are underpinned by morality? Like you don't vote.

T.K. Coleman [132:15] Is that a moral decision? Yeah, every time I get out of this, I can't tell from people. So there we go. But no, is it part of my moral opinion? I mean, part of my moral convictions? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I'm trying to think of what it might look like for me to have any thoughts that are completely independent of a moral framework. I'm not sure if I will say I do.

Joshua Fields-Millburn [132:48] Well, there are opinions, I assume. My opinion is this team is going to win the Super Bowl, or this team is going to win the second round of the NBA playoffs this year. They probably don't have a moral underpinning. Or am I wrong there? They have a moral context. So for instance,

T.K. Coleman [133:05] if I have an opinion like that the Chicago Bulls are going to win tonight, I also have the opinion that the people who vote against them are not evil. The people who want what I want are not better than the people who want the opposite that this is a matter of taste and not a matter of fact. This is not this is much less important than other things like how to treat a human being. And if in if something comes up tonight like an emergency with the family member, that prevents me from watching the game. I ought to do those things more than this thing. So there's always a moral context within which actions are performed, opinions are formed and so on.

Joshua Fields-Millburn [133:46] Destiny, I'm shocked. We haven't talked much about suffering today. It's come up just slightly with respect to like killing or whatever, but it seems to me that there is a sort of middle ground between you don't have to be religious in order to believe in a moral objective reality like St. Harris, the moral landscape sort of is I guess moral objectivism to some extent. It's not moral relativism. Or is it? I don't think it is, but but also like there's something about suffering that underpins all of that. It is anything that increases suffering is at least by his definition approaching to be more immoral than a thing that eliminates suffering is maybe a more moral thing to do. What's the question exactly? Just like is there? Well, the question is with respect to suffering. Yeah. And so what does suffering, what does the role of suffering play in morality?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [134:46] I don't like it's that I'm very philosophical. I try to be careful because there's so many weird objections or challenges like like to if your goal is to reduce suffering, this is why I have to be careful with these AI guys, right? If your goal is to reduce suffering and you push the button on the ad or reduce suffering as much as possible on him a planet, they would just nuke the whole world and you had a zero suffering whatsoever. That's sort of an anti-natalist perspective. Yeah, sure. Yeah, or even you can make things more

T.K. Coleman [135:08] convenient for people in ways that are harmful to them, right? Yeah, and then it's also weird

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [135:11] because you're going to do a world where it's like if I want to live if I want to live a life right now that is the peak of just like physical preference pleasure, you would just be hooked up to like you know a heroin needle until you die and you just keep upping the dust to die and that would be your experience would just be up, up, up, up and then you would end and there'd be no suffering. But it feels that intuitively it feels like a not good answer for some reason.

Joshua Fields-Millburn [135:35] Right, right. And you've reduced suffering there to functionally zero except you haven't because what are the ripple effects of that? The knock-on effects of someone who kills himself from heroin from Dayton, Ohio is the overdose capital of America like a lot of people I know have overdosed.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [135:51] Sure, but even if you were to expand it to every single human being on the planet, if we could all hook ourselves up to a heroin needle at the same time and then ride and die it, you know, I don't think that I don't think that would be satisfactory either. Right, it seems like there's something that is a little bit greater, the human mind is a capacity for something that's better than just physical pleasure. There seems to be yeah, something built into us that wants to aspire to something a little bit more than that.

T.K. Coleman [136:11] Can I play double-z advocate with this? Sure. I'll audition this as an example of a moral fact. So here you have from the vantage point of self-interest, a person who has before them the option to just maximize pleasure. And if they do this, they get to experience increases in pleasure up to the point they die and the suffering is gone. And even if by their behavior other people might be negatively affected or grieved by it or what have you, at the end of the day society can absorb quite a few people like that. And yet people who know they would benefit in terms of pleasure from that option, I agree with you that there's something baked into us, built into us. And I would say in the same way that your mind runs into those mental walls of trying to conceive contradictions or trying to violate epistemic principles, that that would be an example of a moral wall that's telling you no, you know, you know that life is about more than that. You know that. Don't do that. That's not right.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [137:26] Yeah, I'm hearing you. I think we'd run into the same problem we ran into earlier. I would say, well, of course, that's the case because if our minds were built that way, then we wouldn't have made it this far. So our minds could only be this way that we have the capacity for something greater than ourselves. If you want to call that a moral fact versus a survival instinct or something else, I mean, I guess this is back to my question of like, well, what's the difference between any arbitrary way that we label or define or talk about things? But I would say that that survival instinct is not that's like a humanity wide survival instinct. And on the individual level, it might seem to be contradictory, but on the humanity wide level, it has to exist otherwise. All of us would have just

T.K. Coleman [138:00] died long ago. Can we please revisit for a moment something I flagged earlier or something I want to get back to is why does that not undermine the claim to rationality on anything?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [138:16] Why does that not undermine the claim to rationality, unlike even perceiving physical objects

T.K. Coleman [138:20] or whatever, or reason or even reasoning correctly? I mean, this is a very unsatisfactory,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [138:25] this is like the ultimate skeptic position, which I know is not fun or whatever, but I would say that I wouldn't take those things for granted and I would and I would concede humility to that. There might be other forms of logic or reasoning or things that exist beyond meta logic or meta reason or meta meta, whatever outside of that that we just can't even conceive of. And it might undermine that on some ultimate level, but wherever that would undermine it, it's outside of my subjective ability to perceive like I can't even know about it. I wouldn't be able to know about

