WEBVTT 00:00:00.844 --> 00:00:03.222 When we think about prejudice and bias, 00:00:03.222 --> 00:00:05.366 we tend to think about stupid and evil people 00:00:05.366 --> 00:00:07.820 doing stupid and evil things. 00:00:07.820 --> 00:00:09.890 And this idea is nicely summarized 00:00:09.890 --> 00:00:12.358 by the British critic William Hazlitt, 00:00:12.358 --> 00:00:15.293 who wrote, "Prejudice is the child of ignorance." 00:00:15.293 --> 00:00:17.405 I want to try to convince you here 00:00:17.405 --> 00:00:19.040 that this is mistaken. 00:00:19.040 --> 00:00:20.772 I want to try to convince you 00:00:20.772 --> 00:00:22.495 that prejudice and bias 00:00:22.495 --> 00:00:25.783 are natural, they're often rational, 00:00:25.783 --> 00:00:27.614 and they're often even moral, 00:00:27.614 --> 00:00:29.866 and I think that once we understand this, 00:00:29.866 --> 00:00:32.375 we're in a better position to make sense of them 00:00:32.375 --> 00:00:33.432 when they go wrong, 00:00:33.432 --> 00:00:35.200 when they have horrible consequences, 00:00:35.200 --> 00:00:37.525 and we're in a better position to know what to do 00:00:37.525 --> 00:00:39.207 when this happens. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:39.207 --> 00:00:42.234 So start with stereotypes. You look at me, 00:00:42.234 --> 00:00:44.480 you know my name, you know certain facts about me, 00:00:44.480 --> 00:00:46.309 and you could make certain judgments. 00:00:46.309 --> 00:00:49.162 You could make guesses about my ethnicity, 00:00:49.162 --> 00:00:52.443 my political affiliation, my religious beliefs. 00:00:52.443 --> 00:00:54.542 And the thing is, these judgments tend to be accurate. 00:00:54.542 --> 00:00:56.724 We're very good at this sort of thing. 00:00:56.724 --> 00:00:58.207 And we're very good at this sort of thing 00:00:58.207 --> 00:01:00.940 because our ability to stereotype people 00:01:00.940 --> 00:01:04.195 is not some sort of arbitrary quirk of the mind, 00:01:04.195 --> 00:01:06.511 but rather it's a specific instance 00:01:06.511 --> 00:01:08.166 of a more general process, 00:01:08.166 --> 00:01:09.785 which is that we have experience 00:01:09.785 --> 00:01:11.326 with things and people in the world 00:01:11.326 --> 00:01:12.575 that fall into categories, 00:01:12.575 --> 00:01:15.031 and we can use our experience to make generalizations 00:01:15.031 --> 00:01:17.390 about novel instances of these categories. 00:01:17.390 --> 00:01:19.757 So everybody here has a lot of experience 00:01:19.757 --> 00:01:22.010 with chairs and apples and dogs, 00:01:22.010 --> 00:01:23.646 and based on this, you could see 00:01:23.646 --> 00:01:25.998 unfamiliar examples and you could guess, 00:01:25.998 --> 00:01:27.314 you could sit on the chair, 00:01:27.314 --> 00:01:29.879 you could eat the apple, the dog will bark. 00:01:29.879 --> 00:01:31.643 Now we might be wrong. 00:01:31.643 --> 00:01:33.443 The chair could collapse if you sit on it, 00:01:33.443 --> 00:01:35.665 the apple might be poison, the dog might not bark, 00:01:35.665 --> 00:01:38.535 and in fact, this is my dog Tessie, who doesn't bark. 00:01:38.535 --> 00:01:41.294 But for the most part, we're good at this. 00:01:41.294 --> 00:01:43.210 For the most part, we make good guesses 00:01:43.210 --> 00:01:45.024 both in the social domain and the non-social domain, 00:01:45.024 --> 00:01:46.973 and if we weren't able to do so, 00:01:46.973 --> 00:01:50.189 if we weren't able to make guesses about new instances that we encounter, 00:01:50.189 --> 00:01:51.640 we wouldn't survive. 