Brian D. Earp is a cross-disciplinary academic whose work draws on philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, history of science and medicine, and ethics. He is the Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy at Yale University and Research Fellow in the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford. His new book, “Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships”, builds a case for conducting research into drugs that affect the emotion we call love and explores the ethical implications for individuals and society.
**DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE**
Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships
Aldous Huxley’s “A Brave New World” (video summary)
Parental Investment Theory and Sexual Selection (Trivers, 1972)
[showhide type=”pressrelease” more_text=”**SHOW TRANSCRIPT**” less_text=”**HIDE TRANSCRIPT** ” hidden=”yes”] Eric R. Olson:
So Brian formally welcoming you to the SCIENCENTRIC podcasts. Thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate you being here today.
Brian D. Earp:
Yeah, thanks for having me on your podcast.
Eric R. Olson:
Awesome. so as we were just discussing beforehand, I’ve followed you on Twitter for many years and, and sort of admired your work and admired your work in academia and outside of academia exposing concepts and ideas to the larger public. But how would you categorize what you do? How do you define yourself and your career?
Brian D. Earp:
Yeah, that’s a good question. My formal research qualifications are split about evenly between philosophy, psychology, and bioethics or practical ethics. And I got into each of those things through different routes and I’ve tried in some ways to combine them where I can. So some work in psychology I do, for example, is focused on moral psychology and that can dovetail into some of the stuff I do in philosophy, which is more around ethics and moral philosophy, moral philosophy. Sometimes they’re just totally non-overlapping and I happen to get into a very specific subject that I find interesting. The capital’s my attention. So I try to be conversant across different fields. I have collaborators that work in sociology and anthropology and epidemiology depending on the topic. And I try to learn enough about each thing or way of thinking so that I can be sure that I understand what’s going on in the conversation and contributes something meaningful to it. But in some respects, I have obviously very diverse interests and they don’t always come together in a neat way.
Eric R. Olson:
So I mean that’s, that seems sort of counter to how academia tends to work. I mean you have usually have these very niche subjects and then you really have to dive into this niche. I mean maybe that’s more true in like hard sciences than talking about philosophy and ethics and things like that, but how did you manage to, how do you manage to jump around to these different areas?
Brian D. Earp:
I think there’s a way of being niche that’s organized differently to what you’re describing. So you might have a topic or something you’re interested in that’s, that’s somewhat niche but that you, but then you want to be able to examine it from as many angles as possible. So I do have some areas where I’m an expert in something very specific, but I just look at it, there are many different disciplinary lenses as possible. So I, I where some people they’ll get very comfortable with a particular way of seeing the world, a particular set of methods, a particular way of running studies or whatever it is. And then they might look at a bunch of different topics where their nicheness is based on their training in a particular field. Whereas I like to, you know, I have quite a lot of training in these different fields, but I’m constantly looking to try to get new lenses and new tools and new ways of looking at a problem so that I can integrate or, or can triangulate between these different ways of seeing a problem. And then I might get into one particular topic in, in considerable detail and, and hash away at that for years. So I think that’s the way that I kind of combined [inaudible] with, with breadth of interest.
Eric R. Olson:
So what are those, can you like articulate what those perspectives are that you, that you move between? Is it like science and philosophy and, or is there other perspectives that you take when you’re looking at a particular issue?
Brian D. Earp:
One thing that comes up a bunch for me is that I have to figure out when I’m thinking as a scientist and when I’m thinking as an ethicist. So the, the main difference that you might want to draw between those fields is that sciences at least trying to be descriptive and explanatory. It’s trying to say what’s out there in the world. And ethics is, it is at least in some way of thinking about an interested in what should be out there in the world. And those aren’t always the same thing. It gets more complicated than that because one thing I study in the history and philosophy of science is the way in which values can often be baked into scientific projects and paradigms in a way that isn’t always obvious. So you often have this kind of scientistic attitude where if somebody is presenting a view that they’ll describe a scientific and very often they have all sorts of cultural assumptions or personal biases or whatever it is that that’s hanging in the background.
Brian D. Earp:
But it’s invisible to them because they think that they’re acting solely as a scientist. And so when I’m trying to conduct scientific research, it’s very, it’s very important for me to try to rule out certain kinds of biases that I’m aware of. But I don’t know if there’s an entirely value-free way of doing science. I mean, which studies get funded versus don’t get funded is already going to be based on some kind of political or, or, or value-based question. And so at some level or another, science is going to be shaped by values. It’s not a clean distinction, but that’s one, one thing I have to try to keep in my head relatively straight.
Eric R. Olson:
Right, right. But I mean like you know, even thinking of ethics, I mean, that’s based on some sort of coherent internal logic, right? I mean it’s, it’s, it’s not, I mean, I don’t, to be honest, don’t know a lot about ethics in a, in a formal sense, but I mean it has to be, there has to be some consistency there, right? As well. I mean, so, so there is some overlap in terms of science, like in terms of
Brian D. Earp:
So in a lot of ethics, people have all sorts of contradictions that are within their moral systems and they don’t always come to the surface. And so some ways that people think about moral change is that it’s a matter of bringing those inconsistencies into people’s consciousness and forcing them to make a choice and say, Oh, well if I really hold this moral principle, but I also think this thing is okay, those things don’t seem to add up. So maybe I need to either change my moral principle or I need to change my beliefs about whatever it is, whether it’s okay to eat meat or something like that. And so the thing that I think is consistent between certain ways of doing scientific investigation and certain ways of thinking through things systematically from an ethical perspective is that you have certain commitments that are relatively central to your view.
Brian D. Earp:
So within science or certain received bodies of information and forces are laws that are pretty well described and so forth. And those, those make certain predictions, which is that I should be able to observe such so in the world and if you have a good measurement and you don’t observe that you should be willing to go back and tinker with some of your theoretical commitments. Yeah. And I think something similar happens with ethics where you say, I think that everybody should be treated equally or I really think that this kind of moral principle is a, is a solid way of evaluating a set of cases. And then if you apply it to the world and you realize that it leads to something that feels like a morally absurd conclusion, well, gee, that would mean it would be okay to torture babies or something like that.
Brian D. Earp:
Then you have a choice. You either have to follow through with that view and say, well, I guess in a weird circumstance it is okay to torture babies. And so for example, people who are committed to a certain version of utilitarianism will sometimes say something like that. They’ll say, well, if you had to torture a baby to stop a bomb going off, that would kill thousands of people and then they’ll accept something that feels morally uncomfortable. And so they’re willing to sacrifice the immediate intuition. But other times the intuition will be strong enough that you say, gosh, something might be wrong with my moral principle and then you have to go back and see what you should revise there. So I think people who want to live a morally coherent life do you have to do something like this where they’re testing their moral principles against their intuitions about particular cases and trying in some way to find some kind of stable arrangement where they can hold to their principles and to their intuitions about particular cases.
