Is Morality Made Up?

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G'day humans! Welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas. When you say that something is right or wrong, what exactly do you think you're saying? Are you saying that you think it's right or it's wrong because you were raised in a culture that has persuaded you that its norms are universal and that you should believe them and follow them? Are you basically just sort of stating...
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the general preferences of the people who you've grown up with and come to have faith in, but somebody from a different culture could just as plausibly make a different case? Or are you saying that you've stumbled upon some kind of moral truth that you've discovered that lies embedded in the very fabric of the universe that is unalterably true as to what is right and what is wrong?
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Or are you just saying, I just have a preference? It's right and it's wrong in the same way that I like chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla ice cream. This question, this concern of meta-ethics, so to speak, is the concern of today's guest, who is one of the world's leading experts in that field. He's an ethicist. He's a philosopher of law. And most importantly, perhaps, for this conversation, he's also an Israeli historian.
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who's been very critical of the Netanyahu government, of Israel's occupation of the West Bank, of the way the war in Gaza was prosecuted. He, in fact, has been arrested in the past for protesting the Netanyahu government. But he also has a very complicated relationship to the way we think about morality when it comes to Israel, Gaza, and the Palestinians.
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David Enoch studied law and philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He received his PhD in philosophy from New York University, and he's also a professor in the philosophy of law at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, as well as holding a chair in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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When it comes time to make big moral claims about international politics, about Donald Trump, about the far right in Europe or Australia or wherever else, we all need to know how we've arrived at our conclusions and what kind of ground we stand on. David is the man to answer that question. An expert on international law, an expert on when and why we might be morally compelled to break it, and an expert on how you should think about your moral position on the biggest questions of the day.
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I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one, the only David Enoch. Have you seen this story about Netanyahu defying the Supreme Court about this television license? Oh, of course.
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What's going on? So in one respect, this is a terrible next stage. In another respect, it's not a big deal from what I understand. The way in which it's a terrible next stage is that they're going fully open, fully explicit about defying the court, not sort of maneuvering around it, but just saying we're not going to obey. We don't think that's an authorized decision.
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We have had very many things that came close to this, but not quite this clearly. So that's another stage in them challenging the rule of law. And is it true that you were arrested during the initial round of judicial protests for protesting Netanyahu? I was arrested. I was extremely briefly arrested. So I think I got... I'll take it.
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I think it got more hype than it deserved among the philosophy crowd. I think you are either arrested or not arrested. I think it's like being pregnant. I don't think being a little bit arrested is okay for the government. Have you ever been arrested? No, I managed to avoid that. I think it does make a difference. It was like one unpleasant second and everything else was fine and short and it didn't matter and it's okay.
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Okay, but did you end up with a record for it? Did you end up with a... No, as far as I know, I didn't. I mean, I don't think so. Maybe you were detained then without being arrested.
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That's possible, although they did say that I was arrested. But it's possible that you're right in official terms. Also, I should say, very many people were arrested during these protests. And perhaps the saddest thing about them is that while when we were protesting in this way, we were confident that it was the most important thing in the world. And in a way, we were right. Still, looking back from today, it looks like the good old days, because all of this was pre-October 7th. Of course. Yeah.
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where everything just became horribly worse for everyone, although not equally for everyone, obviously. Yeah, but some of these protests have been going on because some of these measures have been going on. This specific way of defying the court is apparently, and this is the way in which it's not that bad, it's apparently more symbolic than actually of practical significance. It's more about the declaration than about anything else.
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Yeah, I mean, the declaration is a worry. Just to give people background, because I didn't know about this until a few minutes ago, one of the television stations, one of the broadcasters in Israel, Channel 13, which is critical of Netanyahu and has done many biting investigations into him, was up for sale, is that right? And then an agreement was made to sell it to a consortium of tech entrepreneurs
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who were led by a billionaire who is hostile to Netanyahu as well. So the government tried to fire the board of the television regulator in order to block that sale and install its own cronies into the television regulator.
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And the Supreme Court said, no, you can't. And what struck me about this, David, was that the Justice Minister, Yarrif Levin, said that any decision passed by Parliament is by definition legal. And I quote, the rule of law means that the law binds everyone, including the court. In a democratic state, Parliament enacts the law and the court is obligated to implement it.
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To which the Israeli president wrote non-compliance with the court ruling as a red line that must not be crossed under any circumstances. There's obviously a lot to be said there. One thing is that I don't think the technical details that you specified are exactly accurate. On the other hand, I'm not sure I know sufficiently accurately as well. Another important piece of the puzzle for the background is that one of the most
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consistent features of Prime Minister Netanyahu's political career has been an obsession with media, with negative media attention, with either controlling the media or parts of it, or making sure that some of his friends with a lot of money can control some of the media and so on. In fact, he's, as you may know, facing criminal charges in the media.
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trial has been going on, at least partly for media-related offenses. So it's very much in line with this, but it's true that there's a kind of explicit loss of shame with these defiance by the Minister of Justice and by others as well, very much in line with the judicial overhaul that, as you know, we've been protesting for about three years from before Turkey's office.
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So tell us about your political background, David. I mean, I've just hinted at it there by suggesting that you were involved in the protests against the Netanyahu government. You also served time in a military jail for refusing to serve in the West Bank, as I understand it. What is your sort of political evolution before we get into the moral one?
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So I know that the word Zionism has different meanings for different people in different places, but I grew up, you know, in a fairly standard. It means Nazi, right? Zionist these days means Nazi? Have I got that correct? In what in Israel would be considered a fairly standard, maybe a bit left-right.
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from middle-of-the-road Zionists. But Zionists, just to take an example, when I was about to become 18, it was just obvious to me that I will serve in the military. I don't even remember thinking about it as a question, whether I may want to somehow avoid this. And I did serve in the military, and I actually served in the occupied territories as well. So I refused only in reserve duty after I finished my regular services.
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I will be considered in today's Israel on the extreme left, although in other places I will be considered partly an Israel apologist, I guess. That's where we are these days. I support the two-state solution when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although the details are extremely hard to implement. Maybe we can talk a bit about this. And I consider myself a good old-fashioned liberal.
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Not in the sort of hyper-American sense in which to be a liberal is another way of being a capitalist neoliberal, right? Kind of the traditional John Stuart Mill kind of liberalism that is not libertarian in any way. I would consider myself a social democrat probably.
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Um, but I am very much about liberty and autonomy and equality and taking people's, uh, well-being and suffering seriously. Um, I think that in Israel today, um.
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these views would put me on the extremist. So when people use the word extreme, they sometimes mean something normative. They sometimes just mean, you know, where are you in terms of the statistics? So I don't think there's anything substantively extreme about my views. But on the other hand, I'm without a doubt on the statistical extreme left in today's Israel, at least among Israeli Jews.
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And what beliefs put you there? These are not economic beliefs, but beliefs about the peace process and about Palestinians? Or both? For me, they are both. But yes, the initial thought that what we need is a kind of fair settlement that takes very seriously the rights and well-being of Palestinians as well as Israeli Jews, that starts from a point of equality, even with regard to the land.
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that recognizes some collective rights for both collectives, although in ways that are somewhat tentative because I'm a liberal and in a way, at the end of the day, I'm an individualist. But, you know, you need to take collective seriously because many individuals take collective seriously. During the war in Gaza, for instance, to just highlight the fact that there are many innocents in Gaza who are being, even if not intentionally targeted, at the very least,
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whose death and injury is tolerated without any kind of regret. To just point that out would put you on the extreme left. That raises a question about the extremeness of the left and whether or not it's you who have drifted to the extreme left or the rest of Israel that has moved to the right and left left.
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your position, which may have been more of an average center-left Israeli position in the 1990s, is now extreme. Would more people have shared it back then? It probably wasn't average, but it was closer to that than it is now. That's true. There's definitely been a shift to the right. It's hard to give
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explanations and also I don't believe in sort of one-liner explanations for such complicated phenomena. One part of it is demographic. The Orthodox Jews tend to be on the right. There are, of course, exceptions, but they tend to be on the right and furthermore on the fairly extreme right. And they are part of the population has been growing. So that's a part of it. Another part of it is that certainly following October 7th, many people think that the chances of anything like a
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peaceful arrangement that partly depends on mutual trust have gone considerably down. Yeah, not a halftime. And when you said that, you just said that the future of a two-state solution or your support of it would be dependent on your liberalism, what is the clash between liberalism and a potential two-state solution that you see?
