Mortality | EP 4

What can we learn from moral psychology? Are the classical philosophers right? What about modern science: can it shed light on moralism? Where does Eastern & Western thought collide?

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
TGI, the Global Island.

(00:03):
Morality. What can we learn from moral psychology?
And have the classical philosopher's provided us a bit more accurate look into human morality?
Will modern science provide us answers about moralism?
And where does Eastern and Western thought collide on morality?

(00:25):
All that discussed today on the Global Island.
So how to cheat in Spanish, French, or Russian.
Do it when you send.
Date one of them.
Yeah, yeah. How to cheat in French class. Just date a French guy.
Date a French chick or a French guy. You know the French. They go both ways.

(00:47):
How to cheat in statistics 101. Take it online. Do it during the pandemic.
Nobody's checking your work. It's fine.
Don't use your school email and download Chegg.
I have no idea what a Z-score is, but I got an A in statistics.
And so I wanted to start off this conversation with one of my favorite psych studies on morality.
And that was Darley and Batten's The Good Samaritan Study.

(01:11):
I just wanted to start off by kind of just explaining The Good Samaritan Parable from Luke 10 in the Bible.
And then kind of talking about the significance of that psych study.
So if you presuppose my ethical framework, I'm sorry I'm making you presuppose that, but just stick with me,
which is that which comparts with reality and minimizes unnecessary suffering.
And you also study psychology. You realize that we suck at doing that, that we have so many biases,

(01:37):
and our behavior doesn't always reflect that deeper ethic.
The beautiful study that shows this is The Good Samaritan Study.
So starting off with the parable in Luke 10, the Good Samaritan story,
this really rich lawyer, religious leader comes to Jesus and says,
Hey, Jesus, how do I enter into an eternal life?
And Jesus sees that he's not asking out of a place of humility.

(02:01):
He's asking out of a place of like pride and like desiring to kind of work his way and kind of earn his way to heaven.
And Jesus asked him, well, you have written the law. What does it say?
And the man says, well, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul and your mind.
And you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And so Jesus says, great.
And then the man, still a little bit confused, says, well, who is my neighbor?

(02:23):
And tries to kind of trick Jesus and test him.
And so Jesus responds with this parable called The Good Samaritan.
The important distinction to start this off with is that Samaritans and Jews did not get along.
This is like, I don't know, what's like a good example of like of like two ethnic groups right now?
Okay, Jews and Palestinians.

(02:44):
I didn't even have to answer that one.
Or like Russians and Ukrainians.
Tibetan and Chinese, Uighur and Chinese.
Yeah. So like imagine the most like there's just such hostility between these two groups, right?
And so Jesus gives this parable where there was this road, 17-mile road from Jerusalem to Jericho, right?

(03:05):
And there was this man who walks down it and it's a really, really rough terrain.
And in the nighttime, there was a lot of thieves that would hide behind rocks and basically find people that were walking alone
and come up to them, steal their clothes, steal all their belongings, and basically nearly beat them to death, right?
And so there was this man and he was nearly beaten to death and he was alone.
And the next day, there is this priest that walks by the road and sees this man who is calling out for someone to help him.

(03:33):
And the priest looks at the man and gets a little disgusted and then basically walks on the other side and continues on his path.
And then there's a Levite, another friendly Jewish person that walks down the road, sees the man,
and decides not to have compassion on him and continues on his journey.
And then there's a Samaritan that walks on the road, sees this man is in distress and has compassion for this man and picks up this man,

(03:57):
heals his wounds, puts bandages on it, puts the man on his own animal, takes him to an inn, gives money to the innkeeper and says,
hey, take care of this man and whatever more money you spend, I will repay you when I return.
And then this good Samaritan goes on and leaves.
And Jesus says to this lawyer, which one of these men would you say loved the neighbor?

(04:18):
And the lawyer said, well, obviously the one that had compassion on him.
So Jesus said, now go, go out and do the same.
And now the funny thing with this story is that to Jews, the notion of a good Samaritan was an oxymoron.
The only good Samaritan is the Samaritan who's dead.
Right? So like there is no good Samaritan, the same way that a Ukrainian would say that there is no good Russian or vice versa.