Eric R. Olson:
Yeah, but there is, I mean there is definitely like a feeling component to that where you, you sort of try on different scenarios and you go like, well that just doesn’t fit something about that feels wrong. Right? I mean
Brian D. Earp:
That’s true. That’s very much the way that moral philosophy is perceived. They’ll say, they’ll say, imagine this case and then they’ll go through the case and very often they’ll appeal to their own intuitions. They often imagine that these are generalizable to, to everyone, which is why this interesting new area called experimental philosophy has emerged where they tried to say, well, listen, you in your ivory tower and how you personally feel about that case may not in fact be how ordinary people think about that case or people in other cultures feel about the case. But nevertheless, the way that a lot of moral philosophy proceeds is the philosopher will say, imagine a case, this principle that I’m defending has this entailment when you’re thinking about this case. But clearly that’s, that’s a horrible conclusion from a moral perspective. And what they mean is that feels really wrong to me.
Brian D. Earp:
And so part of what moral psychology is about, which is interesting, is trying to give a scientific explanation of why it is that certain things feel morally wrong to people. And now you can start to go into different things about, well, what’s the nature of our moral psychology? Why do we have moral intuitions at all? Should we trust certain of them and, and abandon others of them? And if so, on what principles? So, so again, the, the moral philosophy and moral psychology worlds, although they, they seem at a superficial sense, very different. One is descriptive and one is normative. Really these things are folding into each other and have all sorts of very interesting questions to ask each other that isn’t so dichotomous.
Eric R. Olson:
And I, and I think what you’re getting at when you’re talking about science is this idea of, I think scientism, right? Where it’s like there the science is just this objective endeavor that that just sort of unfolds on its own without humans, you know, bringing their own biases, their own judgment judgements to things. I mean, you can obviously see that with, you know, there was sort of a scientific racism where there’s, you know, people were coming up in the let’s say, you know, late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds with, with scientific justification for, for racism, right? I mean, that’s but that, that was, that was the paradigm that racism was okay. And once it wasn’t, then it was like, okay, well, obviously this, this was just shoring up what we already believed.
Brian D. Earp:
That’s a stark example where we can look back with the benefit of hindsight and say, it sure seems that the rank cultural prejudices that were dominant at the time had more to do with the seeming science, then some dispassionate evaluation of the facts. But what’s interesting is that of course, we all have our current rank cultural prejudices. And the point about prejudices is that when they’re dominant, they don’t feel like prejudices. They just feel like neutral truth, right? And so, you know, who knows what’s going to happen a hundred years from now when people look back at our our scientific communities and say, how did they come to the conclusion that such and so or through, or why did they possibly entertain that model? Because their cultural and moral presuppositions may be very different to ours.
Eric R. Olson:
Don’t, don’t you think though that, that like science has gotten better at, at sort of uncovering biases in terms of, you know, I mean, I, I don’t think, I don’t if, if there were those different, if we looked back, we might say, well, these are these are much finer distinctions. It’s not, so, it’s not so blatant in terms of these preconceived cultural paradigms
Brian D. Earp:
That’s potentially true in some areas. I don’t know. I mean, I, maybe I’m biased because the areas that I study are the ones that are very controversial from a kind of cultural perspective. And so, yeah, the areas of science I’m most interested in are the ones where they’re around polarized issues, political issues, moral issues, issues, touching on people’s identities and so forth. And so I’m not so certain that those areas of science today are somehow more immune from the foibles and biases of, of the past. You know, when it’s, it’s, it’s much harder to publish a paper that’s, that’s premised on some sort of lately racist view today than it would have been in the past. Although some people would argue that those kinds of papers still are being published. But with, you know, finer grain distinctions. But in some areas that I work in, the cultural bias is, is overwhelming.
Eric R. Olson:
Well, not everybody, but love and drugs probably probably feel strongly about both of those topics. Let’s, let’s say that everybody has an opinion on those. So I, it’s, it’s, it’s a very interesting read. I feel like this book is about more than what the title actually says it’s about, I mean, there’s a lot of information in here about what I would, what I would call the bio psycho social model at, not me per se, but, but has been called the bio-psycho-social ma model. And it’s about the tension between the bio, the psycho and the social. Would you agree with that characterization? And I guess the other question is why did you choose to frame it around this, this concept of, of love drugs?
Brian D. Earp:
That’s really a really interesting and a good and an insightful question. I was just rereading the book the other day because I got the UK version came in the mail, so I’ve kind of opened it up and was leafing, leafing through it. And that was a thought that occurred to me. I said, you know, I guess if I were to simplify what a lot of the different things that this book is about are, it would be that it’s trying to characterize phenomena like love or like identity or even I get into things like sexual orientation and sexual orientation related identities and so forth. So it’s really about love and sex and identity. It’s about a lot of different things. Human nature is that we, we can’t see any of these things just from one perspective, which goes back to how we started this conversation.
Brian D. Earp:
If you want to understand something like love, it’s not enough to only see it through the lens of literature where you think of it as something that exists in a disembodied soul that’s very beautiful and poetry and literature and art and all the different ways that we talk about love and pop music and movies and so forth. That’s all to the good. But that’s not the only thing that there is in love. Love is also an embodied, biological, visceral aspect of our experience that’s rooted in stuff that’s going on in our brains. And if we don’t pay attention to that part, we’re liable to be misled or to potentially harm our relationships because we’re not alert to the ways in which our biology is relevant to the, the strength of our relationships with others. So, so an example that we talked about in the book is we take all sorts of drugs for medicine on a regular basis.
Brian D. Earp:
And I’d talk a lot about we talk a lot about selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, SSRS, which are used for antidepressant medication usually. And the thing is that we call it antidepressant medication just because that’s what we happen to use these chemicals for, but the chemicals are just chemicals and so they’re doing whatever they’re doing as soon as we ingest them and one thing that they’re doing is they’re interacting with the neurochemical underpinnings of our romantic relationships. But if nobody’s studying that in a systematic way, if nobody is including questionnaires in their antidepressant trials to ask how is this drug affecting your relationship, then all you’re going to get is theoretical reasons for making this prediction as well as random case studies and anecdotes. So partly what we call for is an awareness of the fact that what we experienced psychologically and subjectively as this wonderful, magical, mysterious thing.
Brian D. Earp:
When we’re in love with someone, one that’s partly going to be shaped by socio-cultural considerations and we have to pay attention to the way in which what we count as love is partly variable depending on the culture that we’re in. And it’s also shaped by biological considerations. And although it might seem less romantic to think about brain chemicals in the context of love, we are taking drugs that affect those brain chemicals and therefore affect our experiences of love only in ways that are not currently well understood. And so partly it’s just a call for a shift in focus and a recognition that something like love is a multidimensional phenomenon, not something that is just along one dimension.
