#1280 Rafael Ruiz: Is "Woke" Good, Actually?

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricard Lobs, and today I'm joined by Rafael Ruiz. He's a philosophy PhD student at the London School of Economics, and today we're focusing mostly on his sub stack post titled Being Woke Is Good Actually, and we're also going to talk about moral progress. So Rafael, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to everyone.

00:25 Rafael Ruiz: Yeah, thank you, thank you so much. I'm, I'm a really big fan of, of your, of your podcast. I've been watching for years, so I'm really excited to be here.

00:33 Ricardo Lopes: Well, thank you. So let's start with the definition here. What does the term woke really mean? How would you characterize it? I mean, also because I wanted to ask you this question also, and I think this is also something you will end up addressing in your sub-stack post, but, uh, I mean, the way we hear the term. B used particularly by people on the right nowadays, I mean, it's almost meaningless or it means something like, oh, anything that is progressive or leftist something like that, and it's used as a pejorative, right? So, but what do you think it means?

01:12 Rafael Ruiz: Yeah, exactly. So I think it has two definitions nowadays, um. The classic definition, let's say when it, when the movement started about being woke, the idea was being aware of injustice, and it came from African-American slang, I would say, especially in the, in the US and It became, it, you know, it used to be being aware and attentive to social facts, to social problems, especially having to do with racial justice, and then it expanded also to questions like feminism, right? But I think nowadays in the current discussion. It has become this idea of, uh, being liberal in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme or pandering to the left. So there's, with, with many moral terms, we are always facing this ideological battle, uh, between left and right to try to appropriate terms, and this has happened. A lot in in the last um 10 years or so you can, you know, it, it used to be called being a social justice warrior or being politically correct or feminazi or virtue signaling or a snowflake or identity politics. It has so many or or being easily triggered. It it has so many, um. Has gone so many changes and now woke has become this casual term for, for this phenomenon, uh, being fought in this ideological battle, and the issue is this pushback and this reappropriation of the term by the right as an insult as being this group of people has gone too far over this. Questions that to us are considered to be trivial, that they are not, they are trivial grievances and they are not where the real problems are, and these people are just becoming too sensitive to these issues.

03:11 Ricardo Lopes: Right, I, I mean, it's interesting that you mentioned that that it sort of replaced terms like social justice warrior because just the other day I was thinking about that, that, I mean, we, uh, people were using SJW and then all of a sudden they shifted to woke and it means almost The same thing with perhaps a couple of differences here and there, but it's basically used to as a pejorative against people who position themselves mostly as progressive or on the left and care about social justice, uh, justice issues, correct?

03:52 Rafael Ruiz: Yeah, exactly, um, I mean, if I go back to the history of the term, even thinking about, uh, through our lifetimes, I guess, uh, you can see how this ideological battles used to go on even in the, in the 2010s as like, if you remember movements such as new atheism with Richard Dawkins and how that movement kind of split, uh, in, in. In this ideological fault lines, especially on the Internet, about what do we think about issues such as feminism or or racism or structural injustice, um, I mean, I could go into detail about this, uh, there was this, um. You know, there was this whole Reddit movement, uh, and backlash against people such as like Anita Sarkisian, who was very, very famous in the 2010s, um, as like a feminist critic of things like video games and, and TV shows, and then there was this huge backlash for people from people who put themselves as being more rational. Than these angry feminists and then they would take these clips of, of the feminists, um, sometimes out of context or sometimes like they would take a 5 minute video and I talk about this in the blog post, take a 5 minute video of the feminist and dissect it for like an hour and of course if you do that, um. Everyone can be made to look better when you are able to do this very detailed takedown. I think you could do that even with like flat earthers. You could, if you were a flat earther and you listen to a five minute speech by by somebody who's a scientist, you could tear down every little sentence and, and use almost like rhetorical points to come out on top, even though, um, you know, you're. Arguments might not be so good, like, and, and they used to use all these clickbait titles about feminists being destroyed with facts and logic is the classic sort of Reddit movement, uh, against and, and backlash against this kind of feminism, and I think that has just kept growing over the last 10 years or so. I think there, there has been, well, this is very connected to, to global politics, right? So, um. The politics of Trump, Boris Johnson, Bolsonaro, all these people have promoted this sort of anti-woke radicalization.