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No, I don't think there's a clash there. And I think you can support the two-state solution and,
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you can come at it from different directions and from different starting points. For me, it's all united under this kind of liberalism that thinks, for instance, about any kind of Jewish supremacy claim is just an obvious non-starter. So, okay, there are these people who live here. There are these peoples or nations who live here who have been here for a while, whose fate is tied with the fate of this land, and you need a kind of an egalitarian solution. So, you know.
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Officially, I'm open also to a one-person, one-vote, one-state solution. It does not contradict liberal equality. No, I misunderstood. I thought you were saying that if there were a two-state solution, I misphrased the question, that it would have to be consistent with liberalism.
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Oh, no. So that is a legitimate concern. I don't know to what extent we should be signing to wait, you know, in the current situation because I don't know in what resolution we can work. But I will say the following. Um...
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My kind of liberalism is also deeply pragmatist when it comes to political decisions. So you don't want to sort of stick by these really nice sounding high values and reach arrangements on the ground that are just going to maximize stuff. And I'm not into that kind of, I don't know if I should even call it a political view. But anyway, I'm not a purist in this way, nor do I think that anyone else should be. So for instance, the one state solution.
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with one person, one vote, that in some respects, on paper, sounds the most plausible, almost natural. But I think that just given what we know about what's going on in this part of the world, it's going to be catastrophic in terms of just fairly immediate consequences. So that's off the table. If you describe the plausible picture of a two-state solution that will also result in terrible catastrophes, I would reconsider it.
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Because, you know, these are serious decisions about people's lives, obviously, and we should take them with that in mind. So that political pragmatism that you've just articulated runs counter to your, I suppose, moral, I don't want to call it absolutism, but can you explain your philosophical position on politics?
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When I make a moral claim like women and men should be treated equally and should have equal ability to lead flourishing lives, whether they are in Palestine or Israel or Afghanistan or Australia, am I asserting a preference? Am I asserting a culturally contingent preference?
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point of view that could be otherwise had I been born elsewhere and would be just as valid there? Or am I stating something that's embedded in the fabric of the universe somehow? Yeah. So I'm a strong believer in moral objectivity. I certainly think that what we aim at is full objectivity and necessity. You know, I'm definitely on the extreme side of that. And not because Israeli society has changed. Not because you've always been extreme.
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Exactly. I have a, uh, and I, and I also think that you are, and I also think that pretty much everyone is. So I think that, um, um, some relativist confusions are confusions, but also are fairly shallow confusions. I think that in a conversation you can show people almost everyone.
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not everyone, almost everyone, that their deep commitments are inconsistent with these kinds of relativist confusions anyway. So I have a paper called Why I'm an Objectivist About Ethics and Why You Are Too. I don't think that your adherence to gender equality is one that you're happy to think of as a fashion choice.
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or is it preferences between two flavors of ice cream? These preferences or choices... No, I mean, I'm clearly not happy to think of it that way, but I'm sure that males in the 50s who were convinced of a much more patriarchal cultural setup were not happy to think of that as culturally contingent either. Clearly not our allies when it comes to gender equality, but that doesn't mean they were wrong about the objectivity of ethics, right? So let me give you an analogy.
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You can think about, say, two mathematicians who are of different opinions about a formula, say, whether it's a theorem or not. Now, they disagree about whether it's a theorem, but they typically agree that there's an answer to that question.
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They agree that there is a single answer, that either it's a theorem or it's not, and one of them is right and one is not. They just disagree about who it is, right? So I think it's important to distinguish between moral disagreements, that would be the analog of disagreements about the specific formula, whether it's a theorem or not.
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And what we sometimes call meta-ethical discussions or meta-ethical disagreements. These are discussions that are about ethics, above ethics, meta-ethics. And they will be about, say, the objectivity of morality. So, of course, different people have different moral views. Different people also have different meta-ethical views, but I think that a kind of objectivity runs through common sense, thought about this kind of stuff, and the relativist worries that I know either from...
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general culture or from philosophical discourse are not very impressive. Actually, this kind of stuff in metaethics has been one of my main areas in which I published in philosophy before I was doing a lot of political.
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And David, my hunch, just to push back on the mathematician analogy, that two mathematicians might disagree about the theory, but they agree that there is an objective theory to be understood, and the analogy being that two people might disagree about what is right or what is wrong, but they will agree that there's an objective fact of the matter about what is right and what is wrong. My hunch is that the mathematicians are operating on a
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a greater plane of consensus about the meta-question. In other words, the meta-question is more easily detached from a mathematician or a physicist from the content of the claim than it is in ethics. That really, in practice, you're probably right that everybody deep down is a meta-ethicist, but that's only because they believe that their own morality is the true one. And once you disentangle their morality, their own parochial morality...
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from the claim that there is a universal morality, I don't think they would hold that there is a true moral claim anymore. I mean, partly because so many people's morality has historically come from religion. So if you believe that the creator of the universe has written a book that tells you what is right or wrong, then you don't have to separate the content of the book from the fact of the book's, you know, ineritability when it comes to morality. But does that complicate things at all or not?
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Of course it does. It makes my claims perhaps somewhat more controversial, but also somewhat more politically important. One point that you made, but that I want to emphasize, is that I don't think that there's a consensus in metaethics. Most of my career has been to engage in that disagreement. What I do think is that there's a part of that controversy that we can obstruct. So many people, even people who put forward, say, metaphysical or epistemological views of morality that are very different from mine, will agree about something in the vicinity of objectivity.
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and what I think about the masses now not the philosophers of course they will utter relativist sounding stuff but that's you know a result of some intellectual corruption that's a part of I don't know
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the spirit of the day has been for decades. And as you rightly noted, it's about their deep commitment. I should also say, which are objectivist, I think, I should also say that the situation with mathematics is complicated as well. So some mathematicians will explicitly deny anything
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objective of this kind, or some of them will offer different accounts. So philosophy of mathematics is also interesting. But there too, I'm not interested in what they say. I'm interested in what best captures the underlying commitments of the discourse. Yes. It's not that there isn't a disagreement in philosophy. It's that the lay person has a sort of intrinsic belief that you can tease out. But now to the interesting question, whether we can obstruct
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the meta-ethic stuff from the moral commitments themselves. Think about situations where you have a genuine doubt about something or where you are deliberated. Suppose you don't know a lot about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and you are now wondering about a specific question.
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that has to do with a conflict, right? Suppose you're for equality and you are contemplating whether we should support a two-state or a one-state solution. You're genuinely not sure about this. You're going to try to find out stuff, right? Some of it is going to be to try to find out just factual stuff. What is likely to happen if we institute this or that arrangement? But some of it is going to be more clearly, more purely moral, right? So you may ask, for instance,
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Is it legitimate for an Israeli Jew to prioritize the interests of Israeli Jews over the interests of Palestinians? And similarly for the Palestinians. And if it is okay to prioritize by how much? These are more purely moral questions. Suppose you're now genuinely unsure about this. When you're trying to find out the answer to these questions, the questions you're asking yourselves, aren't you assuming that they have answers? That some answers are better, maybe not fully correct or fully wrong, but some answers are at least better than others.
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In that moment of deliberation, you are not yet committed to a specific moral conclusion. But you are already, it seems to me, committed to there being a moral conclusion. So you are right that many, many times we're more confident about the moral claim than the ethical one. And it's going to be hard to abstract one from the other. But in situations of deliberation, for instance, I think we see the distinction rather clearly.
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That's interesting. I mean, so just to tease this out with a couple of examples, I'm thinking of a couple of things that come to mind as being moral quandaries that I have wrestled with. One is, is it moral to look after your own, to take greater care of your own than everybody else? Like, you know, every country will have these things.
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occasional advertising campaigns about like, you know, you should buy Australian or, you know, you should buy American or they'll put in the ad that, you know, this is made in the USA or something like that. Not just as a way of saying it's high quality, but as a way of saying you're doing a good thing because you're supporting American businesses versus other businesses. I always just thought that was weird. I mean, when I remember being in university in my teens and thinking, but why is the poor Cambodian textile worker less deserving of my money than the Australian...