Eric R. Olson:
Right. so I think you addressed so kind of what I was going to ask you. Like what is love, you know, I mean it’s, it’s so you know, there’s, you can describe it biologically. You can describe it psychologically can describe it in a social, cultural context. But I think back to what I was saying is that the I think what this book is about is the tension between all of those things and, and the drug component you know, is, is how we can maybe bring those things into alignment. But I was going to ask you, and you didn’t really talk about this in the, in the book, but I feel like and I don’t know if this is mediated by, you know, socio-cultural underpinnings, but I feels like men and women have very different ideas about love. Like what loves should be men seem to be able to separate, you know, sex and love.
Eric R. Olson:
Whereas women have a more all encompassing vision of love. Do you think that that’s true? I mean, do you think that there’s this division between how men and women conceive of love? And from my perspective I think those, if there are different conceptions, it has to do with maximizing our, you know, evolutionary fitness. You know, getting back to men, having a lot of cheaply produced the gametes that, you know, they want to get into the world and women having a, a, a supply of, of a limited supply of eggs and wanting to maximize the fitness and resources of their mates to to ensure the survival of offspring. So, do you have any thoughts on that?
Brian D. Earp:
Oh, I have lots of thoughts on that. So this is one of those areas where the fact that evolutionary biology and a lot of evolutionary psychology for the longest time was predominantly conducted by men is something that should at least cause us to be careful about how we evaluate that literature. Because if men are conducting science talking about what men and women are like they might have certain assumptions that they build into their research questions. There is a theory that goes back to Robert Trevor’s called parental investment theory. And this is meant to apply it to all sorts of animal species, including humans. And the idea is just that in any sexually reproducing species you may have a case and you often do have a case where you have an asymmetry in the minimum effort that one member of the sex partnership has to invest to have a viable offspring.
Brian D. Earp:
And so in humans, it’s the idea that males who carry sperm have to essentially just contribute the sperm and then they can walk away and go do something else. And it’s, it’s at least possible that the child will survive. And so the way to maximize their reproductive fitness, the theory goes, is to just impregnate as many people as you can with as little investment as possible. And then that, that will be a winning strategy. You’ll get your jeans on into the next generation. And then the thought is any kind of suite of behavioral dispositions that promotes the passing on of genes to the next generation should be selected for by evolutionary processes through natural selection. And the thought is that females of our species have a different kind of a thing going on, which is that if they become pregnant, then they have a minimum of nine months of totally taking over their body and then some period of time in the ancestral environment of breastfeeding and weaning and so forth.
Brian D. Earp:
And so if they want to have a viable offspring, they don’t have, they don’t have a choice. They must commit much more than the male of the species must commit in order to pass their genes on to the next generation. And the thought is that this fundamental biological asymmetry should lead to concomitant behavioral dispositions that should differ between males and females of the species. Right. Okay. So that makes sense. As far as it goes, there are also denims or agenda to the, to this theory, which, which talks about the reproductive advantages that would come to females of our species who have what’s called extra pair copulations. And so you’ll see this actually another animal species too. So the thought goes really the best strategy for a female of our species, assuming that our only goals and values where capacity genes on to the next generation would be to have a relatively low status male who isn’t going to be getting a lot of mating opportunities, but who will be around and help care for and protect the child and provide food for the child and so forth.
Brian D. Earp:
While at the same time that child should be genetically the result of a very fit male who is getting all sorts of sexual opportunities. And so what is in this female’s best interest would be to sneak away in the Bush and have sex with a high status male and then convince this low status male that actually that that’s his child and then get the parental care from that male, well getting the genetic benefits of having made it with this, this other male. So what that would predict is that there’s, there’s good, as it were, biological reasons for females to also have more sexual partners than just the person with whom they may be forming along term pair bond. So that’s the biological story. All so insofar is that’s true. If there are these underlying biological differences on average between males and females of our species which that may be true.
Brian D. Earp:
There’s, there’s a lot of work for culture to do to either reinforce or amplify these, suppose it or alleged or claim differences or to redirect them or suppress them or build a cultural institutions that naturalize them and, and, and turn them into things that are thought of as good because they’re seen as natural or whatever. And the problem is that there’s just no way to filter out the cultural lens. So when we’re conducting our science, where we’re trying to figure out what’s true of our species, we are a cultural species. So the thing is that we are precisely a species that whose partly its survival mechanism and adaptation is to have culture, institutions, moral norms and other sorts of things, which are in some ways the sorts of things that take us away from these seeming biological imperatives. Right? And so it’s because it’s not possible to filter that out very well.
Brian D. Earp:
When we’re doing our science, look at the biological dimensions of our species. It’s really hard to know how strong these supposedly differences are and whether maybe it’s a little bit of a difference that then gets amplified by culture and then his claim to be natural and is therefore reified. And then, you know, when you say, you know, men and women are generally speaking different in terms of how they see the relationship between sex and relationships generally. It may be that there’s some little difference biologically. But what happens is once that’s the cultural narrative, if you grow up and you had, you identify as a female or a woman in the culture, you’re obviously aware of certain scripts and expectations and norms and stereotypes that pain to people like you and your own desires then are going to be shaped by what you think is normal or natural or expected in your society. And so it might well be that as a consequence of these cultural norms, it is true that many women and many men or women and men on average have different attitudes about the relations between sex and relationships. But, but you can’t turn the dial to figure out how much of that is biology and how much of that is culture.
Eric R. Olson:
Yeah. I, I think that that makes sense. I mean there’s a, I mean, you can think of a lot of things like that where there’s maybe small differences between men and women and then and maybe to, to a beer appear more track attracted to a mate. You might amplify those differences. So then you’re, then you’re saying like, wow, that, that males very masculine, that that female is very, you know, feminine. So like makeup would be an example of that where women exaggerate their, you know, the size of their eyes and their, the color of their cheeks and their lips and everything to kind of amplify those differences that are already there.
Brian D. Earp:
That’s certainly true at least in some cultures. I don’t know how universal that is as a phenomenon, but my understanding is that as a pretty broad, a characterization of, of different cultural groups, there are some attempt or another among those who are in a kind of male gender role and those in a female gender role to amplify whatever biological differences or presumed biological differences exist as part of this kind of meeting, a game that gets played. That seems to be a fairly common phenomenon across societies.
Eric R. Olson:
And, and I think one of the ways that that issue is addressed, like not knowing if it’s, if it’s cultural or it’s biological is looking at cross cultural studies and then you can kind of weed out what sorts of things aren’t you know, that are cultural or that are or sort of innate. So I think if you looked at say, you know, how many, and sorry I don’t have a study like on top of my mind, but if you looked at say the average number of sexual partners that you know, men had versus women, you know, would you find that on average that those differed significantly across cultures? Then you could say, well, maybe there’s something behind that that’s not being, that’s not culturally and being reinforced that it’s actually you know, something that’s innate or instinctual.