06:25 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. No, I, I mean, I am definitely more or less aware of what happened in the 2010s, and I mean, for example, I'm an atheist, but I've never been a very big fan of the new atheist movement because the way that people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris used uh approach or used to approach topics like religion, I, I mean, it's so, it's just oversimplistic and when I have conversations with on the show and even before I started the show. With cognitive scientists of religion, anthropologists of religion, and other people like that, I mean, they never talk about religion that way, the sort of approach that the new atheists has tended to have to religion, I would even consider it to be anti-scientific because it's just calling people stupid or dumb or saying that they believe in imaginary friends or whatever, something like that, so just, uh, overly simplistic, and then, yeah, uh, there. There was that sort of movement in the late 2000s, early 2010s where people started to identify themselves on the internet and on YouTube as skeptics influenced by the new atheists and then they got into uh anti-feminism because they thought that they thought that uh anti, they thought that feminism was equivalent rationally speaking to being religious or something. Something like that and so they sort of equated the two things and I, I'm not saying here that for example I agree specifically with the takes by people like Anita Sarkisian, but feminism is much broader than that and much more complex and uh usually tends to tackle real issues and not the sort of clickbaity things like you mentioned there that people put uh circulating on the internet. Uh-huh.

08:23 Rafael Ruiz: Yeah, I mean, um, speaking even from my own life experience, I guess, uh, as a teenager, I was kind of influenced by this whole, um, new atheism movement, so I remember this quite well, and it, it took effort and, like, being a bit shook by my friends. And and people I knew about the fact that I was absorbing all these anti-social justice warrior rhetoric and buying into this ideology, um, there's some people refer to this as the, as the alt-right funnel, uh, there's, there's this. Firms that you know that they, they might look good from a distance and they might have some clips that seem pretty reasonable, but then over, over a period of time you might get lured into more and more extreme versions of, of the same claims and um once you have like become part of, of a group it's really hard to sort of exit that. Echo chamber. So, and I mean, I, I, it's not that I want to say this is only for, for the right wing. We, um, I guess we'll get into this later. I think there's, there are some problems also with the woke movement and, and echo chambers, but I think especially nowadays we are suffering this more on the, on the right, on especially the extreme right side of things.

09:44 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so one of the things that you also tackle in your post has to do with emotion or resorting to emotions like anger and irritation in the face of injustice, and that's also something that we tend to hear from right-wing people, all those woke people. They are just angry, they're just irritated, they're not reasonable. I mean, but, but don't you think that perhaps there are at least some instances where expressing anger or even being angry and irritated is justified in the face of injustice?

10:20 Rafael Ruiz: Yeah, exactly. So, um, I actually got to learn more about this now that I'm teaching political philosophy at university and I have to tackle some of the contemporary authors writing about this, and, uh, on this part of the article, I, I was thinking about Amy Arinivasan's article, um, on, uh, affective injustice. The idea would be that. Keeping perfectly calm under a situation where it seems appropriate to get angry is a form of, of injustice. It is not a large form of injustice, uh, as compared to like physical violence, for example, but. There's this idea, try to and I, I put this analogy of like try to imagine like you had a friend who is being beaten up by the police and you just have to keep calm because if you get too angry at, at the police that are beating your friend, um, you might lose your standing as as somebody who's who's being rational in that situation you might be taken to be rational or or or be detained by the police as well, um. The problem there is that you have to bottle up that anger in order to be considered rational in and, and as part of civil society. Forcing victims of injustice or or friends of victims of injustice to bottle up that justified, it seems like morally justified anger. So in a way what Srinivasan wants to say is that it seems to be almost like a form of victim blaming. It seems to be blaming the victims of this injustice and forcing them. To, to behave in in ways that are, um, purely uh rational or or calm suppressing that anger to appeal reasonable in the in cases of, of, um, and this to transpose into the woke case right in in cases of racial injustice, in case of uh misogyny, uh, or, or some kind of, uh, aggression here. And I also think we sometimes, you know, and this maybe not so much with the new atheism movement, but especially with the anti-woke, um, it is quite ironic that I actually think that the anti-woke tend to be quite, uh, emotional, uh, in their, in their movement. So they're pushed back against, against the woke, uh, by. You know, tends, tends to also fall for this, uh, bandwagon effects and tends to also suffer from this emotional outbursts. So it's not like, you know, it used to be more understandable when he was like this classical liberal who was very detached. From the issues of structural injustice, arguing against the woke as it was like 10 years ago, but now that is woke versus anti-woke, it seems like both sides are pretty clearly expressing a lot of emotion in the political discourse. So I see, you know, quite a big change here over the last years.

