David Bentley Hart: Why Nietzsche Was Wrong About Love and Morality

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In this conversation, David Bentley Hart joins Jack and Milo to discuss among the most dangerous and controversial of all questions: where does morality come from? Is morality an evolutionary strategy for accruing power, or are love and compassion woven into the structure of being?

In philosophical, theological, literary, and evolutionary terms, Hart discusses the origins of moral instincts in humans and animals, the role of altruism and compassion in nature, and why he believes reductive accounts of morality ultimately fail to explain human experience. We talk about Nietzsche, Darwin, Dawkins, cooperation in nature, and the limits of evolutionary psychology.

Hart also reflects on Christianity’s moral revolution and argues that Christ represented a profound interruption in the moral imagination of the ancient world—placing the poor, the rejected, and the vulnerable at the center of ethical life. The discussion also touches on the Resurrection accounts, the Gospels, the Fall, late antiquity, slavery, philanthropy, and the relationship between love, truth, and spiritual transformation.

In the second half of the discussion we discuss literature, and where we put to Hart various author duels: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Chesterton or Wilde, Eliot or Dickens, Mann or Hesse.

Expect reflections on:

The metaphysical origins of morality

Whether animals and nature exhibit genuine moral behavior

Nietzsche, power, and the “discourse of suspicion”

Evolutionary psychology and The Selfish Gene

Christ’s challenge to ancient morality

Love, compassion, and the structure of reality

Cooperation, altruism, and the natural world

Otters, dolphins, crocodiles… and why philosophy should take them seriously

Plus: in the second half of the interview, Hart turns to literature, The Simpsons, baseball as beauty, and debates some of history’s greatest writers.

If you enjoy long-form conversations on philosophy, religion, literature, and metaphysics, subscribe and join the discussion below:

Where do you think morality comes from?

00:00:00 Introduction

00:07:22 DBH arrives

00:08:55 Poetic epigraph

00:13:00 The metaphysical origins of morality

00:18:30 How Christ interrupted late-antique morality

00:32:00 Was Christ necessary to philanthropy

00:42:12 The Nietzschean view of moral origins

00:48:50 Is Ressentiment a Natural Condition, Co-operative Evolution

00:56:00 Otters! Darwinian Reductionaism. Dawkins Bashing

01:00:20 Did we mechanise nature to morally neautralise it?

01:05:12 Terrence Malick - The Tree of Life - Jonh Ford

01:13:30 Walt Disney - Tolkein on Disney

01:21:50 Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky

01:28:18 Oscar Wilde vs. G.K. Chesterton

01:35:49 Charles Dickens vs. George Eliot

01:38:50 Coffee - Balzac - Rodin - England

01:44:00 Thomas Mann vs. Hermann Hesse

01:47:09 Graham Hancock - Atlantis

01:52:25 Decline in reading - Nostalgia

01:55:19 Ecclesiastes vs. The Song of Songs - Swift vs. Defore - Whitman vs. Wordsworth

01:59:09 The Simpsons

02:04:30 Base ball