T.K. Coleman [138:51] those things. I get you on that, but why would you not describe your position in the following way? I'm going to describe it in like an exaggerated way that maybe unfair, but it seems to me your position could be described as this. Hey, look, that example you gave of a possible moral fact, it's just the way we are, okay? There doesn't have to be some moral structure or order in the universe that I'm being incongruent. I just can't be any other way. But there's nothing necessarily out there that corresponds to it. That doesn't give me a reason to believe in anything like that. And you know what? That's also true of my brain and my eye and my ears and my skin. I impose patterns. I impose concepts like structure, order, and causation on the universe. That stuff may not be out there at all. I'm humble enough to admit that. All I'm doing is just processing information in a way that apparently has helped me to survive. But I make no claims about my ideas or believe being better than any other ideas and beliefs. These are just the ideas and beliefs that the way I am forces me to have. Sounds good. Okay. Okay, go ahead. If that's true, yeah. That seems to me to have a considerable epistemic price. Go for it. What now becomes the basis for ever treating any idea as if it's superior to another idea? And by the way, in case anyone's thinking, oh, why do you need to be superior? Even the very act of trying to learn, even the very act of humbling oneself and receiving corrective feedback is based on the presupposition that a clarified and refined understanding is better than an unrefined understanding.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [140:40] Yeah. I mean, I would say that that I'm making assumptions about other people that all of those other people are running basically the same firmware hardware that I'm running. And so we're going to have some level of like foundational agreement. I just don't go below that and say that like our shared understanding as humans also gives us some like insight into the absolute truth of the universe that no other greater being could conceive of that would be beyond my conception.

T.K. Coleman [141:03] But not just absolute truth because you add that qualifier. I like the way I just represented you that you agree with because you don't you don't add that qualifier for morals. You don't you don't you don't say, hey, look, I mean, I don't understand everything about morality. There might be moral truths we haven't discovered yet. But you know what? I do accept that torturing innocent babies for spectator sport, that that's a moral fact. And you know what? Maybe there are no more moral facts. Maybe there are a thousand and one moral facts who knows I'm epistemically humble enough to just, you know, be agnostic

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [141:37] on that. I don't hear you making a lot of people that would have a disagreement on that one though. And we would that would come down to who kills who I guess on it because there'd be a thousand people that would not I guess grant that consideration that maybe torturing babies for fun would be acceptable. And so the one guy would kind of be voted off the island there, I think.

T.K. Coleman [141:54] Yeah, but that's also true of the guy who questions the external world. We'd vote that person off

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [142:01] the island, you know, practically never have access to my thoughts on that kind of like how you were talking about like free will. I can't see that or observe that or discover that or really any conscious experience over, right? We can't observe that in another person. Yeah, but we have

T.K. Coleman [142:12] people that we we set aside in some kind of way as either being mentally ill or being

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [142:17] psychopaths don't conform with our concept of the world, right? So I imagine everyone to be

T.K. Coleman [142:22] or when their words don't conform that there are some things that we can walk into spaces and say or there are some contexts within which we can utter certain statements that will certainly cause people to treat us differently. Even if these statements are just about what we believe is true or not, they will cause us to be ostracized. Only I think only in so far as they might impact

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [142:42] what you would imagine their behavior would be. So like if I were to say to you right now, I don't know if there's like an objective outside world or if anything else really exists, I can't really prove that. I don't really know if there is. I think you can accept that statement and I don't know if you're thinking horrible thoughts about me. I think if I were to utter that same statement driving 105 miles down the interstate and you were my passenger, I think you would feel significantly different about that statement. I think you wouldn't want me to stop the car immediately because you don't want somebody driving you around that seems to be a total nihilist and so far as the universe exists. I think a lot of our disagreement two stems from I'm not trying to attack your position and maybe you've been agree with this. When you say when you utter moral or when you talk about moral things, I think that your position is considerably, I don't want to say softer because that sounds like an attack when you're position, but it's it's considerably softer than most people when they say here's like a moral statement because these statements are oftentimes arrived at kind of like when you're asking me questions about like subjective versus objective moral values. These statements are arrived at basically without reason, without rationale. It's just like here's like a list of rules that everybody has to follow and that's it. The types of moral statements that you're making I'm a lot more immutable too. I would just I just don't see the huge distinction between those. No, I can't say that because if I say that, that's technically your position because there's no distinction in that and a physical fact. I just don't see why that wouldn't be an arbitrary thing created to describe another set of things that could be described any other way I guess. That makes sense. That was worthy. Like morals are oftentimes people use these as like a shortcut to having any rational thought about a thing. Like here are these moral rules. That's it. Boom, you got to follow them. Whereas you're saying like moral facts can be observed as the logical consequence of all of these underlying, you know, physical realities and structures of the human brain and everything else. And then the ways that we act and the feelings that we have about a particular thing might be I perceive the color red and that's a sensation I have. And then I can speak about the fact of the wavelength there, much the same that I see a person killing a person there. And I have a feeling so I can speak about the fact of that, you know, the killing is wrong. That when you describe morals in that way, I'm like, I would be a lot more amenable to that than I would be to the person's like, here's a list of five moral statements that are just true and you can't think about it. They just have to be true. Full stop. Does that make sense? Yeah,

T.K. Coleman [144:43] but I think what you're highlighting though is the distinction. So in every, I'm going to speak loosely here, but in every worldview, every belief system, there are the apologists, right? There are the ambassadors, the people that you want out front, arguing with those who critique it, representing it, explaining it, teaching it and so on. And I would say the overwhelming majority of adherence to any worldview are not that. And so if you ask the average Catholic what they believe, you're going to get a very different answer than if you asked Thomas Aquinas, right? If you ask, you know, even a moral relativist, the quality of conversation I'm going to get from you, I'm just not going to get from the average person who walks around saying, you know, hey, my truth, your truth, who doesn't care. And so I think what you're highlighting is that there is a level of expression and sophistication of argumentation from those who think a lot about it are willing to take the risk of having philosophical conversations about it that just don't characterize people who just accept it as true. I mean, I mean, I think this may come off as a controversial statement. I don't know what you think, but I think if you were to take the average non debater who believes who rejects flat earth and you put them in a debate with the average guy making hours and hours of YouTube every day, proving flat earth. That guy is going to run circles around the majority of people. I can say that I don't think there's a debate to any

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [146:21] sufficiently educated conspiracy theorist for anything. Yeah, for sure.