(04:42):
Let me talk about the psychological study.
So Dan Batson and Darley from Princeton University ran this beautiful study where they took a bunch of seminary students who were training to become priests.
And what they did is they told them this good Samaritan parable.
And they said, OK, now you're going to learn this and you're going to go across campus and you're actually going to go and give a lecture on this.

(05:03):
Like we are literally doing exactly what I just did right now, which is priming our brains to be like, hey, there are people hurting and we have the resources to help them.
And sometimes our biases prevent us from helping them.
So these seminary students are being primed, which is like go out and help people.
And the beautiful thing is Batson divided these seminary students into two groups.

(05:24):
One group basically had about an hour to walk across campus and then give the lecture.
The other group had about 15 minutes to walk across campus to give the lecture.
And then Dan Batson placed this fake participant in the study, which was this fake homeless person, in the middle of the campus.
And when the seminary students were walking across campus to go give the lecture, they would have to walk past this fake homeless person who is groaning and crying out for someone to help him.

(05:52):
And the unfortunate reality of external factors influencing our helping behavior was that the group that had a time constraint on how fast they needed to go and give the lecture across campus,
only 10 percent of those seminary students who were primed with this story actually stopped to show compassion to this person and try to help them.
And in the other group, around 65 percent of students that had the hour to go across campus, they helped out.

(06:18):
I have two questions with the study. One is this was back in the 70s or 80s, right?
So it was really pre cell phones.
But my second question is, really think about this idea.
Think about when we were in school, what would you do if you saw a homeless person kind of just sprawled out on our university campus?
So I get the priming of the good parable, but I almost see this as like I would go call security.

(06:44):
I would go call.
You know, I would like nowadays on my cell phone, like, OK, I'm rushing to class.
I'll call and be like, hey, like, you know, there's some homeless dude who doesn't look good.
Like he's laying up, you know, up in the middle of the common area.
But like, am I actually going to help them?
I mean, just walk around New York City or Los Angeles on any single day.

(07:05):
Like, are you going to help?
Well, so these people.
So that brings up the other psychological effect that kind of hinders our prosociality, which is the bystander effect, which probably many people are familiarized with because of the huge campaign, you know, public service announcement in schools to teach us that we all have this
bias where we think that someone else will help.

(07:27):
But if everyone thinks that, then actually no one ends up helping.
I do this often is we're like at work where I am my boss and I, we see a lot of stuff.
We see accidents out front.
You know, sometimes people hurt.
Sometimes we go out and check like, hey, are you guys OK?
But usually the first thing we do is we call the authorities.
Luckily, we live in a day and age where you have the access to do that.
Exactly.
You know, I can immediately call the cops.

(07:48):
But that is still taking action and that's still prosocial.
Yes.
You're taking the responsibility.
You're not saying, well, someone else is going to call them.
Yes.
So I think I think a good example of this that's always brought up is if you're like in the countryside, back where backwoods, Tennessee, and you break down on the side of the road, there's few companies.
There's few cars that are coming along.
It's more likely that someone going is going to stop even though a car may not come for, you know, 40 minutes, five hours, whatever it is, that person may actually stop.

(08:17):
OK, so in that situation, that person has a higher probability of stopping because they are primed with shit.
There's not going to be a lot of people.
So so I actually need to take the responsibility.
But in cities, it's more dangerous.
Yeah, because like if you're going down the, you know, an expressway or an interstate highway, you got a million cars coming and you'll just sit on the side of the road.
The only one that might actually come up is some sort of emergency services vehicle.

(08:41):
Yeah.
And so that's why if all of us are aware of these cognitive biases, then we can actually be more moral.
So that's what I was talking about in the beginning.
They're like, if you presuppose my ethical framework of trying to minimize unnecessary suffering, our brains just suck at doing this well.
Right.
Like, I can even give you another another illustration of how bad we are doing this.