00:01:51.640 --> 00:01:54.509 And in fact, Hazlitt later on in his wonderful essay 00:01:54.509 --> 00:01:55.994 concedes this. 00:01:55.994 --> 00:01:58.536 He writes, "Without the aid of prejudice and custom, 00:01:58.536 --> 00:02:00.876 I should not be able to find my way my across the room; 00:02:00.876 --> 00:02:03.328 nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, 00:02:03.328 --> 00:02:07.531 nor what to feel in any relation of life." 00:02:07.531 --> 00:02:09.040 Or take bias. 00:02:09.040 --> 00:02:10.748 Now sometimes, we break the world up into 00:02:10.748 --> 00:02:13.749 us versus them, into in group versus out group, 00:02:13.749 --> 00:02:14.910 and sometimes when we do this, 00:02:14.910 --> 00:02:16.467 we know we're doing something wrong, 00:02:16.467 --> 00:02:18.140 and we're kind of ashamed of it. 00:02:18.140 --> 00:02:19.623 But other times we're proud of it. 00:02:19.623 --> 00:02:21.436 We openly acknowledge it. 00:02:21.436 --> 00:02:22.718 And my favorite example of this 00:02:22.718 --> 00:02:25.120 is a question that came from the audience 00:02:25.120 --> 00:02:27.837 in a Republican debate prior to the last election. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:27.837 --> 00:02:30.129 (Video) Anderson Cooper: Gets to your question, 00:02:30.129 --> 00:02:34.310 the question in the hall, on foreign aid? Yes, ma'am. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:34.310 --> 00:02:36.546 Woman: The American people are suffering 00:02:36.546 --> 00:02:39.183 in our country right now. 00:02:39.183 --> 00:02:42.531 Why do we continue to send foreign aid 00:02:42.531 --> 00:02:43.847 to other countries 00:02:43.847 --> 00:02:47.950 when we need all the help we can get for ourselves? NOTE Paragraph 00:02:47.950 --> 00:02:49.645 AC: Governor Perry, what about that? NOTE Paragraph 00:02:49.645 --> 00:02:51.012 (Applause) 00:02:51.012 --> 00:02:53.350 Rick Perry: Absolutely, I think it's— NOTE Paragraph 00:02:53.350 --> 00:02:55.010 Paul Bloom: Each of the people onstage 00:02:55.010 --> 00:02:56.981 agreed with the premise of her question, 00:02:56.981 --> 00:02:59.100 which is as Americans, we should care more 00:02:59.100 --> 00:03:01.226 about Americans than about other people. 00:03:01.226 --> 00:03:04.091 And in fact, in general, people are often swayed 00:03:04.091 --> 00:03:07.599 by feelings of solidarity, loyalty, pride, patriotism, 00:03:07.599 --> 00:03:10.315 towards their country or towards their ethnic group. 00:03:10.315 --> 00:03:13.400 Regardless of your politics, many people feel proud to be American, 00:03:13.400 --> 00:03:15.462 and they favor Americans over other countries. 00:03:15.462 --> 00:03:18.312 Residents of other countries feel the same about their nation, 00:03:18.312 --> 00:03:20.798 and we feel the same about our ethnicities. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:20.798 --> 00:03:22.482 Now some of you may reject this. 00:03:22.482 --> 00:03:24.203 Some of you may be so cosmopolitan 00:03:24.213 --> 00:03:26.547 that you think that ethnicity and nationality 00:03:26.547 --> 00:03:28.700 should have no moral sway. 00:03:28.700 --> 00:03:31.462 But even you sophisticates accept 00:03:31.462 --> 00:03:33.296 that there should be some pull 00:03:33.296 --> 00:03:35.997 towards the in group in the domain of friends and family, 00:03:35.997 --> 00:03:37.418 of people you're close to, 00:03:37.418 --> 00:03:38.979 and so even you make a distinction 00:03:38.979 --> 00:03:40.954 between us versus them. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:40.954 --> 00:03:43.557 Now this distinction is natural enough 00:03:43.557 --> 00:03:46.481 and often moral enough, but it can go awry, 00:03:46.481 --> 00:03:48.210 and this was part of the research 00:03:48.210 --> 00:03:50.969 of the great social psychologist Henri Tajfel. 00:03:50.969 --> 00:03:53.574 Tajfel was born in Poland in 1919. 