T.K. Coleman [146:24] Because the average person, if you say, hey, why do you believe the earth is a flat? They're going to be like, look, I'd never had a reason to doubt it. This is what I was taught. And I never thought twice about it, but the guy who's making videos about flat earth, he's read so much about it, he'd run circles around them. I don't know what you're thinking, but I feel like the statements

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [146:40] that normal people make are not like, if I were to ask you like, oh, you know what water is? And somebody's like, yeah. And I'm like, okay, we'll tell me exactly what a quark is. We're like, okay, I don't know. But like this person is like the level of understanding might have is here. And then the level of like to get, you know, to chemistry, to physics, to subatomic particles is going down here. But I feel like where we're at right now, where we're talking about, oh, morality, there are statements that God said that at some point, you're like, whoom, okay, actually, there's like an underlying structure of reality and all of these things are what kind of we can observe morals from. I feel like there's a change here. Where it's not just like, you have a more sophisticated understanding of it. It's more like the nature of the understanding is completely different than I think the ordinary person conceives

T.K. Coleman [147:17] of like moral facts as I don't know what like. So I have some beliefs about, hey, this is what God said. And this is wrong or this is good. But I just think the difference is I be willing to argue for it. Sure. I'm okay with being interrogated on it, right? And so can I ask a question?

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [147:35] Okay, I want to ask a hypothetical. You have to answer this one, okay? Because you've gotten, you haven't answered a lot of my okay, but I'm curious on this type of thing. There's something I haven't answered. Well, or because I asked hypothetical and we do a broader explanation, but I'm just curious on this, on this thing. Let's imagine, well, here, so first is the, the Euphrates or whatever, the, whatever the thing is, do you have an opinion on like our things good because God commands them or do God command it? Does God command things that are good? Do you have like a, what's your

T.K. Coleman [148:00] position on that? Yeah, yeah. So I think of God as the ultimate reality towards which all true propositions point that God is like, you know, the ground of being so to speak. Okay. And so I would say that God is honest, not because he conforms to some law outside of himself, but all of the order and structure symmetry that we see in the universe is an expression of God's infinite intelligence. Okay. Yeah. So then, okay. So it's an expression of his nature,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [148:35] if you will. Gotcha. Okay. I have a question for you. I think I know who you're going to answer when I'm curious. Okay. Tomorrow, they're digging in Drew's Limer River and they find a whole new book of the Bible. Okay. It's the last beyond the one after revelation, ignore all the other non-canonical scripture, whatever they're gonna create, but they find a new book. Okay. They find a

Joshua Fields-Millburn [148:52] new book. What is what? No, he's just a big fan of the, the Deuteron canon. We're always having these.

T.K. Coleman [148:57] Oh, you can't resist. Yeah. No. And I'm a big fan of these types of hypotheticals too. I just

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [149:02] sure. So we find a new book of the Bible. It's 100% authenticated signed by God himself. Okay. And this book of the Bible says, actually, eating screaming babies is actually more a good God-rides eating screaming babies is a super good thing. Are you more likely to believe that against all your human intuition or are you more likely to reject all of the Bible and see and kind of like seek some other former truth or is there some third answer? How would you

T.K. Coleman [149:27] deal with that question? Yeah. I mean, so I don't even know what that means to say that like, hey, this has been 100% authenticated by God and signed by God because what you're using that as shorthand for is to smuggle in the presupposition that you already accept this is true. Right? Like here's here's a new book of the Bible that's been found. You already accept this book is true. Okay. And this thing that you accept is true is telling you to do something evil. So I think that's sort of like saying to me like, hey, I found this little book and you accept this book as true and this book tells you that the law of non-contradiction is false. Why would I even accept the book? That's true. That's going to tell me that. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [150:23] Am I make a sense? I think so, yeah. Now, my guess the answer is that I've noticed this, I think, for a lot of questions is that things that are very difficult questions are difficult questions because they bake into them some prior assumptions that make the question or render the question kind of meaningless. So if you assume that God is an ultimate source of truth or points in that direction and there are so many things about our current reality that exist that comport with that, that for you to break that with a simple question would kind of break every single thing you understand about reality such that it would render everything absurd and pointless and the question

T.K. Coleman [150:51] becomes kind of meaningless. Yeah. And also because I believe so if we talk about like order is something that comes from God, we would be talking about something different than the ability to observe order in the same way that if you try to explain a sound in terms of electromagnetic energy, that latter thing is an explanation that you don't even need to understand or know about in order to experience sound. And so we can experience moral facts independently of our theories about God. And so it's in the same way that one can come to know certain truths independently of their belief in God. And you can analyze evidence for or against God in light of those things which you know to be true. And so I don't look at it as like something is true because in this moment, God says, all right, that's true. And then in the next moment, God snaps his finger and says, no, that's not true. That what we have like even something like identity or consistency that ultimately that finds its nature in whatever the ultimate reality is that finds its nature in God. But that doesn't mean I can't recognize consistency

Joshua Fields-Millburn [152:17] without having a theory of God. I know we need to get Destiny on a plane here. Destiny,

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [152:23] how do you feel about this conversation? Good. I think as I think when you get deeper and deeper into philosophical stuff, sometimes it can feel a little bit more unsatisfying, but it's probably unsatisfying in a good way where it's like there are like I do, if you've ever done any political debates, obviously very few reach anywhere near this level of exploitation. So for a lot of that, it was happened to exercise this muscle before. And then like having a conversation like this is not like like most debate, you're not actually thinking on the fly, right? For most debate, you kind of have like you know all the answers and you kind of run through them like a million times. So in this month, there were a few times where I'm going to say a thing and then I recognize well if I will hold on actually by grant this. Technically, I guess I am granting this. So I have to think, yeah, so I'll probably this will be a thing that I'll sit with for a while. I'll kind of like think out more and refine some more positions. And then I'll either think of like, oh, I should have said it to this guy because he was he was so off on this or I'll think like, you know, maybe I'm a little more close to this position than I realized before more something. Yeah. I saw both of you trying

