Kalefa Sanneh

And one way to respect a moral intuition is to have laws against it.

I am a little bit, because I'm having a double reaction to the existence of a taboo, right?

And so my first reaction is to be like, oh, there's a taboo here where we're being guided by something besides our rational sense of consent and not harming people, right?

Part of this reaction is like a little bit superstitious, right?

So my first reaction is to kind of like try to identify the superstition.

But my second reaction is to be like, well, there is something to be said for superstition in that sense.

There is something to be said for taboo.

And when I think about it, just because I acknowledge that it is a taboo doesn't mean I want to get rid of that taboo or get rid of all taboos.

Yeah, and this is a heuristic that can lead you astray, right?

Like, you can say, like, I've grown up in a world where, you know, slavery is considered okay, and I'm looking at other societies, and it seems like there's slavery all over the world, and there's a long history of slavery, so this must be a natural feeling, right?

Oh, right.

That's a way of thinking that can lead you astray, but obviously the point is there's no way to be sure, right?

This is what philosophers talk about.

This is, right, the idea of, like, which of these things that seem really obvious to me are actually kind of wrong.

And there's no way to be sure that the things that feel obvious to you are not, in fact, wrong.

I feel pretty sure about camels.

A lot of people have felt pretty sure about a lot of things over the years.

Something beautiful about that.

That's what surprises me.

It's really, you know, you compare it to other rites.