WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.240 The genes generation. 2 00:00:02.640 --> 00:00:04.760 The sperm that breaks the membrane, 3 00:00:05.740 --> 00:00:07.380 the white moth on white bark, 4 00:00:07.660 --> 00:00:11.100 the strongest of the litter nudging the runt from the nipple. 5 00:00:11.620 --> 00:00:13.720 Select the button for blue eyes 6 00:00:13.720 --> 00:00:16.120 and dial up Mensa membership. 7 00:00:16.620 --> 00:00:20.100 Point an invisible bone at pockmarked genius. 8 00:00:20.900 --> 00:00:24.780 Probes will reach new depths to find the best of the best. 9 00:00:25.600 --> 00:00:27.920 Set the clock, the face, the fingers and toes, 10 00:00:27.920 --> 00:00:32.460 the bellwether and dolly girls lead us to our destiny, 11 00:00:32.620 --> 00:00:36.360 a world decorated with the fabric of perfection. 12 00:00:38.160 --> 00:00:41.120 And in society's pursuit for physical perfection, 13 00:00:41.940 --> 00:00:43.840 may we never create this scenario, 14 00:00:45.160 --> 00:00:46.420 the fat aftermath. 15 00:00:47.920 --> 00:00:50.680 And when the renegade fat people took to the streets 16 00:00:50.680 --> 00:00:53.300 because no one would rent them rooms or houses 17 00:00:53.300 --> 00:00:55.980 and they were forbidden to study or work 18 00:00:55.980 --> 00:00:57.520 unless they underwent, 19 00:00:57.920 --> 00:00:59.200 government buttoning, 20 00:00:59.240 --> 00:01:03.020 they opened sly bakeries and lolly shops in deserted buildings, 21 00:01:03.420 --> 00:01:06.340 imported chocolates from Africa on the black market, 22 00:01:06.600 --> 00:01:09.140 grew illicit sugar cane in national parks 23 00:01:09.140 --> 00:01:12.080 and set up underground confectionery cells 24 00:01:12.080 --> 00:01:14.020 long before the prohibition. 25 00:01:14.840 --> 00:01:16.940 The fat police hunted them like dogs, 26 00:01:17.140 --> 00:01:19.280 loading them into glass-sided vehicles 27 00:01:19.280 --> 00:01:22.440 for all to see as they shunted them through the city 28 00:01:22.440 --> 00:01:23.520 to the nearest clinic. 29 00:01:24.480 --> 00:01:26.300 Jaw wiring and stomach stapling 30 00:01:26.300 --> 00:01:27.900 were outlawed years before. 31 00:01:27.900 --> 00:01:31.440 The community outraged at the waste of government funds 32 00:01:31.440 --> 00:01:33.680 spent on these hopeless cases 33 00:01:33.680 --> 00:01:35.580 who didn't want to help themselves. 34 00:01:36.480 --> 00:01:40.240 Government buttoning only requires a local anaesthetic, 35 00:01:40.420 --> 00:01:42.360 a small slip to the upper lip 36 00:01:42.360 --> 00:01:45.380 and a flesh-coloured knob stitched to the lower lip. 37 00:01:47.040 --> 00:01:50.180 Laser-sealed, the sinful mouth is then mute. 38 00:01:50.920 --> 00:01:53.560 The official reduction nurse appears every day 39 00:01:53.560 --> 00:01:57.420 with a protein shake and a long straw to insert through the nose. 40 00:01:57.900 --> 00:02:00.520 The taste buds die after a few years 41 00:02:00.520 --> 00:02:04.900 and staying within the legal range of zero to one is easy. 42 00:02:05.040 --> 00:02:05.880 Thank you. 43 00:02:14.380 --> 00:02:18.120 I certainly can't think of a better way to introduce this session. 44 00:02:18.200 --> 00:02:20.020 Can we please thank our... 45 00:02:20.020 --> 00:02:21.680 Part of the peppering of the poets 46 00:02:21.680 --> 00:02:24.080 at this year's Adelaide Festival of Ideas, 47 00:02:24.080 --> 00:02:25.940 that was Jude Aquilina. 48 00:02:28.420 --> 00:02:28.900 APPLAUSE 49 00:02:31.060 --> 00:02:33.140 And Jude is an Adelaide Hills poet. 50 00:02:33.300 --> 00:02:35.780 Her latest book, published by Wakefield Press, 51 00:02:35.960 --> 00:02:37.160 is called Woman Speak. 52 00:02:37.880 --> 00:02:39.560 Thank you very much, Jude. 53 00:02:39.760 --> 00:02:42.400 Welcome to the Adelaide Festival of Ideas 54 00:02:42.400 --> 00:02:47.000 and to what I know will be a spicy session indeed, 55 00:02:47.360 --> 00:02:48.760 the case for perfection. 56 00:02:49.200 --> 00:02:52.020 My name is Natasha Mitchell from ABC Radio National. 