Joshua Fields-Millburn [153:22] to explore truth as opposed to prove the other person wrong. And your openness to being rolling it literally change your mind in the mid sentence is not a thing that you see in typical debates. TK, I know you've expressed this earlier in the conversation. What you dislike about debates is the one upping and the, I don't know, it's maybe it's satisfying from a viewer perspective. He's dunking on me sort of thing, but it doesn't make for a great conversation. And what I loved about the two of you connecting here, yeah, it got in the weeds and I stayed out of the wave. And when it got into the weeds here, I'd love to see more conversations like this, whether it's between you two or other people because you don't see a whole lot of this, especially online, especially with the moralizing or the self-righteousness that we see.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [154:10] Sure. Well, I will say this is a very abstract conversation. What there could be, I think, if we had a debate on voting, we might get a lot more heated in terms of like, you absolutely should vote. I can't believe you don't believe this or he might think, I'm not sure what your justification is for not voting, but I'm or in other things like health care or government intervention, but the more abstracted a thought is I think away from what we're doing in our lives day to day or what we're telling other people to do. I think it's probably easier for people to have those conversations. I don't listen to them as well because I don't feel as personally

Joshua Fields-Millburn [154:37] invested in the outcome. Right, but I also think having two of you having that conversation where you disagree about voting is probably going to be go better at most debates about voting.

T.K. Coleman [154:48] For sure. Yeah, that's her too. In fact, we've talked a lot about us getting into the weeds here and I love to know if you agree or disagree with this. My frustration the first time when we had you on the show is every time it felt like we were about to get into the weeds, it seemed like we really enjoyed it, but then we had to like move it on. And so today I was like, oh, this is going to be great. We're going to talk like for six hours. We'll get way into the weeds. I'm not frustrated at all that we got into the weeds. I just hate that we don't have several more hours. And so I would love it if we could talk again in the future and it can be a deeper exploration. And we can try to work some of these things out to see what the implications of some of these things are and get into those fundamentals about realism and anti-realism and so on.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [155:33] So I actually have I wrote a bunch of we make up a bunch of like fallacies and like names for fallacies that people have or we make our own because you think it's funny and actually I have one called the lazy gardener where when you're having a conversation with somebody every time you're starting to get to some bedrock disagreement, they're like, oh, let's not get into the weeds on that. And it's like, well, what are we here for? If not, is this a 30-second TikTok video? Yeah, why not?

Joshua Fields-Millburn [155:54] So yeah, I do appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. Are there is there any when you'd love to see TK have a conversation or debate with with all your experience debating different people? So if someone you're like, now I'd love to hear a conversation between TK and these three people.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) [156:07] Well, now I'm curious because I hate Jordan Peterson and it seemed like you had some admiration or respect for his blue system. I see like he reasons his stuff in a horrible way. So I'd be interested in seeing that back and forth. There's one thing I really hate is you talked about like defining things earlier, like calling for like, oh, what did you mean when you said this or what did you mean when you say that? I really don't like it when people do that selectively. So for instance, one criticism I have of Jordan Peterson is Jordan Peterson will become, you know, do you think that Jews really existed in Egypt and they walked to whatever? And you're like, well, what does it mean when we say Jews and existed and what it's about? It's like, okay, we're all right. And then it's like, when I have it to be with them for like, you know, what do we think about vaccines and medicine? I'm like, well, I know this is wrong and I know that's evil, but I know this isn't true. It's like, okay, well, it seems like here we have very solid foundations on everything. And yeah, when I see people, the biggest like my bad faith sensor goes office when I see highly selective skepticism, when some stuff becomes so like, I can't know anything about this, whereas I know everything about this. That drives you crazy. And listening to him, did you hear him on Jubilee when he did the debate thing? I don't, I thought he called himself a Catholic at one point, but maybe not. But I heard a lot of like very normal ordinary attacks against Catholics on that. Like the mother Mary thing came up, which is if you've ever been Catholic, that's one of the things people always attack you with. And I seem like he didn't have any constant of any of these ordinary lines of attack, which makes him wonder like, well, have you spent any time at all thinking about this?

T.K. Coleman [157:27] Or yeah, I don't know, that drove me crazy. Well, you know, that particular discussion, the way it seemed, I can't know for sure, but the way it seemed was that they advertised it to the students as, hey, bunch of atheists against theists. We're going to get a Christian in here. And then they told Jordan Peterson, hey, look, we're going to have you debate a bunch of atheists about, you know, the, your metaphysics. And he went in there and they took him to task on Christianity and he didn't seem all that willing to even commit to the, to belief in the propositions. I'm not sure that that could be overly charitable, but I will say as much as I roll my eyes at people's irritation with giving definitions or asking for them, I think there is something there about what you said with the way he handles that, questions about the Bible. I haven't watched him in a long time, but the impression that I always got is that this is a question that he doesn't like. It's a question that he wants nothing to do with right now. And it seemed to me that it's that he was in the middle of wrestling. And I'm partially empathetic because philosophy done out in the open can be very risky, you know, like, you know, I don't vote, but it's like, that's not laziness on my part. I would actually love to be convinced. And I would challenge anybody to just bring me on their show. And let's talk about it for three, four hours. I would love for you to make the case for why you think I should vote and I can express all my concerns and objections. I love to get that invite. I'm skeptical that I'll ever get that invite. But like, sometimes when you, when you say things like that, people just write you off. They misunderstand you and they attack you. And it seemed to me like he's not, or he wasn't comfortable with just saying, I don't know if I believe Jesus physically rose from the dead because he has so many Christians who support him. And so many people would be disappointed if he says that. But then he kind of is drawn to the narrative. And I think it's one of those things where he just wishes he could work that part of his philosophy out in private, not be asked about it in public. And he looks like an uncomfortable man when that set of questions comes up. Okay, maybe. I mean, that may be overly charitable, but I'm with you in that. I do think he does that over does it

Joshua Fields-Millburn [159:42] when it comes to those questions. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Destiny. Shout out to Tom Cat, an audio bin, SavvyDee, and Professor Sean on the production side. Thank you so much for doing this today. Yeah, thanks for having me. Look up for it the next time. All right, y'all. Much love.