13:30 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and in the, in your post you use the term anti-woke radicalization. What is that? I mean, what do you mean by radicalization in that instance?

13:41 Rafael Ruiz: Yeah, so I'm thinking of that funnel that um the right kind of pushes people through, um, there, there was this post by Andy Masley on, on Substack as well around the same time as mine, and he says that we have this tendency to, um, fall prey to. When, whenever we don't like something to fall prey into falling into the opposite ideology, um, and that doesn't, it's, it's not necessarily, uh, a rational thing to do. If you're exposed to a lot of, um, versions of one ideology that you don't feel is very compelling. Immediately falling for the opposite ideology is not particularly rational. Um, SO, in a way, we end up falling for this, um. Mm, you, you know, radicalization to the other side that isn't particularly rational either. Uh, IN, in any case, it would lead us to be skeptics of both sides, and, and we can also discuss this, uh, as well, like the idea of like, maybe we shouldn't be woke or anti-woke, which is what a lot. Of the feedback that I got on my post was about, um, but yeah, I think there's this, mm, because of the fact that people got exposed to a lot of woke, mm, ideology or, or woke claims, they just try to adopt the thing as far as possible from the woke. Which doesn't make it rational. And now that we are seeing maybe some of the anti-woke things, we might become again like negatively polarized to become woke again. I think that this is the, when people talk about the pendulum of politics going back and forth. Uh, SOMETIMES it's not because we find an ideology, ideology that we really like that we follow that ideology. It is more a backlash against the current ideology and, and our distaste for the current excesses of that ideology.

15:51 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, DO you think that, uh, anti-woke people are defending the status quo, I mean, in any way?

16:01 Rafael Ruiz: Right. Um, SO, I think, yeah, in, in some regards, they are. Um, SO, a lot of people, when, even when they study, um, politics or political philosophy, they might get up to, you know, the 1970s with, uh, the theories as like John. Roles which only talks about the distribution of wealth in a society, but there have been quite a lot of innovations and I would recommend some people to read, uh, more contemporary, I guess, more contemporary authors that I draw from in my, in my work, uh, because a lot of, lots of worries that have to do with political philosophy are not about the distribution of resources or wealth or taxation. Um, BUT about more issues that might have to do more with identity, for example, um. And How we should try to minimize some injustices that might happen, for example, inside the family, which is where a lot of feminists kind of thrive in their critique, saying like the liberal status quo only analyzes how individuals. SHOULD act with regards to the state, but they don't really talk about almost at all about how the distribution of power should happen within or inside the family. Um, SO in that regard I, I do think we have this, um. Uh, COMPLACENCY and especially now that we have this, some people have called it vice signaling instead of, um, instead of, uh, virtue signaling, which is what we had some years ago about trying to be as pure as, as leftist as possible to win in, in discussions we now. I see a lot of trying to project the most vices or trying to bully people into submission like you might have seen that video of that AI video of Donald Trump, uh, like pooping on, on, on top of protesters and, and that kind of thing which is really like it is signaling lots of vices in a way into, into the wider population. And, or like how in, in the internet you get to see a lot of like, how people want to be uh chats or based or alpha against like the, the other side who is seen as, as weak, right? So I do think that if we don't look at that from the point of view of political philosophy and from the point of view of egalitarianism, for example, and we just try to project this idea. Of power and, and having other people submit to how great we are, of how, how based we are in our claims, how the others are just being weak because they are egalitarian, we might enter a really worrying tendency, I think, in, in many of our Western countries that might lead to a deterioration of many important democratic values, but also. Uh, YOU know, basic levels of equality between people who might belong to different social classes, to different genders, to different races, all of that might potentially be undermined in the long term if we don't take measures to prevent this kind of values from spreading.