57 00:02:52.060 --> 00:02:54.320 I host our program called All In The Mind. 58 00:02:54.340 --> 00:02:57.020 I'm a science journalist and I have to say I find this... 59 00:02:57.020 --> 00:02:57.880 Oh, now, before we start, I want to say thank you 60 00:02:57.880 --> 00:03:01.760 Let me tell you, if you could turn your devices on to silent, 61 00:03:02.740 --> 00:03:03.420 that would be fabulous. 62 00:03:03.820 --> 00:03:07.740 There's a hashtag for the festival if you're an avid tweeter 63 00:03:07.740 --> 00:03:10.340 and that is hash A-F-O-I 64 00:03:10.340 --> 00:03:15.280 and the Twitter address for the festival is at Ideas Adelaide, 65 00:03:15.320 --> 00:03:16.800 a lovely sort of parallel conversation 66 00:03:17.360 --> 00:03:20.520 that can unfold throughout the festival on Twitter. 67 00:03:20.800 --> 00:03:24.740 As a science journalist focused on the mind and self, 68 00:03:24.820 --> 00:03:27.820 I find this interface between technology, science, 69 00:03:27.880 --> 00:03:30.040 and the self utterly compelling. 70 00:03:30.540 --> 00:03:35.040 How will new technologies change who we fundamentally are, 71 00:03:35.220 --> 00:03:37.180 how we think, how we behave, 72 00:03:37.440 --> 00:03:40.480 what we define as essentially human, 73 00:03:40.600 --> 00:03:44.480 and also what we define as natural? 74 00:03:45.600 --> 00:03:50.040 Certainly in the 1980s, the fantasy was the cyborg, 75 00:03:50.060 --> 00:03:51.760 part machine, part person, 76 00:03:51.840 --> 00:03:55.800 and we had that spectacle of the hybrid being, the Terminator, 77 00:03:55.940 --> 00:03:57.800 which was, I guess, to some, 78 00:03:57.880 --> 00:03:59.020 to become a spectacle of a monster. 79 00:03:59.960 --> 00:04:04.420 And today, our utopic and possibly dystopic visions 80 00:04:04.420 --> 00:04:07.580 are perhaps more molecular, aren't they? 81 00:04:08.020 --> 00:04:11.840 Pharmaceutical enhancements, drugs that keep us awake, 82 00:04:12.020 --> 00:04:16.560 that boost our memory, that perhaps wipe out traumatic memories, 83 00:04:17.680 --> 00:04:21.420 or even genetic enhancements before we're born, perhaps. 84 00:04:21.760 --> 00:04:26.080 And this is where things get interesting, contentious, perhaps. 85 00:04:26.420 --> 00:04:27.860 How far do we take this? 86 00:04:27.860 --> 00:04:30.180 How far do we take genetic screening before birth? 87 00:04:30.420 --> 00:04:31.560 What do we screen out? 88 00:04:31.680 --> 00:04:32.620 Who gets to decide? 89 00:04:32.840 --> 00:04:36.100 Whose vision of perfection are we fulfilling when we do? 90 00:04:37.340 --> 00:04:40.840 And certainly one of the most provocative and interesting speakers 91 00:04:40.840 --> 00:04:44.220 that I've seen speak on this topic, that I've interviewed before, 92 00:04:44.400 --> 00:04:47.440 on this subject, is our special festival guest today. 93 00:04:47.540 --> 00:04:51.340 He's an Australian lad, a bioethicist based at Oxford University. 94 00:04:51.420 --> 00:04:56.240 Professor Julian Savulescu, he has multiple hats. 95 00:04:56.480 --> 00:04:57.820 Apparently he's a catnapper. 96 00:04:57.860 --> 00:04:59.520 Which is how he manages to fit in sleep. 97 00:04:59.780 --> 00:05:04.420 He's director of the Juhiro Practical Centre for Practical Ethics 98 00:05:04.420 --> 00:05:06.040 in the Faculty of Philosophy. 99 00:05:06.280 --> 00:05:09.240 He's director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics 100 00:05:09.240 --> 00:05:11.720 and the Institute for Science and Ethics. 101 00:05:11.960 --> 00:05:15.660 He has countless gongs to his name, including one here in Australia, 102 00:05:15.740 --> 00:05:18.780 which means that he gets to come back home for two months each year 103 00:05:18.780 --> 00:05:22.940 at Monash University, where he is the Sir Louis Matheson 104 00:05:22.940 --> 00:05:26.460 Distinguished Professor at Monash University there. 105 00:05:26.620 --> 00:05:27.840 He doesn't mince his words. 106 00:05:27.840 --> 00:05:30.020 I think you're in for a very interesting session. 107 00:05:30.280 --> 00:05:32.260 Can we please give him a warm welcome? 