(09:02):
Right. For example, if we see one victim, one single individual who is deeply hurting and we have emotional empathy for them, we're more likely to actually be pro-social and actually make a change to help them.
Then if we say actually all of Ukrainians are suffering right now for us, for some reason, seeing a large group of people suffering, it doesn't go in our brain that, OK, I should then be the one to step up and do this.

(09:27):
I should be the one to step up and help the Ukrainians.
But if I see one Ukrainian child who's starving to death, I'm donating $50.
So we have...
No, no, no, I understand. It creates this personal sort of connection to it as compared to groups.
And that's when compassion leads to action instead of compassion just leading to kind words and prayers.

(09:48):
But action doesn't always equal morality.
I mean, when you really go back to Kant's kind of view on morality, he had this idea that there was intention behind it and that one could not essentially be coerced into being a moral person.
There has to be this genuine desire and genuine intention.
Exactly. So you could do the right action.

(10:11):
But if that right action comes from a place where it is, if it's in the religious sense of fear of going to hell or in, say, a legal sense, say you live in Singapore, a very, you know, probably the closest thing to a utopian society we have today that's being successful, they have very strict laws.
And people, if you're acting simply out of fear of the law or fear of hell or fear of some sort of punishment, Kant would argue that you're not necessarily acting moral.

(10:41):
You're more so acting out of this idea...
Coercion.
Exactly, of this coercion.
Kind of taking from a different perspective, this coercion can come from cultural beliefs, it can come from religious beliefs, and it can come from actual, you know, governance.
It could be from, you know, violence, you know, the whole idea that the state has monopoly on power and they're using that power to coerce you into doing what they perceive as the correct action and behavior.

(11:13):
That doesn't necessarily equal morality.
Agreed.
So what's interesting about this study though is they're all in religious training.
Seminary.
Seminary, thank you.
At Princeton, so they're not like stupid, you know.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Not to say that if you don't go to Princeton, you're stupid. We did not go to Princeton.

(11:34):
You know, I've met some law students that'll make great lawyers. I don't think there's a thing going on in their heads, but that's besides the point.
You're calling for intention.
So here, yes, it really comes down to an intention, and that's something that's very difficult to measure, because as you just said, they're in seminary school, they're at Princeton.
We're using these standard views of looking at Princeton, okay, high Ivy League University, okay, seminary school.

(12:00):
They, you know, obviously care, like these are good people as far as Christian.
Or they should. They should care.
Or they're simply, they are simply aligned with this sort of cultural way of being, and they restrict themselves to it.
Now, to kind of go for another issue with the study, for the ones that were kind of going along very, very hastily to the next course where you said they had 10, 15 minutes.

(12:32):
It is very possible that they just didn't even notice.
So, Batson and Harley made it, like made the homeless person scream and like really make it clear that he was singling out these students to help.
But it wasn't just the time constraint. There's also like social conformity.
Just imagine you are, you know, in seminary, you're learning and it's your responsibility to give this lecture.

(12:53):
So you feel that you're going to let these other people down, right?
If you don't get there on time, you're trying to reason your way through it. Like, what's more important?
But so you can get completely lost in thought. I mean, we, everyone, it's kind of generally agreed upon that Adam Smith is, you know, one of the most brilliant people, you know, that have lived.
And Adam Smith used to do this thing where he would talk to himself and leave his house and come to like awareness miles from his house.

(13:22):
And the people that lived around him knew that Smith would do this.
He would get so caught up in thoughts, he had no idea what was going on in the world out there.
And it, no, seriously. So Adam Smith's obviously brilliant. So this is a sort of an outlier.
But if we look at somebody, if you grew up in New York City, for example, walk by homeless people every day screaming, people just dropping down, you know, it's common.

(13:46):
I saw in front of Penn Station one day, this guy literally fell over.
He was obviously nodding off, most likely from, you know, opiates or fentanyl. And some dude across the street just yells him, hit him.
He yells, Yeet, hit him with the Narcan Fam.
So if you live in this environment, even if you are, you know, primed on this parable and whatnot, you can just kind of go right by it.