19:33 Ricardo Lopes: So would you say that the values espoused by woke people are morally good?

19:41 Rafael Ruiz: So, I think so, at least on first approach. Um, SO, I think the woke values originally came from this, uh, 1968, um, revolts, the student revolts, um, and a growing concern about many other issues that went beyond, uh, just liberal values. And I do think it takes, for example, uh, some level of moral courage to, especially in the current climate, to put forward these values. Now, um, it is tricky because I would I would say that we also, there are also some problems of, of echo chambers of and so mainly the problems are not so much moral problems, so I think the woke fundamentally more or less have good moral values about, about equality, about trying to reduce this structural injustices, trying to think our current society has a long history of. Things being pretty unfair and we should attempt to remedy these issues, but. The problem is more epistemic. I think people might not understand what's the best way of, of tackling these issues, and especially when, when people enter these echo chambers nowadays with the internet, right, um, that reinforce ideologies in these very simple ways and people fall for these purity tests where like the best woke person is the one who is the the best leftist radical. Um, I, I don't think that's a good way to go for the woke movement. So, I think the values are good, but maybe the, the epistemic values that are being cultivated because it's such an online thing and it happens so much online rather than in other areas of life is problematic.

21:49 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, SO give us perhaps some examples of how wokeism can go too far.

21:58 Rafael Ruiz: Yeah, so, I mean, I spend a lot of time seeing this almost like culture wars which used to take place on Twitter and now that it's split into, into Blue Sky and versus Twitter, um, you see these echo chambers in, in both directions in the, in the right, like you can almost like choose your, your, your social media platform. You can choose the, the leftist blue sky or, or, or the modern X which, you know, in, depending on which you go to, you might face these echo chambers, um, that are really, really bad, uh, I think it, it can lead to, um, So in the, in the woke movement, it would lead to this purity testing of people, so that you have to be better and more woke than the people around you and That radicalizes people into um espousing slogans, I think that are unsustainable, like you might think of the whole defund the police movement and the more you think or the more you think about that, um, I think, uh, it's, it's just a bad slogan probably because you don't really want to be defending the police, then what would happen if a if a crime were to happen, right? Uh, SO. Because of the use of slogans in online discussion, I think, mm. There's this really corrupting kind of phenomenon that happens a lot in, in social media. And I, I do have another blog post that talks about why we shouldn't use slogans or, or analogies so much when thinking about political problems because I think they can be greatly misleading. So, while I see the, the value of like gathering people around the slogan. Um, THERE can be a lot of harm actually coming from that because that's not the ultimate goal and also you are alienating people who might be more moderate into your movement, so like people who might not accept the idea of defund the police or recently you hear the slogan of from the river to the sea in the protest about Palestine and Israel and The underlying idea there is that um Palestine should be the only owner of that of, of that section of land and and Israel should not own anything, uh, and then you have the worry, well, what would happen, uh, what, what then after if, if those slogans were to become a reality. So sometimes we espouse these slogans. And we either, if we are reasonable, we either want to say, no, actually I, I'm saying this, but I don't mean it, which, you know, at, at that point, like why are you espousing the slogan in the first place because you're also alienating a lot of people who don't really believe that that slogan or you're only appealing to people with very extreme beliefs, uh, or people who might have a very short term look at political issues like it's not that. The world ends after you, you have your victory in politics, after your party wins or anything like that. The world has to continue and Um, it's just, it's gonna be difficult to actually, uh, engage with this new politics, uh, when, when that, that slogan is being implemented into policy.

25:37 Ricardo Lopes: Right, so, uh, I mean, this is something that you also work on. What is non-deal moral theory and how does it apply to these discussions surrounding wokeism?