108 00:05:39.980 --> 00:05:41.540 Thanks very much, Natasha. 109 00:05:41.880 --> 00:05:44.780 It's a great pleasure to be back in Australia 110 00:05:44.780 --> 00:05:47.660 and also for my second time in Adelaide. 111 00:05:49.000 --> 00:05:51.220 Steve Jobs died a couple of days ago 112 00:05:51.220 --> 00:05:57.700 and I was reading the obituaries yesterday on the plane. 113 00:05:57.700 --> 00:06:00.240 People were talking about his achievements, 114 00:06:00.280 --> 00:06:02.960 introducing the Macintosh computer, I recently bought one, 115 00:06:03.060 --> 00:06:07.940 the iPhone, the iPad, and what great inventions these were. 116 00:06:08.440 --> 00:06:11.160 But what are these things that Jobs created? 117 00:06:11.820 --> 00:06:15.040 Well, effectively, they're either cognitive enhancers, 118 00:06:15.100 --> 00:06:17.740 the iPhone is an incredibly powerful tool 119 00:06:17.740 --> 00:06:20.280 for enhancing our ability to record information, 120 00:06:20.640 --> 00:06:23.380 remember things, manipulate that information, 121 00:06:23.740 --> 00:06:26.580 access the internet and the world wide web, 122 00:06:26.580 --> 00:06:30.220 or mood enhancers, things that make us happy, 123 00:06:30.280 --> 00:06:31.620 listening to music and so on. 124 00:06:31.720 --> 00:06:36.340 So Jobs is really just one of an enhancement revolution 125 00:06:36.340 --> 00:06:38.900 that is going on all around us. 126 00:06:39.080 --> 00:06:42.240 So I've written quite a lot on physical enhancement, 127 00:06:42.460 --> 00:06:45.720 enhancement in sport, and cognitive enhancement. 128 00:06:46.280 --> 00:06:50.460 For the last eight years or so, I've been working on the ethics 129 00:06:50.460 --> 00:06:54.800 of enhancing cognitive ability, and recently that's come 130 00:06:54.800 --> 00:06:55.880 to the popular. 131 00:06:55.880 --> 00:06:59.400 Media through films like Limitless. 132 00:07:00.060 --> 00:07:02.820 But today I'm going to talk about a different kind of enhancement. 133 00:07:03.060 --> 00:07:06.140 Not physical enhancement, not cognitive enhancement, 134 00:07:06.440 --> 00:07:08.020 but moral enhancement. 135 00:07:08.560 --> 00:07:13.640 And my idea for the Adelaide Ideas Festival is that we can 136 00:07:13.640 --> 00:07:20.320 and should enhance people's moral capacities by using technology, 137 00:07:20.520 --> 00:07:25.060 and I'll talk a little bit about how we could do it using biotechnology. 138 00:07:26.480 --> 00:07:30.420 So many of you will be familiar with Anders Breivik, 139 00:07:30.600 --> 00:07:35.740 who earlier this year killed 77 people with automatic weapons, 140 00:07:36.000 --> 00:07:40.600 and another eight with a bomb outside of the government buildings in Oslo. 141 00:07:41.000 --> 00:07:47.580 Most of his victims were young people at a Labour Party camp. 142 00:07:47.900 --> 00:07:50.480 He said that the Labour Party had to pay the price 143 00:07:50.480 --> 00:07:53.260 for letting down Norway and the Norwegian people. 144 00:07:53.940 --> 00:07:55.860 Published a 1,500-page paper, 145 00:07:55.880 --> 00:08:01.100 and in fact was an avid cognitive and physical enhancer. 146 00:08:01.120 --> 00:08:05.180 He took a number of drugs to improve his performance in various ways. 147 00:08:05.320 --> 00:08:10.440 He was worried that Norway and Western Europe were being taken over by Muslims. 148 00:08:12.240 --> 00:08:18.860 There's been interest in whether there is evil intrinsic to human nature, 149 00:08:19.020 --> 00:08:21.400 whether some people are born evil. 150 00:08:21.460 --> 00:08:24.340 This film we need to talk about, Kevin, 151 00:08:24.340 --> 00:08:28.320 is about a boy who comes to become a mass murderer. 152 00:08:29.200 --> 00:08:32.040 Steven Pinker, the famous Harvard psychologist, 153 00:08:33.200 --> 00:08:35.160 in a book called The Science of Evil, 154 00:08:35.240 --> 00:08:39.080 said that genetics and neuroscience are showing that the heart of darkness 155 00:08:39.080 --> 00:08:41.620 cannot always be blamed on parents and society. 