>animals are super important to me

Seems like you find the debate important, then?

This entire post was at 0 for like the first five hours or so. I was pleasantly surprised to see it break through. Didn’t think it would even be visible.

>very thorough and appreciated

Someone downvoted it. LOL.

I don't know what "Stephen" is supposed to mean.

"What's the deal with [him]" is a pretty unspecific question. Are you asking why it is that some people don't like him? If that's what you meant, I can answer that.

He started his writing career attacking religion alongside Richard Dawkins, so the Christian Right really didn't like him. Then more recently he criticized Donald Trump quite a lot, so they got even more incensed. Then he rejected association with some former debate partners like Jordan Peterson, publicly saying that they'd gone off the deep end during the Trump years, and during Covid, and that made the right even angrier.

But the Left doesn't like him, either. While attacking religion post-9/11, he paid special attention to Islam, and how the specific tenets and beliefs of a religion or religious person can lead to increased suffering. This got people like Glenn Greenwald and Sam Seder quite angry, because they thought it supported endless war in the Middle East. More recently, as I mentioned, Sam debated Jordan Peterson about religion, and because his relationship with him during the debates was friendly, people lumped them together. Sam has also rejected most of the talking points of the social justice Left, and was labeled racist when he interviewed Charles Murray, the author of The Bell Curve, popularly believed to be a text that supports racism. Though he is no further right on race than someone like John McWhorter, who is fairly center-left politically, this label has stuck in some circles, especially after Ezra Klein debated him.

Most of his time, though, is spent talking about consciousness, the self, free will, meditation, charitable giving, and other middle of the road topics.

In the second half, which is paywalled if you don't request a free subscription, Sam takes issue with Nussbaum's assertion that there can be no hierarchy between living creatures, and that one should care as much about the killing of a mouse as the killing of a human. When pressed, she admitted that she wouldn't feel the same in both scenarios, but only because she is imperfect.

This may have been the most important question raised in the discussion: is it only "speciesism" that leads us to value complex life more than "less complex" life, or is there actually a rational basis from which to ask the question of which animals' lives are more important? To what degree are all creatures conscious, and what level of consciousness is deemed "conscious enough" for us to feel empathy? What kind of world would we be living in if we actually cared less about four homeless people than about five squirrels?

This touched on some of the same ideas that Sam has discussed with Peter Singer, Uma Valeti (Memphis Meats), and others, as well as one of his hobby horses, consciousness.

As my submission statement said, Sam Harris is the author of The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, The End of Faith, and other NYT best sellers. Sam received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He has also practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. He is the creator of the meditation app Waking Up.

I was thinking, “people with bipolar disorder don’t always know what is real, let alone helpful.”

I’m glad you like it. I’m not sure why you said it wasn’t worth listening to.

... although it's better than the response of /r/psychology, which was to make a weird comment about Jordan Peterson in a thread in which Sam was interviewing an entirely different Psychiatry Professor from Harvard.

I don't doubt that Sam has pissed off a lot of people on the left and right of the political and philosophical spectrum. I still would have thought a [wannabe] philosopher would have a more thoughtful way of saying "Fuck this guy I have a tertiary knowledge of."

You’re trying strangely hard to be negative for someone who just listened to a free 45 minutes of someone they’re interested in hearing from, commented elsewhere that it was a “great” episode, and then signed up for a free three months of the podcast so that they can listen to the second half.

I expected a higher quality of commentary and criticism on this sub.

Huh.

45 minutes of free discussion of philosophy isn’t worth listening to?

January 19, 2023

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Philosophy Department and the Law School of the University of Chicago. She gave the 2016 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities and won the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, the 2018 Berggruen Prize in Philosophy and Culture, and the 2020 Holberg Prize. These three prizes are regarded as the most prestigious awards available in fields not eligible for a Nobel. She has written more than twenty-two books, including Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions; Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice; Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities; and The Monarchy of Fear.

Website: simonandschuster.com

Sam Harris is the author of The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, The End of Faith, and other NYT best sellers. Sam received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He has also practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. He is the creator of the meditation app Waking Up.

Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Martha C. Nussbaum about her philosophical work. They discuss the relevance of philosophy to personal and political problems, the influence of religion, the problem of dogmatism, the importance of Greek and Roman philosophy for modern thought, the Stoic view of emotions, anger and retribution, deterrence, moral luck, sexual harassment, the philosophical significance of Greek tragedy, grief, human and animal flourishing, the "capabilities approach" to valuing conscious life, the rightness or wrongness of moral hierarchies, "the fragility of goodness," and other topics.