The Question at the Heart of the Debate

What, if anything, makes moral claims real in a way that is more than evolved preference or social convention, and how should that shape how we reason about human flourishing and conduct?

What this analysis found

Destiny and T.K. Coleman agree on more than they realize — both reject dogmatic morality, both demand intellectual honesty, both want moral seriousness to survive scrutiny. What separates them is narrower and more precise: Destiny fears that "objective morality" becomes a shortcut around thought; T.K. fears that without it, cruelty collapses into mere preference. The most revealing moment comes when Destiny's own skepticism spreads further than he intended — and he follows it there, live, on camera.

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Stephen Bonnell (Destiny)

3.5Formal/Systemicreasoning

3.0Ideologicalworldview

What do these labels mean? →

T.K. Coleman

3.0Abstractreasoning

3.0Ideologicalworldview

What do these labels mean? →

Good-Faith Summary

He argues that morality can be explained through human biology, coordination, and shared constraints without positing a separate moral ontology. He is trying to preserve moral seriousness while resisting any claim to objectivity that outruns what can be justified.

Good-Faith Summary

He argues that moral realism is realism applied to moral life: people are responding to real structures of order and disorder, not merely reporting preference. He wants to preserve the reality of wrongdoing without relying on religious authority as the primary argument.

3.5Rational

Moral Anti-Realism

3.5Formal/Systemic

Coherence

3.5Formal/Systemic

Techno-Economic Progress

3.0Abstract

Is-ness

3.5Formal/Systemic

Function

Moral Realism

3.0Ideological

Correspondence

3.0Abstract

Moral Progress

3.5Social Contract

Oughtness

3.5Social Contract

Structure

3.0Ideological

Epistemic Style

He reasons through testability, analogy, and explanatory sufficiency, often shifting domains to see what kind of truth claim is really being made. He is unusually willing to revise his own framing when he sees a symmetry problem.

Epistemic Style

He works through conceptual distinctions, inference to best explanation, and symmetry arguments that link moral realism to broader commitments about reality. He is calm, precise, and skilled at slowing the conversation down to preserve clarity.

The Tell

He repeatedly asks what would count as settling the disagreement before granting that a moral claim tracks reality.

The Tell

He returns again and again to moral walls and the idea that some realities impose on us whether we like it or not.

Synthesis

He is protecting the need for earned moral claims rather than inherited certainty, without which moral language too easily becomes a shortcut around thought.

Synthesis

He is protecting the reality of genuine wrongdoing beyond taste or convenience, without which condemnation of cruelty risks collapsing into preference management.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny)

3.5Formal/Systemicreasoning

3.0Ideologicalworldview

What do these labels mean? →

Good-Faith Summary

Moral Anti-Realism

3.5Rational

Coherence

3.5Formal/Systemic

Techno-Economic Progress

3.5Formal/Systemic

Is-ness

3.0Abstract

Function

3.5Formal/Systemic

Epistemic Style

The Tell

He repeatedly asks what would count as settling the disagreement before granting that a moral claim tracks reality.

Synthesis

He is protecting the need for earned moral claims rather than inherited certainty, without which moral language too easily becomes a shortcut around thought.

T.K. Coleman

3.0Abstractreasoning

3.0Ideologicalworldview

What do these labels mean? →

Good-Faith Summary

Moral Realism

3.0Ideological

Correspondence

3.0Abstract

Moral Progress

3.5Social Contract

Oughtness

3.5Social Contract

Structure

3.0Ideological

Epistemic Style

The Tell

He returns again and again to moral walls and the idea that some realities impose on us whether we like it or not.

Synthesis

He is protecting the reality of genuine wrongdoing beyond taste or convenience, without which condemnation of cruelty risks collapsing into preference management.

Highlights

The moments that matter most

Highlight 01

The Skepticism Trapdoor

His attack on morality swallowed physics too.

Highlight 02

The Debate That Outgrew Its Premise

Objective morality gave way to a stranger question.

Highlight 03

The Free Will Backdoor

Agency entered where morality got stuck.

Highlight 04

The Softening of Realism

The realist won ground by giving up the strongest claim.

Highlight 05

The Shared Enemy Was Moral Theater

They fought each other while resisting the same cultural failure.

Every debate has a surface argument and a deeper one. This section maps both — what each speaker is explicitly claiming, what they're actually trying to protect, and where their real disagreement lives. Start here to understand what's actually at stake before the analysis begins.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny)

Stephen Bonnell approaches the question of morality from a deflationary and naturalistic starting point. His core claim is that what humans call morality can be explained as an emergent feature of human social life, biology, and coordination needs without positing a separate layer of mind-independent moral facts. He repeatedly frames morality as something like a system-relative truth: more like mathematics or truths internal to a constructed world than like a truck physically parked outside. His working assumption is that humans, because of shared biology and social dependence, will converge on many norms, especially those needed for cooperation and survival. That convergence is real and important, but for him it does not automatically establish that moral claims correspond to an independent moral order. He keeps asking what would count as a test, what would settle disagreement, and what observable or inferential procedure could distinguish a moral fact from a deeply shared preference or evolved disposition.

The stakes for him are partly epistemic and partly moral-political. He is trying to protect against smuggling in certainty where there is only consensus, intuition, or inherited language. He fears systems that turn moral language into a shortcut around argument, where “objective morality” becomes a thought-terminating move rather than a defended conclusion. He is especially wary of selectively applied skepticism: people who become hyper-precise when defending metaphysical or religious claims but suddenly act maximally certain in other domains. Emotionally, he seems motivated by a desire not to overclaim, not to be trapped by sloppy categories, and not to be accused of defending arbitrary dogma under the banner of truth. His dominant narrative metaphor is that of layered systems: physical reality at one level, then human conceptual overlays, then moral language as a further abstraction built for creatures like us. He also repeatedly uses examples from games, fiction, and formal systems to show how robust internal truths can exist without being the same kind of truth as physical objects.