156 00:08:42.780 --> 00:08:46.840 There's a famous psychologist in London called Essie Veeding 157 00:08:46.840 --> 00:08:52.160 who's done a lot of work on what's called callous, unemotional personality in children. 158 00:08:52.240 --> 00:08:53.600 These are children who are very cold. 159 00:08:54.340 --> 00:08:55.560 They're very aggressive and torture animals. 160 00:08:55.920 --> 00:09:01.780 A large proportion of these children come to be psychopaths as they enter later life. 161 00:09:02.000 --> 00:09:06.820 In fact, a few weeks ago, I read an article in The Age in Melbourne 162 00:09:07.540 --> 00:09:11.960 of an Australian researcher who's writing in a similar vein, Mark Dadds. 163 00:09:12.280 --> 00:09:15.620 He described what he called cold children. 164 00:09:16.080 --> 00:09:19.440 One in 200 children, he says, are cold. 165 00:09:19.640 --> 00:09:21.460 They don't react emotionally. 166 00:09:21.620 --> 00:09:23.380 They don't care about other people's feelings. 167 00:09:24.340 --> 00:09:24.980 They're hard to discipline. 168 00:09:25.180 --> 00:09:26.560 They show little remorse. 169 00:09:27.100 --> 00:09:31.760 When he took 100 children aged 5 to 16 with this cold disposition, 170 00:09:32.080 --> 00:09:34.700 which he's called oppositional defiant disorder, 171 00:09:34.980 --> 00:09:39.680 and screened out the parents for abuse or mental illness, drug and alcohol problems, 172 00:09:39.880 --> 00:09:43.160 and screened out children for other behavioural problems, 173 00:09:43.400 --> 00:09:46.820 he watched these children and their mothers playing. 174 00:09:47.240 --> 00:09:52.400 And as the mother told them, told these children that she loved them. 175 00:09:53.540 --> 00:09:57.580 What he found was that these children were not different to other children 176 00:09:57.580 --> 00:09:59.520 in terms of their ability to communicate. 177 00:10:01.360 --> 00:10:06.100 And nor were their mothers different in their ability to communicate their love to the children. 178 00:10:06.160 --> 00:10:11.000 But these sorts of children don't return the mother's love in obvious ways. 179 00:10:11.120 --> 00:10:15.080 They show little response to the mother's love and avert her gaze. 180 00:10:15.580 --> 00:10:20.060 The fathers of these children also show cold characteristics. 181 00:10:20.060 --> 00:10:24.700 And this researcher believes that these children can be modified 182 00:10:24.700 --> 00:10:28.400 to become more empathetic and more loving. 183 00:10:29.040 --> 00:10:34.580 So the idea that evil can be a part of our nature 184 00:10:34.580 --> 00:10:39.260 obviously goes back to the beginning of human history itself. 185 00:10:40.140 --> 00:10:45.080 John Steinbeck, a famous writer from the United States from last century, 186 00:10:45.200 --> 00:10:49.300 in a book wrote, as a child may be born without an arm, 187 00:10:49.300 --> 00:10:52.860 so one may be born without kindness or potential of conscience. 188 00:10:53.340 --> 00:10:57.740 Now modern science is starting to reveal the human moral limitations 189 00:10:58.300 --> 00:11:03.180 in the most extreme cases of psychopathy and sociopathy. 190 00:11:04.780 --> 00:11:10.220 Now our world today is utterly different to the world that existed 191 00:11:10.220 --> 00:11:16.560 for any of our forefathers because of a number of different characteristics. 192 00:11:16.560 --> 00:11:17.960 But I'll focus on two. 193 00:11:17.960 --> 00:11:21.900 First of all, we have much more powerful technology 194 00:11:21.900 --> 00:11:24.620 than any human has ever had before. 195 00:11:25.920 --> 00:11:29.800 Breivik killed 77 people with automatic weapons. 196 00:11:30.680 --> 00:11:33.100 But in fact we could kill many more people 197 00:11:33.100 --> 00:11:35.640 with the sort of technology that's available today. 