00:03:53.574 --> 00:03:55.713 He left to go to university in France, 00:03:55.713 --> 00:03:58.268 because as a Jew, he couldn't go to university in Poland, 00:03:58.268 --> 00:04:00.778 and then he enlisted in the French military 00:04:00.778 --> 00:04:02.061 in World War II. 00:04:02.061 --> 00:04:03.830 He was captured and ended up 00:04:03.830 --> 00:04:05.361 in a prisoner of war camp, 00:04:05.361 --> 00:04:07.628 and it was a terrifying time for him, 00:04:07.628 --> 00:04:09.316 because if it was discovered he was a Jew, 00:04:09.316 --> 00:04:11.408 he could have been moved to a concentration camp, 00:04:11.408 --> 00:04:13.400 where he most likely would not have survived. 00:04:13.400 --> 00:04:15.987 And in fact, when the war ended and he was released, 00:04:15.987 --> 00:04:18.492 most of his friends and family were dead. 00:04:18.492 --> 00:04:20.329 He got involved in different pursuits. 00:04:20.329 --> 00:04:21.860 He helped out the war orphans. 00:04:21.860 --> 00:04:23.591 But he had a long-lasting interest 00:04:23.591 --> 00:04:25.136 in the science of prejudice, 00:04:25.136 --> 00:04:27.796 and so when a prestigious British scholarship 00:04:27.796 --> 00:04:29.641 on stereotypes opened up, he applied for it, 00:04:29.641 --> 00:04:30.998 and he won it, 00:04:30.998 --> 00:04:33.188 and then he began this amazing career. 00:04:33.188 --> 00:04:35.937 And what started his career is an insight 00:04:35.937 --> 00:04:37.777 that the way most people were thinking 00:04:37.777 --> 00:04:39.893 about the Holocaust was wrong. 00:04:39.893 --> 00:04:42.299 Many people, most people at the time, 00:04:42.299 --> 00:04:44.200 viewed the Holocaust as sort of representing 00:04:44.200 --> 00:04:47.204 some tragic flaw on the part of the Germans, 00:04:47.204 --> 00:04:51.038 some genetic taint, some authoritarian personality. 00:04:51.038 --> 00:04:53.096 And Tajfel rejected this. 00:04:53.096 --> 00:04:55.639 Tajfel said what we see in the Holocaust 00:04:55.639 --> 00:04:57.950 is just an exaggeration 00:04:57.950 --> 00:04:59.728 of normal psychological processes 00:04:59.728 --> 00:05:01.489 that exist in every one of us. 00:05:01.489 --> 00:05:04.174 And to explore this, he did a series of classic studies 00:05:04.174 --> 00:05:05.918 with British adolescents. 00:05:05.918 --> 00:05:07.467 And in one of his studies, what he did was he asked 00:05:07.467 --> 00:05:10.019 the British adolescents all sorts of questions, 00:05:10.019 --> 00:05:11.903 and then based on their answers, he said, 00:05:11.903 --> 00:05:14.260 "I've looked at your answers, and based on the answers, 00:05:14.260 --> 00:05:16.357 I have determined that you are either" 00:05:16.357 --> 00:05:17.363 — he told half of them — 00:05:17.363 --> 00:05:20.320 "a Kandinsky lover, you love the work of Kandinsky, 00:05:20.320 --> 00:05:23.298 or a Klee lover, you love the work of Klee." 00:05:23.298 --> 00:05:25.114 It was entirely bogus. 00:05:25.114 --> 00:05:27.404 Their answers had nothing to do with Kandinsky or Klee. 00:05:27.404 --> 00:05:30.132 They probably hadn't heard of the artists. 00:05:30.132 --> 00:05:32.872 He just arbitrarily divided them up. 00:05:32.872 --> 00:05:36.143 But what he found was, these categories mattered, 00:05:36.143 --> 00:05:38.654 so when he later gave the subjects money, 00:05:38.654 --> 00:05:40.330 they would prefer to give the money 00:05:40.330 --> 00:05:42.130 to members of their own group 00:05:42.130 --> 00:05:43.963 than members of the other group. 00:05:43.963 --> 00:05:46.290 Worse, they were actually most interested 00:05:46.290 --> 00:05:48.296 in establishing a difference 00:05:48.296 --> 00:05:50.862 between their group and other groups, 00:05:50.862 --> 00:05:52.770 so they would give up money for their own group 00:05:52.770 --> 00:05:58.018 if by doing so they could give the other group even less. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:58.018 --> 00:06:00.236 This bias seems to show up very early. 00:06:00.236 --> 00:06:02.536 So my colleague and wife Karen Wynn at Yale 00:06:02.536 --> 00:06:04.147 has done a series of studies with babies 00:06:04.147 --> 00:06:06.979 where she exposes babies to puppets, 00:06:06.979 --> 00:06:09.244 and the puppets have certain food preferences. 00:06:09.244 --> 00:06:11.426 So one of the puppets might like green beans. 00:06:11.426 --> 00:06:14.001 The other puppet might like graham crackers. 00:06:14.001 --> 00:06:16.370 They test the babies own food preferences, 00:06:16.370 --> 00:06:19.060 and babies typically prefer the graham crackers. 00:06:19.060 --> 00:06:21.672 But the question is, does this matter to babies 00:06:21.672 --> 00:06:24.788 in how they treat the puppets? And it matters a lot. 00:06:24.788 --> 00:06:26.307 They tend to prefer the puppet 00:06:26.307 --> 00:06:29.786 who has the same food tastes that they have, 00:06:29.786 --> 00:06:32.342 and worse, they actually prefer puppets 00:06:32.342 --> 00:06:35.327 who punish the puppet with the different food taste. 00:06:35.327 --> 00:06:37.604 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:06:37.604 --> 00:06:41.236 We see the sort of in group out group psychology all the time. 00:06:41.236 --> 00:06:42.900 We see it in political clashes 00:06:42.900 --> 00:06:45.314 within groups with different ideologies. 00:06:45.314 --> 00:06:48.940 We see it in its extreme in cases of war, 00:06:48.940 --> 00:06:52.157 where the out group isn't merely given less, 00:06:52.157 --> 00:06:53.745 but dehumanized, 00:06:53.745 --> 00:06:55.985 as in the Nazi perspective of Jews 00:06:55.985 --> 00:06:58.070 as vermin or lice, 00:06:58.070 --> 00:07:02.306 or the American perspective of Japanese as rats. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:02.306 --> 00:07:04.520 Stereotypes can also go awry. 00:07:04.520 --> 00:07:06.781 So often they're rational and useful, 00:07:06.781 --> 00:07:08.355 but sometimes they're irrational, 00:07:08.355 --> 00:07:09.581 they give the wrong answers, 00:07:09.581 --> 00:07:10.798 and other times 00:07:10.798 --> 00:07:12.973 they lead to plainly immoral consequences. 00:07:12.973 --> 00:07:15.781 And the case that's been most studied 00:07:15.781 --> 00:07:17.448 is the case of race. 00:07:17.448 --> 00:07:18.855 There was a fascinating study 00:07:18.855 --> 00:07:20.929 prior to the 2008 election 00:07:20.929 --> 00:07:23.955 where social psychologists looked at the extent 00:07:23.955 --> 00:07:27.397 to which the candidates were associated with America, 00:07:27.397 --> 00:07:31.002 as in an unconscious association with the American flag. 00:07:31.002 --> 00:07:32.358 And in one of their studies they compared 00:07:32.358 --> 00:07:34.372 Obama and McCain, and they found McCain 00:07:34.372 --> 00:07:37.766 is more thought of as more American than Obama, 00:07:37.766 --> 00:07:39.469 and to some extent, people aren't that surprised 00:07:39.469 --> 00:07:40.327 by hearing that. 00:07:40.327 --> 00:07:42.257 McCain is a celebrated war hero, 00:07:42.257 --> 00:07:43.916 and many people would explicitly say 00:07:43.916 --> 00:07:46.616 he has more of an American story than Obama. 00:07:46.616 --> 00:07:48.553 But they also compared Obama 00:07:48.553 --> 00:07:51.069 to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, 00:07:51.069 --> 00:07:53.330 and they found that Blair was also thought of 00:07:53.330 --> 00:07:55.837 as more American than Obama, 00:07:55.837 --> 00:07:57.910 even though subjects explicitly understood 00:07:57.910 --> 00:08:00.900 that he's not American at all. 00:08:00.900 --> 00:08:02.324 But they were responding, of course, 00:08:02.324 --> 00:08:05.375 to the color of his skin. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:05.375 --> 00:08:07.426 These stereotypes and biases 00:08:07.426 --> 00:08:08.876 have real-world consequences, 00:08:08.876 --> 00:08:11.748 both subtle and very important. 00:08:11.748 --> 00:08:14.410 In one recent study, researchers 00:08:14.410 --> 00:08:17.679 put ads on eBay for the sale of baseball cards. 00:08:17.679 --> 00:08:20.413 Some of them were held by white hands, 00:08:20.413 --> 00:08:21.631 others by black hands. 00:08:21.631 --> 00:08:23.210 They were the same baseball cards. 00:08:23.210 --> 00:08:24.454 The ones held by black hands 00:08:24.454 --> 00:08:26.521 got substantially smaller bids 00:08:26.521 --> 00:08:29.005 than the ones held by white hands. 00:08:29.005 --> 00:08:31.367 In research done at Stanford, 00:08:31.367 --> 00:08:35.597 psychologists explored the case of people 00:08:35.597 --> 00:08:39.166 sentenced for the murder of a white person. 00:08:39.166 --> 00:08:41.970 It turns out, holding everything else constant, 00:08:41.970 --> 00:08:44.340 you are considerably more likely to be executed 00:08:44.340 --> 00:08:46.117 if you look like the man on the right 00:08:46.117 --> 00:08:48.090 than the man on the left, 00:08:48.090 --> 00:08:50.119 and this is in large part because 00:08:50.119 --> 00:08:52.653 the man on the right looks more prototypically black, 00:08:52.653 --> 00:08:55.283 more prototypically African-American, 00:08:55.283 --> 00:08:57.332 and this apparently influences people's decisions 00:08:57.332 --> 00:08:59.103 over what to do about him. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:59.103 --> 00:09:00.650 So now that we know about this, 00:09:00.650 --> 00:09:02.307 how do we combat it? 00:09:02.307 --> 00:09:03.929 And there are different avenues. 00:09:03.929 --> 00:09:05.363 One avenue is to appeal 00:09:05.363 --> 00:09:07.409 to people's emotional responses, 00:09:07.409 --> 00:09:09.542 to appeal to people's empathy, 00:09:09.542 --> 00:09:11.415 and we often do that through stories. 00:09:11.415 --> 00:09:13.980 So if you are a liberal parent 00:09:13.980 --> 00:09:15.852 and you want to encourage your children 00:09:15.852 --> 00:09:18.226 to believe in the merits of non-traditional families, 00:09:18.226 --> 00:09:20.499 you might give them a book like this. 00:09:20.499 --> 00:09:22.225 If you are conservative and have a different attitude, 00:09:22.225 --> 00:09:24.156 you might give them a book like this. 00:09:24.156 --> 00:09:25.905 (Laughter) 00:09:25.905 --> 00:09:29.241 But in general, stories can turn 00:09:29.241 --> 00:09:31.473 anonymous strangers into people who matter, 00:09:31.473 --> 00:09:34.158 and the idea that we care about people 00:09:34.158 --> 00:09:35.860 when we focus on them as individuals 00:09:35.860 --> 00:09:38.139 is an idea which has shown up across history. 00:09:38.139 --> 00:09:40.722 So Stalin apocryphally said, 00:09:40.722 --> 00:09:42.169 "A single death is a tragedy, 00:09:42.169 --> 00:09:44.379 a million deaths is a statistic," 00:09:44.379 --> 00:09:45.830 and Mother Theresa said, 00:09:45.830 --> 00:09:47.371 "If I look at the mass, I will never act. 00:09:47.371 --> 00:09:49.696 If I look at the one, I will." 00:09:49.696 --> 00:09:51.766 Psychologists have explored this. 00:09:51.766 --> 00:09:53.067 For instance, in one study, 00:09:53.067 --> 00:09:55.850 people were given a list of facts about a crisis, 00:09:55.850 --> 00:10:00.106 and it was seen how much they would donate 00:10:00.106 --> 00:10:01.690 to solve this crisis, 00:10:01.690 --> 00:10:03.527 and another group was given no facts at all 00:10:03.527 --> 00:10:05.625 but they were told of an individual 00:10:05.625 --> 00:10:08.065 and given a name and given a face, 00:10:08.065 --> 00:10:11.284 and it turns out that they gave far more. 00:10:11.284 --> 00:10:13.145 None of this I think is a secret 00:10:13.145 --> 00:10:15.256 to the people who are engaged in charity work. 00:10:15.256 --> 00:10:17.904 People don't tend to deluge people 00:10:17.904 --> 00:10:19.227 with facts and statistics. 