25:50 Rafael Ruiz: Yeah, so on this point, I draw from the philosophy of Charles Mills. Uh, WHO kind of challenges the political philosophy of John Rawl's, uh, idealized, uh, social contract. So ideal political philosophy and ideal moral theory is the idea that once you set up the correct moral values, everyone in society immediately complies with those values, immediately obeys the correct values, and Well, That is problematic first of all because that's not really uh applicable to, to reality and uh Charles Mills focuses a lot on the idea that um the social contract has been used to. Um, OPPRESS and, and to kind of ignore many of, of these problems, make, um. Makes many social problems that don't have to deal with, with the contract itself, uh, invisible, first of all, but also, um, originally when John Locke were, were draft and, and people in the, in the Enlightenment were drafting these social contracts, they might write about the quality of all people yet own slaves, for example, at the same time. So those, even those social contracts were uh problematic. But also, mm, as people like, uh, Iris Mayor Young have pointed out, there are different levels of oppression, such as exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, um, forms of violence that are really not captured by this, uh, idealized social contract. Um, AND also, like, even if we were to find out the ideal values. If we failed partly to comply with them, that would, could yield a worse society than if we were to just focus on non-deal theory, which is another worry that that is known as the as the theory of the second best in, in economics, and it's basically just to put a simple example. Imagine the ideal society were to have two different values, uh, this ideal distribution of resources and, uh, a defense of, of property rights. Um, AND you might think, OK, well, the, what we have to do in political philosophy is to try to approach that ideal, and this is how Ross thinks about things. You just have to get as close as possible to that ideal. Well, Imagine we can fulfill the, what we desire in terms of, of, um, property rights, but we cannot achieve the distribution. That could be a worse result than even like the current status quo, uh, just because it reinforces, um, the, the situation, and it could be, it, it could be definitely worse than a a situation of a completely different political arrangement that doesn't really reinforce just one of the elements and fails and at another one. SO actually what these people want to say is that. Like there's almost no point to doing um ideal theory because as long as not all the conditions are met, then we would, we could be falling into a worse situation than we could be doing if we started thinking of politics from the here and the now and the problems that we currently have instead of trying to think of this realistic utopia project that Ross is thinking about.

29:31 Ricardo Lopes: Right, I understand. So let's talk now a bit about moral progress and then also try to link it to wokism. So, first of all, what is moral progress? How do you approach it?

29:45 Rafael Ruiz: Right, so actually the definition of moral progress is not so difficult, but the problems arises when you want to actually come up with a concrete theory or conception. So moral progress just means that, um, a society or an individual or humanity is moving morally in a better direction, but that doesn't say anything without providing, um, a full theory of it, but The way that, you know, we, the people that work on this topic, think about it is we have at least some paradigmatic cases that most reasonable people think are moral progress, such as the abolition of slavery. Uh, THE extension of legal rights to women, uh, universal suffrage, uh, ending the criminalization of homosexuality, and a lot of people, Alan Buchanan, uh, Philip Kitcher, Hanno Sauer, people who have, you have interviewed in the past actually, um, yes,

30:44 Ricardo Lopes: Hano Sauer and, uh, Alan Buchanan, yes, yeah.

30:48 Rafael Ruiz: Have, um, talked about, about many of, of these, um, of these things, and the core for many of these people is this idea of expanding the moral circle to include more, more beings over time. So there's this historical trajectory which is not as simple as people want to, to put forward, of course, like there's no linearity to history. There are always many setbacks. But at least in, in the process of modernity, there have been these expansions of the moral circle that I have mentioned about the abolition of slavery, about the growth of democracy in the world, um, considering interracial marriage to not be morally problematic, considering homosexuality to not be morally problematic, um. But of course, also this idea of moral inclusion might be too narrow to capture all the cases of, of moral progress. So there may be other situations, uh, that we might want to consider moral progress that are not just reducible to, to this theory, but I guess that's the core theory that has been developed until now.

32:01 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and there are different approaches to moral progress. There are, for example, psychological theories of moral progress, materialist theories of moral progress. Let me ask you first about the psychological theories, that the ones that tend to be based on or focused on improvements in moral reasoning or expansions of empathy. Uh, WHAT do you think about that kind of theories?