(14:13):
And I get what you're saying, because it is on a college campus and it is like, you know, you would think it.
But if these are such high achievers and, you know, we can sort of compare them, you know, if Princeton and if we're accepting Princeton's sort of claim on, you know,
professionalism and, you know, choosing some of the best people in the world to attend there, these people could have been caught in their head the same way Adam Smith was, you know.

(14:36):
Bingo. Maybe it would be useful to go a little bit more shortly into like the neurobiology of helping behavior, because we have actually mapped this all out.
We know that we have these different motivational systems of the brain, right?
We have the Meso-Olympic reward pathway that Adam Smith, where he is thinking, okay, I got to figure this out.
I am so hyper focused and determined to figure this out because I know that there's a reward if I figure this out.

(15:00):
I'm egoistic motivation, right? Then we have the fear and avoidant motivation.
And that fear and avoidant motivation says, actually, there's a threat to helping this person or this is a dangerous situation and it's going to be incredibly discomforting to me.
So I need to get out of here, right? So you have the seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, neural circuits, right?
The beautiful thing is we also have this caregiving system that originates in our medial preoptic area of our hypothalamus.

(15:27):
Big words for this is the origin of maternal and paternal caregiving.
So we evolved to actually make incredible sacrifices for our offspring, that parents actually, they inhibit their seeking pleasure and avoiding pain in order to take care of their kids.
There's two channels to get into this caregiving system that inhibits our reward pathway and it also inhibits our fear and avoidant.

(15:50):
So it allows us to take risks.
The way to get into this caregiving system is if we have a social bond with the person is in distress.
And then the other way is if you are a person that has a secure attachment style and you see the person is actually in deep distress and even if they're a stranger, but you feel like you have the resources to help them.
Dan Batson, when they were doing the study, they didn't know all this, right?

(16:13):
This is information that we just found out 10, 15 years ago when we actually mapped out the neurobiology.
So now we can design better studies.
I mean, now we can design better institutions and communities of people where we can nurture social bonds.
We actually have a way of mediating social bonds in psychology with something called a closeness induction where you can actually form people to form social bonds.

(16:35):
And for some people, they actually end up getting married because it's such a strong thing.
Or you can actually attune people's brain to be more secure and also sensitive to error management, to be more sensitive towards people who are needed.
You can prime people, what I'm saying fundamentally, is you can prime people towards helping behavior, even if they have these propensities like Adam Smith to be very reward driven.

(17:01):
Okay, but so we're focusing a lot on helping behaviors.
And I kind of wish I could go around or find a study about this as I'm in social work.
If we look at 50 students sort of in the program, these are all people that are trying to be professional in the helping section.

(17:22):
But I would definitely argue that these people are not all moral.
And some of them may be ideologically captured, some of them may simply be doing this because they believe it's the right thing to do.
Action...
Tease that out for me. So what's the distinction between someone who's acting morally?
You talk about Kant and also I know Nietzsche talks about how you don't want slave morality.

(17:46):
You want that pure intention. You want to be morally motivated out of a place of actually logically understanding why you're behaving.
So tease that out between someone who's morally acting and someone who is ideologically acting or being coerced.
What do you mean by genuine moral motivation?
Kant had this great quote.
I don't disbelieve in moral universalism and I also don't disbelieve in moral relativism because life is simply a little bit too complex to take a stance in either.

(18:16):
But Kant really had this quote and I'm going to be simplifying it.
It's whenever you act with a person, treat that individual not as a means but rather as an end.
Machiavellianism?
No, it's the opposite of Machiavellianism.
Okay.
I'm not having a conversation with you because and recording it because I want to earn money and become famous.

(18:41):
I have a conversation.
Well, that's what I want.
That's all good.
That's fine. You know what? I'll even take this further. You're accepting that to me.
I'll work with it. That's the whole guru thing.
You know what? You're telling me the truth. I accept it. I'm working with it.
No, but if I was lying to you and said, hey, I want to have good conversations and I want to see how we grow over time and I actually enjoy spending time doing this, then my intention is known and I'm actually doing it.