Brian D. Earp:
That would be one sort of evidence that could weigh a little bit in favor of one of those views over the other. But even that evidence is hard to interpret because at least in the last a hundred years or so, the, the dominance of Western culture over other societies is, is so strong that it’s hard to, you have to go into these rare special cases where you get the untouched, a Hunter gatherer group and then you can sort of do studies among them, but then you don’t know how representative that Hunter gatherer group is and their cultural practices compared to some others. So there’s been this concern in the recent literature that at least in psychology there’s too much emphasis on studying what are called weird populations, which are, those were whites are Western educated people from industrialized rich democracies. That’s what that stands for. And so that was, we should be studying, we should be studying other cultures.
Brian D. Earp:
Otherwise, if we’re making these generalized claims, we’re really just projecting out from, you know, the undergraduate research participants that we’re getting from, you know, American universities is, is some large proportion of psychologists studies and, and that’s true. But then Paul rosin, a famous psychologist, wrote a response to that where, where he said, for better or worse, weird culture is the future of global culture because of the power and the reach of Western media and geopolitical forces and so forth. So by studying these weird people, we are maybe studying the future of much of human culture.
Eric R. Olson:
Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. So you know, bringing it back to this idea of the bio-psycho-social model of sort of humans and human phenomena you know, your book love drugs is about when there’s this tension between those things. When those things don’t match up and when it’s appropriate to, to modify one of those, those aspects to, to make things match essentially. So if you and you bring up the example of like, if you’re in an abusive relationship, if somebody ended up in an abusive relationship and they, they really, you know it’s, it’s obviously bad for them. They’re getting, you know, beat up or something like that, that, that maybe they could take a drug that would eliminate that feeling of love that they have for that person so they can escape the bad relationship.
Brian D. Earp:
Could you just talk a little bit about that?
Eric R. Olson:
What and what
Brian D. Earp:
Yeah, yeah. Appropriate and when it would not be appropriate.
Eric R. Olson:
[Inaudible]
Brian D. Earp:
Yeah. W we have this case that we discussed over the course of two chapters because it’s an extremely difficult and sensitive issue. So insofar somebody who’s being abused in a relationship that has a very heavy social cause, which is that societies tend to be permissive of male violence, usually toward women. At least that’s the case that we, we look at it in our book. There is inter intimate partner violence that happens from women to men as well. It’s less well studied, but it’s, it’s social institutions and structures and forces that allow people to feel in their private lives that it’s okay to hit someone that they are in a romantic relationship. So you might think that the obvious solution to this problem is going to be a social one. If it’s a social problem, then the solution should be in the same the same domain.
Brian D. Earp:
And to an extent that’s true in so far as somebody who’s in an abusive relationship. There are, and there should be more and better resources, but there are social pathways such as, you know, the police and other legal measures that can be taken when somebody is committing a crime. The part that we tried to call attention to in the book is this very unfortunate phenomenon whereby there’s also biological consequences within an abusive relationship that are mediated through psychological forces where very often people become more attached to their abusive partner. And so what happens is you might find a situation where someone is being abused and they know they’re being abused and maybe even they know that they ought not to be abused and they should get out of the relationship, but they may find that they have this uncontrollable visceral feeling of attachment to the very person who is hurting them.
Brian D. Earp:
And this is unfortunately very common. So we, we constructed a case that may be somewhat stylized where we said imagine you have somebody who has a objective reason to leave a relationship. In other words, it’s not a question of whether they should or shouldn’t stay, they shouldn’t stay. But what they find is that they are so desperately emotionally drawn toward and attached to their partner and they know that that attachment is making it hard for them to leave the relationship. We said, well, if it were the case that this person could voluntarily, in addition to whatever sociological legal measures might be pursued, take a drug that would sever that feeling of attachment to the abusive partner at least long enough for them to get out of the relationship and begin to rebuild their life in a more healthy way where the right kind of social supports elsewhere, then we can imagine that that might be a situation where the use of such a drug could be permissible.
Brian D. Earp:
And the reason why we’ve constructed this case is that there’s a long history of people using biological interventions to impede or impair a things like people’s sexual orientations or other expressions of people’s sexual interest in others in an, in an abusive or paternalistic way. And so we were trying to say, could you ever use an anti love drug in a way that wouldn’t just collapse into some kind of really paternalistic use? And we thought, well, the structure of that case would be something like the feeling of attachment would be the sort of thing that it’s bad to have in this case. And the person would know that and have a sort of second order awareness of the fact that this first order emotional attachment was, was not good for them and they would voluntarily take the drug to reduce that attachment. But we just try to emphasize over and over in the book that this isn’t a drug business. This is meant to replace the social measures that should be enhanced for helping people get out of abusive relationships.
Eric R. Olson:
Huh. But so are there limits to this? I’m just thinking like you know, I, I in my twenties, I was in a real relationship ended badly. I was, you know, pretty torn up about it. Would it be ethical for, for, for me to have taken a drug that said, okay, I’m just going to like erase those feelings so that I feel, you know, for this woman.
Brian D. Earp:
Yeah, this is, I mean this is another just deeply challenging question and it’s one that we dwell on in the book and people have different attitudes about this. So the, the conservative view about the value of suffering is that almost almost unbearable suffering is the sort of thing that they think we ought to be very slow to try to eliminate from our lives because they think it’s a sort of thing that can help us build our character or find meaning or value in existence. And that if all we had was happy experiences all the time, it would be something like, I’ll just Huxley’s brave new world, which is a dystopia. It’s, it’s, it’s not actually utopia to be taking someone pills and just be happy all the time because the whole point of that book is that you don’t have a sense of meaning and you’re disconnected to what’s true.
Brian D. Earp:
And so a sort of dogmatic conservative view would say you should never take a drug to try to reduce the suffering that you feel as a result of a, a traumatic relationship. And moreover, they might say the pain and the grief that you feel is partly instructive for you so that before you get right into another bad relationship, you will have very strong reasons to reflect on what happened and, and potentially learn from that and avoid getting into a similarly bad situation. So that’s, that’s where one center of gravity is in this debate.
Eric R. Olson:
And you call that the bio conservative view. Correct?
Brian D. Earp:
Yeah. That, that, that I think that can be fairly described as a bio conservative view and
Eric R. Olson:
That that sort of sort of what’s, what’s feels bad in the moment in the long run is going to be good for you because it’s, it’s, it’s the whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger sort of philosophy, right?
Brian D. Earp:
That’s one way that some bio conservatives will talk about the value of, of grief or suffering. They’ll make an instrumental claim that this, this grief for the suffering is the sort of thing that on balance is likely to help you grow and so forth. Sometimes it sounds like it’s almost an intrinsic claim. They’ll say that suffering is part of what is to be a human and if we relieve suffering, we’re relieving something that’s intrinsically valuable even though it feels bad. So there’s different ways that that argument is sometimes supported on the what’s sometimes called the bio liberal side of things, who are just roughly speaking, people who tend to be a little bit more permissive or open to the idea of using new technologies to intervene in human experiences. They might respond this way. They would say, well sure, sometimes suffering can be instrumental.
