Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Your view is — and I’ve written on empathy, and I’ve heard a similar argument for this, which is, you could have a decision which you ground — you may be thinking about immigration on a rational cost-benefit analysis. You might say, “Look, for people to act towards this decision, your average person won’t do it my way. They would need some emotion. Maybe they need disgust or empathy to take them there.” You might want to argue that without disgust, Canadians wouldn’t be motivated to a policy that, on balance, would be better for them. Possibly. I just think back, and I figure, well, disgust must have been socially functional at some stage of development. Not perfectly functional, but it had some benefits. You might have a very detailed argument for why all those earlier benefits have vanished, but I think I would be skeptical. I’m surprised you think that, say, your views toward migration are not equally emotional as, say, the social conservatives. Yours might be correct, but do you think yours are that much less emotional and more rational? I think, on a whole, some views are more rational than others. I’m the wrong person to ask. Everybody’s going to tell you their views are grounded in the rational equation, they thought them out, and everything like that. I’m sympathetic enough to Jonathan Haidt’s line that often we delude ourselves and we’re driven by these emotions. I don’t know. I wouldn’t say that the person who says, “Black people and white people shouldn’t marry because it grosses me out,” should be thought of on the same level as somebody who says, “Eh, what harm does it do?” I think the what-harm-does-it-do person is being a better person.…

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