32:27 Rafael Ruiz: Yeah, so, I think they are, they are an important component, but I think they, they are also somewhat incomplete. In, in the sense of, so when you read people like Peter Singer, uh, Steven Pinker, um, they might appeal to phenomenons such as the, you know, after we undergo this process of, of growing empathy in modernity, um, because maybe we interact with more foreigners in, in modern societies than we did in the past. And we also start listening to some uh arguments about there not being morally relevant differences between people in different countries that might lead to a process of moral consistency reasoning, so treating cases that we recognize as being the same equally, um. It, it leads to this process where rationally we would be compelled to, to act in ways that we treat two agents equally because we don't see those morally relevant differences. So the, the cases would be sexism or. Racism, uh, but also speciesism, for example, more, more recently, Peter Singer, who has developed this theory of the expanding circle, also wants to expand the circle to animals and, and think that the species is, is not a morally relevant characteristic. Um, THE problem that I see with these theories, I guess, and this leads to, to the second part of the discussion, more about more materialistic theories of moral progress is that I don't think. Well, we don't have enough empirical research about this, but also like the empirical research. Um, DOESN'T seem to be very robust. Like you might have seen some articles by Singer and Swiss Gebel talking about how when people go to an ethics class, they are more willing to eat vegan or vegetarian after, after an ethics class, but the, the difference might be like 10 or 20% compared to, to the, to an alternative group. And I don't think this is also a good explanation for why did so much moral progress happen, I guess, together, uh, clustered in this process of, of modernity and enlightenment. Like, it doesn't seem so plausible to me since our biological capacities for reasoning or emotion haven't changed very radically, um. It doesn't seem so plausible to me that this is the correct explanation, and we need to supplement the explanation with, with something else.

35:17 Ricardo Lopes: OK, and then what do you think about uh materialist theories of moral progress? And I know that you are interested in, for example, linking them to work in cultural evolution done by people like Joseph Erich, Peter Richardson, Robert Boyd. I've had them all on the show and big trends in human history, like for example, the theory of uh by Ian Morris on the history of human values as well as Michael Muthu Krishna, I mean, I've, I've also had him on the show and Vaclav S Mill's, uh, approach to energy capture and how it leads to different types of hierarchy. So tell us about all of that.

36:03 Rafael Ruiz: Yeah, so. I mean, I want to replace the traditional psychologistic picture that I guess Singer is putting forward about empathy and reason being the main drivers of moral progress and move towards a more materialist understanding in order to explain why so many. So many morally progressive changes happen in such a relatively short period of time and, and clustered together around the 18th century until now. Um. And I think that's so, and, and when I say materialism, a lot of people tend to think of, of, um, you know, the Marxist theory of historical materialism, but that is not necessarily the case. What I would say is that we should keep the framework of materialism and say that material change. WHERE the most important thing, the most important factor for, for this, uh, changes in, in ideology, but we can understand materialism in a, in a very broad way. So, just to go from the, I guess, maybe the most abstract to the more concrete. So, for example, Morris and Smil talk a lot about how energy capture over history has changed the hierarchies of, of the societies that we might have had. So, When we were hunter gatherers, we might have had some level of tribal egalitarianism, and, but when we established agriculture that led to a division of labor and, and in, in a division of society into different classes or, or castes, um. Of like priests and kings and, um, you know, uh, people in agriculture, people doing pottery, like different, different levels and, and a sort of level of hierarchy. And now that we are I think one of the most impactful changes has been since the industrial revolution that what happened was when we entered the industrial revolution, we had this movement of social classes from this rigidly hierarchical, almost like feudal societies or at least aristocratic of the ancient regime. Into a movement on a, on a growth of a bourgeois class at least, um, then eventually it led to the development of a middle class, but in the beginning it was this development of a bourgeois class at the top, but that challenged the traditional ways that societies were arranged, which led to a move towards more egalitarian values and, and values of like recognition. Um, DEMOCRATIC recognition for people across society, and I think that, so that movement of. Um, OF energy capture leads to renewed ideas and renewed institutions, basically. Uh, SO in terms of ideas, it also happens because of the development of new technologies. So, so that is why the, the materialist theory can be quite broad because, um, even new technologies such as the printing press have had a great impact on how the new classes could organize themselves in. Due to the printing press, there was this development of an academy of letters that was able to write, you know, people from France and people from England and from other countries were able to develop this enlightenment period. Um, BY being able to communicate scientific discoveries, but also importantly radical moral ideas for their time, so they would also be organizing new social arrangements and thinking how can we change, uh, our, our current societies, which led to a change eventually of how institutions were shaped around society basically. And those institutions um were able to be much more democratic than than in the past, especially when we transcended that fight or that uh scramble for zero-sum scramble for resources that we might have faced in the past of, uh, a very low level of living where. We had enough to eat basically, but we didn't have a substantial amount of economic growth. I think what happened with the industrial revolution, even though in the beginning it was not a very high level of growth, I think it was around 2%, um. But that 2% growth compounding year after year, uh, really led to a great amount of, uh, energy, energy capture and that reform our institutions, but also reform our moral psychology when people are in a zero-sum competition for, for the very basic resources such as food and shelter, and they might be forced to pillage, plunder, uh, enter war with other nations. As opposed to having much more peaceful behavior in general, so there was all these pressures that all of a sudden, um, Became much less pressing in terms of material conditions and that led to a very changed psychological makeup for people living in in modern societies, but also really changed institutions who for the first time they were much more representative of um of their people and much more egalitarian.