Brian D. Earp:
But as we all know from people who experience, for example, a chronic untreatable depression and it disables them from participating in life or potentially starting a new relationship, which could itself have all sorts of value for them. There are some cases where suffering is just suffering and we, we quote my colleague Eric parents who is describing this viewer, he says, sometimes suffering just crushes human souls and we have to be open to the idea that if we’re willing to take other kinds of measures to address what feels like unproductive suffering. Where I feel like, you know, I’ve just been in despair for years and I’m not even open to a new relationship because I’m so downtrodden over what happened before. At some point if we respect people’s decisions about their own lives, we might think that a person could say I’ve suffered enough. And there are non technologically mediated ways of dealing with suffering.
Brian D. Earp:
You know, you try to get over your partner in all sorts of ways that people have written about forever. You know, you can, you know, try dating other people or you delete all the messages from your old partner or you go to therapy or whatever it is. And we’re always talking about drugs in this book as something that’s not meant to replace those measures, but to potentially enhance them or serve as adjuncts to them. So imagine for example that you are going to talk therapy to work through your feelings about this bad relationship. And you’re saying, I’ve suffered enough, I’ve suffered enough. Well the your therapist or if it’s a psychiatrist, they might prescribe you a drug that’s meant to help or facilitate the effects of the therapy. So that instead of being completely disabled by the depression, you actually are able to get to a place where you’re able to more productively deal with those emotions rather than simply be crippled by them.
Brian D. Earp:
And so either side can be dogmatic, you know, the, the PR, the progressors could say, well, you know, any individuals should just decide when they’ve suffered enough and here’s a range of drugs they could take to relieve the suffering. And let’s not analyze that too much more. And usually that’s a, that’s a kind of a straw character of, of the progressive view, few progressive or that are that simplistic about it. Yeah. You can also, you can also be dogmatically conservative where you say, you know, never should we ever intervene in the biological substrates of any human experience, even if the person really thinks that the suffering is no longer serving a good purpose in their life, that would be dogmatic too. So we tried to carve out a space in the middle where we can say we should certainly be aware of the potential use or maybe even the intrinsic value of certain kinds of sufferings or context, but we shouldn’t be dogmatic about it and we should be open to the possibility that some drugs used in some ways and some context could be necessary for helping a person extricate themselves from, from unbearable and unproductive suffering and thereby potentially increase their genuine flourishing life.
Eric R. Olson:
Right. yeah, that’s, I mean that, that makes sense to me. I think that, I think you’re, I think I would agree with that position in particular. For the record, I did end up taking some kind of opiate opioid based pain reliever because I literally felt like I was in physical pain. And so the doctor prescribed that to me, did not help in the long term. Of course, once the drug wore off then I, you know, was upset still felt very upset. But, but I could imagine that would be a you know, a big help to a lot of people. Now would MTMA be useful for that sort of thing. Getting over a bad relationship.
Brian D. Earp:
It’s, it’s hard to say. I there, there is a lot of interesting anecdotal research from the 1980s when MTMA was used as an adjunct to therapy and to couples therapy before it became prohibited in a kind of hamfisted, politically reactionary way and, and was listed as a schedule one substance, which is supposed to be reserved for substances with no therapeutic value. And when that happened, those therapists who were using MGMA as an adjunct therapy were very upset about this and went to the drug enforcement agency and said, you’ve got to be kidding. There’s no evidence that this drug is, is harmful unless it’s being used in a recreational way in a club with, you know, mixing it with other drugs and so forth. And it is extremely helpful with massive therapeutic benefit for people if used in the right way. The problem is that we, we don’t have a whole lot of evidence that’s more contemporary that’s been done in a systematic way to identify exactly those kinds of cases that are most likely to benefit from MD may assistant therapy.
Brian D. Earp:
And so just to be clear, what we argue for in the book is not that people should go try and DMA, but that we should conduct this systematic research into the interpersonal effects of these powerful drugs that are in any event being tested for individual levels, symptoms like with, with PTSD. And so, you know, could it be helpful for that shirt, the anecdotes and case studies and stories and what we understand about the effects of the drug and how it can put you into a state of mind and so forth. So just that for some people it might be the sort of thing where they could find that helpful in recovering from the trauma of a, of a an ended relationship in the same way that people who are now using it in the context of clinical trials for posttraumatic stress disorder are finding that it allows them to deal with the trauma of their experience in war. And so, you know, relationships themselves can be traumatizing and breakups can be traumatizing, not in some kind of metaphorical way, but just as traumatizing to our basic mental health as, as the more stereotypical cases that you’re used to in literature. So in so far as a broken heart can be just as debilitating as the trauma that one gets from being in a war zone, then you might think that if this use of the drug is very helpful in the one case. So to my mind it’d be helpful in the other.
Eric R. Olson:
So in, in the case of MGMA, I mean the basic idea is that your you’re able to approach, I guess from a psychological standpoint, you’re able to approach scary feelings or bad feelings in a way that you’re a bit detached from them, attached from them. Right. And then you can, you can work through those with a S a psychiatrist or a psychologist. Is that basically how it works?
Brian D. Earp:
That’s the prevailing view right now about why there seems to be such radically good treatment effects for PTSD compared to essentially every other treatment that’s been tried is that, and you can just read the accounts of people who’ve gone through this therapy. You don’t have to reduce it to statistics or whatever’s in the, in the latest scientific journal. You can just ask people who have been on every treatment and tried everything and have contemplated suicide and so forth. And then they have two or three treatment sessions with MGMA and they go off all of their pills and feel genuinely transformatively different when, when they describe what it was like to go through the therapy, that’s exactly what they say. They say these very thoughts and traumas and scary feelings and horrible memories and so forth that whenever they were elicited or touched on before, it would cause me to completely freak out under the influence of this drug. I felt safe enough to, within that therapeutic setting on a, you know, on a temporary way approach those very scary things and kind of look them in the face in a, in a less traumatized way and say, what are we going to do with you and how are we going to get through this? And, and they find that, that, that enabled them to do that.
Eric R. Olson:
Yeah. Another scenario that, that you mentioned in the book, which I thought was really interesting, was the case where when, when we’re talking about, you know confer conversion therapy and such, where, again, bringing it back to the bio-psycho-social thing, there’s this tension between, you know, biology, psychology and so you know, socio-cultural factors. So you know, there’s definitely more acceptance of you know, L LGBT Q people now than there used to be. But that’s true in the West in, you know, sort of, that’s kind of the bleeding edge of culture, but there’s other cultures where there’s, where that’s not the case in the middle East for example. And so, you know, there’s ethical questions around somebody taking a drug that would say, you know, change their sexual orientation to match their culture. And you explore that in the book. And I, and I thought that was really interesting and sort of the ethical pitfalls there. Could you just, could you just address that a little bit?
