New Podcast Release: Sigal Samuel

In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we talk to Sigal Samuel, senior reporter at Vox and author of the philosophical advice column Your Mileage May Vary

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In this episode we speak with Sigal Samuel about how to navigate moral complexity in everyday life, from giving effectively to caring for family, from honouring religious traditions to letting go of them. Sigal draws on her own experiences of being raised in Orthodox Judaism, and shares how she continues to find value in ancient texts while embracing a pluralistic, evolving view of ethics.

We discuss the role of ritual, the psychological insights embedded in religious practice, and how value pluralism can guide our choices when moral theories fall short. Sigal also reflects on her work as a philosophical advice columnist, her own struggles with scarcity and generosity, and the difficult balance between care for others and care for oneself.

Below are some highlights from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.

On Leaving Orthodox Judaism

PETER SINGER: In one of your columns, you say that you were raised in Orthodox Judaism and no longer identify as Orthodox but still find a lot of value in the religious tradition. Please tell us a little bit about breaking away from the religious beliefs you were raised in. Were your parents upset by your no longer keeping the many laws that govern the way Orthodox Jews live?

SIGAL SAMUEL: I wouldn't characterise it as a breaking away. I still very much find a lot to value in the religious tradition.

The more I studied, the more I began to appreciate the literary intricacies. And I began to see it not as law but as literature. And when I say I see it as literature, I don't mean that as a diss, I mean that as a high compliment. I see it similarly to how I would see a great Dostoevsky novel, which is to say I value it a lot, as you know, a richly considered, well-thought-out point of departure for thinking about how to live a good life.

I don't feel obligated to it in the way that an Orthodox Jew might because I think humanity is evolving. We might want to think about many other things as time goes on. I still very much consider myself a part of the community and try to weave in a lot of the wisdom that I find in ancient religious traditions with a lot of the wisdom we find in secular philosophy, modern sciencae, and so on.

On Religion as a Source of Psychological Insight

KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: What is the most charming or encouraging thing that you value in religion?

SIGAL SAMUEL: What we now call religion would've been an all-encompassing culture in ancient times, right? It wouldn't have just been a religion to you. It would've been your all-encompassing culture. So, it would've included sacrifices and the rules of how you govern your social life, culture, everything. A lot of that stuff is basic; you can think of religion as a technology that has been time-tested and debugged over the centuries. It has captured a lot of psychological truths about what humans need to live a good life, and you find that a lot of the rituals that religion provides are actually attending to human psychological needs very efficiently.

For example the ritual surrounding grief, we have the practice of sitting Shiva when a family member dies and that means that you are going to be surrounded by people who will come and talk to you and try to comfort you at precisely the point in your life when you might feel like just being alone and cutting yourself off from everyone and burying your head under the blankets.

I think that it captures some wisdom about what human psychology really needs, so things like that, I think, are very helpful. The sort of rituals and how they speak to human psychology. And I think if you study these ancient religious texts, it is just a masterclass in philosophy. It's like doing a philosophy PhD. As modern thinkers, we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Just like we study Socrates and Plato, we can study the ancient rabbis or the Byzantine Christian thinkers and glean a lot of wisdom and use that as our starter pack.

On Choosing Values from Religion

KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: There are also a lot of things, like stoning people, for example, for not obeying Shabbat. So, there are things that you definitely don't want to follow. How do you choose the ones that you believe are still reasonable and helpful from those that are not?

SIGAL SAMUEL: It's a great question, and the truth is people have been grappling with that for a couple of millennia at this point. The rabbis say that even though the Bible says to stone people for certain transgressions, the court in Jerusalem never actually carried out that sentence, which is a way of saying we, the humans, assume a certain authority and level of agency in how we interpret the texts. We'll decide what to apply and how to apply it.

I think it was never like, "We mindlessly follow this stuff.” It's always recognizing that the way we play out morality is culturally conditioned and has to work with the social mores of our time. And it's always evolving and always in progress.

On Value Pluralism and Moral Decision-Making

KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: So you mentioned now two things that rather affect ourselves, but morality, of course, is even more about those outside us. When you make your own moral choices, how do you reason about that? How do you put those different values when you are a pluralist? How do you make your own moral choices?

SIGAL SAMUEL: The most honest way to explain this is to back into it by foregrounding and saying I'm probably what you would call a moral anti-realist. I tend not to think about, oh, there's some objective moral truths out there, handed down from the heavens or discoverable in some other fashion. I'm less interested in philosophy from the universe's point of view and more interested in philosophy from the point of view of the nervous system. I'm attracted to the type of story that people like Patricia Churchland or Lisa Feldman Barrett, might say, or what the pragmatists like William James or Elizabeth Anderson for example, might say.

My dear friend Emily once, uh, kind of changed my life, oddly, by having me do an online quiz which was meant to suss out my top values.
I ended up with values like—the first one was what I like to call "delight of being, comma, joy" because this online quiz put a comma there oddly. So there was that, there was creativity, there was care and compassion, both for myself and others. There was learning and growth.
These are some of my top values. And when I'm going through the world having to make moral decisions, I am typically thinking about what would it mean to live out those values? How can I live in line with those values? And sometimes, as we said before, our values are in tension and it might be hard to live out two competing values both to the max. And so there I have to figure out how I will balance them. Sometimes I will try to put 50/50, half emphasis on each and split between the two values. Or sometimes it'll be, you know what, in this instance, in this situation, I'm putting 100% on value X and I know that in a month I'm having this other situation, I'm going to put 100% on value Y.
But broadly how I'm moving through the world is trying to balance between those core values.

On Balancing Effective Giving and Local Compassion

PETER SINGER: Let’s talk about that division of the resources, because there’s another really interesting column that you wrote in response to a reader who said, I give significantly to effective charities—I think this person was giving 10% of their income—but I don’t give to homeless people on the street who I pass.
And I have to say, you know, I empathize with that. I also give significantly to effective charities, and I don’t give to homeless people on the street for, for various reasons. One of which is, you know, it’s really hard to know how much good it’s doing. But I understood what you’re saying about giving something, you know, because you seem to think this person was conflicted about walking past the homeless people. And so you could give them a little.

I was puzzled, though, as to why you included the local and national charities at all, because you know that the money goes further in low-income countries, and will do much more good.

SIGAL SAMUEL: About giving to the people you encounter directly on the street: I don’t tend to be that concerned about effectiveness there because I think that’s a little pot of money – it is for me to a large degree concerned with the effects on my own moral conscience.

When I was growing up, we didn’t have a lot of money, but my dad would always make sure to have a few bucks in his pockets whenever we would walk around downtown where we would encounter a lot of unhoused people. He would just give a few bucks to people we encountered. Is that going to change their life radically? Is that the most effective way to give? No. It was a sort of psychological nudge that would reminding him of his values and also teaching me these values and preventing himself from developing a kind of callousness towards suffering.
So I think ignoring people you see suffering can come at a cost to your own moral consciousness and can be kind of corrosive. I’ve heard this from more than one person who is trying to do the optimizing their money thing and only donate abroad.

So both for that and for the justice reasons, um, I think it’s fine. It’s fine to also want to address the problems in your home country. And I think there’s something, especially galling in super-wealthy countries like the US, when you see, let’s say, rampant homelessness—we have the money to be able to fix this. And so I don’t think it’s crazy for people to want to invest in systemic change on the national level that will try to change the homelessness situation in the country.