(19:11):
That's when I'm actually doing my Dharma, I guess, my work and I'm doing it with goodwill and intention because I'm treating you as an end.
You want conversation. I want conversation.
It's not some sort of, I know it sounds transactional, but it's not by any means. I'm treating you.
Because it's coming out of a place of good faith.

(19:33):
Exactly. It's good faith, bad faith. I guess it's, who is that? Jean-Paul Sartre, I believe, who is good faith, bad faith.
But when you treat someone as a means, say, you're with this girl and you want to go out to dinner and you only want to use her for sex.
That is something that is now immoral because you are essentially looking for something from this person and you're going to do something.

(20:00):
But isn't that an end?
Well, that would be an end to you. You need to treat people as if they were an end.
Do not treat people as a means. Treat people as an end.
Okay, I get it now. That was helpful.
Do you kind of see now?
Let me try to shortly steal a man to see if I'm making sense of this.
Go for it.

(20:21):
So what you're saying is instead of seeing what you want out of someone as the end, so in the situation of the guy wanting sex from a girl,
so he buys her flowers, he does all these nice things, he takes her out for dinner, his end goal is the egoistic desire for hedonistic sex,
and the means is the girl and whatever he needs to do to the girl, right?

(20:42):
Exactly.
Instead of what you want is the end is actually to see this person fulfilled, happy, and satisfied.
And then the means are whatever it takes to actually, and to learn in that process because you don't know what the means are.
The means are going to show themselves to you.
Each step is going to be revealed to you as you are good-hearted in faith, stepping along that journey or dance.

(21:04):
Exactly. It's this idea that Kant had that you must operate within the good will.
And he felt that this good will, that this could not be coerced.
And this is also something that could happen to you over time.
And he actually felt that people weren't able to be fully moral until their 40s.
I mean, he himself grew when he was younger, he was not anti-imperialist, but as he got older, this was back in the 1700s,

(21:31):
he saw imperialism and slavery, these were these institutions, these collective actions, they were using people as means rather than ends.
Okay, so then that presupposes that we have a definition for what is our end result, what is our end goal?

(21:52):
Well, the end goal is something you don't necessarily have to have an end goal in mind.
There does not need to be an end goal in mind.
So when you say the words before that David is the end goal or Matt is the end goal, what do you mean by that?
It means I'm not treating you as if to get something out of you.

(22:14):
Do you know when you, and this is something where intuition kind of takes a play and where obviously people have worked on it from Kant's perspective,
being from the 1700s, but I really want to go back to sort of the original of it.
You can feel intuitively when somebody wants something out of you and you're working with them and it just doesn't feel right.

(22:37):
Here, I'll give you this example.
Say you're in a classroom, right?
And you want to get into this program for grad school and you need this professor to write a letter of recommendation for you.
Do you be that sort of kiss ass student in class where you purposely do everything that the professor does and try to shape yourself
in the form where you're not yourself in order to get this out of the professor?

(23:02):
Or do you rather do your Dharma that you are a student and it is your obligation to be a good student within the realm of the class?
Perhaps that may mean challenging the professor, perhaps that may mean discussing things outside the realm,
somebody that's sort of out to be the best they possibly can, and I mean best as in to obtain something from this person, may not.

(23:27):
But if you actually are intuitively yourself and you do your actions with good faith, with good will, then you are acting morally.
Yeah, so how I'm digesting this is like instead of wanting materialistic end goals, right?
Of like, I need that letter of recommendation so that I can get to grad school, so that I can get a good paying job,
so then I can get a really attractive fiance, so that I can have really cute kids and live on that house and have that, yeah.