Brian D. Earp:
I basically try to write about as many extremely controversial cases in this book as possible. Know we’ve, we’ve tried to deal with them as, as, as sensitively and carefully as we can. But this is certainly one where it’s a very difficult question. So one thing to say is that as far as we know, there is not any existing technology that can completely reorient someone’s sexual interests from just simplified same sex, sexual attraction to opposite sex, sexual attraction. But there are currently fundamentalist religious groups, for example, Orthodox Jews in Israel who have set up this arrangement whereby Yeshiva students who have same sex sexual attraction or even the desire to masturbate, which was seen as problematic in this highly conservative religious society find themselves in this very difficult position, which is that they are suffering from very severe depression because they’re, as it were, naturally occurring desires are totally incompatible with the norms and also the theological commitments of their group.
Brian D. Earp:
And so what a good progressive would say is, well obviously the correct solution here is to just liberalize those norms and you know, lets down with religion or something like that. And sure. I mean maybe I’m not a religious person myself. I was raised in a very conservative religious world and I see the dangers and the pitfalls of that. But I also know a lot of religious people who are sincerely, theologically committed to certain principles that I don’t find intuitive or compelling, but they might genuinely think that their relationship with God will be better if they could get rid of these sexual feelings. Now again, I think, I think a positive development would be if people could integrate their religious commitments with an acceptance of their same sex, sexual desires, that that should be the goal. My view is there’s nothing at all wrong with having same sex sexual desires, but what do you say to the person who’s an adult who has had time and reflection and so forth, and we’re certainly raised in a, in a, we might think of it as a, as an oppressive society who sincerely believes that their relationship with God would be improved if they could only as it were, get rid of, get rid of this, this one problem.
Brian D. Earp:
Well, what’s happening now in this, this Orthodox Jewish group that I mentioned, is that the rabbis and the marriage or the, the psychotherapists are getting together and the counselors are prescribing SSRI [inaudible], which are usually used for antidepressant purposes to these Yeshiva students. And this has this very interesting quality to it, which is that a side effect of SSRI is for many people is it is a decrease in libido. So if you didn’t want to analyze this case who carefully you could say, well, they’re just, they’re just treating depression just as they should be allowed to do. These kids really are depressed and it’s too bad that that depression is clearly at least largely due to a mismatch between their desires and their culture. And maybe we think the culture should change. But again, I don’t know how anybody’s going to cause that to happen overnight.
Brian D. Earp:
So, okay. They should be treated for their depression and antidepressant medication. SSRI is one way to do that, to allow them to function in their society. Right. If that has the side effect of also depressing their libido, which actually seems to be kind of the point in these, in these particular contexts where the, the people who are prescribing the drugs know full well that partly what this might do is depress the sexual desire of the issue for the students. So it has this kind of dub double pronged effect. It’s kind of a copay,
Eric R. Olson:
Cool. Castration, if you will,
Brian D. Earp:
In in a way that’s the idea is that if you ha, if you want to masturbate and that’s not seen as good in your community, well we have a way to make it so that you don’t want to do that anymore. Yeah. So this, this is a difficult, because if you just assume progressive secular premises, then it seems obvious that the way to respond to this case is not to be, you know, administering a drug to the student to suppress their libido, but rather to, you know, extricate them from their religious community. But the problem is that we can’t just assume that our interlocutor is a, is a secular, progressive person. Like like we might be our interlocutor might be somebody who was sincerely committed to a religious worldview. And, and so that project is a much bigger project. And the question of what is the ethics of this particular drug use?
Brian D. Earp:
That’s like, what is the conversation in society happening between the forces of secularism and the forces of religion or the insights of conservatism and the insights of progressivism. And you know, what do you say to somebody who is philosophically or theologically committed to a certain worldview that you find a porn but that they have every right as an autonomous adult to, to believe in. And so, so I think sometimes when people have a critique of the culture where they don’t like for example, certain religious beliefs or certain cultural norms, they try to wage that war on the level of what specific thing is ethical with respect to who should be able to prescribe what drug and what situation. And I think in a way that’s a bit of a red herring. It’s not actually clear to me what to do in this case because the students are depressed. [inaudible]
Brian D. Earp:
It might be that they should just leave their religious community. But again, that’s very easy for somebody to say in a flippant way for somebody for whom their religious beliefs is deeply interwoven into their sense of self and their whole sense of how they are situated within the universe. It’s not simple to leave your religious community. That’s where all your friends are and your family is. And everybody that you love and care about, and maybe you yourself endorse these values, at least that the, the level of your own conscious reflection. And so maybe that’s the right answer, but it’s certainly not a cost-free solution to, to leave your home and your family and your religious beliefs and everything else. A lot of people have done that to avoid persecution and, and mistreatment on the basis of their sexual orientation. But in this case, you know, at least we have to grapple with the fact that the possibility of administering drugs, which can depress somebody libido and treat their depression at the same time, it creates a dilemma where you’re helping the individual in the here and now. But by doing that, you’re actually reinforcing the very oppressive structure that is creating the problem in the first place. So that’s a very difficult case. And we just talked about the different ways you might think through it. But I don’t have any easy answers.
Eric R. Olson:
Well, and, and, and I think you bring up in the book that it also kind of, it kind of hides the fact that these people exist that say have same sex attraction. So, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re sort of going to have the same sort of political will to change things on a social level, right. Because those people have kind of disappeared due to change changing their biology.
Brian D. Earp:
Yeah. So, so if, if some sort of high tech conversion therapy is invented in the future, which makes it so that people can effectively reorient their, their sexual attractions a major, a major risk of that is that seemingly BenefitsAlly minded people who want to help, you know, these poor people in their community who have these bearance desires. If, if they were able to, to, to use these technologies and actually make it so that the person could safely and effectively reorient their desire, which, which does not seem to be possible currently, but it could be possible in the future. Well then exactly. You sort of, you’ve deflate the whole queer movement that’s oriented around trying to gain greater acceptance for people who have all different kinds of sexual desire. So there’s this very strong normalizing pressure of people who have a view of what’s appropriate and want to enforce it on anybody who doesn’t fit the mold.
Brian D. Earp:
One, one thing I study in my own research apart from this book are children with intersex genital characteristics are neither stereotypically male or female. Now it’s a relatively small percentage of the population, but there’s, you know, millions and millions of births every year. So there are thousands and thousands of people who are human beings with genitals that are neither stereotypically male nor female. But there’s this, this desire among societies that want things to be clear to, to basically surgically try to eliminate this group of people. They say, well, we’re going to mold your genitals. And it’s something that at least looks more stereotypically male or female. And it’s precisely in doing that, that they are erasing an entire group of people rather than thinking, gosh, maybe, maybe sex is more complicated than male or female.