The strongest version of his argument is that human moral life is fully intelligible as the output of evolved social cognition, shared constraints, and practical coordination. We can explain why people condemn murder, value fairness, feel guilt, and build institutions without positing irreducible moral facts. We can also explain why moral disagreement persists, why some norms shift with material conditions, and why “moral progress” may often track technological and economic change more than discovery of independent truths. He is not arguing that morality is fake, or that anything goes, or that humans should be hedonistic nihilists. In fact, he repeatedly affirms stable human concerns like flourishing, survival, and social order. The tension inside his position is that as the conversation deepens, he concedes more epistemic skepticism than his earlier contrast between physical realism and moral anti-realism can comfortably bear. Mid-debate he explicitly recognizes that his own standards may push him away from straightforward physical realism too. So his enacted position drifts from “physical facts are clearly more real than moral facts” toward “both are mediated by human cognition, but moral claims still seem one layer more abstract and less testable.” That drift is not hidden; he openly notices it and revises in real time.

T.K. Coleman

T.K. Coleman’s core claim is that moral realism is not an exotic add-on but realism applied to moral life. He argues that when people say certain acts are wrong, they are often doing more than reporting preference, disgust, or social conditioning; they are responding to something real about the order of things. His preferred language is not primarily command or rule but structure, order, congruence, and moral walls. He treats moral reality as analogous to other forms of reality that are not reducible to immediate sensory inspection but are nonetheless rationally inferable. His framework begins with a broad realism: just as we infer a mind-independent world from shared and involuntary experience, we can infer mind-independent moral structure from the universality and felt imposition of moral experience. He distinguishes carefully between moral structures themselves and moral sensitivities to them, which lets him say that guilt, indignation, or conscience are subjective responses to something objective rather than the objective thing itself.

The motivational stakes for him are substantial. He is protecting the intuition that some acts are not merely disfavored by current human wiring but genuinely out of alignment with reality. He fears losing the category of real wrongdoing and collapsing morality into preference, convenience, or adaptive behavior. He also fears a world in which moral language becomes unintelligible as anything more than strategic signaling. At the same time, he is trying to protect seriousness without collapsing into dogmatism. He repeatedly emphasizes definition, patient clarification, and the difference between over-moralized taste claims and genuine moral claims. He seems especially concerned to avoid being accused of merely importing religious authority into the discussion. Even though he is a devout Catholic and later grounds order ultimately in God, he is careful to argue first from common experience and philosophical structure rather than from revelation. His dominant narrative metaphor is that of reality as an ordered field with constraints: physical walls, logical walls, and moral walls that human beings run into whether they like it or not.

The strongest version of his argument is that the same inferential habits used to justify belief in a mind-independent physical world also support belief in a mind-independent moral order. He identifies two key features: universality of appearance and involuntary imposition. People across cultures exhibit recurring moral categories, even when they disagree about particulars. And moral experience often feels imposed rather than chosen: guilt, remorse, indignation, and the sense that some actions are beneath us or forbidden arise even when inconvenient. He argues that evolutionary explanations do not defeat this any more than they defeat physical realism, because explaining how a faculty developed does not settle whether it tracks something real. He also tries to show that anti-realism risks becoming self-undermining if it treats all cognition as merely survival-oriented while still relying on rational critique. A notable tension within his position is that he sometimes speaks as though moral realism is strongly analogous to physical realism, but later narrows “oughtness” into the subjective side of moral sensitivity rather than the objective side of moral structure. That move is sophisticated and arguably clarifying, but it also shifts the terrain: the debate begins around objective morality in a familiar sense and ends with a more structural, less command-like realism than many listeners would initially expect. He acknowledges this indirectly when Destiny asks whether his view matches ordinary religious moral realism; his answer suggests partial continuity, but also a more philosophically mediated version than many lay believers mean.

Good arguments can still contain weak evidence, logical slippage, or rhetorical moves that substitute for reasoning. This section examines each speaker's argumentative integrity — not to declare a winner, but to identify where the strongest and weakest links are in each case.

Stephen Bonnell (Destiny)

Coherence strengths

Stephen’s strongest argumentative habit is methodological self-scrutiny. He repeatedly asks what key terms mean, what kind of truth is being claimed, and what would count as evidence. He does not merely assert anti-realism; he tries to differentiate types of claims: physical, mathematical, fictional, normative, and moral. His use of analogies to Harry Potter, mathematics, the Sims, and social coordination is not random rhetoric but part of a consistent attempt to show that internal coherence and practical indispensability do not automatically imply mind-independent existence. He also demonstrates unusual intellectual honesty in publicly revising his position. When T.K. presses the symmetry between his evolutionary critique of moral realism and his confidence in physical realism, Stephen explicitly says he may have to abandon the label “physical realist.” That is a major concession and a sign of good-faith reasoning rather than debate performance.

He is also relatively careful not to overstate his own conclusion. He does not claim to have disproven moral realism. More than once he says his point is that evolutionary and social explanations seem necessary and sufficient for explaining human morality, making realism explanatorily unnecessary. That is a more modest and defensible claim than “there cannot be moral facts.” He also notices the difference between ordinary practical discourse and ultimate metaphysical certainty. His repeated emphasis on epistemic humility is consistent with his reluctance to claim access to bedrock truth beyond human cognitive constraints.

Weaknesses and logical issues

His biggest weakness is drift between levels of analysis. At times he argues from practical testability: physical claims can be checked by senses and instruments, moral claims cannot be checked in the same way. At other times, when T.K. presses the analogy, he retreats to a much deeper skepticism about physical reality itself. That move is not necessarily illegitimate, but it weakens the force of his earlier asymmetry argument. If physical realism is itself only a pragmatic human-level framework, then the contrast with moral realism becomes less sharp than he initially presents. He notices this himself, but the result is that some of his earlier objections lose bite without being fully reformulated.