198 00:11:35.960 --> 00:11:39.700 Around the middle of last century, humans acquired the capacity 199 00:11:39.700 --> 00:11:43.200 to destroy the whole of humanity through nuclear war. 200 00:11:43.600 --> 00:11:47.940 A number of experts, including the astronomers, 201 00:11:47.960 --> 00:11:50.980 the President of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, 202 00:11:51.120 --> 00:11:55.580 have estimated that perhaps the chances of us doing this this century 203 00:11:55.580 --> 00:12:02.440 without a nuclear, biological or computing technology is 20 to 50%. 204 00:12:03.080 --> 00:12:05.880 Our technology continues to increase in power. 205 00:12:06.260 --> 00:12:09.580 So while in the middle of last century only a handful of people 206 00:12:09.580 --> 00:12:12.280 had the capacity to destroy the world, 207 00:12:12.340 --> 00:12:16.760 many, many more today have access to uranium 208 00:12:16.760 --> 00:12:21.080 from the dozens of stockpiles from the former Soviet Union. 209 00:12:21.380 --> 00:12:25.240 Richard Posner, a Supreme Court judge in the United States, 210 00:12:25.320 --> 00:12:30.320 estimates there's enough plutonium to furnish 20,000 atomic bombs. 211 00:12:30.840 --> 00:12:33.600 So it only takes one, Anders Breivik, 212 00:12:33.680 --> 00:12:38.480 to not access some fairly crude fertiliser and automatic weapons 213 00:12:38.480 --> 00:12:43.880 but to access this kind of technology to kill many more people than 77. 214 00:12:45.340 --> 00:12:49.880 More scary still than nuclear weapons are biological weapons 215 00:12:49.880 --> 00:12:52.340 because these in general are cheaper to produce 216 00:12:52.880 --> 00:12:56.240 and can be produced with much less sophisticated technology. 217 00:12:56.900 --> 00:13:03.460 On the top of the screen you can see a mouse infected with a skin disease here. 218 00:13:03.600 --> 00:13:04.680 This is mousepox. 219 00:13:05.100 --> 00:13:10.280 Around 2000 scientists in Canberra were trying to develop 220 00:13:10.880 --> 00:13:12.920 a way of controlling the mouse plague in Australia 221 00:13:12.920 --> 00:13:18.260 by genetically modifying mousepox virus to render mice infertile. 222 00:13:19.660 --> 00:13:21.800 Instead of rendering mice infertile, 223 00:13:21.840 --> 00:13:25.760 they produced a super lethal strain of this naturally occurring virus 224 00:13:25.760 --> 00:13:28.260 that killed 100% of mice. 225 00:13:29.180 --> 00:13:31.360 Now they published their findings on the internet 226 00:13:31.920 --> 00:13:36.520 and it was immediately obvious that you could do the same kind of genetic modification 227 00:13:36.520 --> 00:13:41.200 reasonably simply in a low-tech laboratory to human smallpox. 228 00:13:41.200 --> 00:13:46.500 Now human smallpox has killed more people than any other infectious disease. 229 00:13:47.500 --> 00:13:51.820 It's highly contagious and is an ideal biological weapon. 230 00:13:52.100 --> 00:13:57.400 At the moment there are still stockpiles of human smallpox in Russia 231 00:13:58.200 --> 00:14:03.660 and the disease itself was eradicated through a vaccination program over 30 years. 232 00:14:04.100 --> 00:14:09.840 But the slide on the bottom right is of an artificially created virus. 233 00:14:09.840 --> 00:14:11.880 In this case poliovirus. 234 00:14:12.340 --> 00:14:16.360 Artificially created using materials that you can buy over the internet. 235 00:14:17.060 --> 00:14:21.000 At the moment smallpox is too large to create in a backyard laboratory 236 00:14:21.840 --> 00:14:25.340 but given the exponentially increasing power of technology 237 00:14:25.340 --> 00:14:31.840 it will only take a matter of years, perhaps decades, but probably much less 238 00:14:31.840 --> 00:14:37.360 to be able to synthesise a genetically modified version of smallpox 239 00:14:37.360 --> 00:14:42.580 that would be an ideal biological weapon that people like Breivik 240 00:14:42.580 --> 00:14:49.740 and other fanatics and psychopaths could use to kill millions of people with this disease. 241 00:14:50.240 --> 00:14:54.960 This scenario is depicted in the film 12 Monkeys with Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis. 242 00:14:55.240 --> 00:14:58.560 And often these science fiction movies are very well researched 243 00:14:58.560 --> 00:15:03.360 and really take advantage of the curve of advancing technology 244 00:15:03.880 --> 00:15:05.940 to predict what might happen in the future. 