41:51 Ricardo Lopes: So do you think then that the materialist approach to moral progress has more explanatory power than psychological approach?

42:04 Rafael Ruiz: I think so. Um, I think there's a gap in the, in the psychological approach in trying to explain why moral progress happened when it did. Um, THEY could be alternative explanations. I'm not saying. You know, people could say, well, given your, what you have said about the Academy of Letters and that people could communicate with each other, there was this spread of ideas, um, that led to, to this psychological and, and arguments being shared across people in different countries, but I don't think that by itself was enough to, to lead us to. To this push for moral progress. So I do think we are still um We, we still need the material conditions to change in a substantial way because, well, there, there have been, um, some, uh, aristocrat classes or, or people in churches who were always able to, to communicate with each other, uh, but still I don't think the material conditions were there in order to reach this more universal push for different values.

43:19 Ricardo Lopes: Right, so one last question then, uh, do you think that moral progress links to being woke, and if so, how?

43:29 Rafael Ruiz: Right, so I think woke could be seen as, well, being morally progressive, right, at least in the positive, uh, sense of the term, which is having greater, um, greater attention for justice, equality, inclusion, which are parts of what moral progress consists in, uh. And especially when we link it to a materialist approach, um, we might see that many of the injustices that happen in the world might be more structural than just simply conscious. It's, it's not that people might have bad intentions all the time, but it's simply that we are socialized in particular ways to. Um, THAT leads us to behave in, in, in society in, in such ways, and also we come from this background, if you listen to like evolutionary evolutionary psychology of nepotism of favoring um us versus uh having a a wider um scope for moral concern, so we, if we are able to combine. Uh, YOU know, uh, a flourishing material conditions with, uh, good ideologies that might reduce levels of racism, sexism, transphobia, classism, um, even correcting for some colonial wrongs that might have happened in the past, like you might worry that, you know, people still in many countries are being benefited by colonial wrongs that happened a long time ago. And people have not done anything about them, and we are still suffering from, and people in many countries are suffering from a situation of just being unlucky and that they were born in a country that is really poor, as opposed to being born in a country with a privilege of um. I guess, being in a better economic and social situation, right? Um, SO. There is a combination, I guess, of the, of, of moral progress with wokeness here and I guess wokeness is, is one step of it, um, but I would also push people who are woke to pay attention to, um, the prioritization of different, uh, areas where, where they want to. Uh, PUSH for, for more justice. So in order to not just be aspirational, maybe we should try to put our efforts where we see that they might matter most, and that might not be so intuitive. So I mean I am. In a way, uh, interacting with different, uh, parts of, of, um, political philosophy, uh, but also leftist movements, but also the effective altruism movement. So I guess I would want them to learn some things from each other. So I would like the world to learn about the ideas of like, how can we become more effective, and at the same time, I, I guess I would like Uh, some of the effective altruism people to look more at the structural or, or material causes that, that shape our current societies. So. I guess I would push for people to take the good aspects of being woke, that commitment to social justice, but also learn how to prioritize it better, to be, um, I guess, numerically informed in such that we might worry about the biggest issues in ways that are proportional for how much they matter. Um, SO I guess that would be, to me, that would be the ideal evolution of the, of, of moral progress and, and, and of the, I guess, the woke movement.

