Summer Fridays: How zombies, dragons, and superheroes could make you a better person (w/ Christopher Robichaud)

How to Be a Better Human

In this summer special episode of How to Be a Better Human, host Chris Duffy interviews philosophy professor Christopher Robichaud, who explor

Key takeaways

• Imaginative roleplaying games like D&D foster empathy, problem-solving, and perspective-taking—skills that translate into real-life moral development.

Main topics

• The ethical value of roleplaying games like D&D
• Using pop culture to teach real-world morality

Notable quotes

"Dungeons & Dragons socialized me... taught me how to take up different perspectives. It taught me how to deal with uncertainty and the consequences of my decisions."

Conclusion

Robichaud illustrates that ethics isn't confined to classrooms—it's lived

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Hey everyone, thanks for listening to How to Be a Better Human. This summer, we're doing something special. We're calling it Better Human Summer Fridays. And every Friday this summer, we are going to be dropping a special episode on the feed pulled straight from the How to Be a Better Human archive. These are conversations that I loved and that our team loved. And we think a lot of you may have never heard. And we think they deserve another moment in the sun. So we're giving them that literal moment in the sun here in the summertime. This show has grown a lot over the years. So this is our way of making sure that if you found us recently, you're not missing out on one of the conversations that I am still thinking about sometimes years later. And if you are a day one Better Human listener, well, first of all, thank you. Thanks for listening for all these years. And I hope that you will enjoy this trip back into our archive, back into some of the best conversations that we've had in the past. So let's get into it. Here's Better Human Summer Fridays. Speaker 3 (0:50) You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Okay, so our show is called How to Be a Better Human. So one question that I've tried to ask every person that I've gotten to interview for this show is, what's something that's made you a better human? And the answers that I've gotten from them have been very varied, from a person in their life, to an idea, to a book, to a movie, to all sorts of other possibilities. Speaker 3 (1:16) Here is how today's guest, philosophy professor Christopher Robichaux, here's how he answered. Speaker 6 (1:22) Oh, that's a really great question. Speaker 6 (1:27) I'm going to say Dungeons & Dragons, which I don't know if you get a lot on this show, but the reason I'm going to say this is because from a very early age, Dungeons & Dragons socialized me. It socialized me and taught me how to develop good friendships. It taught me how to play. It taught me how to imagine. It taught me how to take up different perspectives. It taught me how to problem solve. It taught me how to read in a lot of ways. And it taught me how to deal with uncertainty and to deal with the consequences of my decision. And all of that was while having a blast and fighting trolls and dragons and all the rest of it. I think Dungeons & Dragons means different things for different people. But for me, it was an arena in which I developed certain traits that I've leaned on my entire life. So Dungeons & Dragons, playing Dungeons & Dragons with good friends has made me a better person. Speaker 3 (2:10) Christopher has taken that idea and that passion, and he's made a career out of teaching others ethics and philosophy using D &D and pop culture. He picks apart thorny moral questions using everything from zombie apocalypse simulations to superhero narratives. And what I find so fun and engaging about Christopher's work is that he is dealing with really big, important questions, the ways in which ethics intersects with our everyday lives, no matter who you are. But he's able to make those tough concepts accessible in this very unexpected way. So today on the show, we are going to be talking zombies. We are going to be talking superheroes. And we are going to be talking about how we can learn lasting life lessons through play and imagination. and we're going to get on that trolley in just a moment. But first, a quick ad break. Speaker 5 (3:05) In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Petra Mathers and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Speaker 4 (3:16) Dear honeys, this is goodbye. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland. Speaker 5 (3:25) Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (3:42) And we are back with zombie expert and moral philosopher, Christopher Robichaux. Speaker 6 (3:46) Hello, my name is Christopher Robichaux. I'm a senior lecturer in ethics and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. What is ethics? That's the basic most question. Speaker 3 (3:57) Hey, I know people spend their whole careers studying this exact question, but if someone's listening, isn't really familiar with the term. Speaker 6 (4:05) Professionally, the study of ethics really looks at the way that thinkers across time and space have really wrestled with questions surrounding how ought we live our lives? What's the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do? What does the good life look like? And I've tried to come up with answers to those