Dr. J. Budziszewski

No, I was not Raskolnikov.

Although I could understand how Raskolnikov could think that way.

Sometimes I thought to myself, on one occasion I was arguing with somebody, if there was some catastrophe and 10 million people died as a result of some act, how could I...

How could I even say that this was good and evil?

If I was going to say that there was no good and evil, that this was all, these were all humanly invented constructs, humanly invented distinctions with no rational basis, then, okay, somebody says, well, what about this?

I'd have to, I'd have to be consistent.

Well, that's a better point of view than I held then.

But what Sam Harris means when he says flourishing, I doubt that he means what I mean by flourishing in the first place.

And in the second place, he thinks that what causes us to flourish is merely an accidental byproduct of a historical...

By history, I mean here natural history of an eons-long process which did not have us in mind.

We just happened to end up with inclinations to take care of our children or to be kind or to prefer kindness to cruelty or something like this most of the time.

And we just happened to.

But if we had evolved a little bit differently...

No, but his point would be... Then we might have been like guppies eating our children.

But he's wrong.

I mean, if you don't have any idea of providence, it's very difficult to see from an evolutionary point of view why... Look, from a purely Darwinian point of view, it was vanishingly...

The probability of intelligence developing was vanishingly small at all.

And we certainly can't say that it was more likely to happen to primates who follow the reproductive strategy of having a few young and lavishing a lot of care on them.

than on organisms like worms or guppies that have lots and lots of young and lavish.

No harm, no care on them.