47:31 Ricardo Lopes: Great, so where can people find you and your work on the internet?

47:37 Rafael Ruiz: So they can follow me on Twitter at Rafael Ruis Delia. Uh, I also have a website, Rafael Ruis Delia.com. They can find me, I guess, at the LSC philosophy website or at Field people, the field papers website, which, uh, many philosophers publish the papers they might publish there, um, in order to kind of keep in touch with my future papers, I might write and hopefully an upcoming book in the In the following years about the philosophy of moral progress, and they can also follow me on the, on my sub stack, the moral circle.

48:15 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been great to talk with you.

48:21 Rafael Ruiz: It, it's been great, Ricardo. uh THANK you very much.

48:25 Ricardo Lopes: Hi guys, thank you for watching this interview until the end. If you liked it, please share it, leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by Enlights Learning and Development done differently. Check their website at enlights.com and also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or PayPal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and PayPal supporters, Perergo Larsson, Jerry Muller, Frederick Sundo, Bernard Seyaz Olaf, Alex, Adam Cassel, Matthew Whittingbird, Arnaud Wolff, Tim Hollis, Eric Elena, John Connors, Philip Forst Connolly. Then Dmitri Robert Windegeru Inai Zu Mark Nevs, Colin Holbrookfield, Governor, Michel Stormir, Samuel Andrea, Francis Forti Agnun, Svergoo, and Hal Herzognun, Machael Jonathan Labran, John Yardston, and Samuel Curric Hines, Mark Smith, John Ware, Tom Hammel, Sardusran, David Sloan Wilson, Yasilla Dezaraujo Romain Roach, Diego Londono Correa. Yannik Punteran Ruzmani, Charlotte Blis Nicole Barbaro, Adam Hunt, Pavlostazevski, Alekbaka Madison, Gary G. Alman, Semov, Zal Adrian Yei Poltontin, John Barboza, Julian Price, Edward Hall, Edin Bronner, Douglas Fry, Franco Bartolotti, Gabriel Pancortezus Suliliski, Scott Zachary Fish, Tim Duffy, Sony Smith, and Wiseman. Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Georg Jarno, Luke Lovai, Georgios Theophannus, Chris Williamson, Peter Wolozin, David Williams, Dio Costa, Anton Ericsson, Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralli Chevalier, Bangalore atheists, Larry D. Lee Junior. Old Eringbon. Esterri, Michael Bailey, then Spurber, Robert Grassy, Zigoren, Jeff McMahon, Jake Zul, Barnabas Raddix, Mark Kempel, Thomas Dovner, Luke Neeson, Chris Story, Kimberly Johnson, Benjamin Galbert, Jessica Nowicki, Linda Brendan, Nicholas Carlson, Ismael Bensleyman. George Ekoriati, Valentine Steinmann, Per Crawley, Kate von Goler, Alexander Obert, Liam Dunaway, BR, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, Perpendicular, Jannes Hetner, Ursula Guinov, Gregory Hastings, David Pinsov, Sean Nelson, Mike Levin, and Jos Necht. A special thanks to my producers Iar Webb, Jim Frank Lucas Stink, Tom Vanneden, Bernardine Curtis Dixon, Benedict Mueller, Thomas Trumbull, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carlomon Negro, Al Nick Cortiz, and Nick Golden, and to my executive producers, Matthew Lavender, Sergio Quadrian, Bogdan Kanis, and Rosie. Thank you for all.