00:10:19.227 --> 00:10:20.249 Rather, you show them faces, 00:10:20.249 --> 00:10:21.985 you show them people. 00:10:21.985 --> 00:10:25.212 It's possible that by extending our sympathies 00:10:25.212 --> 00:10:27.183 to an individual, they can spread 00:10:27.183 --> 00:10:30.061 to the group the individual belongs to. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:30.061 --> 00:10:32.527 This is Harriet Beecher Stowe. 00:10:32.527 --> 00:10:34.970 The story, perhaps apocryphal, 00:10:34.970 --> 00:10:36.834 is that President Lincoln invited her 00:10:36.834 --> 00:10:39.042 to the White House in the middle of the Civil War 00:10:39.042 --> 00:10:40.626 and said to her, 00:10:40.626 --> 00:10:43.290 "So you're the little lady who started this great war." 00:10:43.290 --> 00:10:45.175 And he was talking about "Uncle Tom's Cabin." 00:10:45.175 --> 00:10:47.706 "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is not a great book of philosophy 00:10:47.706 --> 00:10:50.850 or of theology or perhaps not even literature, 00:10:50.850 --> 00:10:53.365 but it does a great job 00:10:53.365 --> 00:10:55.863 of getting people to put themselves in the shoes 00:10:55.863 --> 00:10:58.196 of people they wouldn't otherwise be in the shoes of, 00:10:58.196 --> 00:11:00.598 put themselves in the shoes of slaves. 00:11:00.598 --> 00:11:02.379 And that could well have been a catalyst 00:11:02.379 --> 00:11:03.983 for great social change. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:03.983 --> 00:11:06.345 More recently, looking at America 00:11:06.345 --> 00:11:09.414 in the last several decades, 00:11:09.414 --> 00:11:12.563 there's some who reasonably say that shows like "The Cosby Show" 00:11:12.563 --> 00:11:15.161 radically changed American attitudes towards African-Americans, 00:11:15.161 --> 00:11:18.234 while shows like "Will & Grace" and "Modern Family" 00:11:18.234 --> 00:11:19.597 changed American attitudes 00:11:19.597 --> 00:11:20.897 towards gay men and women. 00:11:20.897 --> 00:11:23.352 I don't think it's an exaggeration to say 00:11:23.352 --> 00:11:26.013 that the major catalyst in America for moral change 00:11:26.013 --> 00:11:28.906 has been a situation comedy. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:28.906 --> 00:11:30.322 But it's not all emotions, 00:11:30.322 --> 00:11:31.388 and I want to end by appealing 00:11:31.388 --> 00:11:33.833 to the power of reason. 00:11:33.833 --> 00:11:35.989 At some point in his wonderful book 00:11:35.989 --> 00:11:37.212 "The Better Angels Of Our Nature," 00:11:37.212 --> 00:11:39.228 Steven Pinker says, you know, 00:11:39.228 --> 00:11:41.810 the Old Testament says love thy neighbor, 00:11:41.810 --> 00:11:44.532 and the New Testament says love thy enemy, 00:11:44.532 --> 00:11:47.218 but I don't love either one of them, not really, 00:11:47.218 --> 00:11:48.885 but I don't want to kill them. 00:11:48.885 --> 00:11:50.751 I know I have obligations to them, 00:11:50.751 --> 00:11:54.221 but my moral feelings to them, my moral beliefs 00:11:54.221 --> 00:11:55.934 about how I should behave towards them, 00:11:55.934 --> 00:11:57.981 aren't grounded in love. 00:11:57.981 --> 00:11:59.920 What they're grounded in is the understanding of human rights, 00:11:59.920 --> 00:12:02.143 a belief that their life is as valuable to them 00:12:02.143 --> 00:12:04.499 as my life is to me, 00:12:04.499 --> 00:12:06.431 and to support this, he tells a story 00:12:06.431 --> 00:12:08.279 by the great philosopher Adam Smith, 00:12:08.279 --> 00:12:09.965 and I want to tell this story too, 00:12:09.965 --> 00:12:11.261 though I'm going to modify it a little bit 00:12:11.261 --> 00:12:12.939 for modern times. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:12.939 --> 00:12:14.530 So Adam Smith starts by asking you to imagine 00:12:14.530 --> 00:12:16.741 the death of thousands of people, 00:12:16.741 --> 00:12:18.781 and imagine that the thousands of people 00:12:18.781 --> 00:12:21.020 are in a country you are not familiar with. 00:12:21.020 --> 00:12:24.574 It could be China or India or a country in Africa. 00:12:24.574 --> 00:12:27.058 And Smith says, how would you respond? 00:12:27.058 --> 00:12:29.365 And you would say, well that's too bad, 00:12:29.365 --> 00:12:31.241 and you'd go on to the rest of your life. 00:12:31.241 --> 00:12:33.460 If you were to open up The New York Times online or something, 00:12:33.460 --> 00:12:36.420 and discover this, and in fact this happens to us all the time, 00:12:36.420 --> 00:12:37.941 we go about our lives. 00:12:37.941 --> 00:12:40.135 But imagine instead, Smith says, 00:12:40.135 --> 00:12:41.389 you were to learn that tomorrow 00:12:41.389 --> 00:12:43.928 you were to have your little finger chopped off. 00:12:43.928 --> 00:12:46.097 Smith says, that would matter a lot. 00:12:46.097 --> 00:12:47.508 You would not sleep that night 00:12:47.508 --> 00:12:48.861 wondering about that. 00:12:48.861 --> 00:12:50.880 So this raises the question: 00:12:50.880 --> 00:12:53.346 would you sacrifice thousands of lives 00:12:53.346 --> 00:12:55.315 to save your little finger? 00:12:55.315 --> 00:12:57.633 Now answer this in the privacy of your own head, 00:12:57.633 --> 00:13:00.552 but Smith says, absolutely not, 00:13:00.552 --> 00:13:02.244 what a horrid thought. 00:13:02.244 --> 00:13:04.275 And so this raises the question, 00:13:04.275 --> 00:13:05.649 and so, as Smith puts it, 00:13:05.649 --> 00:13:07.867 "When our passive feelings are almost always 00:13:07.867 --> 00:13:09.315 so sordid and so selfish, 00:13:09.315 --> 00:13:10.780 how comes it that our active principles 00:13:10.780 --> 00:13:13.313 should often be so generous and so noble?" 00:13:13.313 --> 00:13:15.363 And Smith's answer is, "It is reason, 00:13:15.363 --> 00:13:17.138 principle, conscience. 00:13:17.138 --> 00:13:18.679 [This] calls to us, 00:13:18.679 --> 00:13:22.104 with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, 00:13:22.104 --> 00:13:23.781 that we are but one of the multitude, 00:13:23.781 --> 00:13:26.222 in no respect better than any other in it." NOTE Paragraph 00:13:26.222 --> 00:13:28.347 And this last part is what is often described 00:13:28.347 --> 00:13:31.555 as the principle of impartiality. 00:13:31.555 --> 00:13:34.184 And this principle of impartiality manifests itself 00:13:34.184 --> 00:13:35.931 in all of the world's religions, 00:13:35.951 --> 00:13:38.209 in all of the different versions of the golden rule, 00:13:38.209 --> 00:13:40.663 and in all of the world's moral philosophies, 00:13:40.663 --> 00:13:41.970 which differ in many ways 00:13:41.970 --> 00:13:44.964 but share the presupposition that we should judge morality 00:13:44.964 --> 00:13:47.949 from sort of an impartial point of view. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:47.949 --> 00:13:49.771 The best articulation of this view 00:13:49.771 --> 00:13:52.856 is actually, for me, it's not from a theologian or from a philosopher, 00:13:52.856 --> 00:13:54.213 but from Humphrey Bogart 00:13:54.213 --> 00:13:55.760 at the end of "Casablanca." 