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worker who's making the more expensive t-shirt, why should I feel good about putting money towards an Australian than a Cambodian who probably needs it more? And then another one is, as you pointed to, Gaza and Israel. I mean, a lot there rode on what were the facts on the ground in Gaza and, you know, a whole bunch of other things. But
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I saw a comment on my substack last week, David, which was about a recent episode I did about Israel saying the infuriating thing is I'd never know before I tune in which Josh I'm going to get.
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Because I've spent the past three years, you know, publicly going wrestling with how I feel as a Jew, as a grandson of, you know, Holocaust survivors, as a critic of Israel, as a sometimes not Zionist and sometimes Zionist, as a, you know, someone who cares about the Palestinian people. So as I'm going through those mental processes of trying to figure out what is more right and more wrong...
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I don't think of it as being I'm groping my way towards a conclusion that lies out there embedded in the universe in a kind of terrain of reality equally as real as the physical world. I think of it more as...
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Where would the logical steps lead me to? And which of the conclusions in my head has the greatest kind of structural support? Are they the same thing? I don't think they're the same thing, but they're clearly related. I suggest not giving up on truth too quickly.
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I think that you are trying to make up your mind about the question of, we call it partiality, whether you're allowed to give more weight to the near and dear. By the way, I think that the political version of partiality is not the most plausible. So is it okay for you to read bedtime stories to your children, but not to mine? Yeah.
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So, you know, some partiality seems more clearly justified than the political... It would be logistically complicated, David. And that's one of the stories that people tell, but it's not clear that they go far enough. So suppose you are of the opinion that partiality to your children is fine up to a point, partiality to your compatriots is not. That's one possible view. Surely you don't think of this as just, you know, your style when it comes to reasoning.
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You think of it as something that holds, that doesn't depend on you, something that you found out rather than made the case or legislated. And in fact, if I think that we shouldn't even be partial towards our children, you probably think that I'm wrong.
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Or if someone else thinks that we should be partial towards our compatriots, you probably think that they're wrong too, right? So I think the truth very much plays a role here. I mean, I don't care about words. If you don't want to use the word truth, don't. But I think that's genuinely the concern that's coming up. Right, right. I see. When you talk about logical structure or something along these lines, I think that the most natural way of thinking about it is not as a substitute for truth, but as an indicator of truth. And that's something that's,
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Very common the case, right? So you hold, you have some maybe more general, maybe more abstract moral beliefs that you hold more confidently, maybe more concrete ones. So I'm much more confident that it's okay for me to be partial towards my children than of any theory in morality, right? So, you know, logical connections go in all directions. And then I try to come up with a coherent system.
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or to see what follows from things that I'm rather strongly confident in. But that doesn't mean that what I care about is the coherence of the system. What I ultimately care about is the truth.
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It's just that making sure that my system coheres better is one way of approximating the truth. And what is the... So what is the difference? Why do we need to go... Well, maybe we should define realism first so we don't lose people. I may be making a cartoon caricature version of what your claim actually is, but it reminds me a little bit of mathematical realists who...
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If I'm doing a long, complicated multiplication on a piece of paper with a pen, and I arrive at the number, this is not an opinion. You know, this is a fact. If I've done it correctly, then it is absolutely correct. And yet there's still...
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a group of philosophers of mathematics who will say, well, it's correct insofar as it works, and it just sort of works because those are the rules of math as we understand them. And then there's another school of philosophers of mathematics who will say, no, it works because that number exists in an almost philosophical platonic realm. It's just as real as the table in front of me right now. And you make a similar leap with ethics. What gets you to make...
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that leap? Why isn't it sufficient that I say that I've reached a conclusion that is viable, that is supported by all of the evidence that I can find? My conclusion about, you know, I don't know, yeah, whether or not I should buy Australian is X. Why do we need to then jump into a metaphysical realm of realness in the universe?
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Why do mathematical Platonists believe that the empty sets and the number eight exist? As you said, as real as this table, probably more real than this table. Right. This table is contingent. It could have failed to exist. But the number eight and the empty set are necessary entities. Why do they believe in that? I think that the answer, and we're sort of deteriorating to general philosophical methodology here, the answer is that there's important stuff you can't do without that.
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Maybe you can't do scientific theory without them. Maybe you can't explain important things without quantifying over numbers, without assuming that sets exist, without something along these lines. So it comes down to a kind of theoretical productivity. It's actually the same reason we have to believe in quarks, say, or in electrons. And we believe in them because they are needed for the best theories that we have or whatever it is that we want to explain.
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So I would use an analogous methodology and say, let's see, what are some of the things that it's important for us to explain, to accommodate, to account for, to vindicate about ethics or about normative discourse more generally? And then I'm going to try and see whether we can do it without taking very seriously the existence of normative rules, laws, facts, truths, even entities.
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And then, of course, it will all come down to the details. Let's see. Can we explain stuff without electrons or quarks or sets or fields or numbers? And if we cannot, then that's a very good reason to be a Platonist, although there may be reasons not to, and the discussion goes on. So similarly, I would say, can we, for instance, explain and accommodate and vindicate moral deliberation, the kind of deliberation we talk about?
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without assuming that there are at least some normative truths, some moral truths that do not depend on us, that are out there for us to discover. This is not exactly moral entities. This is not exactly, you know, moral particles. But it is moral truths and moral facts. And that's the stuff I care more deeply about.
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more deeply about. And it does seem to me that there are very strong intuitions, very strong things that we care very strongly about that cannot be accommodated and vindicated without this kind of realism. I should say, by the way, that most of the meta-ethical discussion in the philosophical literature, not all of it, but most of it, agrees with the starting point, namely thinks that moral discourse at least exhibits what we call objective purpose, right? It's not.
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tries, it aspires to objectivity, and some of the other features that I like to emphasize. But then they show how, if they are right, they can accommodate that without going all the way realistic, analogously to the mathematical play. And that's, I think, of course, a fair game to play. A lot of different, you know where I think the game ends, but it's a legitimate game to play.
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And so just to tease that out for us about the necessity of these things being true, the counterclaim to your position, I think I read Harmon putting this, was that in the case of an electron, it is hypothesized, then there's a test in a lab, then there's a little vapor trail that goes across the particle accelerator, and we go, oh, that's an electron,
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vapor trail, and if we didn't believe in electrons, then there'd be no other way to explain the vapor trail. On a moral question, I think Harmon says, imagine that a bunch of hooligans are burning a cat alive. And a woman sees that and goes, well, that's wrong.
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Do you need anything? Where is the necessary electron? Since I can explain that by saying she's a woman who holds certain beliefs about animal cruelty that are contingent on her upbringing, and she doesn't like seeing a cat burned alive, and a cat is being burned alive, and she doesn't like seeing a cat burned alive.
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To me, there's nothing missing in that explanation of morality in the same way that there would be something missing from the electron analogy if there was a vapor trail and they didn't have an electron. So like most analogies and this analogy, everything depends on the level at which you draw the analogy. So I agree. If the question is, do we need an electrode to explain people's beliefs in electrons, the answer is yes. Do we need moral facts in order to explain people's beliefs in moral facts or people's moral judgments?
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I say, no, we don't. So I'm with Harmon and with you on this one. But I think we should go, as it were, a level up. Do we need electrons? The important question is, do we need electrons in order to explain anything worth explaining? And in fact, in order to accommodate anything worth accommodating?
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And the answer is yes. Another question is not whether we need moral facts in order to explain people's moral judgments, but in order to accommodate or vindicate anything else that's worth accommodation or vindication. And that's where deliberation comes in. That's just one example, right? The question for me is not
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Third, personal. You look at this woman making the judgment and you're trying to explain it, although that is also an important project. My question is, I'm trying to deliberate whether to do something or not. For instance, whether to intervene, if need be, violently, in order to stop this terrible thing from going on. Now I'm trying to decide
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It seems to me that at this point I'm relying on objective morality of the kind. It's going to be very hard for something like Armin to eliminate. Maybe I should give another example. Can you just hold that example for one second while I just push back on that? Aren't we just moving back the subjectivity of the moral claim from the woman onto me?