Eric R. Olson:
Yeah. yeah, that makes sense. I mean it has to do with I think you mentioned also in the book this sort of pathol
Speaker 3:
Yeah that’s a tough one. Pathology. Yeah, I did, I did the audio recording of the book and totally mangled that several times and had to keep recording word pathologization apologization pathologists ization or
Eric R. Olson:
Medicalization of, of certain characteristics, whether that’s sexual orientation or you know, intersex characteristics and then saying, okay, well this has to, you know, if it falls outside this, this boundary of what’s normal than that, that needs to be fixed or, or, you know treated in some way. You know, and we’ve kind of moved beyond that with you know, sexual orientation. But
Brian D. Earp:
As you say in some societies, but again, this creates a huge problem because there are a lot of cultures that are just extremely homophobic and where gay people and other sexual orientation minorities are routinely subjected to violence and murder. So this is, this is a real global problem.
Eric R. Olson:
Yeah. But would you say you know, your, the, the sort of, you say that your, your central messages that you’re sort of divided, you’re, you’re sort of saying, well, we don’t have to choose here. We can, we can, we can solve people’s short term suffering in the situation that they find themselves in right now, but we should also be working towards, you know, a society that’s more inclusive, more just more you know, tolerant. I mean, is that, is that kind of the central idea here?
Brian D. Earp:
It would be nice if people could have their cake and eat it too. And there’s some work in the feminist literature that points to this kind of solution to these kinds of problems. So we raised analogy in the book of a cosmetic surgery that is, you know, it’s, it’s very painful and risky to undergo dramatic surgical changes to your body to conform to what is the prevailing aesthetic norm in your community and many women and now increasingly men as well are finding that it’s really hard to contest the norm. It’s hard to change the norm and make everybody have a more broad and open sense of what’s beautiful. So they’re willing to accept the cost of having surgical equipment applied to their bodies to try to conform to the norm. Yeah. And Margaret Olivia Little who has done some really good work on this and she’s said, well, it may well be the case.
Brian D. Earp:
She, I think she’s focusing on cosmetic surgery for women. So she says, it may well be the case that undergoing the surgical procedures will in fact improve the quality of life of many of these women. It will cause them to feel more competent in their own bodies vis-a-vis these questionable norms. But they can’t change the norms. They can change their bodies. So she says, you know, the individual surgeon and the individual woman who are deciding what to do, the, the doctor’s obligation is to their patient. And the woman’s obligation is to her own flourishing, not to change all of society. And so she says, it might well be the case that it’s permissible to perform the surgery to help this person feel better in their body. But, but at the same time, the doctor or anybody else’s party to this, to the situation has an obligation to try to change the culture.
Brian D. Earp:
And so she says, maybe it’s kind of both. You know, the doctor can, you know, ideally should be not profiting from unjust or sexist aesthetic norms. That’s not going to happen. I mean, cosmetic surgeons are making bank on preying on people’s bodily insecurity. So, you know, it’s, maybe it’s a pipe dream to think that this is really gonna happen. But I’ve, I’ve, I’ve made this argument before with respect to so-called virginity restoration surgeries where they supposedly restore the hymen or create a fake Hyman in very repressive societies where somebody might be murdered if they don’t have a visible Hyman, which again, the whole ideology is totally messed up. Having hymen is not a sign of virginity or not a reliable one anyway, but, but if somebody raises the credible threat of violence and says, if you don’t perform this simple five minute procedure, I might get beaten up and killed.
Brian D. Earp:
What do you do? Is the doctor there? You don’t say, well, I don’t know. Good luck to you. I don’t want to reinforce those problematic norms. You might say, well, I guess I can perform the procedure, but then you have an obligation now to try to contest those norms and how do you do that? I dunno, maybe you write op EDS or you donate to women’s charities or something like that. It’s really hard to know what to do in these situations where you seem to face a choice between helping the individual and reinforcing probably problematic norms or contesting those norms while at the same time causing individuals to suffer. And that’s a very difficult decision that has many, many domains in which that exists.
Eric R. Olson:
Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that’s quite a conundrum. I just wanted to bring up, we’re, we’ve, we’re gone, we’re should probably wrap up. But I just wanted to, I wanted to flit one other thing by you, which is sort of the limitations or what do I want to phrase this? I think when we’re talking about like societal norms or we’re talking about, you know genitals that are maybe look different or, or sexual orientation or something. From my perspective, from like, you know, an evolutionary perspective. To me it seems like some of those things are malleable and some of them are not. So like for example, if you have genitals that are abnormal your intersects, like there, there’s a lot of evolutionary pressure on you to have genitals that are normal because that leads to normal sexual, sexual functioning that then can perpetuate your genes and, and into the next generation. Right. So I guess what I’m saying is that I think some of those norms are socially constructed, but I think some of them also have like deep evolutionary roots that we can’t really well that have been, have pressure up, have evolutionary pressure on them.
Brian D. Earp:
Well, sure. But then the argument would be that, you know homosexuality because it’s not conducive to reproduction is therefore evolutionarily apparent. And that therefore we should have a moral norm, which suggests that we shouldn’t be supportive of same sex relationships, but that doesn’t follow. So we, because we’re these, you know conscious creatures that create culture and have all sorts of values that are different from the value of passing our genes, we get to decide what’s good. And it’s true that certain kinds of genital differences might make it hard to engage in penile vaginal intercourse and you know, a certain kind of an in becoming impregnated through those means. But that’s not the only goal of life. It isn’t the fact that the purpose of being a human in terms of our moral values or our TB ology or what we might value is just down to passing on our genes to the next generation.
Brian D. Earp:
There’s lots of ways of flourishing, meaningful moral life, including people who don’t reproduce. So I think there we have to be very careful not to conflate what does evolution want us to do with what is good for us to do. And you know, in the case of somebody with, with you know, intersectional characteristics. I mean, just take the example of somebody with, with what’s sometimes considered on the intersect spectrum, there’s a condition called hypospadias, which is where the a urethral opening doesn’t form at the tip of the penis. It performs, it opens up somewhere on the bottom of more toward the body. So it’s, it’s hard to, if you want to have sex with someone for the purposes of conceiving a child, it’s a little bit hard to do it through unassisted penile vaginal intercourse in this case, because the scene when it’s released won’t release in the end of the penis.
Brian D. Earp:
But there’s lots of tech, technologically assisted ways whereby you can gather the semen and potentially caused inception. And so in that case, you know, you can still fulfill your evolutionary purpose, but why should that be your purpose? Maybe that isn’t your goal in life. So as long as we can keep those things apart, we should, we should be okay with people having different bodies and different sexual orientations and different this and that. Because, you know, human beings have worth for all sorts of reasons that they’re, that are not in any way reduceable to their, their evolutionary fitness.
Eric R. Olson:
Yeah. Yeah. And, and you know, I’m, I guess what I’m saying is that yeah, and I didn’t mean to suggest that, you know, things that are, are descriptive or necessarily prescriptive, like, like we should, you know, but I do feel like there is a tendency to, to feel that way. Like if you, if you describe something as, as abnormal or atypical, then it’s, then you’re suggesting that, Oh, this is something that should, that, that should be excluded or changed or whatever. Definitely I feel though that like, like you know, nature is sort of a cruel mistress. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s back to this idea that like, we have these and it’s less so because of technology, but we have these had through our history, these evolutionary pressures on us that, that kind of in force, the, you know, somewhat binary structures. Like for example, we were talking about you know you know, women wearing makeup for example, or having cosmetic surgery, I mean, in a way that’s socially mediated, but it’s also those women may be even subconsciously just trying to maximize their reproductive fitness, their potential. Right?