00:13:55.760 --> 00:13:59.536 So, spoiler alert, he's telling his lover 00:13:59.536 --> 00:14:00.676 that they have to separate 00:14:00.676 --> 00:14:02.269 for the more general good, 00:14:02.269 --> 00:14:04.133 and he says to her, and I won't do the accent, 00:14:04.133 --> 00:14:05.815 but he says to her, "It doesn't take much to see 00:14:05.815 --> 00:14:07.274 that the problems of three little people 00:14:07.274 --> 00:14:10.385 don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." NOTE Paragraph 00:14:10.385 --> 00:14:13.665 Our reason could cause us to override our passions. 00:14:13.665 --> 00:14:15.381 Our reason could motivate us 00:14:15.381 --> 00:14:16.602 to extend our empathy, 00:14:16.602 --> 00:14:18.929 could motivate us to write a book like "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 00:14:18.929 --> 00:14:20.652 or read a book like "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 00:14:20.652 --> 00:14:23.346 and our reason can motivate us to create 00:14:23.346 --> 00:14:25.308 customs and taboos and laws 00:14:25.308 --> 00:14:27.118 that will constrain us 00:14:27.118 --> 00:14:28.794 from acting upon our impulses 00:14:28.794 --> 00:14:30.383 when, as rational beings, we feel 00:14:30.383 --> 00:14:31.778 we should be constrained. 00:14:31.778 --> 00:14:33.791 This is what a constitution is. 00:14:33.791 --> 00:14:36.712 A constitution is something which was set up in the past 00:14:36.712 --> 00:14:38.019 that applies now in the present, 00:14:38.019 --> 00:14:39.004 and what it says is, 00:14:39.004 --> 00:14:41.231 no matter how much we might to reelect 00:14:41.231 --> 00:14:43.834 a popular president for a third term, 00:14:43.834 --> 00:14:45.929 no matter how much white Americans might choose 00:14:45.929 --> 00:14:49.997 to feel that they want to reinstate the institution of slavery, we can't. 00:14:49.997 --> 00:14:51.673 We have bound ourselves. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:51.673 --> 00:14:54.090 And we bind ourselves in other ways as well. 00:14:54.090 --> 00:14:56.848 We know that when it comes to choosing somebody 00:14:56.848 --> 00:14:59.799 for a job, for an award, 00:14:59.799 --> 00:15:02.757 we are strongly biased by their race, 00:15:02.757 --> 00:15:05.053 we are biased by their gender, 00:15:05.053 --> 00:15:07.268 we are biased by how attractive they are, 00:15:07.268 --> 00:15:09.919 and sometimes we might say, "Well fine, that's the way it should be." 00:15:09.919 --> 00:15:12.226 But other times we might say, "This is wrong." 00:15:12.226 --> 00:15:14.115 And so to combat this, 00:15:14.115 --> 00:15:16.366 we don't just try harder, 00:15:16.366 --> 00:15:19.367 but rather what we do is we set up situations 00:15:19.367 --> 00:15:22.406 where these other sources of information can't bias us, 00:15:22.406 --> 00:15:23.721 which is why many orchestras 00:15:23.721 --> 00:15:26.366 audition musicians behind screens, 00:15:26.366 --> 00:15:27.610 so the only information they have 00:15:27.610 --> 00:15:30.303 is the information they believe should matter. 00:15:30.303 --> 00:15:32.626 I think prejudice and bias 00:15:32.626 --> 00:15:35.720 illustrate a fundamental duality of human nature. 00:15:35.720 --> 00:15:39.496 We have gut feelings, instincts, emotions, 00:15:39.496 --> 00:15:41.657 and they affect our judgments and our actions 00:15:41.657 --> 00:15:43.988 for good and for evil, 00:15:43.988 --> 00:15:47.610 but we are also capable of rational deliberation 00:15:47.610 --> 00:15:49.045 and intelligent planning, 00:15:49.045 --> 00:15:51.862 and we can use these to in some cases 00:15:51.862 --> 00:15:53.805 accelerate and nourish our emotions, 00:15:53.805 --> 00:15:56.573 and in other cases staunch them. 00:15:56.573 --> 00:15:57.807 And it's in this way 00:15:57.807 --> 00:16:00.574 that reason helps us create a better world. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:00.574 --> 00:16:02.918 Thank you. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:02.918 --> 00:16:06.623 (Applause)