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then, and someone who's watching me could make the same adjudication about my decision as to whether or not to intervene as I am making of the woman about the wrongness of the cat being birthed? Of course, they're going to explain your moral, if what they want to do is to explain your moral judgment. But what's insufficient about that explanation if it provides an entire picture no matter how many generations I go back? I'm not trying to explain.
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Suppose I'm there deliberating whether or not to intervene with force. I'm not trying to explain my moral judgment. I'm not even trying to predict what my decision will be. I'm not trying to say, you know, suppose I decide to intervene, what will have explained that decision? What I'm trying to do is to decide. That's very different. It's ineliminably in the first person. It's about making up one's mind.
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And it seems to me that there it's going to be very hard to do away with the thought that it's wrong. Or even more, the thought that that cat is suffering in a way that is unjustifiable. It certainly feels that way. What justifies my intervention, violent, violent intervention, right, is not anything about me or me.
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or about what I believe, or about how I judge things, or about any explanation that you may offer, as it were, in the aftermath. What justifies it is that it's suffering and it's wrong.
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I mean, that's the subjective experience of the woman as well, I suppose. You know, the non-realist is a bit like the denier of free will in that they're making a case that feels intuitively wrong to us because we feel like we're making moral judgments both freely and also based on some kind of principle that transcends ourselves.
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But I suppose the moral non-realist can just say, well, sure, it feels like that. I mean, feelings are wacky, and we are evolved primates who have all kinds of strange sensations. So I agree that there are similarities, but there are ways in which actually the non-realist is in poorer shape compared to the free will skeptic. Because the free will skeptic will say something like, I understand that what we want, as it were, is this full free will. I have some fancy metaphysical argument showing that it's impossible, and so we are in error.
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There is an analogous view in metaethics, we sometimes call it error theory. I think it's respectable in some ways, problematic in others. But most non-realists, certainly most people who are not professional metaethicists, who think that they're non-realists, don't say, look, I understand that we want this objectivity. I have a fancy metaphysical argument showing you can't get it. So we are all mistaken in our moral judgments.
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Rather, what they think is something like, so it's relative, so it's about your preferences or about your own judgments or something. But that just doesn't follow at all, right? The free will skeptic doesn't say, so actually free will is all about our feelings about free will. No, they say free will is, you know, that's the full deal. And if the universe doesn't play along, then the intellectually honest way to go is to say that we're mistaken about this. And again, there is a metatical view along these lines.
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I mean, all that points to is that the moral relativist, in fact, does not believe in morality at all.
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Well, I don't think that, well, I don't know that the moral relativist exists. Someone may be, I mean, I agree, of course, that there are moral relativists, as it were, during working hours, but I don't know if there are genuinely moral relativists. And I should also say that there are current versions of moral relativism in the literature which are more sophisticated, which can accommodate more of the phenomenon and so on, right? So,
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There are people who would claim that the Taliban is no worse than Western civilization because every culture sets its own moral rules and that is appropriate for them. But they don't want their daughters to go and live under the Taliban. How many people do you know who genuinely believe this? I mean, I understand that some people will find themselves saying such things.
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when they are with their back to the wall. I mean, I don't know any of it. They're all true on poor arguments. It's a rarefied academic pursuit. You had another analogy that you were going to throw. Do you remember what it was? But first, an important ground rule. Do we get to say football because Australia, or should we say soccer because the U.S.? You are really scratching a harsh scab here because when I grew up in Australia, it was called soccer.
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And ever since, yes, in the past sort of 20 years or so, there's been a push to call it football. And now it's officially called football. But if you go to a pub and, you know, it's full of people, then they're going to watch the soccer or, you know, the World Cup. So let's say soccer. Can we just do soccer for the Americans and the older Australians? Think about the referee in a soccer ball. And think about the following view. That view says that the referee cannot possibly get a call wrong.
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Because what defines offside is precisely the fact that the referee called an offside. That's a possible future, right? Yes. I remember as a child in school, we had a poster in the gym saying something like this. The referee is never wrong because what the referee says, that's when there's a foul. Then that's where there's a penalty. That's when someone was offside. Suppose that's true.
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How can you deliberate as a referee? Right? So you're trying to decide whether or not it's offside. You use the VAR. You have all of the facts, right? But you're not entirely sure whether it amounts to offside or not. How can you genuinely deliberate when you know that whatever your call is going to be, it's going to be right because that's what makes it offside?
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The whole position of, I mean, you can still pretend to deliberate. Maybe there are other things you can do. But if you're genuinely deliberating as a referee, what it shows is that you reject this theory of what offside comes from. You think that there are facts about offside that don't depend on your very decision in this deliberation. Otherwise, deliberation doesn't make sense, right?
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That, it seems to me, is true of the phenomenology of what it feels like to deliberate across the board. And it's true of many moral cases as well. When you're trying to find out, when you're trying to determine what your view is on what's been going on in Gaza, on many other things as well, you are trying to genuinely find out something that doesn't just depend on you. It's the same kind of phenomenology that would have made deliberation impossible as it would have been for the referee if...
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but the referee decides maybe the case that the decision was correct.
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And just before we move on to politics, which I want to get to, can you just articulate for me what you think in your head when you talk about the truthfulness and the real existence of moral truths in the sense that they... Because for a normie, I remember interviewing Brian Green, the physicist, and saying, you know, when you say that there are like 11 dimensions and you say that they're real, do you mean that...
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that their real sort of like love is real? Or do you mean that they're real in that they're really, really real? And he said, no, they're really, really real. What are you implying about love? I mean, you know what I mean? Like it's real, I guess. But like it's a very different kind of real. Don't you love your children? Yes, absolutely. But it's not the same. Are there many things more real in your life than that?
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No, that subjective experience is irreducible and feels very true. The question about love is not whether it's real. The question about love is how to make sense of the phenomenon in a way that respects the fact that it's real.
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Well, I think there's another wrinkle that I was pointing to in the question to Brian, which is that no one would dispute, well, some people would, most people would not dispute that love is a real phenomenological thing that takes place in the physiology of humans and probably other mammals too. When I say, is it real the way love is real, I'm talking about
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The idea of love, the poetry of love, the majesty of love, a love that is more than whatever is happening physiologically when I feel that upwell of warmth when I see my kids, right? So what is that plane? When you're thinking about moral truths, where are you locating them at?
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So I think of them as existing in the only sense I know of the word exists. But different things exist in different ways. For instance, quarks exist, presumably, as a part of basic physical reality. States exist, countries exist, universities exist.
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podcasts exist. All of these things exist, but their existence amounts to something a little bit different. Their existence is the same thing. They all exist. But for a university to exist is not for it to be a part of ultimate physical reality. It's for there to be something really complicated that includes physical stuff, institutional setup, and participation by people, and all sorts of things. Numbers exist. For numbers to exist is the same thing as for quarks and universities to exist.
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But there are different things that come along with it. For instance, for electrons to exist, it is very closely tied to something in space, something in time, and causal powers. But for the number eight to exist, these things are up. So the number eight, if it exists, is what we sometimes call an abstract object. Which means that questions about time and space are...
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if you pardon the pun, out of place here. If you ask me, where is your number eight? The answer is, your question's wrong. To ask where is the number eight is to make a false presupposition about the nature of eight, that it is spatial, but it is not. But I'm also agnostic about whether the number eight exists. I don't understand the philosophy of mathematics enough to understand what the question means.
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I'm just using it as an example. I know a little bit philosophy of math, but not enough to, you know, You're not going to convince me one way or another after my first year of philosophy. I tend to be a Platonist, but I don't know. So when you say you're a Platonist, does justice exist? Well, justice, the word justice has more than one meaning, right? One meaning is just a social phenomenon that exists in some places and not in others. That's fine. But if you ask me, say, the right to free speech, where is it?
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Or when is it? Where is it located in time? Of course, we can say something about the history of the recognition of the right to free speech. But that's the history of the recognition of the right. I would say that the right to free speech, with some complications aside, is a necessary existence. Just like the empty set and the number eight.
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It's always existed. It exists outside of time and space. It does not have causal powers. So it exists, but it still looks very different from this table or from quarks or from universities. So there's a meaning to the term exists that remains unified across all of these very different things that exist.
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Right. But actually, I still don't really get it, frankly. I mean, if someone asked me before I knew that I was interviewing you, what is free speech? What is the right to free speech?