He also leans on empirical and historical claims that are plausible but under-supported in the transcript. For example, he suggests that women’s equality may owe more to economic growth, war mobilization, and birth control than to moral evolution; that anti-slavery sentiment may track economic conditions; and that no clear moral progress analogous to scientific progress has occurred. These are not obviously false, but they are epistemically sloppy in the sense required here: broad, multi-causal historical claims asserted without evidence or qualification beyond “probably” and “I wonder if.” Similarly, his claim that “98% of humans are going to agree on like 98% of moral things” is clearly rhetorical rather than sourced. It functions as a directional point about broad convergence, but it is numerically precise without warrant.

There is also occasional causal oversimplification. His evolutionary-survival account is often presented as sufficient to explain moral intuitions, but he does not specify what evidence would distinguish “evolution explains the emergence of moral cognition” from “evolution shaped our access to some real moral structure.” T.K. presses this gap effectively. Stephen’s answer becomes a broader skepticism about all cognition, which is coherent in one sense but leaves his original explanatory sufficiency claim less developed than it first appears. He also sometimes treats ordinary moral realism as mostly a rhetorical shortcut used to avoid argument. That may describe some public discourse, but as a characterization of the philosophical position it risks a domain-generalization fallacy: inferring too much about the theory from common bad uses of its vocabulary.

Epistemic style

Stephen’s dominant epistemic style is a mix of rationalist analysis, genealogical explanation, and pragmatic naturalism. He wants to know where beliefs come from, what functions they serve, and what inferential standards justify them. He is highly sensitive to language, category distinctions, and hidden assumptions. He also uses a genealogical style when he explains moral beliefs through evolution, social coordination, and material conditions. His style is well-suited to exposing overclaiming and conceptual confusion. It is less well-suited when he makes broad historical or social claims without evidence, or when his skepticism expands so far that it threatens the practical distinctions he relies on elsewhere.

T.K. Coleman

Coherence strengths

T.K.’s main strength is conceptual architecture. He offers a structured case rather than a pile of intuitions. He defines realism in ordinary terms, then extends it to morality through a shared inferential pattern: universality of appearance plus involuntary imposition. He distinguishes appearance from reality, moral structures from moral sensitivities, and explanation of a faculty from ontology of its object. These distinctions allow him to avoid several crude forms of moral realism. He does not simply say “everyone feels it, therefore it’s true.” Instead, he argues that recurring and imposed features of experience call for explanation, and that realism is the best explanation. He is also careful to say that evolutionary explanations are compatible with realism rather than automatically refuting it. That is a legitimate and philosophically stronger move than denying evolutionary influence.

He also performs well in dialectical pressure. His most effective line is the symmetry challenge: if evolutionary explanations undermine moral cognition because they track survival rather than truth, why would they not equally undermine the cognitive faculties used to defend physical realism or rational argument itself? This is one of the clearest moments in the exchange, and it successfully pushes Stephen into revising his own framing. T.K. is also generally fair in acknowledging where he has not yet fully argued his case. He explicitly says at one point that he has not yet proven moral realism and is only showing that certain objections do not refute it. That is a sign of analytical discipline.

Weaknesses and logical issues

His central analogy between physical realism and moral realism is philosophically interesting but not fully demonstrated. The move from “people across cultures exhibit moral categories and feel moral compulsion” to “mind-independent moral structure is the best explanation” depends on a controversial inference. He presents it as parallel to physical realism, but the analogy may conceal a category difference rather than overcome it. Shared and involuntary experience can support realism in many domains, but the transcript does not show him fully ruling out alternative explanations for moral convergence beyond saying evolutionary accounts are compatible with realism. That compatibility point is valid, but it does not by itself establish realism as the best explanation. So the argument is coherent, but under-argued at its decisive step.

There are also moments of epistemic overreach or imprecision. He says “every culture has a concept of treachery or betrayal,” “every culture has its concept of heroes and villains,” and “we’re not able to find counterexamples where we can point to cultures that have no moral categories at all.” These are plausible anthropological generalizations, but in the transcript they are unsourced universals. Likewise, references to serial killers such as Ted Bundy being highly self-righteous may be directionally plausible, but they are used illustratively rather than evidentially. None of this is clearly false, but it is asserted without support.

A subtler issue is possible equivocation around “oughtness.” Early in the discussion he seems to defend objective morality in a way many listeners would hear as including objective oughts. Later he says explicitly, “I do not believe oughtness is objective,” locating oughtness in moral sensitivity rather than moral structure. This may be a refinement rather than a contradiction, but it is a significant shift that could confuse the debate unless more clearly integrated. If objective morality does not include objective oughtness in the usual sense, then the position needs sharper articulation to avoid talking past common formulations of moral realism.

Epistemic style

T.K.’s dominant epistemic style is rationalist-metaphysical with support from phenomenology and common-sense realism. He begins from lived experience, but not in a merely intuitive way; he treats experience as data to be interpreted through inference to the best explanation. He also draws on philosophical distinctions, named traditions, and conceptual analysis more than on empirical research. At points he blends this with tradition-adjacent language, especially when discussing God as ground of being, but he does not primarily argue from authority. His style is well-suited to the transcript’s central question because the debate is about ontology and justification, not just policy outcomes. Its weakness is that it can make controversial metaphysical inferences feel more settled than they are.

Epistemic mismatch note: Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) and T.K. Coleman are operating with different standards for what counts as explanatory success. Stephen prioritizes genealogical sufficiency, pragmatic testability, and parsimony; T.K. prioritizes inference to best explanation, phenomenological constraint, and ontological continuity across domains. They are often not disagreeing about the same evidentiary burden.