245 00:15:07.360 --> 00:15:12.400 Now given this hugely powerful range of technologies that we now have 246 00:15:12.400 --> 00:15:14.880 the iPhone is just a sort of popular example 247 00:15:15.800 --> 00:15:21.140 we also need to consider the nature of the beast that uses them. 248 00:15:21.680 --> 00:15:26.740 And as I said, ever since human history began and literature and art 249 00:15:26.740 --> 00:15:30.320 evil has been portrayed as being a part 250 00:15:30.320 --> 00:15:34.120 as well as the goodness in our nature as a part of human nature. 251 00:15:34.280 --> 00:15:36.360 We're all familiar with sociopaths and psychopaths. 252 00:15:37.360 --> 00:15:39.900 Like Breivik, fanatics and ideologues. 253 00:15:40.700 --> 00:15:49.840 These disorders are not just things that arise through bad parenting or social injustice. 254 00:15:50.380 --> 00:15:54.780 There is a strong biological component to these sorts of personality traits 255 00:15:55.360 --> 00:16:04.660 and this biological story is starting to be unravelled by people like dads and Essie Veeding and others. 256 00:16:05.460 --> 00:16:10.820 75% of people in jails have an antisocial personality disorder 257 00:16:10.820 --> 00:16:13.040 and 25% are psychopaths. 258 00:16:13.320 --> 00:16:17.240 Now even if this is not genetic or biological in any way 259 00:16:18.140 --> 00:16:25.040 the fact is that if one of these people accesses the sorts of technology that I've been talking about 260 00:16:25.660 --> 00:16:30.500 there will be much greater disaster in this century than there has been so far. 261 00:16:31.440 --> 00:16:34.640 So that's one end of the spectrum of why we need to think about technology. 262 00:16:34.640 --> 00:16:38.000 And the other is why we need to consider our own moral dispositions. 263 00:16:38.080 --> 00:16:40.740 But the second one is a much more important pervasive problem. 264 00:16:42.240 --> 00:16:49.640 The second issue is that we all have not capacities for enormous evil like Breivik 265 00:16:49.640 --> 00:16:52.640 but very limited moral dispositions. 266 00:16:52.820 --> 00:16:56.760 And these limited moral dispositions have profound consequences 267 00:16:57.640 --> 00:17:00.500 when we collect them together in a modern world. 268 00:17:01.700 --> 00:17:03.600 Our moral dispositions 269 00:17:03.600 --> 00:17:05.320 how we behave towards each other 270 00:17:05.320 --> 00:17:08.480 whether we say we're sorry when somebody steps on our toes 271 00:17:08.480 --> 00:17:11.760 or whether we become angry when somebody offends us 272 00:17:11.760 --> 00:17:16.480 are the results of the way we've developed as social animals. 273 00:17:17.420 --> 00:17:20.900 So over the last two to three hundred thousand years 274 00:17:21.600 --> 00:17:27.600 human beings have evolved from the first homo sapiens. 275 00:17:28.300 --> 00:17:33.440 But while our technology and society have gone through enormous changes 276 00:17:33.600 --> 00:17:34.880 in the last ten thousand years 277 00:17:34.880 --> 00:17:36.640 and particularly the last one hundred years 278 00:17:36.640 --> 00:17:40.260 our biology and our basic set of dispositions 279 00:17:40.260 --> 00:17:45.020 are the same as those that occurred in the very brief time 280 00:17:45.600 --> 00:17:49.320 in evolutionary terms from when we first emerged as homo sapiens. 281 00:17:49.760 --> 00:17:53.300 Now what was life like through virtually all of human history? 282 00:17:53.840 --> 00:17:56.420 Humans had to compete with each other for resources. 283 00:17:56.860 --> 00:18:00.220 They had to be fit to survive with their own hands 284 00:18:00.220 --> 00:18:02.100 and their own abilities 285 00:18:02.100 --> 00:18:03.960 by the time they reached adulthood. 286 00:18:04.140 --> 00:18:09.860 It was much easier for them to bring harm to their fellow human beings 287 00:18:09.860 --> 00:18:11.020 than it was to benefit them. 288 00:18:11.160 --> 00:18:14.960 Something like forty percent of humans through most of human history 289 00:18:14.960 --> 00:18:20.000 died by homicide, being killed by another human competing for resources. 