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I would tell a story about human societies and civilizations having been thwarted by an overly censorious clique and the great revelation during the Enlightenment about the utility of tolerating other people's
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speech and having a boisterous town square and the way that that was codified by the United States Constitution and then spread, you know, in the 20th century in the post-war period. And that would be a contingent. That was pretty good. You just came up with this on the Facebook page.
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I came up with it on the fly, I guess. And the same would be of something like the rule of law in Israel. Coming back to the first thing we just talked about, the independence of the judiciary in Israel. This would be a thing that is contingent. Maybe this just shows that my example was not ideal. How about the badness of suffering, the wrongness of humiliation, and justification of gender equality?
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So about all of these, you can talk about, you know, maybe gender equality. That's a, in human history, it's a fairly new idea. True. But it was progress when people came up with that idea, precisely because they recognized something that was true independently of their recognition. Right? Similarly, the fact that some people don't think that humiliating some others is a problem. That's a problem with those people. They disagree, but they're simply wrong. And that fact, the wrongness of humiliation, does not,
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It does not come into existence at some moment in time. It does not exist, you know, in some parts of the planets, but not in others. In fact, trying to put it in spatiotemporal terms is already a false presupposition. Just like asking, you know, when did the Pythagorean theorem become true?
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I mean, we can ask about the history of recognizing its truth. When did people come up with the proof and so on? But its truth does not depend on these things. Right. So how broadly do you draw realism in morality? Because there are going to be, and this gets back to what you were saying earlier about your political pragmatism, because some people might assume that someone who believes in the absolute truth,
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truth of moral claims would be rigid politically and dogmatic in terms of their partisanship, in terms of insisting that certain moral positions be fought for. But you're politically pragmatic. You are critical of the way that liberalism has come to be understood as just a kind of waffly, live and let live, relativist kind of, you know, not really believing in anything
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group of people who can be steamrolled by whoever believes things more passionately than they do. Take us on the journey from here to there. Right. So the...
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My kind of liberalism, which I call, I'm not sure I'm going to stick with this name. For now, I call it shameless liberalism. I like to point out... Shameless. Shameless. Shameless. Right. So it's shameless in both directions. In one direction, it knows what it stands for, the fundamental liberal principles, liberty, autonomy, well-being, equality. And it doesn't lose its confidence at the first time of disagreement, nor is it undermined by relativist confusions, anything along those lines.
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This is sort of one side. The other side is that it's fully open-eyed about reality and its complexities. And I know that many people think that there's a kind of tension between the two. But for me, the latter almost falls from the former. If you genuinely care about people's well-being, as every liberal should,
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you should be very sensitive to the implications of what you're going to do in the real world. I mean, you can do what we sometimes call ideal theory. You can talk about utopias. You can talk about solutions to problems under hypothetical conditions that make them easier to solve. And in some respects, that's fine. That can be interesting. Great. But if you want to say something about the real world, and if you genuinely care about equality and genuinely care about well-being and genuinely care about people's well-being counting equally,
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and about allowing people to make their own lives, to be the authors of their life stories, and so on. Well, you can't do that by remaining insensitive to the facts. If a policy looks to be in line with liberal fundamentals, but its effects in the imperfect world in which you find yourself are going to be seriously harmful to autonomy or to liberty or to equality or to well-being, then as a liberal, you cannot support it.
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So I think that actually being pragmatic in this way is not my style of being a liberal. I think it follows from the liberal fundamentals.
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How many things can we be confident are moral truths in that worldview as a passionate liberal? Because liberalism itself, well, I don't want to say, liberalism is overused. The center-left over the past 15 years has had a huge civil war intellectually about whether or not the liberalism of Martin Luther King and Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama
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was the sort of colorblind egalitarian ethos to pursue, or whether that had been too ignorant of the power structures that keep down traditionally oppressed minorities, and that what progressive politics is really about is about turning the volume up, not down on our differences and making sure that we create a more just society by elevating people who'd been traditionally disenfranchised.
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That then means that there's a clash between people who are claiming that there are different moral truths even in the same liberal camp. Is it the case that Dave Chappelle's freedom of speech to joke about transgender people trumps the right of transgender people not to feel demeaned by Dave Chappelle's stand-up comedy routine? Is it the right of...
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biological females to organize themselves on their biology, which is exclusionary towards trans women, or is it correct for trans women to be able to insinuate themselves into all biologically female spaces? These culture wars, it strikes me, have been just people talking past each other without really finding any solid ground to center themselves on. What went wrong? Yes. Um,
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Obviously, there are different conversations here, and I don't think there's a sort of one-size-fits-all account of all of them. Some of them are just disagreements about facts. So you can describe some of these things are going to be disagreements not about either the fundamentals or, as it were, the end point, where we want to get to, but rather about how instrumentally useful are going to be different ways of getting there.
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I think some of the discussions of affirmative action have been along these lines. Some, and only within roughly this camp, because there are also other objections. Some people say this is a necessary step in order to have more diversity, in order to make up for past wrongs and their lasting effects. And some people say, you don't understand, it's going to be counterproductive.
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Now, these discussions can become very heated politically, and maybe they should. But philosophically speaking, there's nothing that heated going on. They agree about all the normative stuff. The questions are, as it were, mechanical. What would be a better way of getting there? I think that's true of some of these things, not of all. Some other disagreements seem to have a very different style to them. Some of them seem to be disagreements between what I would call purists and pragmatists.
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So a purist is someone who would say, I don't know, I support liberty. And that's it. And, you know, maybe they support freedom of speech for that reason. And then you show them, look, the whole idea that the marketplace of ideas is actually a pretty good system. That was true for some technologies, but it's no longer true for the technologies we have. We need to rethink stuff. And they say, no, no, you don't understand. That's like a basic commitment. I don't care about the facts.
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So my disagreement with someone like this is going to be very different. So I don't have any patience for this kind of purism, at least not ultimately. I have a lot of patience for intermediate purism. So you may want to have a kind of division of liberal labor. You may want to have an organization that's just about free speech. They don't have to ask about how to...
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balance this with other things and how to engage in trade-offs. That's their role. And then there are going to be other organizations doing that. That's fine. So if you want to organize your liberal field in this way, that's great. But ultimately, I really don't think purism is the way to go.
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And then there's also another- Just as an aside, David, I'm not even sure that the purists actually believe it when you scratch the surface. It comes back a bit to our conversation about, do people really believe in moral relativism? That's a good point. Once you push the purists, there's almost always edge cases. So then you can just say, okay, well, then it's just about the dividing line, really, because there's always going to be an experiment. It's important for me that even a purist pretense can in some cases be instrumentally useful.
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I mean, you may assign, in some organizations, you may have someone assigned to just raise this consideration every meeting, whenever it's open. And that can be a useful way of it. So something like this can be useful. But ultimately, yeah, I don't think that's it. But another thing is that there may be genuinely important disagreements that are in some sense internal. They're inside the field, inside the camp even.
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but still go fairly deep. What is the best understanding of equality? Is equality primarily about opportunities? Is it primarily about distribution of goods? Or is it primarily about relationships? So against hierarchies. This is...
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Two liberals, perfectly decent, perfectly thoughtful, may have a conversation about that. That's an important—I don't know that we see a lot of this in the public sphere, but that's a genuine disagreement that is not just about the facts, not about some weird kind of purism, and not with the racists. This is about how to best understand equality. I think that people who have this kind of disagreement are still going to be able to agree about quite a lot. There's a reason we're in the same camp.
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But there is room for this disagreement as well. So if you're asking about this, and now if we want to address the specific examples of some controversies that we had, you know, the real world is messy. So I suspect what you're going to see is that the very same kind of disagreement about what was it, Chappelle's free speech to speak in ways that many find terribly offensive,
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and many are offended by, not just find deeply offensive. I suspect that if you try to analyze that conversation, you'll see that it's a mess. It involves some purists who just don't care about, or any of all, some factual controversies about what the best ways of getting to fairly widely agreed endpoints within the field are. But you'll also see some people who promote, perhaps, a different understanding of the precise value of liberty and how it translates to highly offensive speech.
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I mean, I think there's also a power dynamic going on where, you know, a mob can come up with an unassailable moral position that they regard as being pure. Trans women are women, for example, or something like that. You know, a slogan, a catchphrase.