(23:53):
Instead of living that way where you are kind of all in control on these materialistic, hedonistic things, having like, I'll give you an example.
When I took Dr. Brown's class, I knew nothing about what the word prosociality even meant.
I was totally ignorant to that and I just liked that it was like neurobiology.
I was like, oh, I want to get into this. This looks cool.
And then her class just transformed my worldview and I was just so curious. I was so interested in it.

(24:19):
And I knew that like it's probably a good thing to get into a psych lab, you know, if I want to go to grad school.
And that was always in the back of my mind. But I always, I was always acting as I don't give a shit about my resume.
I care about curiosity and I care about actually learning and being knowledgeable on things because I just, I feel this deep intuition that that's the right thing to do, right?

(24:41):
Instead of checking all these things off so I could put it on my resume, but I'm actually so like dissatisfied internally about, about I wasted all my time doing all these things just so I can get social approval and virtue signal.
You know, I don't, I don't exactly know where you came from if you were, you know, somebody that sort of failed in high school sort of thing or got Cs.

(25:02):
Dude, yo, I had an IEP, an individual education plan. I was in Wilson reading. I was in speech language pathology.
You were in everything.
Yeah.
I've noticed that between you and between other friends that I've met at our school, those that really learned and sort of messed up in life, and then they turned around.

(25:24):
They're like, wait a second. It's almost like that intuition comes out of the failure in which we've all, you know, sort of come from.
Now compare these people and I noticed like these are the people that I tend to really connect with, especially like you know there's a certain amount of wisdom there. There's a certain amount of learned sort of morality, if you would call it morality.

(25:46):
Now compare that to the overachievers, the ones that have always done it. Those people are not necessarily immoral.
But when you really get to know them sometimes, they are those get ahead types. I mean, talking about like certain individual, you know, talking about it from like the Chinese philosopher, Cheng Su.

(26:07):
I might be saying that wrong. I'm sorry. Fourth century BC.
When he discusses like power, discusses who's in charge and essentially how to govern, you know, those people that want it the most, he says should not be in charge.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. So, okay. Let me know if this distinction, I was getting this in my brain. I think this might be helpful. So those high achievers, right?

(26:33):
They are solely looking at I want this end result and the work is just a means to get there where the students that maybe had some learning disabilities or who have a more good willed, just curious, wanting to have resilience.
They place all of the value and they place all of the enjoyment and actually the work, not the end result. Just, okay, at least let me just read a book for 10 minutes today and then that would be a win where the high achiever said, yeah, I read 17 novels last week. What did you do?

(27:07):
Exactly.
Like it's because they are more talented in that, that's a blessing, but the curse that comes with that where they need wisdom to balance that out with is that there's actually deep value in the dance of the actual reading, instead of checking off that you read.
Now, I don't know if that makes any sense. Yeah, no, no, no, absolutely. This is one-upmanship and this is where more moralism, if you are one-upping, and you see this in, especially in the religious realm, in the academic realm because people want to better their career and it's a game of politics when you're a quote-unquote expert in the academic field.

(27:47):
And in the religious field you see, you know, spiritual one-upmanship. It is something that has been talked about for, you know, absolute decades.
I mean, calling it as it is, it's just narcissism, it's rational self-interest, but the important thing is that is this narcissism being motivated out of a place of insecurity because the person actually is in finding fulfillment and value in more meaningful things in their life?

(28:11):
Or are they just a part of the dark triad and these are just the 3 to 5% of the sociopaths, the Machiavellians, you know, the sadists?
Perhaps it's ignorance because we never know how life's unfold. Kant said, you know, he thinks you can only achieve it when you're 40. It's lived experience.

(28:33):
And I wouldn't always... Lived experience, but there's also blind ignorance. There is blind ignorance. Right, and so I think that's also, I think, what we should talk about next episode about, like, self-transcendence and how do we actually live a life of a place of humility and having good faith.
I think the way that would leave morality and faith, if I was to leave it this way, it's not perennialism where it's many paths, one peak. It's rather an ocean with many shores. And there's different ways to arrive to them.

(29:04):
You're gonna have to break that down in the next episode, but I love ending off like that. Sick, bro. Great conversation. Word.