Polarity: Moral Realism ↔ Moral Anti-Realism

Summary: The debate turns on whether moral judgments track a mind-independent order or are fully explainable as evolved, shared human responses. Integration: realism without dogmatism Lever: explanatory burden

Pole 1 name: Moral Realism Pole 1 tagline: Morality tracks reality Pole 1 protects:

The reality of genuine wrongdoing
A basis for condemning cruelty beyond preference Pole 1 neglects:
How moral cognition is socially and biologically shaped
How often moral language overreaches its warrant Pole 1 pathology:
Turning moral claims into insulated certainties
Smuggling authority in as explanation

Pole 2 name: Moral Anti-Realism Pole 2 tagline: Morality emerges from us Pole 2 protects:

Parsimony in explanation
Humility about what moral language can prove Pole 2 neglects:
The force of lived moral constraint
The possibility that explanation need not equal reduction Pole 2 pathology:
Collapsing wrongdoing into adaptive preference
Undermining critique by overextending skepticism

Speaker enactment:

Speaker: Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) Enacts: Pole 2 Pole Center line: worldview Pole Center: 3.5 Achiever Pole Center rationale: He defends anti-realism primarily as a rational worldview about what kinds of entities we should posit, grounding morality in explanatory sufficiency, parsimony, and human coordination rather than in group doctrine or mere taste. Perspective Structure: 3.5 Managed Perspective Structure rationale: He recognizes what realism is trying to protect and even concedes he may partly agree with T.K.'s version, but he still mainly manages the tension by returning to explanatory sufficiency rather than fully inhabiting realism from the inside. Contributes: He insists moral claims need clearer tests than shared intuition or inherited language. Misses:
- moral experience as evidence
- reduction may not settle ontology Cues:
- “morality is the thing that emerges predictably from human behavior”
- “a realist explanation is just adding an unnecessary layer”
Speaker: T.K. Coleman Enacts: Pole 1 Pole Center line: worldview Pole Center: 3.0 Expert Pole Center rationale: He defends realism as a self-authored, principled reality-picture in which moral order is as real as other forms of order, argued from first principles rather than authority. Perspective Structure: 3.0 Oppositional Perspective Structure rationale: He recognizes anti-realism clearly but mostly engages it to show it is self-undermining, not to grant it as a legitimate pole protecting something his own frame cannot. Contributes: He defends the idea that moral judgments answer to reality, not only preference. Misses:
- convergence can arise non-realistically
- analogy may hide category differences Cues:
- “moral realism is just realism applied to moral values”
- “a mind independent moral reality is the best explanation”

Mismatch: Stephen hears realism as unnecessary metaphysical surplus, while T.K. hears anti-realism as dissolving real wrongdoing into preference. Mismatch A→B: When Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) says “explained by evolution,” T.K. Coleman tends to hear “therefore not real.” Mismatch B→A: When T.K. Coleman says “moral structure,” Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) tends to hear “extra ontology without new evidence.” Bridge move: Ask what evidence would distinguish “fully explained by adaptation” from “adaptation as access to a real structure” without assuming either answer.

Synthesis: T.K. Coleman is trying to protect the intuition that some acts are not merely disliked by creatures like us but are genuinely out of order with reality. His language of “moral structure,” “moral walls,” and congruence with reality is an attempt to preserve the seriousness of wrongdoing without reducing morality to taste. Stephen Bonnell (Destiny) is trying to protect a different but equally important value: explanatory discipline. He wants to know why we should posit moral facts if shared biology, social dependence, and evolutionary pressures already explain why humans converge on norms. Both positions make sense because each is guarding against a real failure mode: one against nihilistic flattening, the other against metaphysical inflation.

The talking-past dynamic is that each treats the other as making a stronger claim than they are. Stephen is not saying cruelty is trivial; he is saying cruelty may be fully intelligible without a separate moral ontology. T.K. is not merely asserting commandments; he is saying that the felt and shared structure of moral life may be evidence of reality, not just psychology. Stephen hears “objective morality” and anticipates dogmatic rule lists. T.K. hears “evolved preference” and anticipates the evaporation of moral seriousness. A more fruitful question would be: when human beings across contexts experience some acts as not just costly but beneath them, is that best understood as only adaptive wiring, or as adaptive wiring responding to something real? That reframing lets parsimony and moral seriousness become partners rather than enemies.

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The Crux

The deepest disagreement was not simply over Moral Realism ↔ Moral Anti-Realism. It was over what each man thought would be lost if the other was right. Stephen was trying to prevent moral language from becoming an unearned authority claim — a way of turning “this matters deeply to us” into “reality itself has spoken,” and then using that move to shut down inquiry. T.K. was trying to prevent the opposite collapse — the reduction of cruelty, betrayal, and dignity into nothing more than adaptive patterning, useful sentiment, or species-wide preference. One feared metaphysical inflation; the other feared moral evaporation.

The missing variable was not God, evolution, or even free will. It was adjudication across levels: how to tell when a functional explanation of moral life is merely a causal story about why we have certain intuitions, and when it is also evidence that those intuitions are tracking something real about the kind of beings we are. Neither speaker fully introduced a shared method for distinguishing causal origin, practical function, phenomenological force, and ontological status. Without that missing variable, they kept circling the same impasse: Stephen heard “structure” as a relabeling of function, while T.K. heard “function” as an attempted replacement for structure.

The Higher-Order Reframe

The conversation opens up if morality is treated neither as a list of freestanding cosmic commands nor as a mere projection of evolved preference, but as a reality of fit between creaturely form and lived order. That frame is different from both men’s default stance. It keeps the integration handle of realism without dogmatism while shifting the question away from “Are moral facts out there like trucks?” and away from “Can evolution explain why we feel this way?” toward a more precise question: what patterns of action reliably preserve, deepen, or deform the kind of life humans are capable of living together? In that frame, moral claims are not object-like, but neither are they merely invented. They are claims about whether a way of being is congruent with the forms of agency, vulnerability, reciprocity, and aspiration that human life actually has.

Made by Corey deVos · About this analysis