Brian D. Earp:
Yeah, I mean, so, so one example that Paul bloom a psychology professor here at Yale has raised in one of his books is how to explain people’s interests in pornography. That, you know, why that you can’t have sex with that person on the screen. It doesn’t make any sense, but you know, you’re going through all these motions. Why would you do that? It’s not conducive to your evolutionary fitness. And his point is just that evolution can help us explain why we have certain characteristics or dispositions in the first place, but how we then use those capacities is going to be driven by all sorts of things. And so it doesn’t make evolutionary sense to masturbate to a computer screen, but it makes sense from the perspective of, I don’t know, subjective, hedonic pleasure or something like that. You know, there’s, there’s different reasons why we might do things with the evolutionary features that we have. So my nose didn’t evolve to hold up my glasses, but it turns out that it does a pretty good job of it. And so I, again, you know, we can, we have to think about when are we appealing to evolutionary theory to help explain why it is that we’ve come to have certain traits. And then it’s a, it’s a largely different question as to what do we then want to do with those traits.
Eric R. Olson:
Yeah. And, and I totally agree with this idea of like the naturalistic fallacy that we can, we can slip into saying, well, if it’s, if it’s natural, it’s good, which necessarily isn’t the case. Nature is actually quite cruel. You know, and, and we now have the capabilities to you know, change things and, and make the world in the way that we want it. But I also feel like we also can’t deny the fact that those things, that, that our history exists, that our, our evolutionary history exists and is, you know, perpetuating forward through our, through our existence now. So that, you know, there’s kind of a balance there. I think.
Brian D. Earp:
Definitely we, we talk about in the book where we say if we think that human beings are just infinitely moldable into whatever cultural form somebody proposes or we can just use technology to intervene in our human nature in, in whatever way we wish. We’re going to find that a lot of problems fall from that because you do have to have some kind of minimal conception of the kinds of creatures that we are. And once you have that conception, there’s going to be, there’s going to be certain things that are relatively more or less conducive to our flourishing, generally speaking. So there are certain social arrangements that just don’t make sense for the kinds of species that we are. Just like if you took, you know squirrels and put them in a bunch of cages, that wouldn’t be good for the squirrels because squirrels should be able to run around and climb trees and so forth.
Brian D. Earp:
Maybe they could live in the cages, but it’s not good for them. And similarly, you know, human beings because of the kinds of creatures that we are, there’s going to be a constrained set of possible ways of arranging ourselves in society. And the constraints set of norms that we should support that are at least minimally consistent, are not inconsistent with our, our underlying nature. So, so it’s both of those things we, we endorsed in the book, something we call the principle of default natural ethics, which just means that for the most part, when we have the choice, we should adopt norms and scripts and social institutions that are consistent with generally speaking, those aspects of our human nature that don’t respond very well to cultural suppression in the sense that it reliably will lead to suffering. But so who should we be able to separate? What’s natural from what’s good and they’re going to be some cases where we should not be taking our marching orders from natural selection and figuring out where that point is. Is, is part of the logic of the book?
Eric R. Olson:
Yeah. I think also though that, you know, we like, we don’t, we also don’t have perfect knowledge about that. Like we don’t have perfect knowledge about, you know, how we evolved and how, how, you know, if we were to base our lives on you know, our, our evolutionary history, we don’t have perfect knowledge of that. I mean, the perfect example of that is like the paleo diet, you know, I mean, people are trying,
Brian D. Earp:
Oh, sorry. Can you bring that up?
Eric R. Olson:
You know, trying to base how they eat on on how we evolved. Well, you know, we evolved in all different parts of the world and, and we’ve eaten all kinds of different things to our history and it depends on where your ancestors came from. So it’s like there’s not one, one diet that’s going to necessarily work, but, but it’s,
Brian D. Earp:
That’s, that’s a, that’s a great example though, which is that, so it’s true that there are certain kinds of foods that are generally speaking better for us or easier for us to digest or more nutritive for us or whatever that is. It doesn’t mean that the only foods that we can permissibly eat are ones that you know, would have been eaten by our ancestors 10,000 years ago in an unmodified form. We can come up with new foods that are consistent with the principles that certain kinds of things are good for us, but we can also come up with foods that are horrible for us and we can explain why they’re horrible for us by appealing to these evolutionary norms. So this is a very good example because facts about how our bodies came to be through a long process of evolution can help us identify or explain what kinds of things.
Brian D. Earp:
I mean, if we get more knowledge in this area, there is a big epistemic problem. Yeah. What sorts of things are generally speaking, going to be conducive to our health and our wellbeing. But that isn’t, that isn’t the same as the set of things that we could consume that would be good for us because some of those things might not have existed in the evolutionary environment, but we can, we can predict which ones of them will probably be treated as nutritious by our body by, by extending those principles forward, even if those things are unnatural or wouldn’t have been found in the evolutionary environment. So that’s a very good analogy for the kind of thing that we’re talking about in the book.
Eric R. Olson:
Yeah. All right, well I think we could probably go on for like a couple more hours here.
Brian D. Earp:
Isn’t it a really fascinating conversation. I mean, I appreciate the questions and this has been really, really fun to talk about.
Eric R. Olson:
Oh, thanks. Yeah, sorry, I, I’m, I’m having a little bit of trouble of articulating some of my questions, but and we’ve kind of jumped all over the place, so I apologize for that. But I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it. So anyways well thanks so much Brian. I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Where can people find you? I know you’re on Twitter cause I, I see posts from you like multiple times a day. But, but where else can they find you?
Brian D. Earp:
That’s probably the best way. I mean, if people are interested in papers that I’ve written, I’ve tried to put every paper that I write in some form or another up on my academia.edu page and on my research gate page. So it’s not always the final printed version, but usually it will be the version or something like that. So I try to make all of my writing accessible for free and if people interact with me, Twitter is a great place. So I’m at Brian, David herb, I think on Twitter.
Eric R. Olson:
Cool. And just one, one final question. So this, this book loved drugs. What did the publisher plan on this coming out around Valentine’s day? Or was that just a happy coincidence?
Brian D. Earp:
There are probably a combination of both. I mean, there was just so, this can’t have been the original plan, but maybe within the range of plans that were possible after I missed the deadlines, they tried to lean it in favor of Valentine’s day, so yeah, it could be that it’s coming out now.
Eric R. Olson:
Yeah, I think the timing’s great. All right. Thanks a lot, man. Really appreciate it. Definitely. All right. Take care. All right. Thanks Brian. [/showhide]