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that they can then use to exert influence and gain fame and notoriety and a sense of being on the right side of history. And not to bash on the trans lobby here, you could make the same case about a conversation between two liberals about whether or not particular migrant communities exist.
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can be well integrated into Western liberal democracy. And you don't need either of them to be a racist or an Islamophobe to hopefully have a constructive conversation about what sorts of populations are most amenable to integrating well in Western countries. But
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The problem is that as soon as a person suggests, actually names a migrant community, that they might be worried about as being regressive or extremist. In this case, it would usually be a conservative Muslim community in the West—
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um, that the, the power structures come into play and there's always going to be a mob who can jump on that person and say, this is, you know, this is our cause. That person's a racist, they're an Islamophobe or whatever. And that gives them a certain cultural cachet, um, which brings us perhaps clumsily to Israel and Palestine. Wait, can I, can I just say something about this? So, um, so
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Clearly, philosophical discourse is not very fond of mobs, and I'm with you on that to an extent. But I also want to make two points. One, which you already hinted at, is that the danger of abuse, of use of power, including this kind of, in some respects, soft power, but power that can be fairly destructive, that risk is ubiquitous.
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It's not just about this or that debate. It's not just coming from this or that side. So yeah, we should try to avoid and do what we can to fight these risks when we can. So that's one point. The other is that I don't want to endorse or to sound as if I endorse a kind of view. And some philosophers, I think, do endorse it. According to which, the best way is always to discuss everything with an open mind.
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I think it's a very good way very often, but I don't think it's always the only way. And so if I'm talking back to Israel, if I'm having a conversation with an extreme right-wing Jewish supremacist, I'm not looking to have a decent conversation, and I'm not out to learn anything. I know what I need to know. I'm looking out to defeat them.
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And there are different ways of defeating them in different contexts. There are going to be different means that are going to be useful. And in some contexts, the useful way would be to pretend that I'm having an open-mind discussion. But I don't. There's nothing they can say that will convince me of Jewish supremacy, nor should there be. At times, this is a morally important stance. That's where you should be. You should say...
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That's where I stand. At times, it's important to even show this kind of confidence. At other times, it may be important to sound more open-minded because it's a better way of convincing them, or that's going to be highly unlikely, perhaps of convincing a third party who's listening, right? Uh-huh.
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And I think that would be my view about at least some of the examples. Yes, I mean, the third party who is listening is critically important, obviously, for me, since I have these kinds of conversations, even with people who I know, you know, I'm not going to agree with. And since you're running a podcast, you're talking to one person, but hopefully a few others are listening. The whole point is, yeah, is for the third person. But I would just push back on what you said on the basis of...
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Your claim supposes that you are fully cognizant of the rationale that the Jewish supremacist believes that they are fighting for. And if you are, then I agree that your position of non-engagement is justified. But I will frequently hear a position that rhymes with the one you just gave me.
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from people who have summarily made a judgment about their enemies and actually impede their own ability to fight them because they don't understand them. I mean, we've done this on both sides of politics quite a lot. I agree with that. Like, why do I need to talk to a Nazi? He wants to, you know, he wants to reduce immigration. You know, he wants to halve the number of migrants coming into Britain. I don't need to talk to a fascist like that. Well, maybe you do need to talk to him to understand where he thinks that he's coming from. I fully agree with that.
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So part of this morality play, the most visible morality play that has been taking place over the past few years in the West has been around Israel and Palestine. We have successfully superimposed this highly specific scenario onto all of our post-colonial guilt and our moral hang-ups about being powerful white people dropping bombs on poor brown-skinned people.
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completely morally valid ways in terms of their instinct, but ways that steamroll all of the specificity of what's going on on the ground in Israel and Palestine. So on the 20th of October in 2023, this is what, less than two weeks after October 7th, these Oxford academics released a
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calling on the British government to call for a ceasefire less than two weeks in. On November 1st, less than two weeks after that, a group called Philosophy for Palestine of 407 international philosophers released a letter expressing their...
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unequivocal solidarity with the Palestinian people and denouncing the ongoing and rapidly escalating massacre being committed in Gaza by Israel, on and on and on. We call on our colleagues in philosophy to join us in overcoming complicity and silence. You declined to join them and instead wrote a pretty scathing article against those two pieces and others in The
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So I started with responding to my colleagues at Oxford, first on a philosophy blog and then in The Economist. A part of it was just that it seemed to me to be so factually unsophisticated. So it seemed like people were working with very simple formulas and were just applying them.
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without any sensitivity to what are clearly morally relevant features of the kicks. Now, I also...
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became extremely critical of the war in Israeli terms fairly early on, not that early. I don't think I found out lately what all these people knew all along. I think the situation changed in morally significant ways. But just to give one example that I think is extremely important, to highlight the harm to innocence is both correct and extremely important anyway, regardless of what happens.
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But there have also been some important strategic decisions for Israel to make, certainly in the aftermath of October 7. And it wasn't clear what the alternatives were and that they were accepted. Including, I'll just give you one example of a consideration that is almost always neglected in these discussions. And that certainly these two pieces that you mentioned neglected. And that's the significance of deterrence. Um.
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Deterrence is ugly and abusable and deterrence is a game played with the blood of innocence. But also deterrence saves lives all the time. So it's blood of innocence in both directions, right?
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immediately after October 7th, Hezbollah in the north did not join the war, certainly not with full force. Had it joined the war,
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The catastrophe that we saw on October 7th and afterwards is apparently nothing by comparison to what we would have seen. There were very, very, very little Israeli forces on the north border. Hezbollah would have made tremendous progress, would have caused horrible harm within Israel, and then Israel, with its back to the wall, would have responded in ways that are orders of magnitude more lethal than it did, unjustifiably at the end of the day in Gaza. Why did Hezbollah not join?
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That's a very good question. We don't know, of course, all of the facts. But we do know that in 2006, Hezbollah started an altercation with Israel that ended with Israel bombing Beirut in really problematic ways. But we also know that the then leader of Hezbollah said, had he realized that that was the result would have been, he would not have started that specific conflict or that specific part of the conflict.
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So it's possible that you need to judge the 2006 bombings of Beirut, partly because of the deterrence effect that they caused that was still in effect in 2023 and that prevented a much, much worse catastrophe. And I think something similar is to also the response in Gaza. And Israel responded in a very, very local sort of surgical kind of way.
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it's possible that it would have lost, I mean, it did lose a lot of deterrence effect, but it wouldn't reestablish it.
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Now, I don't know what exactly to say about this. It's really complicated. Just pause on the deterrence thing then, because you've written about the kind of muddy morality of unintended harms, you know, collateral damage versus the sort of logic of intentional harm, like the terrorists pulled off on October 7th. The fact that there comes a point at which, you know, the unintentional harm is so likely
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for so little yield that it becomes sort of morally indistinguishable from terrorism, because you know that if you drop this particular bomb, you're going to do an enormous amount of civilian damage for very little military outcome.
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So the deterrence thing, I have problems with the deterrence argument on that basis, in the sense that if deterrence is a goal, it gets us very close to saying that killing bystanders is more permissible when the purpose is to send a message to third parties. So if you're harming people you know are innocent, partly in order to display resolve, you know,
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how is that meaningfully morally different from terrorism? In two ways. First, because the aim is to save lives overall, which is typically not the aim of terrorists. But it might be. It might be. Of terrorists. I mean, there have been terrorists. I mean, I agree. I agree.
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And I also think that for some theoretical purposes, it makes sense to focus on those terrorists, rare though they are, I call them in a paper, interesting terrorists. But perhaps the more important point is the following. So I agree that we shouldn't target innocents.
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that the name of the game is collateral damage, right? Collateral damage is when you know or foresee that innocents are going to be put in harm's way, but as a side effect of targeting legitimate targets rather than targeting them directly. But then there are questions of proportionality, which you also alluded to, right? So it's not as if any amount of collateral damage is allowed.
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for, say, bombing or launching an attack to be permissible, it has to satisfy more than one condition. One condition is it has to target a legitimate target rather than innocents or non-combatants. And the other is that the foreseen harm, the collateral damage to non-combatants, should be proportional to whatever it is that you are aiming to achieve by the attack. And we don't have a lot, theoretically, to say about proportionality, but clearly that's an extremely important notion there.