290 00:18:20.940 --> 00:18:24.840 Morality, what we call our moral norms 291 00:18:24.840 --> 00:18:27.100 the sorts of things that we punish people for 292 00:18:27.100 --> 00:18:30.740 evolved to enable humans to be stable enough 293 00:18:30.740 --> 00:18:33.760 to cooperate in small groups 294 00:18:33.760 --> 00:18:37.960 and survive as a group 295 00:18:37.960 --> 00:18:40.640 to pass on their genes to the next generation. 296 00:18:41.620 --> 00:18:46.180 But because of this very limited set of dispositions 297 00:18:46.180 --> 00:18:47.920 and this particular history 298 00:18:49.280 --> 00:18:52.540 our basic dispositions are extremely limited. 299 00:18:52.800 --> 00:18:58.120 We tend to be biased to what can happen in the very near future 300 00:18:58.120 --> 00:18:59.820 because through most of our past 301 00:18:59.820 --> 00:19:01.520 we couldn't affect things in one century. 302 00:19:01.720 --> 00:19:04.140 We couldn't even affect things five years 303 00:19:04.820 --> 00:19:06.260 from the time at which we acted. 304 00:19:06.500 --> 00:19:09.260 So we tend to focus on the near future. 305 00:19:09.440 --> 00:19:12.400 We also are much more concerned about 306 00:19:13.180 --> 00:19:15.280 what happens to the people close to us 307 00:19:15.820 --> 00:19:18.920 our friends and family, those who we cooperate with. 308 00:19:19.140 --> 00:19:22.860 The basic size of a human group was roughly 150. 309 00:19:24.420 --> 00:19:27.040 Most tribes, most groups of humans 310 00:19:27.040 --> 00:19:29.680 existed in groups of 150 311 00:19:29.680 --> 00:19:33.460 because at that point you can internally cooperate 312 00:19:34.040 --> 00:19:38.000 and enforce norms without some need for external policing 313 00:19:38.000 --> 00:19:41.040 or external law enforcement. 314 00:19:42.020 --> 00:19:45.240 So we're geared up to deal with small groups, not big groups. 315 00:19:45.440 --> 00:19:49.120 We're not geared up to think about a world of six billion people. 316 00:19:50.400 --> 00:19:53.060 We tend to cooperate with each other 317 00:19:53.060 --> 00:19:55.260 but only when we're observed. 318 00:19:56.020 --> 00:19:58.900 So when humans aren't observed 319 00:19:58.900 --> 00:20:01.260 there is a basic tendency to free ride 320 00:20:01.260 --> 00:20:04.840 to let others make sacrifices while you benefit. 321 00:20:05.400 --> 00:20:06.540 And I'll give you evidence for this. 322 00:20:06.940 --> 00:20:09.300 We're also distrustful of strangers and people 323 00:20:09.300 --> 00:20:11.820 who are from different races or groups 324 00:20:12.480 --> 00:20:14.400 because through all of human history 325 00:20:14.400 --> 00:20:16.680 we had to be wary of our group members 326 00:20:16.680 --> 00:20:19.260 because they represented a threat to us 327 00:20:19.260 --> 00:20:21.260 and to the resources we sought to gain. 328 00:20:22.920 --> 00:20:24.060 So we're partial. 329 00:20:24.060 --> 00:20:26.040 We are altruistic. 330 00:20:26.080 --> 00:20:27.780 We do make sacrifices 331 00:20:27.780 --> 00:20:30.420 but typically for our friends and family. 332 00:20:31.460 --> 00:20:32.980 And there's a reason for this 333 00:20:32.980 --> 00:20:35.240 because if we made sacrifices for strangers 334 00:20:36.060 --> 00:20:37.160 we wouldn't have survived 335 00:20:37.160 --> 00:20:40.060 because the strangers would have tended to exploit us 336 00:20:40.060 --> 00:20:41.600 or to free ride on us. 337 00:20:42.240 --> 00:20:45.200 So xenophobia is a part of human nature 338 00:20:45.200 --> 00:20:48.580 and in fact science demonstrates that even people 339 00:20:48.580 --> 00:20:50.080 even the best people 340 00:20:50.080 --> 00:20:52.180 when you look at their reaction times 341 00:20:52.180 --> 00:20:54.040 and look at subtle measures 342 00:20:54.040 --> 00:20:56.940 of their reactions to our group members 343 00:20:56.940 --> 00:21:02.500 have an element of fear and distrust of our groups. 