questions, leaning on religious tradition, leaning on their own rational faculties, just trying to argue and argue in the best of ways. Think about what we ought to do, what our obligations are. All of us during the course of our lives are trained in thinking about ethics from a very young age, at least I hope so. But at the professional level, what we try to do, at least what I try to do, is to look at all those spaces in which it's not exactly obvious what the right or wrong course of action is, where reasonable people can end up reasonably disagreeing about what ought to be done or what our obligations are. Speaker 3 (4:56) You know, it's funny. Obviously, I just asked you, why is it important to teach ethics? But there's something... It's so fundamental to what it means to have a functioning society and what it means to be a good person that there's something very funny to me about the idea that ethics is an elective course that students choose to take. Speaker 6 (5:15) I really want to emphasize here, I think ethics at an adult level is not like a list of, it's not a laundry list. Here are the right things to do. Here are the wrong things to do. It's not a recipe. It's more an invitation to really think about what are my values? What are my principles? What are other people's values and principles? And how do I settle on these? These hard questions where it's not obvious what to do. Right now, we are still dealing with a global pandemic. And so one of the issues that has arisen over the course of the past year has been this conversation around what is it reasonable to ask people to do in terms of curtailing their liberties for the sake of public health? So here we have two things that we really value, public health and individual liberty. And it turns out that we can't have as much public health as we want and as much individual liberty as we want. Speaker 3 (6:00) Yeah, it's it's so practical. It just it really, again, highlights that this is not just a hypothetical that is for studying in a college course. It's something that we have to live with every single day and ask ourselves. And even Speaker 6 (6:12) the hypotheticals end up turning into real life scenarios. So philosophers, at least trained in the kind of thinking that I'm that I've done, talk for many years about these trolley problems. And this shows up in. in television as well. You know, here's a runaway trolley. It's about to go over, you know, five people, but you can pull a lever and put it on a track and it only runs over one person rather than five. Do you let it kill the five or do you put it on the other track? This was entirely a hypothetical scenario. And many people for many years were like, okay, this is interesting, whatever I come up with, but this is never going to happen. And then folks like Google started designing cars that... are going to drive themselves and Tesla. And pretty soon, a lot of ethicists are being hired by these companies to be like, all right, well, what is the answer? Of course, we need an answer now Speaker 3 (6:57) because the trolley is on the runway now. Exactly Speaker 6 (6:59) right. So that's not going to be the case in every hypothetical, but it does turn out sometimes that the hypotheticals end up bleeding into real life. Speaker 3 (7:06) I mean, this is probably going down and opening a whole can of worms, but I have to do it just because I'm curious. When you think about the trolley problem, do you pull the lever or not? I Speaker 6 (7:14) do. at least in the first case that I gave you, you know, it's going to run over five people or you can put on track and have it kill one. And then, you know, you come up with scenario number two. Famously, you know, you're on a bridge overlooking a bridge. Trolley's about to run over five people. There's a large person next to you, really tough and big. You can push them over onto the track and kills that person and saves five. What you get from a lot of people is, well, I'll pull the lever. Most people will say they'll pull the lever, not all, but most. And then most people will then say, yeah, but I'm not going to push the guy. I'm not going to do that. So then you have to step back and ask, well, what's the difference between those? And I gave you that example because I myself am regularly challenged with, you know, here's my gut reaction, but I can't just stop with my gut reaction. I have to think about it. Like, what might be the differences here? What am I trying to track when I react differently to these different cases? That to me is where philosophy, good ethical reasoning starts. When you're presented with a challenge, even of yourself, like, I don't know how to make sense of myself here. I better do some thinking and maybe I have to revise my beliefs. The importance of curiosity as a virtue, I can't emphasize enough. We should be curious towards others and how they think. We should equally be curious towards ourselves. And so looking inward at ourselves, not just to do important psychological work, but important philosophical work as well. Why do I think this? Should I be thinking this? Am I willing to follow an argument to a conclusion that I might find uncomfortable? Speaker 3 (8:35) So how do you, though, in your day-to-day life, and obviously you are an ethics professor and a philosopher, but there are so many decisions that we make in each day. Certainly we can't hold all of them up