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I don't think that deterrence can justify targeting innocents. But I think deterrence effect should get into the proportionality calculus. So when you're trying to determine whether an amount of collateral damage is acceptable, given whatever it is that you're trying to achieve with your attack, you should factor in deterrence at that stage. I see. And that's an important difference. Yeah, right. And so it was your evolution on Gaza, basically, when you got to the point at which it was
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clear to you that the damage being done was not going to yield an equivalent payoff? Yes. So I published another piece in The Economist. I think it was in March of 2024 saying that at this point there are no further deterrence effect we had. On top of all of this, there's also sort of a depressing word.
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My access to facts, you described your wavering on this just because, you know, the facts are so complicated, right? My access to facts, I mean, to say that it's limited is going to be an understatement. And furthermore, it should be limited because, you know, you can't run a military operation with letting, you know, every academic know all of the facts. What this means is that you need to have leaders you can trust.
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You need to have commanding officers you can trust, but also political leaders you can trust. You need to be able to say something like, look, I'm not sure exactly what the facts are, but I have good reason to believe that they're of the kind that justifies my state's actions, because these are people whose judgment I trust. I have zero trust in the judgment of my leaders, both in its competence and in its moral soundness.
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I have just as little trust in the leaders of the enemy. So at this point, I mean, I can't be in that sort of position that you would hope to be in, in a decent country. Namely, without a lot of facts, I should trust the leaders that they're responding reasonably to the factual knowledge that they have. I cannot be in that situation. That's something that I wrote, you know, on the first week of the war.
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that it seems clear that these rules must respond rather forcefully, but I have zero trust in either the moral inhibitions or the factual competence of my leaders. And that is depressing. I mean, the realization that the people who do have access to the information and to make decisions are ones you wouldn't trust with, you know, giving you advice about everyday kind of stuff.
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uh, uh, yeah, that is, I mean, it does put you in a weird position, David, where you're, you're the person who insists that moral truth is objective. And you're also the person who is telling everyone that we're too confident about the biggest moral question of the decade. That that's, uh, it is a weird position because you know, it's fairly rare, but it's not a tension or, or a contradiction, right? I mean, that would be like someone saying, uh, like a referee saying, um,
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you know, without the VAR, I just don't know whether the guy was offside. Yeah. Yeah.
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Where is the morality of Zionism for you now? I ask because prior to October 7th, I think, there was an uncomplicated way in many sort of reasonably pro-Israel or just at least not anti-Israel people's minds to separate the ideal of Israel, the existence of the country, the...
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ideals of Zionism from the actual reality of the Netanyahu government and the occupation and the military, the thicket of military impositions on daily Palestinian life in the West Bank and the blockade on Gaza. And since then, it's become much trickier, I think, to disentangle the actual living, breathing
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reality of the israeli government's actions from an abstracted notion of the kind of moral standing of zionism as a concept can you help i'm not sure i can partly because zionism means different things for different people i mean i should say here's something that certainly became harder since uh has become harder since october 7th um
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Don't get me started on Netanyahu. He's, of course, a major part of the problem. But it goes much deeper than Netanyahu. The percentage of the Jewish population in Israel who are willing to say things like there are no innocents in Gaza, which is, you know, perhaps it's an expression of an understandable sentiment on October 8th, although it's terrible even then, but it's basically genocidal in spirit.
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The percentage of Jewish-Israeli population willing to adhere to that was ridiculously high. I haven't seen recent polls on it. I hope that it's not as high as it was, but I'm not even sure of that. So the problems run much deeper than Netanyahu. And if you think that, suppose that Netanyahu loses in the upcoming election in the fall, sorry in the Northern Hemisphere fall, if you think that...
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I'm in the process of thinking about packing for Australia. Yeah, it's actually just started to get cold. Mind you, cold in Sydney is like cold in Tel Aviv, you know, like 20 degrees. Yes. So if Netanyahu loses, it's going to be a step in the right direction, but the thought that it's going to solve everything is, of course, highly oversimplified. That doesn't have to be... I mean, that's not a necessary condition, though, believing that Netanyahu has ruined everything. Like, he could have ruined things beyond... Not he...
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Of course. You know, the worldview that he is the apotheosis of could have ruined things beyond repair. And it could also be true that had that movement and in particular, specifically his political acumen not come along the way it did in the first decade of this century, that there could have been another path. Right. And all...
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As with almost everything else that's important or interesting, everything is a matter of degree. So it's not about either being good or bad. It can be about being worse or a little bit better, right? I certainly hope that we'll see a change in the upcoming election. But, and this just goes back to your point of saying how it's harder to sort of distinguish between what's going on and a somewhat better version of Zionism. I'm with you on that and has become harder because of some shifts in views of at least many in the Israeli Jewish population.
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I think that there is a crux of Zionism that can be defended, if not as ideal, then at least as an acceptable response to a fairly non-ideal world. I think that remains true. I think it's also...
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It used to be, historically it was a significant part of Zionism, but I should say that I'm really not an expert on the history of Zionism. I do think that the way Zionism, the shape Zionism has taken over the years, I don't think that it can be morally defended. Whether we can clean it up.
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and go back to a version that perhaps was dominant in early Zionism, again, I'm not an expert on this, that makes it morally acceptable again, at least as a response to a complicated world, that can be an important question in some context. I think that the word has now become unhelpful.
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So when I am asked to define my own views, but also when I'm, uh, uh, I took part in some, you know, a failed attempt to create some Jewish Arabic collaboration with Venezuela and so on. And, you know, Zionism is a big breaking point there. Right. And so I say, you know, um,
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Well, I'm not a Zionist. I'm not an anti-Zionist. I can tell you what my views are if you ask about many things, including about the conflict. If you then choose the label for me, go ahead. I don't care.
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Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, there is, I agree that it obscures so much more than it reveals, that there's no point having a conversation about it. I mean, at its most benign, it simply means that Jews, just like Chinese people or Japanese people or Arabs or whoever, have a right to have a country probably in the same neck of the woods as they were banging around in 3,000 years ago, if possible. Yeah.
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But, of course, in popular parlance now, you see comments on social media from non-antisemitic, well-meaning, progressive people just saying, you know, we have nothing against Jews, but Zionism is a fascist, racist ideology that has nothing to do with, you know, us disliking Jews. Obviously, there's a significant rift between that definition of Zionism and the first one I gave.
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Once again, we shouldn't aim at one-liner explanations. Is it all about anti-Semitism? Of course not. Are there some people who are anti-Semites and also take part in this? Of course, it's complicated. What about the claim? I mean, I was somewhat convinced by a...
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a Jewish friend of mine who was saying, because the yearning for Israel and Jerusalem is woven so deep in Jewish culture and religion and thought for thousands of years, it's almost like a kind of indigenous dreaming, we would call it in Australia, like a, you know, a fundamental part of the foundational text, that it is that to criticize Israel,
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the idea of Jews having a right to that homeland is intrinsically an anti-Jewish move. I'm not sure whether I necessarily buy that, but what do you think? Interesting. I think I'm willing to concede that, again, I'm not sure how central it is. So it's true that there's a sense in which the hope is central, but it's not clear that the hope is central in the sense that actually requires its realisation.
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It could remain mythological. Right, right. So I'm not sure about this, but granting this for the sake of argument, I would say then, yes, in that case, in denying the right to the land, there is something anti-Jewish, but that's not in any way anti-Semitic. You are denying a part of Jewish doctrine
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which is fine. You're allowed to do that. So we start with the list of all the things in Jewish doctrine that I reject or in the doctrines of many other religions. I mean, there's, yeah, in that sense. Yeah, okay. So you reject that. If the hope was to show that there is something close to anti-Semitic about it, then I would say, no, you can think that there are false, important and false, immoral parts of Jewish doctrine.
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or of some Jewish doctrines, because of course there are differences among them and so on, and some traditions, you can criticize those without being anti-Semitic in any way. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of Jewish people in the diaspora do argue that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism for that reason, because it's inextricable. You can't think about the Jewish people without thinking about their connection to that piece of real estate. But I'm glad to hear
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In terms of the permissibility of what Israel did in Gaza and international law, just after the attack, you wrote a piece called What is Permissible in the War Against Hamas? You co-wrote this. And did I misunderstand? It seemed like you were arguing that if military acts are morally justified, then they should be carried out even if they're in violation of international law.
