New Podcast Release: Robert Wright
The latest episode of "Lives Well Lived," the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, is now available.
In this episode, Kasia and I had the pleasure of speaking with Robert Wright, a prominent thinker on evolutionary psychology and the author of several influential books. To give you a taste of our conversation, here are some highlights from the transcript, lightly edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.
On Compassion and Evolution:
Kasia de Lazari-Radek: “Last year I got breast cancer. Since I had been active on social media, I went public with the news. I got huge support from my readers, which helped me a lot. Many women, mostly complete strangers, shared their experiences with me. This support from strangers—how can it be explained from an evolutionary perspective?”
Robert Wright: “Well, first of all, I’m sorry to hear about your news. I guess the standard Darwinian explanation would start with distinguishing between kin selection, where it makes Darwinian sense for us to care about the welfare of close relatives because they share a lot of our genes. There's a second thing called reciprocal altruism, which is kind of misleadingly titled and even explained sometimes because it sounds like what you mean is a very calculating kind of thing where, okay, I'll be nice to this person and then down the road, they'll be nice to me. And although that is the underlying Darwinian logic, the way it seems to have manifested itself through human evolution is to give us the whole infrastructure of feelings that undergird friendship, for example.”
On Altruism Beyond Kin:
Peter Singer: “We have cases of people donating kidneys to strangers. The donor doesn’t know the recipient. Does the evolutionary explanation go far enough to explain this?”
Robert Wright: “Not exactly. I mean, again, if you want to ask me what I think a fairly strict evolutionary psychologist would say, the next thing they would mention is the fact that we seem to have been kind of engineered by natural selection to care a lot about our moral reputations, to want to be thought of as good people, and so to want to think of ourselves as good people.”
On the Role of Technology and AI:
Kasia de Lazari-Radek: “Are you hopeful about technology and its potential for non-zero-sum interactions, or do you think it could doom us?”
Robert Wright: “Well, it's funny, I'm writing a book about artificial intelligence and I think it's going to be a big challenge. It has a lot of promise, but I think it is going to change things so fast and raise so many new perils that I worry about our capacity to adapt without really painful disruption. I think it's another strong argument for trying to get past this phase of human history characterized by hot wars and cold wars and moving toward international governance. All these technologies have tremendous potential.”
On Living a Life Well:
Peter Singer: “What does it mean to live a life well? Does the idea of a purpose in the universe contribute to this?”
Robert Wright: “Yeah. I think a legacy of my religious upbringing, for better or worse, is absolutely the intuition of moral realism. I absolutely feel as if there is something good out there that I'm trying to align myself with. I kind of dodge the question if you're asking me if I can construct a strong rational basis for it, but I absolutely feel that there is, as if there's moral truth, and try to live my life that way, not always successfully. And I would go further and say another legacy of this upbringing is the sense, and this is, I think, maybe a more unusual thing to persist even after one has lost their religious faith per se, but it's a sense of being judged by higher power.”