344 00:21:03.620 --> 00:21:06.040 Because it was very easy for us to kill 345 00:21:06.040 --> 00:21:09.300 we had strong proscriptions, strong rules 346 00:21:09.300 --> 00:21:13.740 in every human society against harming members of your group. 347 00:21:13.920 --> 00:21:16.400 But that didn't extend to members of other groups. 348 00:21:16.620 --> 00:21:18.200 In fact in many cases 349 00:21:18.200 --> 00:21:21.680 you were required to kill members of other groups. 350 00:21:22.740 --> 00:21:24.020 What was most important 351 00:21:24.040 --> 00:21:27.940 to us was that we didn't cause people harm 352 00:21:27.940 --> 00:21:31.740 but there was no obligation to benefit people. 353 00:21:32.880 --> 00:21:37.040 We believe that we are responsible for what we've done 354 00:21:37.040 --> 00:21:38.140 what we've caused 355 00:21:38.140 --> 00:21:39.800 but not for what we allow to happen. 356 00:21:40.880 --> 00:21:44.040 So I'm not defending these dispositions 357 00:21:44.040 --> 00:21:47.240 I'm describing what cuts across all human cultures. 358 00:21:48.320 --> 00:21:50.820 As I said we tend to care about what happens to us 359 00:21:50.820 --> 00:21:53.600 and the people we care about in the near future. 360 00:21:54.040 --> 00:21:57.280 We are able to empathise and sympathise 361 00:21:57.280 --> 00:21:58.080 with single individuals 362 00:21:58.080 --> 00:21:59.760 but not with large groups. 363 00:22:00.120 --> 00:22:01.860 There's a striking finding that 364 00:22:02.740 --> 00:22:05.240 people's willingness to give aid 365 00:22:06.520 --> 00:22:09.740 decreases as the number of people presented 366 00:22:09.740 --> 00:22:12.120 would be the recipients of aid. 367 00:22:12.300 --> 00:22:16.320 So if you want people to provide aid in a crisis 368 00:22:16.320 --> 00:22:18.340 you show them a picture of a single individual. 369 00:22:19.220 --> 00:22:22.780 People are just not psychologically set up to deal 370 00:22:22.780 --> 00:22:26.360 in large complex terms 371 00:22:26.360 --> 00:22:29.180 of dealing with collectives and large groups. 372 00:22:29.800 --> 00:22:31.820 Now the second feature of our world today 373 00:22:31.820 --> 00:22:34.420 that differs from the world in the past 374 00:22:34.420 --> 00:22:36.100 is that it's hugely globalised. 375 00:22:36.580 --> 00:22:38.220 Events in one part of the world 376 00:22:38.220 --> 00:22:40.480 affect very distant parts of the world 377 00:22:41.340 --> 00:22:42.640 with lightning speed. 378 00:22:43.160 --> 00:22:45.100 And together with technological advance 379 00:22:45.100 --> 00:22:47.320 this means we can affect other people 380 00:22:47.320 --> 00:22:50.740 to a huge degree that we could never do so in the past. 381 00:22:51.700 --> 00:22:53.380 So many modern problems 382 00:22:53.380 --> 00:22:55.280 are not just local problems 383 00:22:55.280 --> 00:22:58.340 they're what are called global collective action problems 384 00:22:58.340 --> 00:23:00.400 and I'll talk a little bit about climate change 385 00:23:00.400 --> 00:23:01.440 as an example of that. 386 00:23:02.500 --> 00:23:03.680 Now because of the... 387 00:23:03.680 --> 00:23:05.700 but because we're not psychologically set up 388 00:23:05.700 --> 00:23:08.780 for a globalised world of six billion people 389 00:23:08.780 --> 00:23:11.740 we're set up to think about a group of 150 people 390 00:23:11.740 --> 00:23:14.760 that's what our natural dispositions are 391 00:23:15.760 --> 00:23:18.440 we don't in fact aid people 392 00:23:18.440 --> 00:23:20.160 in other parts of the world 393 00:23:20.160 --> 00:23:20.660 when we could. 394 00:23:21.980 --> 00:23:22.540 We've... 395 00:23:22.540 --> 00:23:27.020 the US has spent 3.1 trillion dollars 396 00:23:28.600 --> 00:23:30.440 prosecuting a war on terror 397 00:23:31.160 --> 00:23:33.460 in Afghanistan and Iraq. 398 00:23:33.960 --> 00:23:35.420 3.1 trillion dollars. 399 00:23:35.500 --> 00:23:36.380 It's probably much higher now 400 00:23:36.380 --> 00:23:37.240 this is a year or so 401 00:23:37.240 --> 00:23:38.040