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That is, I don't know that this is a view of my co-author, so I should be careful about this. But I do think this. I think that there is a fairly low upper bound
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on how significant the relevant parts of international law can be. I actually wrote it in a paper in Hebrew after one of the previous runs in Gaza. Oh, right. Yes, you quoted it in a subsequent piece. Here's the thought.
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Forget international law for a second. Let's talk about domestic law. I assume you'll agree that there are some, at least possible, I would say also actual circumstances in which it's justified to disobey the law. Yes. Not just if the law is morally horrible, but also, you know, if you just find yourself in circumstances...
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in which horrible consequences will follow if you obey and you disobey. That doesn't mean that the law doesn't matter morally. Of course it matters morally in all of these other circumstances. But there are going to be cases when the stakes are sufficiently high, that's the crucial point, that it may very well justify disobedience, violating the law.
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In situations like the ones we saw in Gaza, but also in many other combat situations, situations of warfare, the stakes are unbelievably high. We're killing tons of innocents. Either way, if we refuse to engage, we're also putting other people at risk. So as I said, it's the blood of innocents. That's the price in all directions. So now let's see.
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Suppose that what international humanitarian law directs you to do is what you have independently moral reasons to do. Then, of course, that's what you should do. And international humanitarian law doesn't make a lot of a difference in that case. The interesting case is the case in which there's a conflict. So suppose that international humanitarian law forbids you from doing something that because of the effect of deterrence will end up saving many, many innocent lives.
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the stakes are unbelievably high, close to maximum. And in that case, even if the law forbids it, you should still do it. I mean, in the opposite direction, if international humanitarian law, suppose that it permits the kind of bombing we saw, say, in the first stages of the Gaza war after October 7th, which were...
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Horrible. I don't think they were indiscriminate, but they were very close. The collateral damage allowed was up in the sky. But suppose that for some fancy reason international humanitarian law permits it. If morality doesn't permit it, then you shouldn't do it. And merely relying on the fact that you found a loophole in international humanitarian law is not going to save it. So the general point, it's not specifically about
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International law, it just applies specifically to international law. The general point is that when the stakes are high enough, it's hard to see that the law matters. I mean, by definition, the laws of war only apply when the stakes are very high.
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So, I mean, every... Which is why the problem is more serious for the laws of war. Right. But I mean, all I'm saying is that every rogue actor in history would have been able to make that argument. That, like, you know, we don't have time for our hands to be tied by these bureaucrats writing their fancy laws. We're here on the ground. We have to...
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make so i mean you're a professor of the philosophy of law which is why it surprised me that you know essentially the international laws of war are meaningless if there's a get out of jail free card if the states are meaningless no but i'm saying i'm saying they functionally become meaningless because the stakes in war are always high um
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Think about it. So I fully see the dangers, and it's very open to abuse, and it's quite possible that the right thing to do when you're, say, designing institutions is to ignore this point of mind because it's so dangerous. But the point remains true nonetheless. And as you now know, I want to emphasize the point of view of the deliberating agent or the deliberate decision-maker. So suppose that you're a decision-maker. You are now trying to decide whether or not to drop some bomb.
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The target is legitimate, but all accounts, say a combatant or a command and control center, whatever. The benefits are significant, but also there's going to be significant collateral damage. So you're now wondering whether the situation overall justifies dropping that bomb, right? That's the question. You know how many people roughly will die and so on. In comes the lawyer.
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it's permissible. In terms of international law, you're not going to get into trouble if you drop the bomb. Should this affect your deliberation in any way? What do I care about? I'm going to be killing innocents. That's a given. Do you really think that that's... So what if it's permissible? I'm killing innocents. If it's morally impermissible, then I shouldn't do it, even if it's legally permissible.
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Now in the harder opposite direction. I understand it's harder for my thesis, but still. Suppose you know you're going to be killing innocents, which is horrible. But you think that the benefits are so tremendous. The benefits are in terms of, you know, not control over oil fields. In terms of saving innocents. The benefits are going to be so tremendous that at this point, morality says do it. In comes the lawyer. So, oh, but you should know legally it's unacceptable.
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I'm no expert in the international laws of war, but I would assume that if there was a demonstrable way in which it was going to save more lives than it was going to hurt, and it was a legitimate military target, then it probably would be within that.
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Good. Then we're in agreement that law doesn't matter. So I say, at least, again, putting to one side now dangers of abuse and so on, if you're going to do the moral deliberation reasonably well in such cases, the stakes are so high that nothing about the law should change it.
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Yeah, I mean, I'm no huge fan of international laws of war necessarily because of precisely this pickle. But I think once we concede that they're detached from morally justifiable behavior, then there's no point in – there really is no point in having them. And especially if you don't have trust in your own leaders, it becomes obvious that that is a – I agree that that's a huge thing. That is a loophole through which they can drive a truck. I agree. They'll always have a reason why these persnickety laws shouldn't apply to them.
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I agree with that. What's the moral position then, just zooming out, I want to let you go, of where Israel stands in relation to the Palestinians? I mean, the morality of the blockade of Gaza pre-2023 and the morality of the settlements in the West Bank and the morality of the occupation of the West Bank.
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are the black stains that have made public opinion globally, I think, so hostile to Israel's response and so frustrated with a status quo where people feel there is no next step that leads to greater peace and flourishing between the river and the sea?
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and therefore that all of that destruction was unwarranted and sort of purposeless. How do you, as someone who spends all of his time thinking about morality, lay it on top of the reality of where you live? When the stakes are so unbelievably high,
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I'm less interested in backward-looking moral judgments and more about pragmatic solutions, forget solutions, pragmatic ways forward, right? I have views. I agree with the moral judgments that you expressed. I think that many on the Palestinian side, I mean, there's enough responsibility and blame to go around.
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But I also think that if presented with a manageable way forward, that's not going to be, you know, heavenly perpetual peace, but it's going to be, I don't know, Northern Ireland kind of stuff. Just, you know, then this takes priority. That doesn't show that I don't care about morality. I think that that's what morality requires. It requires that we give absolute priority to trying to minimize
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suffering and harm, especially to innocence. I definitely agree that Israel's policy in the territories and in Gaza has been morally horrible. I think that even though the effects have been more horrible in Gaza than on the West Bank, morally speaking, there is something cleaner.
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about the evil of the Israeli policy in the West Bank, because there are some security concerns in Gaza that need to be addressed. And it's complicated. I don't think Israel has been doing it remotely, but on the West Bank, what we've been seeing, certainly since the current government, but not only at that point, of settlements, of ethnic cleansing, there's no security concern. There's nothing that can be said to just the government.
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At all. It's pure Jewish supremacy. So I'm definitely willing to join you in criticizing these practices and also in criticizing many practices on the Palestinian side. But at the end of the day, I don't care. I want to find a way forward that's going to reduce suffering by at least a little bit.
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To be fair to the Likud, which is a sentence I don't say often, they would probably argue that there is a security rationale for those policies in the West Bank insofar as were the West Bank to become a Palestinian state, by far Hamas is the most popular force there. You would have Gaza.
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times three or four or whatever it is population-wise and times 100 or whatever it is geography-wise. And it would pose an intolerable security threat to Israel. And therefore, whatever you can do now to postpone or impede that as an outcome, a two-state solution as an outcome, is great for the security of Israelis. Yeah.
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One fallacy in that reasoning is that it abstracts from the way in which your policies affect people's views and how things develop. We know that there was much, during the times of Rabin and Arafat and the beginning of Oslo, there was much more support on both sides, by the way, for such solutions than there is now. But another point is, sure, we should discuss security concerns. Absolutely. What do they have to do with the kind of ethnic cleansing that we see has been going on very aggressively, especially since October 7th, on the West Bank?
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So the most extreme parts of the government have been taking advantage of the opportunity that October 7th has given them. And you said, you know, to be fair to the Likud, to be fair to the far right partners of the Likud, they are totally explicit about this. They will say it's not about security at all. It's about Jewish supremacy. It's about the right to the land. I suggest believing these people, not accommodating them, but taking them seriously.
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David, it's absolutely fascinating to talk to you. Thanks for your time. Have some time to Australia. And yeah, thanks for joining us. Thanks very much.